GREAT PLANS OF MICE AND FREAKS: The hunt for a live band in Cardiff

Tat Syrup, Live at the Hawaiian Bar, Cardiff.

I love bands that are on the edge, pushing the boundaries, going where no band has gone before; or at least I like to check them out at least once. When they get it right they blow me away, but very often they are just dreadful. It was a quest to check out a Japanese experimental metal band that took me, Crispy and Rob to Cardiff Tonight.

It was with great excitement that we headed to Clwb Ifor Bach to check out Melt Banana , even though we knew very little about them apart from a rave review in the local paper and a couple of MP3s we had downloaded from their website. And it was with great disappointment that we discovered that the gig was sold out and there were a bout 50 people outside without tickets. Maybe they are not quite as obscure as we thought! I will have to wait now to find out if they are awesome or awful!!!

Determined not to waste the night we headed over to the Barfly, but the sign on the door stated “over 16’s night”, which did not sound too appetising.

Crispy wanted to get tickets for Rich Hall in the Glee club for next week so we headed down to the bay. We had a wander around the area first, checking out the new Millennium Centre and then went off to find the Glee Club. The club is set in the middle of Mermaid Quay, which is basically a shopping centre without any shops, but about thirty up market restaurants. They are obviously there to serve the neuvau riche who have moved into the new apartments that have sprung phoenix like for the ashes of the docks and passing tourists, as opposed to the thousands of locals that have lived there all along. When we got to the Glee Club we discovered that '3 Men + Black' were playing, a super group that is made up from Pauline Black (Selekter) and her many friends. On this particular tour her friends are Roddy Radiation (Specials), Jake Burns (Stiff Little fingers) and Nick Welsh (?). We had a bit of a debate, Rob did not want to pay £15 to watch anything that had any ska in it, and I did not want to give any money to Jake Burns (for reasons given in my post ‘Go Fly A Kite’ dated 25^th September); this combined with the stream of people walking out because they thought the show was boring resulted in us not going in.

After a phone call we ended up in ‘The Hawaiian Bar’ on City Road, where by coincidence my mate Dan’s ska band ‘Tat Syrup’ were playing. Rob was not too pleased about the idea of a ska band, but it was getting late and we wanted a pint. In the end it turned out to be an interesting evening, even if it was somewhat different to the one we had planned.