{"id":9206,"date":"2011-01-18T10:52:49","date_gmt":"2011-01-18T10:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejoycollective.co.uk\/blog\/?p=9206"},"modified":"2011-01-18T10:52:49","modified_gmt":"2011-01-18T10:52:49","slug":"gruff-rhys-h-hawkline-gwdihw-cardiff-10-01-11-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/review\/gruff-rhys-h-hawkline-gwdihw-cardiff-10-01-11-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Gruff Rhys \/ H. Hawkline : Gwdihw, Cardiff : 10.01.11"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>You hear about these exclusive gigs don\u2019t you? Sometimes you see them on the BBC, an audience full of Graduate Recruitment Scheme Alumni who have a mate of a mate that knows someone who works on the Jools Holland show. They have\u00a0three-quarter full\u00a0pints and runny noses. Their partners look like they will sleep with anyone else just to make it all stop. They are going bald. Some are wearing scarves indoors. All have cried secretly in a workplace toilet cubicle.<\/p>\n

So you sit watching with a sneer on your face and a feeble sense of superiority in your heart and say things like: \u2018Graduate Recruitment Scheme Alumni\u2019 and \u2018Jools Holland\u2019 and \u2018bald\u2019 and \u2018scarves\u2019 and then next thing you know you are invited to one. But the one you are invited to will be nothing like that because you are fucking hip. You refuse to get excited by anything anymore. You aren\u2019t some saddo fanboy who has previously made a mental note of every time you have seen Gruff Rhys in public. No way.<\/p>\n

The first time I saw Gruff Rhys in public was when Hypervalue was still on Cowbridge Road East, Cardiff. He was wearing a red bubble coat and a bobble hat. I hadn\u2019t long since moved to Wales and, for me, this was very exciting. I understand that many of you\u00a0bleed Clark’s Pies\u00a0and can\u2019t as much as knit a nice jumper without finding it attached to a Furry Animal of some kind but I was a foreigner in your land and, for me, Gruff Rhys was some magical creature that travelled exclusively by astral projection. I’d never expected to see him. And I\u2019d never expected to see him outside a discount household goods store.\u00a0It was a thrill and to this day seeing him is still\u00a0a thrill.<\/p>\n

I suppose what I am trying to say is, this was an exclusive gig to see Gruff Rhys at Gwdihw, I had a ticket and I was really, really pleased.<\/p>\n

However I was a little intimidated by just how genuinely hip this gig might be. I set my watch to hip time and turned up an hour after doors opened. That was less hip than I imagined it would be. The place was packed, mostly, with people who were just genuinely much nicer human beings than me, and H. Hawkline was about to finish. It sounded fantastic. Everyone said it was great. I believe them. Next time I\u2019m not going to be so damn hip.<\/p>\n

Managing to secure a decent spot down by the front while other people bought beer, chatted to friends, had a good time and stuff like that, I checked out the dessert trolley of instruments that had been left out as tantalizing treats for the expectant crowd: a children\u2019s keyboard, a shaker thing that looked like a tangerine, a record player, a metronome, a box with a weird light on a wire like some crap android Angler Fish; those mad drum sticks he\u2019s used at a few things lately. I looked back across the various people sat, perched, leant and jammed. Someone I knew made sex faces at me as he sat next to the woman he loved. If it weren\u2019t for the small army of photographers stalking the place and generally getting in the way, I might have felt sexy too, but I suppose that just proves once and for all that I\u2019m just not cut out for a career in the porn industry.<\/p>\n

Then he appeared. The front door opened and Gruff Rhys himself squeezed into the room with his big, cardboard \u2018Applause!\u2019 sign. We did! He was wearing a black bubble coat and a bobble hat. He ordered a coffee and began to play some music to us.<\/p>\n

You know what Gruff\u2019s music sounds like, and he played it. Lots of it. On his own. For 90 minutes. He managed this with both acoustic simplicity and idiosyncratic re-imaginings: \u2018Candylion\u2019 was sung over the looped intro of the 7\u201d single version. And by looping, I just mean stopping the record, picking up the needle and starting again. The sections between picking up and playing were referred to as ‘gaps’. Less a loop and more a\u00a0perforated circle, like the bit around your tax disc when it arrives in the post. He also did a beautiful song about genocide.<\/p>\n

On \u2018Cycle Of Violence\u2019, there were actual, proper loops \u2013 all kinds of unseen pedals curdling Rhys\u2019 chanting, drones and screams into infinite curlicues of sound. Some songs were played over acetate backing tracks on the record player, while others were just given a homespun finish; homespun, that is, if you happened to grow up in the shop that Brian Cant ran in Bric-A-Brac.<\/p>\n

However, it was those songs delivered in a more stripped-back folk form that worked best. A lot of adjectives swirl around Rhys\u2019 work but buried beneath the restlessness and renegade silliness, Rhys has an incredibly honest and quite rich voice, showcased perfectly during these quieter moments.<\/p>\n

Still, the surreal was never far away, from vinyl pressings of Norwegian bird-song to interludes of epic synth solos on 45 as he reset his keyboard, Rhys is a fascinating mixture of earnest composer and Situationist jester. This can sometimes come across as confused and disjointed, a prime example being the somewhat overlong and often bizarre encore, but at its best this concoction serves up a wonky but brilliant show that wouldn\u2019t seem out of place at next year\u2019s Edinburgh Fringe as well as a tent at Green Man.<\/p>\n

What was my word limit again?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You hear about these exclusive gigs don\u2019t you? Sometimes you see them on the BBC, an audience full of Graduate Recruitment Scheme Alumni who have a mate of a mate that knows someone who works on the Jools Holland show. They have\u00a0three-quarter full\u00a0pints and runny noses. Their partners look like they will sleep with anyone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[459],"tags":[469,1421,647,1561],"class_list":["post-9206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-cardiff","tag-gruff-rhys","tag-gwdihw","tag-h-hawkline"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}