A wizard, a true star. Back for a fourth Cardiff show in a few years, Chicago’s evergreen beloved entertainer has a puzzling Valleys fanbase who, hopefully, will turn out for this in the numbers they did at his brilliant Clwb debut in 2007. Resplendent in red velour tracksuit, wheeling around, mock-sobbing, mock-laughing, it was one of the finest and most unexpected successes Cardiff’s seen in years. He returned for the first Swn that year sans band, serenaded a Dulok and stacked it face first over the monitors. Nothing if not good value. This Conn show was at one point billed as a full-album playback of his reissued 1998 album Rise Up!, but that tagline now appears to have been dropped so hopefully we can expect tunes from across his repertoire; from the coke-disco sex ballads of his 2001 masterpiece The Golden Age, all swooning strings and falsetto come-ons like Beck with the clap, to 2004’s Bush-baiting The Homeland and 2007’s valedictory King For A Day. Do not miss his peculiar genius.
Rocketgoldstar, as far as I knew, were consigned to a long-ago Cardiff of Mo-ho-bish-o-pi, JT Mouse and membership cards for Clwb. ‘Soul Of A Nu-Machine’ and ‘What Are You Singing About?’ were lovely pop-psych meanderings, and the band’s more outlandish ideas (12 hour gigs, etc) were pleasingly eccentric and out of step with their peers. Seems they still gig once in a while, though, and even have a new album finished. Should be interesting to see where they’re at a decade or so on.
Tuesday, 30th November 2010
Clwb Ifor Bach
Bobby Conn and The Burglars / Rocketgoldstar
Tickets on sale now. In an American indie-rock scene characterised by slackers and underachievers, Chicago’s Bobby Conn stands out like a sore thumb. Decadent pop chameleon in strange surrealist fancy dress, Conn is the sort of larger-than-life songman who’ll never let constraints of budget or plain old good taste scupper a bright idea. Bobby has equally delighted and annoyed hipsters since first appearing on the Chicago music scene in the mid ’90s. Blending aggressive showmanship with an omnivorous love of musical genres, from Suicide to Streisand or from The Sweet to Stravinsky, Bobby has often irritated and provoked audiences, but never bored them.
7:30pm | £8/£10 | buy tickets
* www.myspace.com/bobbyconn
* www.bobbyconn.com
* www.myspace.com/rocketgoldstar
