Band Of Holy Joy + Pete Astor's The Attendant + Masal
This Sound Lounge show is a benefit for UK registered charity Seven Spikes Relief who are working to improve conditions in bomb ravaged Gaza and Palestine.
It is brought to you by Sutton Friends of Palestine and Stand Up To Racism Sutton. Three great live acts are donating their time. The gig is entry by donation at the door and tickets can be reserved here.
Band Of Holy Joy have mutated endlessly since their origin as a kind of trash-bin industrial folk collective, through early experiments in an intensely poetic form of ambient postpunk, to near chart-contenders on Rough Trade, free of bitterness but with greater heart…and more recently onward to a series of albums of gently anthemic social culture and political critique.
The new album ‘Scorched Jerusalem’ released at the end of January 2025 confronts the historic-political issues of the last several years head-on. The album received four and five star reviews in Uncut, Mojo, Lounder Than War, Record Collector, Narc, etc.
Live is where they are at their best, with a unique energy and intensity.
The Attendant: Pete Astor, widely revered leader of seminal Creation Records’ guitar combos The Loft and The Weather Prophets, has never been the proverbial one-trick pony. Weaned on Can and post-punk angularity as much as the poetic end of the rock ’n’ roll spectrum, Pete has long maintained a ‘shadow career’, punctuating a still-thriving song-based solo career with music of a more abstract palette via notable parallel projects such as sample-based, lo-fi mavens The Wisdom of Harry (Matador) and, in tandem with David Sheppard, utopian instrumentalists Ellis Island Sound (Heavenly).
Add to that list The Attendant, a project which manifested out of the strange, empty days of lockdown and in which Pete delivers spoken-word narratives – wonderfully off kilter poetic monologues plucked from some lost art movie of the memory – against a drum-machine-propelled textural swirl delivered by Pete alongside multi-instrumentalist-producer Ian Button (Death in Vegas, Wreckless Eric, Go Kart Mozart, Thrashing Doves), bassist Andy Lewis (Spearmint Paul Weller, Blow UP club DJ).
The Attendant’s initial tracks were released over a series of lathe-cut 7inch singles, which sold out straight away, as did 2021’s 10” mini-album compilation, Audit. A smattering of beneath-the-radar live shows subsequently kept a growing audience engaged, and now the ensemble is set to release a brand-new EP, Unit, it’s quintet of tracks diving deeper into itchy, oddly catchy musicality, joining the dots between Krautrock, post-punk and a kind of deluxe bedroom electronica. All of which is but a frame for Pete Astor’s poignantly intoned disquisitions on everyday mystery, opportunities missed and half-remembered events in the ill-lit locales of yesteryear. The difference here, however, is that each of the tracks blossoms into a full-throated chorus – an unexpectedly dynamic efflorescence that arrives courtesy of some soaring arrangements.
The band are now working on a first full length album, Note Verbale, which will be out in 2025.
Masal is a collaboration between Al Johnson and Ozlem Simsek. Ozlem is a Turkish multi instrumentalist whose middle eastern background is entwined with her western studies in classical music. Al performs psychedelic electronic music as Alien. As Masal they weave harp, Theremin and electronics into a beautiful aural journeys.
Their 2023 album collaboration with Andy Bell (Ride / Oasis) ‘Tidal Love Numbers’ and album as a duo ‘The Galloping Cat’ both received strong support from 6 Music DJs (Iggy Pop, Cerys Matthews, Gideon Coe, Marc Riley, Stuart Maconie). ‘Exquisite’ - 8/10 - Uncut. ‘Enchanting’ - Electronic Sound.
