The Monorchid - Vimeo

Back in September 2006 a few of us from Nottingham made a last-minute decision to go to Chicago for the Touch & Go 25th Anniversary. It was great fun, it looked a bit like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin/sets/72157594314716448/with/261746806/

The last band to get added was The Monorchid. I'm a fan. I got asked to write something for Careless Talk Costs Lives magazine a few years ago. The plan was to interview vocalist Chris Thomson about the various bands he's been involved in but with an eye on deflating the whole revivalist/reunion culture that was on the rise at the time and now seems to have killed music stone dead. To quote Chris from another interview:

"It’s not that this music existed in some vacuum. We toured, we played out, and we did our best to make the performances accessible. So, if you’re upset you never got to see Monorchid or Lupus, I really don’t give a shit, there were plenty of opportunities"

It would have been good. Seems like every band the guy is in gets progressively less interested in referencing the past. If anyone can stick a banana in the exhaust pipe of the whole Michael Azzerad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, re-assessment of gut-instinct-events-as-carefully-planned-socio-political-plans then I figured it'd be Thomson.

The editor thought it was a shit idea. Oh well.

On the Friday, after the first day of the festival, they played a warm-up for their Sunday slot at The Note. Here's 2 poorly-lit, horrific-quality snippets of X Marks The Spot Something Dull Happened Here and The Warmers.






Woke up on Saturday morning with a bad head and about $2 in my pocket together with this covered in what looks like dogshit:



Here's how Sunday went: