07/10/2008
Constant blabber about a New Cross music ‘scene’ has always been pretty unfounded, hinging heavily on the lie that the Klaxons have something to do with the place. Someone even tried to coin a name for it once – ‘Rocklands’ – which made very little sense and caught on with no one. Undeterred, the organisers of Nail the Cross have realised the potential for a multi-venue festival across the area’s many art-scum bars, and by bringing together Domino Records and Adventures in the Beetroot Field, succeeded in attracting an impressive mix of intellectual rock and performers with names like DiscoFuckSlut DJs (or similar). Notion started things off with The XX, who demonstrate enough taste in their neo-goth plagiarism to be really quite good. Darting over to the New Cross Tavern, we catch a genuinely local band; Hatcham Social deliver their fidgety, stripped-down early 80s indie to some adoring fans and a few newbies, who vow to remember the name. More darting takes us to Goldsmith’s University for the foot-stomping, bottle-smashing maelstrom of Archie Bronson Outfit. A few in the crowd look slightly baffled by the band’s increasingly psychedelic re-working of their songs, but there's still enough energy there to leave you feeling as though you’ve been beaten by a gang of Mississippi rednecks. It would have been nice to see Clinic, who were undoubtedly excellent, but in the interests of journalistic variety, Notion headed to the Amersham Arms for a spot of These New Puritans. They should be rubbish given the fact that no one does ecstasy anymore, but somehow TNP’s Madchester vibe of droney, beat-heavy swirls and Messianic shouting, still sounds relevant and captivating. It sets the crowd up perfectly for the next five-or-so-hours of increasingly degenerate dancing, to a wide mix of electro-techno-digi-dancehall-whatever, interspersed with some animated stumbling around the streets. All in all, quite an achievement - if only fleetingly, New Cross stopped being merely the decrepit home of irritatingly-clothed art students and actually felt like a music scene. Words: Eric Randolph / Photo: Simon Fernandez
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