Trigger Pulled: How Not To Tour Brexit Britain
I was supposed to review a live show headlined by Trigger Cut, but the UK Border Force Agency had other ideas.
Thanks to the efforts (that is, a single tweet) from Charlatans frontman and professional album listener Tim Burgess, you may already be aware of the fate that met Stuttgart noise-rock band Trigger Cut when they arrived in Calais to sail the Channel for a short tour of this increasingly-irrelevant Western European pinprick of an island we call Brexit Britain (emphasis on "prick"). Despite months of wrangling with all manner of newly implemented bureaucratic nightmares which many on these shores still insist on calling "freedom," they were turned away by a borderline jobsworth on the apparent basis that because this was not their main job, they were not welcome.
With one act of pettiness, the UK has closed its doors to the entire European DIY music scene. At least we have our precious, PRECIOUS sovereignty. And bendy bananas.
As the ringmaster said to the newly amputated lion tamer: The show must go on. And so it did one overcast evening in Ipswich, a town best known for belligerently making no attempt whatsoever to apologize for Ed Sheeran. From my bunker, I ventured out to one of their DIY venue success stories, The Smokehouse, for a gig that never was.
Support was both musical and moral. Providing the sounds were a pair of local noise merchants, Weapon Eyes and Italian Books. The former, at one time my radio boss, punished the audience with a brutal audio-visual barrage of ultra-tight gabber, gloriously bone-shattering sub-bass, and AI-generated humanoid monstrosities. Meanwhile, the latter screamed his way incomprehensibly through an aural assault of power electronics which, while good fun, would have been twice as good if it had trimmed some fat and come in at half of its 20-minute runtime.
Moral support came in person from promoter Rick Baylor, with appeals to the audience for additional donations to absent German friends, and in the form of two videos. Legendary punk poet Atilla The Stockbroker shared his condolences in angry, righteous form, while Crass co-founder Steve Ignorant was utterly inaudible against a background of coastal wind noise, leaving me the space to decide that he's starting to look a bit like Jim Bowen.
The men of the hour - Ralph, Daniel, and Mat - show us what we limey losers are missing out on with some blistering rehearsal footage which, even in lo-fi projected video form, sounded fucking great. Apparently taking the Motörhead approach of making everything louder than everything else, it's easy to imagine how their Albini-inspired guitar noise would have blown the roof off The Smokehouse. If the notoriety of their ill-fated tour found them fame, I hope that their actual live show will, someday, bring them the acclaim they deserve.
Baylor returned to the stage with former support act, now reluctant headliners, Earth Mother Fucker. Fronted by Larry Grayson lookalike and glorious misanthrope Bruce MacGregor, EMF delivered a cracking mix of country and noise, somehow finding the mid-point between Sonic Youth and John Denver. In a world where Sleaford Mods can crack the charts with scrappy punk channeling the rage of middle age despite sounding like total garbage, a band like EMF, who sound genuinely great, should be far bigger. MacGregor frequently blames their lack of commercial success on the band's long-suffering label, Antigen Records, and its owner, standing stage right. I would venture that, like Selfish Cunt before them, their name probably doesn't help. It certainly didn't get their name in any of the broadsheet newspapers covering the Trigger Cut saga, much to MacGregor's hilarious chagrin.
PT Barnum once said that any publicity is good publicity. Or was that Max Clifford? Anyway, despite initially insisting that they would never attempt to tour the UK again, the public interest generated in the band since their tour-that-never-was means the pull might be too great. Particularly when Atilla The Stockbroker is reportedly offering them a headline spot at The 100 Club.
Even if, like Grouch Marx, you have principles, it might not hurt to have others. Particularly when it comes to Brexit Britain.
