As we've had a year of obviously awful, awful character in which gigs haven't happened, it seems appropriate for Cyril Atrocious to offer a bunch of reviews of gigs that didn't happen by bands that don't exist....
Turtle Chaos (12th April '20)
Ashington anarcho-legends Turtle Chaos have a large, loyal and dedicated fan-base who travel from afar to every gig they play, which made for a bit of an awkward scene as most of us Vaults regulars were kind of shunted to the back of the room by a crowd of foxes, badgers, stoats and at least one glassy-eyed vole, who kept scrambling over my feet to get into the gap between the nudgie and the jukebox. I didn't know what he was doing in there, but apparently Sara found a glue-bag in there afterwards. The band themselves are impressive, especially considering that as highly specialised marine reptiles, they lack any fingers to form chords with, though that of course is really what gives them their signature sound. Still, they did suffer some technical difficulties after an Arctic tern, who'd had a bit too much to drink, shat all over the mixing desk, causing the sound to keep cutting out. Not that it mattered much: they kept on playing regardless, and the assorted woodland creatures, who knew all the words, sang along with them. Canny gig like.
Tulips (3rd May '20)
The inappropriately titled Tulips are unquestionably the stupidest grind band I've ever seen. The drummer basically played a 35 minute long snare roll, with very occasional cheeky paradiddles; he had completely dispensed with the kick drum, and in its place had a sine wave oscillator emitting a constant drone at 60Hz. The oscilloscope was a nice touch mind. The guitarist had only one string on his guitar, tuned to D: the rest of the broken strings dangled ostentatiously (and improbably) from the headstock, as he spent the entire set whipping his hand up and down the fretboard like he was frantically wanking off a horse. The vocals were so intense that they actually transcended the human auditory spectrum, and were discernible only as a faint mouse-like squeak. The bassist looked like he was actually playing something interesting, but as it was totally inaudible under the sine wave, I can only imagine what it might have been. The crowd, which began as a feisty mosh-pit lasted nearly 3 mins / 11 songs before slumping to the floor, liquid shit seeping from their arses, and occasionally making pitifully feeble efforts to punch each other. I bought a CD but I doubt I'll listen to it.
Seventeen Reasons You've Never Heard Of Us (31st May '20)
This is a screamo band from New Herrington who are named after their own debut LP, which indeed is 17 tracks long and each song describes a reason you have never heard of them, or why, having heard of them, you don't like them. They're actually pretty decent: quite polished and melodic, if you can get past all the tedious self-referential meta-irony. Songs like "Our Band Name Is Too Long And Unwieldy (And So Are All Our Song Names)" or "We're English Yet We Sing In Awful Canadian Accents" actually have quite catchy hooks. "We Hang Out At The Bridges, Drinking Coffee From Starbucks" has some pretty sweet vocal harmonies in the build-up to the chorus, while both "Carly's Song / Narcissistic Whining In Dm7"and "We're Morally, Ethically And Aesthetically Opposed To Songs Written In 4/4 Time" have some interesting dynamic developments. It's just a shame really they're such insufferable prats (which reason is referred to on "You Hate Us, We Don't Care, So We Formed A Band And Wrote A Bunch Of Songs About It").
Shirtless Stalin (28th June '20)
There is a fine line between post-modern ironic Tankie-ism and handing out membership forms for the Young Communist League, and Shirtless Stalin repeatedly crossed it. I mean, I can take songs like "Hey, Ho (To The Gulag You Go)" and "Death To The Kulaks!" in the spirit of playful humour that they're (hopefully) intended. But I definitely draw the line at "Liquidate The Anarcho-Syndicalists". It's one thing playing up to the stereotype of the mad-eyed ultra-Leftist for laughs, singing about human rights being bourgeois sentimentality, but irony as a permanent stance actually ceases to be ironic. Just as the functional difference between ironic racism and actual racism is none, the difference between continually joking about worker's democracy being petit-bourgeois deviationism and actually being a counter-revolutionary pig is zilch. Long story short, these fuckers need shooting. #beingironicbutalsodeadlyserious
Naked Babies (19th July '20)
There is a sculpture by Salvador Dali involving a rotting corpse-like mannequin and a multitude of live snails. I mention this because it may well be the inspiration for Naked Babies. Deliberate ugliness is a hard thing to countenance. Dali had a flair for it, and in a sense, so too do Naked Babies. The musical talent on display is very obvious: the rottenness though is in the lyrical substance of the songs. This is a band whose edgelord antics are so dank, they actually caused a slug infestation in the Vaults. I first sensed the problem with the somewhat tasteless introduction to their second track, "The Ballad Of Jimmy Saville". Unease then shifted to startlement when I went to take a sip of my pint and my lips touched on the shell of a snail, clambering over the rim of the glass. Flicking the creature aside, the disgust intensified when I tried to put the glass down on the mantelpiece and lightly squished a fat four-inch long licorice-like slug. The glass tipped and spilled as the slug recoiled under its weight, amidst a puddle of fizzing lager. With mounting horror, I realised that the back room of the Vaults was inundated with invertebrates and their silver-slime trails. Was I hallucinating? The glistening wee goo-beastie creeping between the silver studs on the back of Prior's jacket certainly looked verité. Everywhere I looked, on the walls and floors and the ceiling, the room was alive with moist-backed molluscs, the coloured disco-lights reflecting off their flesh, scattering multi-hued twinkles around like little black mirror-balls at a goth disco. It was a transfixing sight, and ickiness aside, I'd pay to see them again. Less so Naked Babies and their tawdry paedo jokes though.
Anti War Dead (2nd August '20)
Noted knobhead Bob Geldof once famously went off on one about identikit punks from the stage at Rebellion. If he'd directed his criticism at Anti War Dead though, honestly, you'd have been hard-pushed to disagree with him. Skanky black denim and stencilled slogans on bedsheet banners, verbose diatribes set to a D-beat, bizarre ska songs about nuclear holocaust, and a tendency to equate eating meat with the crimes of Dr. Mengele... truly they're a full house in a game of 80s punk bingo. That said though, when I got home after the gig, I did see on the news that the Arab-Israeli conflict had resolved itself and world peace was briefly achieved for the duration of their set, so there is that to be said for them.
Slouching Towards Bensham (13th September '20)
These were a noise improv band composed of three bassists and an SR-16 drum machine run through a guitar pedal board. As the interminable sub-bass cacophony rumbled on into its twelfth minute, the portrait of Dickie that overlooks our gigs was seen to avert its eyes, and in that awful, fateful moment, all hell broke loose as The Deep Ones emerged from the sea and over-ran the Port Of Sunderland, before swimming up the Wear and directly attacking The Vaults. A desperate battle ensued, lasting best part of forty minutes, as the Bowls fought with beer bottles, fireplace implements and broken furniture against the clammy, dead-eyed, vaginal-mouthed, many-tentacled monsters from the Deep. Awful were the screams and squelches as the tentacles entwined with salt-slimed limbs, the suction pads puckering and tearing spots of flesh from our bodies. Quivering with primal terror and revulsion, we stabbed and slashed and battered and burned these nightmares made flesh, until finally, we drove them off. They were last seen schlepping towards Pallion Matalan, but the ruination of the bar and the lingering stench of rotten seaweed was so overwhelming that the rest of the gig had to be abandoned.