What: Live Show
Venue: The Labour Club
Town: Northampton UK
Date: Friday, 3^rd of June 2005

Notes

the next Masters of Budvar. It's on Friday 3rd June at the Labour Club and the bill is:

From Berlin - Wolfgang Tschegg
From London - Peter Crouch
From NN1 - Yours truly, Pat Fish

It's free, of course.

Coming soon to Masters of Budvar - The Telescopes; Hot Mocambo; Tim Keegan; Max Eider; Mickey Greaney; Dave Kusworth and many more...

Masters of Budvar present

- at -

  The Labour Club, Charles Street, Northampton NN1

Friday 3rd June 2005

    Wolfgang Tschegg

  Born in a part of Austria where the German language never really made it into the 15th Century, Wolfgang Tschegg studied at the conservatory in Vienna and made early appearances at that city's notorious Flex Club, U-4 and Szene Wien before recording his extraordinarily beautiful first album in a rural church. He recorded two further albums with Vienna Scientists producer Gernot Ebenlechner before decamping for several months to New York. He is currently based in Berlin and has just released another CD.

  Styling himself the Electric Alpine Country Boy, Wolfgang mixes soulful Vienna house backing tracks with melodic electric guitar lines and that wonderful rich, dark voice of his.  Often he sings in German, sometimes in English, occasionally in Italian or French, but the beauty and feeling of his songs need no translating.

  Wolfgang is in the UK for just two dates, at London's 12 Bar Club on Sunday 5th June (for all you metropolitan readers) and, of course, at Masters of Budvar this Friday. Check out this unique artist for yourselves, people.

Disappointment is not an option.

http://www.wolfgangtschegg.de

  Peter Crouch

  From 1991 to 1993 Peter Crouch was the lead guitarist in the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy. Since then he has been writing and producing songs from his home studio under the name Cellartime, building a substantial body of work that bears comparison with Leonard Cohen, Dean Wareham or English post-punk songwriters like the Weather Prophets' Peter Astor and Laurence Heyward of Felt. He admits to influences from Randy Newman and Robert Cray, so expect a dark blues inflection to his sweet, elegantly simple tunes of misery and despair.

  Important note to fans of Southampton FC: this is not the same Peter Crouch as the lanky Spurs reject you will be shortly losing to a Premiership club.

  Pat Fish

  As Creation Records positivity-generator-in-chief Edward Ball once put it, "Part Madonna, part Maradona". This man likes to make what he calls Skuff Karaoke. Funny, really - it was Wolfgang Tschegg who sold him on the idea in the first place. A part electric, part acoustic set with lush melodies and annoying little squelchy noises of uncertain origin.

http://www.jazzbutcher.com

  Stage times:

  Pat Fish - 9:00pm

Peter Crouch - 9:30pm

Wolfgang Tschegg - 10:00pm

Admission is free, as always. The people are friendly, the beer is cheap, the PA warm, the speeches short.

      PS - Don't forget Beat Wednesday this week, upstairs at the Labour Club, featuring totally acoustic performances from Joe Woolley and his guests, Katy Malko and Californian songwriter Steven Wilson aka Plasticsoul.

Outrage at Masters of Budvar! Fishy walks on and sings "Julian Cope is Dead"! He can't resist the urge to sing it like Bill Drummond. Curtis barely resists the urge to throw furniture about. Joe Woolley then proceeds to join in to play lead on Sister Death. JBC twin lead guitar beasts Peter Crouch and Max Eider (for it is he) gaze in baffled astonishment. Fishy blames Big Tim Sansom (a spurious excuse, if ever there were one) and careers off into a karaoke set, crashing into the wall about twenty minutes later with a rendition of De La Soul's "Tread Water".

This is Peter Crouch's first ever solo show, so he has sent for moral support and recruited the aforementioned Eider to play his lovely old Gretsch while a seated Crouchy sings and plays acoustic rhythm. Max starts a little quiet, but, once he hits the right level, he provides a beautiful lush accompaniment to Crouchy's acid-tongued chronicles of intercontinental anguish and despair. It's fun to hear him playing Crouchy's own lead lines from the recordings too. Altogether it's an inspired pairing: elegant, world-weary, darkly tuneful and quite mesmerising. We want this back again.

Wearing a baseball cap and a fat old semi-acoustic that could almost give Max's Gretsch a run for its money, accompanied by assorted odd little bits of machinery and the dapper German jazz bassist Rainer, Wolfgang Tschegg returns to Northampton Town. He opens up with one of my favourite tunes, "Helicopter", then makes brief introductions before setting up the mutated bossanova beat for "Mann aus den Bergen", one of the loveliest tunes on his new album. Next comes a choppy little number called Mustang: "And if you ask yourself do I mean the car or the horse...it doesn't matter. Both are cool." By this stage of the game Wolfgang and Rainer are really grooving, and although their singing in German makes them a touch impenetrable, the audience are starting to get it too. Me, I'm sitting right in front of the stage, so happy I could...well, never mind what I could do. Wolfgang is giving that guitar a good going over. "Yeah, yeah - all right!" Then into the cool ballad "Das Haus" and "Dunkel" ("It's a little bit dark, but not very dark") complete with harmonica solo before the recorder apocalypse that heralds the new single "Tarzan Sagt" (Yes, "Tarzan Says", that's right...) There is a touching version of "Winter Kompakt" before Rainer takes gamely to the electric piano for "Superhimmel". There is a supremely far-out droney thing called "Das Schiff" ("It's a space ship") with some outrageous bendy bass playing, all of  which has people cheering like fools and baying for more, so we are graced with a kicking, souped-up "Sonnenmaedchen" to conclude. It was all unspeakably beautiful. So I shall speak of it no more, save to offer my heartfelt thanks to Wolfgang and Rainer for coming and doing that in our club.

Back at Shakespeare Villas we enjoyed another fine afterhours set from Joe Woolley, whose CD was promptly seized by Rainer for further investigation back in Berlin. Doesn't it get light early these days? What's that you say, Crouchy? No, leave it. Leave it.