Graham Coxon & Switches Live @ 53 Degrees in Preston
Review by Ceri-Lee Thomas
Switches strutted onstage on time (gasp!) and instantly plunged into there high energised set.
The ambition and rock stardom lust shone through on stand out tracks like “Snakes and Ladders” and “No Hero” as well as NME track of the week and new single "Lay Down The Law - out now on Degenerate Music.
The obvious comparisons to The Dandy Warhols aloofness mixed bizarrely with the catchy rhythms that touch on Franz Ferdinand and at times Brit-Pop bands such as Ash, Switches are a band who have the music, the attitude and the stage presence to make it worth your while.
You can watch the Switches in action by clickin just here...
Graham Coxon was considered to be the miserable one from Blur, but this evening he was far removed from this. Never has a band been so obviously happy to be onstage and performing.
With his bashful humorous banter with the audience Coxon put on a great show, alongside a very punk-orientated setlist.
The singles “Spectacular”, “Freakin’ Out” and “Bitter Sweet Bundle of Misery” were placed between album tracks and B-sides, ensuring that there was something for even the ardent fan.
The new single “What’s He Got” was played before the B-side “Bloody Annoying” on that release, and was well received by the audience.
All the songs were played at 110mph in true punk style, which had the crowd pogo-ing around like it was the 70’s.
The slower “Girl Done Good” was placed right in the middle of the set and perhaps lost some of the audience, but then the pace picked up even more furiously than before.
A six song encore completed the night on a bang, as Coxon reminds you how much of an amazing and talented guitarist he is.
MORE ABOUT SWITCHES
Biography August 2006
The nursery schools of Rayleigh, Essex had never seen the like. Most four-year-olds would turn up, stick some plasticine up their nose, piss in the sandpit and fill four hours happily smacking a plastic truck with a squeaky hammer. But not Mr & Mrs Bishop’s little boy Matt – when he wasn’t sat in a corner writing T-Rex style songs on the electric guitar his dad had built for him in spare hours off at the BBC engineering department, he was bouncing sounds back and forth between an ancient reel-to-reel and a Fisher Price tape recorder like some kind of miniature Epworth. It was, to the stunned creche supervisors, nothing short of rusk’n’roll.
“When I was a kid all I did was listen to music,” Matt remembers, “so I started playing and writing songs when I was four or five. At that age I only knew, like, two chords so it was mainly Bolan rip-offs. They’ve got pictures of me lying on the living room floor with a little toy piano and tape recorder, just lying around and pressing things. I used to be fascinated with multi-tracking. I had this Fisher Price tape recorder and my mum’s reel-to reel and I used to bounce across. I don’t know if those tapes still exist, I’ll have to find them and do some remixes.”
And while this didn’t make Matt – Switches mainman and a classic rock nutter in the making - a ‘child prodigy’ as such (“A child prodigy is someone who learns classical piano and gets grade 8 by the time they’re five, not a toddler wishing he had an afro and stars stuck to his face”), it was certainly the start of a childhood obsession with rock that bordered on the pathological. Having taught himself rudimentary mixing techniques at about the same age the other kids were getting the hang of joined-up writing and experimenting with four-tracks aged eleven, by the time he hit school Matt was a fully fledged Child Of Britpop (Blur Division) and his addiction had taken hold: he found himself regularly bunking off to listen to records, sneaking into gigs, losing concentration in class because he was “dreaming of music” and interrogating his classmates on their favourite records – whatever they’d recommend, be it Beefheart or Blink, Matt would then track it down and scour its grooves for the ‘secret of music’.
“I’d even listen to Gary Glitter,” he admits, “I hate to say it but my dad had a few of his records and I used to love those double-tracked drums.”
Becoming something of a musical sponge, as a teenager Matt wrote hundreds of songs spanning vast swathes of genre – early attempts were influenced by Blur, Bowie, The Beatles or T Rex; Bee Gees style disco tunes; Billy Joel piano ballads; Beck-esque hip-hop; glam rock, punk and hardcore emo. His stacks of home-made tapes were typhoons of conflicting styles and it wasn’t until he went to college in Guildford that he put together a band – formed by emailing every student over the intranet and then hiring the respondents he liked best without hearing them play – to initially act as a siphon for all this overwhelming influence and then come together as... "well, the idea was a band, but we're really a neurotic bunch of obsessive compulsive weirdos" smiles Matt.
