Flipron, The Coronet, London
Thursday, 22 February 2007
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Glastonbury-based band Flipron might have seemed an odd choice for an all-nighter put on by Lost Vagueness, but their magpie instincts and oddball lyrics fitted the glamorous crowd of would-be flappers, gangster molls, kinky nuns and top-hatted gents who filled The Coronet.
The event was billed as Valentine Day's Massacre and Flipron played under two huge red hearts while their equipment was, as usual, festooned with garlands of paper flowers. They opened with "Dogboy Vs Monsters", from Biscuits For Cerberus, their dog-obsessed second album, with front man Jesse Budd wailing over Joe Atkinson's busy piano and the tight rhythm section of drummer Mike Chitty and bassist Mark Wingfield.
Budd seems intent on emulating the chanson tradition of Jacques Brel, and tackles some very unusual, at times uncomfortable, subject matter. The Flipron singer might have been sitting down to play guitar - and occasionally mandolin, harmonica or, indeed, accordion - but there was no mistaking the intensity of his performance as he conjured up a Zimmer frame out of thin air over the jazzed-up groove of "Youth Shall Never Beat Old Age in a Race".
There is a fascination for the morbid at the heart of Flipron's music, as illustrated by "Raindrops Keep Falling on the Dead" and "The Vicious Car & Love Poem", and the Hawaiian-ska near-instrumental "Skeletons on Holiday", though the light-hearted "Rusty Casino's Casino Rustique", also from their Fancy Blues and Rustique Novelties debut, had fans waltzing on the dancefloor.
"Big & Clever" was half sea-shanty, half rugby song, but the real tour de force turned out to be "The Flatpack Bride of Possibilities", quite the most disturbing song I've heard since Bryan Ferry's paean to an inflatable doll in Roxy Music's "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", though Budd's snarly delivery proved more believable than Ferry's suaveness. If Budd can harness his wild imagination, Flipron could become the house band on the ghost ship in the next instalment of Pirates of the Caribbean. Someone tell Johnny Depp.
Touring to 7 March (www.flipron.co.uk)
