Graham Day & The Gaolers at the 100 Club, and The Mist

PARSLEY’S COMMLOCK Concert Review : Graham Day & The Gaolers, Bongolian & Len Price 3, 100 Club 29/10/08 Caught up with Graham & his men, now including the excellent John Barker (who bears a remarkable facial similarity to Stockhausen) on bass guitar, at the 100 Club. Opening quite early were the Len Price 3. They were as bright and bouncy as I remembered them when I saw them at the Primitive Festival in Rotterdam. Their originals were such instant classics that it made me wonder why they bothered with covers. Apparently Graham has been producing their recent recordings. Shamefully they weren’t allowed an encore. Next up was the Bongolian. This was a stunning tour de force of bongo jazz magic. Main man Nass makes it look deceptively effortless, but it’s an extremely exciting sound. There was excellent conga and piano support. They were the icing on the cake that was already mouth watering courtesy of the drum/bass/bongo+organ core sound. Finally, Graham & co. took to the stage & rocked their socks off, with excellent vocal harmonies too, and an interestingly autobiographical collection of new material including songs on smoking, drinking, songs, and backstage bores. Graham’s admirers were in, and some conveyed their ‘focus’ by staring intently at the stage even before he took to it! It was a top night and I hope the rest of the Gaolers tour goes as well. Film Review : The Mist Stephen King is a famous writer. When he writes a ‘novella’ it may give a clue as to a story idea that cannot sustain enough interest for a book’s worth. I am very easily frightened and need to steal myself to watch a horror film & hope to goodness it’ll be worth the effort. On this occasion I was fooled by an impressive array of commendations from various publications on the DVD cover. I have a note of their names and will make a point of never trusting them again. The film begins with a storm in a house causing a normal amount of chaos, somewhere in America. The locals all head for a local supermarket for supplies and repair items and this is where their troubles and a nightmare of a film (for all the wrong reasons) begins. It seems the storm has somehow unleashed the results of some military research station and this consists of a mist in which scary things are happening. In the most clumsy way imaginable the people in the supermarket begin to become farcical caricatures, over-articulating thoughts about the situation that they couldn’t possibly have had time to come up with. They then get into completely implausible confrontations with each other leading to as much carnage as the mist is creating. Prime amongst least plausible is Marcia Gay Harden as psycho Christian doom-sayer Mrs. Carmody. Obviously as people are dying everyone suddenly starts believing her and following her. Jeez, despite the breakneck speed of everyone’s farcical behaviour changes, I couldn’t help wondering if they might have had mercy on us and made this into a 20 minute episode of Night Gallery rather than 2 hours of Hollywood quality failure. I also wondered why these horror films still require some fairly major suspension of disbelief, when we have realistic examples of how people behave in crises, thanks for example to detailed accounts of 911. One chirpy moment for me amongst the debacle was spotting Toby Jones as assistant shop manager Ollie Weeks. I’m aware he’d been in other things, but for me he will always be the cute star of a commercial by my former employers NCR. In it we get a hole-in-the-wall’s view of his life as he meets his love and ends up marrying her, supported by his friendly cash dispenser. Here he didn’t seem to have aged from that ad, which must be around 10 years old. He gave a reasonable account of himself amongst the appalling action. The suspense was fairly non-existent. Fairly swiftly the ‘trapped in supermarket’ part gave way to the ‘fighting weird creatures’ part, with reasonable effects along the usual ‘why is everything alien so amazingly dangerous and horrible?’ lines. The alternative parallel plot, of psychotic ‘Lord Of The Flies’ style madness spreading at a stupid pace, got disastrous free reign. I won’t reveal the twist at the end, but if you can’t see it coming then maybe this is the film for you because for me it was heavily ‘signposted’ in the most farcically obvious way. If this film is a classic, then it’s a classically clunky approach to the horror ‘frightening alien creature/learning more about ourselves by the story’ movie. Overall review : thumbs down. This film was nearly comedy it was so bad. In fact it would probably have been far more successful if it gone for comedy rather than being a horribly lame horror film. parsley@gardenrecords.com [www.gardenrecords.com]