They're not so much the last gang in town as a foursome of amiable loners, fiercely individual to the point of each finding their artistic drive from a different musical decade. Ollie Thomas is the self confessed sixties throwback guitarist, socialite and communicator of the band, aspiring to psychedelic tinged virtuosity, Hendrix and Abbey Road. Matt is the seventies, with a love for 10cc downright strange in someone who wasn't born while they existed. Jimmy G on drums is all sharp dressed eighties, Thriller, Vegas and Let's Dance era Bowie - he also claims he sold one of his kidneys to buy a drum kit, but he may be bluffing here, being an avid poker player and dry source of amusement for the rest of them. Finally, Max Tite on bass is the nineties and beyond, the most up to date musically, the odd man of the band, too slack to be a geek, with a borderline pathological desire for vitamins, cake and Sufjan Stevens songs. In another life he'd be Vincent Gallo and has a quiet musical rebelliousness to counter Ollie's love of the big guitar and Matt's of the big tune. They were called Matt Rock And The Others, they got compared to Weezer and The Vines a lot (Weezer for the music, The Vines for Matt’s unpredictable stage madness which often saw him falling over the drumkit and clambering onto tables) and the peak of their success was winning the university Battle Of The Bands competition: first prize, a support slot with The Darkness.
“We didn’t know who they were when we saw them backstage.” Matt says. “Max was going ‘when are Status Quo on then?’”
From there, there was only uphill. Relocating to a flat next to a Guildford brothel in 2003, where they would write songs to the backbeat of the banging eminating from their neighbours, Matt Rock And The Others became Switches, toured around the south for a year and eventually got snapped up by Degenerate Music then, after an amazing trip to South by South West in Texas, Atlantic Records, on the basis of the most mind-boggling demo of the decade.
Matt grins. “When my publisher first approached me he was like ‘I've heard five tracks – one of them sounds like The Bee Gees, one sounds like T Rex, one sounds like Fugazi…’”
Rather than head straight into the studio to record a disjointed mish-mash of an album – what could have been the pop equivalent of a schizophrenic jabbing random numbers into a karaoke machine for 45 minutes – Switches hit the road in support, variously, of The Rakes, Louis XIV, Nightmare Of You, Hard-Fi, The Rifles and Graham Coxon on a mission to solidify their sound and present a coherent musical front. They returned this April ready to record the ‘Message From Yuz EP’ – four tracks of handclappy glamstomparama that crystallize the last decade of British pop excellence and stand as the perfect introduction to Switches’ skewed and sensational world. For two tracks (the title track; ’13 Years Inside’) it’s Supergrass kung fu kicking their way through a burning firework factory, then it turns into The Killers doing Blur’s ‘Girls And Boys’ for ‘No Hero’ and winds up in a three-way rock opera face-off between ELO, Kraftwerk and Ziggy Stardust on ‘Joysticks’, a song Matt wrote as an entry to a college song composition award, presumably the only entry about convincing your girlfriend to let you shag her sister.
“The first bit is in ballad mode,” Matt explains, “but I guess it’s more of a sarcasm sort of thing. Then it breaks out into the full band and it gets more deviant in a sexual way, talking about keeping your sister satisfied. Not my own sister, my lover’s sister. That song was three things that came together, I tried to make some sort of suite out of it.”
It’s not all deviant sexual practices in Matt’s lyrics - no, mostly it’s emotional deviance. His imagery works as metaphor for his relationships; when ‘Message From Yuz’ talks of “You told me that my head had gone blue… you showed me what I needed to do” it’s speaking, Matt claims, of “some sort of communication between two people, whether it be love or desperate medical attention”. Likewise ‘13 Years Inside’’s references to Alcatraz prisoners and feeling trapped signify “trying to escape embarrassing encounters with women”. And Switches debut album, due in 2007, will be swamped in the bitter sting of romance.
“The message is going to be of love but to be wary,” says Matt. “A lot of the songs are going to have a sour bite to them, love songs that aren’t quite happy endings. Songs like ‘Every Second Counts’ are glorious love songs, saying every second counts in love but there are other songs that aren’t so… I’ve written a song for my girlfriend which is a bit sad. I don’t know if it’s completely reflective of our relationship. I think it’s my age. Maybe when I’m married with kids I won’t write about women anymore. I really admire Damon Albarn for starting off in that mode and writing loads of albums that weren’t involving him, he was just watching. Ray Davies did it as well. I’d love to be able to do that at some stage but at the moment I need to be true to myself and that’s writing songs about emotion.”
But one thing niggles. With so many potential futures open to Switches, so many styles and genres already mastered, just what kind of band are they going to end up?
“Hopefully a really creative and passionate one,” Matt states, “and one that pushes boundaries. Rock music is still alive and kicking but there could be some changes made to it. A lot of bands seem to be overtly retro in their influences and that bugs me a lot. I hope we can take rock’n’roll into new areas.“
He grins broadly. “I don’t know exactly what those will be ...... yet.”
From tuneful toddler to genius genre glutton, Matt Bishop and Switches are turning it on.
Buy tickets »
comments