DIARY OF A PANDAMAN – DECEMBER 2024
Well, we had that one wonderful job to to, and blow us down with a tarred raven’s feather if we didn’t go and do it. Checking out 365 live sets through 2024? Signed sealed and delivered at the start of November with the mighty Mercury Rev at Norwich Arts Centre. How precisely lovely, and a precise point to put our paws up and whistle away the rest of the year. But no! We ended November amidst a veritable blitzkrieg of cool bands from the continent over at the Viva Sounds Festival in downtown Gothenburg, and even as the mince pies are minced and the sausage rolls are rolled the gig count continues upwards.
The fierce panda Christmas party is one particular gigging hotbed at Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes in downtown Shoreditch, with furiously gritty Margate trio TARMAC roadtesting some suitably hardcore concepts and JW PARIS bringing the classic indie rock swag and indeed swagger, all hell-for-leather melody and mayhem. Opening up, in an entirely unsuitable musical vein, we have KORDA KORDER, a Hastings duo who’ve been amassing radio plays a’plenty for their swoongazing ‘What Have You Done?’ single.
It’s one of those surprise out-of-the-chilly-blue successes, a track which drops into the lap of radio and impacts so speedily Korda Korder are actually playing katch up on the gigging front. So tonight’s show – their second ever – is a stripped back affair, just a duo with Tom on guitar and Grace on vocals. Beamingly bittersweet they are too, the minimal dynamics giving Grace’s intensely graceful vocals a chance to shine in a gently charming atmosphere. Half of the appreciative crowd seems to consist of DJs who’ve already been playing ‘What Have You Done?’ in full effect. Next time we’ll see them in the new year they’ll be a full five piece band, for now just we can just cherish the burgeoning musical love.
One final dash for that pre-Christmas finishing line, then: the Pandaman finds himself heading to the chilly south coast for something old, something new and something slightly blue: Eastbourne Winter Garden is an appropriate place to be on December 18th, where we find our very own HAMISH HAWK on resplendent form, bruised of vocal and flamboyant of gesture and full of the joys of his 6music album of the year ‘A Firmer Hand’. “The Mozzer you CAN take home to meet the parents,” is the pithy take away from a show where his Celtic panache goes down so snowingly well with the TRAVIS thousands his merch stall queue snakes out virtually to the seafront.
For Hamish is on the entirety of the Travis tour, a jaunt which rolls right through the month. Admirable work – what does soundchecking after sunset day after day after day do to a bassist’s brain?? – and there is no little appreciation for the headliners. They’ve had their travails, have Travis – there’s the odd band who followed in their ‘90s commercial jetstream who can now carry off a string of stadium shows, while Travis play the coastal towns they forgot to close down – but it’s worth reminding ourselves that ‘The Man Who’, after a sluggish start, eventually spent nine weeks at the top of the album charts at the fag end of the last century.
That’s the record that gave us ‘Driftwood’ and miserably mizzly festival favourite ‘Why Does It Always Rain On Me?’, and these are the kind of songs which endure in an endearingly ramshackle set. This is partly down to Fran Healy – currently flame red of hair – and his habit of indulging in the kind of heartfelt anecdotal asides that Billy Connolly would have appreciated. This is not a night for thrusting rock antics, it’s one for retrospection, relishing the fact that we’re still here in this moment and shouting along to ‘Sing’.
Hamish and Travis have some kind of homecoming coming up together in Glasgow on December 21st. This frankly shames the Pandaman, because the following day it’s a train over to Brighton City for our own final show of the year, it being a whole two days earlier on December 19th. Pathetic, we know. But there’s a Shakin’ Stevens song in the air and a Goo Records Christmas party in the Red Room downstairs at The Prince Albert, while upstairs is a band called RUGRAT. These are the the days we call our own.
Because just when you think there isn’t anything left to see in 2024 Rugrat turn up from Guildford with a panache and a passion you kinda forgot ever existed in this post-post-poster-boy-punk indie world. There are throwbacks, for sure – the smart / casual charity shop chic lends a sultry air of The Strokes to proceedings, and the frontman is one part Damon Blur and another part Roddy Woomble. So there is old school energy here, but there are freshly minted songs as well, fizzing with sassy hooks and classy indifference.
Indeed, it’s such an ace musical facedown even indie-hardened seasiding locals are impressed. Next time we’ll see them they won’t even be called Rugrat – pre-empting the takedown call from the Nickelodeon legal boffins they’ve already decided to rename themselves Lemon Suckr. Forever ahead of the curve, the singer is even already wearing a Lemon Suckr tee.
Not suckrs at all, then.
PANDAMAN’S 2024 TOTAL OF LIVE ACTS SEEN IN 2024: 414
Want to read about all the gigs the Pandaman saw in 2024. Click on the link below.
