Martin Longley witnessed a transcendent chip off the old block of John Lennon.
The Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger
Hare & Hounds
1st September
Sean Lennon expressed seemingly genuine surprise at the room’s crowded nature. After all, GOASTT don’t really push the knowledge that Lennon is frontman to this deeply psychedelic miasma-orientated combo. The gig’s publicity was extremely and supposedly deliberately low-key, but at the very least, mere curiosity alone would have been sufficient to gather a reasonable number of Beatles obsessives, at the beginning of this rare UK tour. Fortunately, this outfit don’t require such associations to deliver a striking night’s music. Lennon and his co-creator Charlotte Kemp Muhl are devoted to the extremities of rock, coating their quite poppy ditties in a viscous tar of late-1960s distortion, phasing, delay, echo and/or general sonic-obscuring layers of the dirty-washing variety.
The entire crew are garbed in 1967-through-1973 clobber, with Sean looking much like Pops Lennon, around Beatles demise-time: black, feathered hat, and long locks, updated by current Brooklyn spectacles. This is doubtless deliberately unsettling.
Muhl was surprisingly a shadowy figure, concentrating on her nimble basslines and contributing backing vocals or co-vocals that were as deeply mired as Lennon’s in special effects. Their keyboardist favoured Mellotron-like swathes, adding to the beautifully-separated morass of the guitars.
The leaders almost seemed slightly nervous, Lennon rambling in his appealingly jokey introductions. There was no such hesitation in his guitar playing, with most of the key solos erupting from his molten strings in high-frazzling appreciation of the excessive UK voltage, compared to the weedy US and Japanese standards. His effects pedals promptly cut out for a spell.
It was often difficult to discern the words, but the payback was in a richness of psychedelic vocal surfacing. The pair of covers were also finely-picked, with an orgiastic number by nearly forgotten late-1960s rockers Gandalf, and as a final tune, Syd Barrett’s Long Gone, piling up the swirling density even further. Despite Muhl’s voiced distaste for encores, we could easily have lapped up another ten minutes or so of these heightened freak-outs…
