Life is fucking is dancing is Shopping is rhythm
Everything is wrong. You want to know how wrong? I have seen plenty of Greatest Guitarists of All Time lists, vacantly staring as I have, and not one of them has listed Rachel Aggs in its Top 10. Now, we can agree, I know very little about music, certainly not as much as those venerated assholes over at Rolling Stone and supportive of the new NME, but this seems wrong to me. So paced, so energetic, so focused. Each dissonant note calibrates and then cuts straight through the crap. She does this without thinking, though. She does this while bouncing, smiling, singing. I have never witnessed ESG play live but this is not ESG. It is minimal inasmuch as not a note is wasted, but it is complicated. Life is complicated. Life is wrong. If you listen closely enough you can hear entire conversations taking place between her guitar’s strings. Now you tell me. Did Johnny Marr ever manage that?
Perhaps it is the bass-playing of Billy Easter? She knows that no one looks sexier when they are dancing and sweating while they are dancing. The room tonight is nearly depraved in its overload of sexiness: everywhere I turn women are frottaging men, feet are lifting fast and quick, fast and furious. We are fucking the world, and dancing on its remains. Life is fucking is dancing is Shopping is rhythm. I am not dancing though. I have discovered that perhaps the worst drug to view Shopping in all their multifaceted aware glory is Valium, and I am mildly overdosing on Valium. I meet a new companion tonight and have to apologise for my dullness in a world full of stars. My companions race rings around me, dancing. You could hold entire dance parties around the bass of Billy Easter.
Perhaps it is the heartland drumming of Andrew Milk? Words never fail me. Bu…. There is so much to take in and enjoy and not take in and enjoy and stand open-mouthed in wonder at except you can not do that you are too busy dancing across the dance floor in your head, doing the moon stomp with the skins, the Watusi with the Athens sorts, the post-punk glitch. It has been decades since I saw Delta 5 play live but… but this is not Delta 5. There is no alienation, only welcoming embraces of dance floor rhythms and sweet, sour sweat.
I am asked what music I used to DJ with, and point helplessly at the stage. Here. This is it. Right here in front of us, in 2015, in Brighton. Better than Hanover. A veritable mountain of beans. One thing alone is certain in this rotten, wrong world and one thing alone: they will never strut out on stage and destroy Britain to the strains of Shopping at the Tory Party Conference.