Once more for those in the cheap seats – hell is for heroes and beer is for drinking for this is Glasgow, after all, and if you can’t win a drinking contest then perhaps you should relocate your unfortunate beard to Edinburgh. Tonight, however, the deep fried musical focus is on Bone Cult, Maps of Michigan and Mick Flaherty and the basement is that of Pivo Pivo. I like basements, by the way.
Mick Flaherty, born or borne of Liverpool, had a loop pedal for musical motivation and an acoustic guitar for folk influences which was just as well as his set was more directed towards generating atmosphere than making an immediate impact with his unassuming persona reinforcing the feeling that his focus was more on the cultivation of the background than the foreground.
Local threesome Maps of Michigan were fortified by an amalgam of familiar guitar riffs and, despite an occasional lapse into determined reinvention, they took their untidiness as the inspiration for a set of songs that made more of the middle than the end. That might well be a symptom of prog rock or it might well be a symptom of impending anarchy. The truth is, as always, where you seek it.
Hitting the stage harder than any crime that they might have committed would have deserved were Bone Cult. Electro rock and a relentless desire to assault the senses, both aural and visual, were their raison d’être and with but two committed souls in Mexican wrestler masks to bring eternal life to their locked to the backing track songs, Bone Cult hypnotised an audience that must have wished it were Friday night. The performance is, after all, everything.
And what of matters of fried food. I hear you say? The truth, as ever, is out there. Unless you have headbutted a car, of course.