You have to take your heart in your mouth to go to Corsica Studios. The front of Elephant & Castle is potentially scary; you feel the presence of knives in the jackets, even if they're not there. But Corsica Studios is round the back. I've only ever been there at night. You approach it through the deserted, tawdry shopping arcade, and on through the deserted, tawdry Thameslink station; then you come out the backstreet where transit vans, parked up in the cavities of the station building, do their best to look more anonymous and unsuspicious than each other. You shimmy inoffensively up to the two Big Men Dressed in Black, who might be bouncers: "Errr, is this Corsi…?"; an almost imperceptible nod of the head, and you're through the door.
Where it's bright and warm, and a pretty young woman checks your name off the WeGotTickets.com list. Everything was OK, I'd arrived at the gig, my fifth David Thomas Broughton performance of 2007.
I spotted the merchandise table, cocky and confident now. "This is what I was after," I said, clutching this CD. I'd seen it mentioned on DTB's MySpace.
I've mentioned before what an astonishing, incredible performer is live, and how difficult it is to capture that on record. Can't be done, basically, because it relies on the physical experience of being there, the physical expression of every emotional cramp you can think of. Let me be lazy and copy and paste from the MySpace site:
For someone who appears to be going through his set in a completely random manner, he was in total control, commanding a reverential attentiveness for a performance that doesn’t pause for applause. Punching the wall, rearranging the candles and bottles on everyone’s table, kicking over his own pint, using a tape-recorder to squeal and grind out a quasi-rhythm, banging his equipment in time, and of course, coming into the audience to sing…all in one brilliantly orchestrated movement of expression. These things may not sound particularly impressive in isolation, but it was the sensation it produced as you watched it all unfold together: to be wowed and transfixed in the most life-affirming way possible.
I'd love to know if he's ever seen Forced Entertainment, or they've seen him.
I think this so-called mini-album (it's over an hour long — how mini is that?) is the best recording yet of DTB. A lot of credit for that goes to 7 Hertz, a band from Leeds featuring violins and stand-up double bass (initially I wondered if they might be the same 7Hz as I knew in Sheffield in the 1990s, who were involved in the Noisegate collective and 'zine, but evidently not). They particularly come into their own on the last couple of tracks.
The first track Weight of my Love featured in the last couple of performances I saw DTB do, and always got a titter for its line "I can't afford a pasty from Gregg's Bakery". I haven't seen him at all this year. That's partly due to other commitments — I was booked in for one gig but then had to be away on business — but also because part of his impact relies on surprise, and it's unreasonable to expect someone to keep on coming up with new surprises when you see him week in, week out.
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