GOD DAMN RELIGION

Sir Richard Bishop and James Blackshaw
22/10/06, The Red Rose, London

Young British guitar-player James Blackshaw makes for an unassuming figure in performance, any excess energy in his body channelled directly into the blurred digits of his right hand turning cartwheels over 12 strings, but the distinctiveness of his playing makes it clear why he’s become a name on the lips of so many soft-spoken new music scenesters of recent.

He starts off with a series of invitingly naturalistic devotionals of the kind that make one feel like knocking on the door of a mighty oak and crawling inside for a snooze, open strings and hidden resonances of his 12 string providing momentary, fading bursts of pure-tone drone hovering above a dense nest of hypnotic, repetitive picking. Jolly, jolly nice all round, and material such as the more Fahey-esque “Transient Light” raises the bar further, melodies of startling purity descending upon the forest-drone mulch rather like the divine radiance suggested by the title.

Whilst Blackshaw numbs us gently with insistent beauty, Sir Richard Bishop of venerable subterranean paradigm-botherers Sun City Girls has come up with some rather more nefarious uses for the art of hypnosis. His film ‘God Damn Religion’, screened between performances tonight, is a sense-assaulting 30 minute montage of recontextualised imagery, Bishop’s avowed intention being to hi-jack the primal power of religious iconography via the techniques of Clockwork Orange style visual brain-washing, altering the viewer’s understanding of organised religion forever. Whether he succeeds or not is a moot point, but regardless, the film’s exhaustive world tour of “negative” religious imagery is a startling and awe-inspiring testament of the depths of human and/or divine madness, the seething subconscious of violence, domination and sexual dysfunction that underlies the respectable veneer of religious practice exploding in a wordless orgy of boggle-eyed, marauding demons, blood-crazed death goddesses, demented infernal torment, howling sacrificial innocents and grimacing, masochistic christs.

Sun City Girls’ shameless magpie approach to world culture has seen them accused of both irresponsible cultural voyeurism and bloody-minded obscurity over the years, but an occasional triumph of their aesthetic such as ‘God Damn Religion’ redeems all, not only as a beautiful, transformative film in its own right, but also by punching home with some decidedly concrete social and ontological issues of the kind sorely lacking in much of the formless chaos of the American psychedelic underground.

Lord Bishop’s musical set – another solo guitar venture - is overall less successful, but an event to behold nonetheless. An unapologetic virtuoso and the kind of guy who could over-play an elastic band, he’s all over the fretboard like a game of 5 dimensional hopscotch, coming on like some super-charged robo-tech Davey Graham, possessed of an unholy desire to career through a rambling, incoherent musical narrative taking in larger than life chunks of every guitar tradition under the sun; a whole pile of Django gypsy-jazz twisting through sinister Eastern modes, wistful folk-picking, dramatic mariachi madness, improv chaos, blues mutations and above all just non-denominational high-spirited prog wanking. Whether it all could be judged to be good or not is rather beside the point – the message here is that Sir Richard exists and he’s having a whale of a time playing the guitar like an absolute bastard and could probably benefit from cutting down on the coffee and getting out a bit more.

The best bit is where he sings – yes, he does one vocal song, completely out of the blue, and it’s fantastic! Hollering like a lusty pirate he sings what he dubiously claims is a “folk song from the ‘20s”, a demented tale of a stranger cut into six pieces by vengeful townsfolk on Christmas day or some such nonsense – it’s absolutely stunning. Sing more and play less Richard!

(I should note that I had to clear off home before the end of the set, so I guess he might have sung a bit more after my departure. I also missed United Bible Studies who were also on the bill – hope to catch them in future.)