GUADALUPE PLATA | LIVE REVIEW
The Moon Club, Cardiff, Fri 23 Sept
I don’t go to very many live gigs. Time and money on the weekends is limited, as I’m sure you’ll agree, and as Buzz magazine’s clubs editor, I have my priorities. Guadalupe Plata caught my eye though – I guess because they’re Spanish, the otherness adding a kind of cultural caché, especially when described like this: “the most deathly delta blues outfit to ever emerge from Andalusia … theirs is a sound that lingers in the sunset like a voodoo curse.” I was instantly sold. It turns out other people think so too – the band won the IMPALA Music Prize (the European equivalent of the Mercury) for the best European independent album of the year in 2014.
Opening were local three-piece The Rockin’ Sinners, somewhat regulars at the Moon: at one time a covers band but now breezing through a well-thumbed set of their own twanging garage and rockabilly joints, fried and dusty. They were an endearing presence with an almost Partridgian onstage rapport, topless upright bassist Al Hellbound looking incongruously fleshy in the early evening light.
Due to an overly eager pre-session at the Robin Hood beforehand, and being slow to leave, I was judiciously oiled by the time the Andalusians hit the stage, which was suitable way to experience their swampy, fuzzy session. Two Spanish ladies go crazy at the front as the band barrel through a set of creaking, groaning, careening tunes that channels wild, distorted blues and tom-tom pounding rock and roll through the dark mythology of Andalusian music. The singer’s wailing voice catches in his throat, a strangled yelp like a dog in pain, but far from being ugly, it kind of harmonises with the band’s feedback-blurred guitar riffs, bass rubs and fried drum sizzle.
Guitarist Paco sometimes uses a three-string cigar box guitar he made himself, and they made their own style of washtub bass out of a Zinc bath tub, a chainsaw cord, and a broomstick they found in the graveyard in Úbeda, the town from whence they came and whose patron saint gave them their name. It was purportedly a location for filming spaghetti westerns – this may not be true, but it certainly should be. What a trip.
words GWYN THOMAS DE CHROUSTCHOFF