Noisy Pubs and Endless Surprises – the Fat Tuesday Tour
By VICTORIA KINGHAM & AMANDA BROOKS
Everybody here knows that in Hastings, Mardi Gras is now celebrated joyously each year as its literal translation, Fat Tuesday. As someone fairly new to this town, I can say it’s a wonder to behold. Good-humoured local residents come out dressed unashamedly in bright robes, flowers, jewels, hats, rags and feathers. Brass bands and drummers and makeshift bands and buskers parade up and down the narrow streets of the Old Town, and the pubs are rammed. Rammed. And every pub, every half-hour, puts on a different musical act, as the culmination of four days of festivity. Here we pick just four, who all write original lyrics.
As performers these young bands expend vast amounts of calories in energetic performance, though some of them, on the day, are amplified far in excess of the requisite number of decibels for the back room of a pub. City Dogs, for instance, were deafening, even though they looked no more than 17 years old. They have an enthusiastic following. Men and women of all ages, girls and boys, were ready to applaud the bombardment. Me, I had to leave – this volume, this close, was impossible. I didn’t get to stay long enough to work out what the lyrics were.
Contrast this with Message From the Ravens, a women’s band deservedly well-known in this area but indeed more widely in Britain. They are an admirably tight quartet who bill themselves as ‘alt-folk’. Wearing carnival sparkles and headdresses, they sing about ghosts, banshees, lost loves, and found objects. Their rhythms are faultless, their voices powerful, their harmonies tight and tuneful, their songs alluring, spellbinding, unashamedly original. And it is clear that their slickness of presentation is the result of a great deal of musical effort. An admirable band, rapidly and deservedly becoming well-known.
Funke And the Two-Tone Baby is a wild, madly energetic and exhilarating performer with a huge range of influences, one of which is clearly the two-tone sound of the early eighties – the Specials, Madness, Bad Manners – nevertheless he emerges as gloriously inventive. A singular ensemble, he filled a room loudly and confidently with ridiculous but wonderful songs played by himself on guitar, computer, harmonica and looper machine. And funny. He jumped and sang and talked and moved and sang again, all the while playing his guitar chords and working his electronic machinery. The crowd loved him, and his performance was electrifying. “You are not enough bonobo mate,” he sings, and the whole audience delightedly answer “Too much chimpanzee”. Oddly, I am completely charmed by this.
Lunabarge are a duo, partners in life as well as in song. Their own entry (on bandcamp.com) is so comprehensive that I reproduce it here:
“LunaBarge are a double-stomping, energetic quirk-folk duo. They are armed with banjo, guitar, ukulele, two voices and two stomp boxes. They bring you their catchy uplifting original songs covering topics such as date disasters, dinosaurs, holidays in space and the London Underground. They have just recorded and released their debut album with many more new songs on the way.”
The lyrics are clever and very British; one or two of them are fast and definitely in the realm of folk-rap. The album they mention does not do justice to the dynamic spectacle of this duet tapping their right feet on tambourines perfectly placed, close in all senses, in perfect harmony. “Proud to be a weirdo,” they sing, and this summed up the whole evening for me, and indeed this whole unique and lovable town.
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Thank you so much for the lovely review. We had brilliant fun at Fat Tuesday!