All photos by www.sarabowreyphotos.com
Above – The Piper team plus Hotwax and The Mystic Shed
One last blast of live music before the start of the November lockdown
It’s a Wednesday night in St Leonards-on-Sea and we are once again upstairs at The Piper.
This is our fifth gig here in six days, as we’ve been gorging on live music before the second nationwide Covid19 lockdown kicks in.
We’ve seen Kid Kapichi, Helen Sharpe and Blair, Dr Savage, Ellie Thmpson and Alice Barnard, Al Mitchell, Blabbermouth, Snake Eats Boy (Harrison Davies), and Buddha Triangle – all of whom have provided a great store of memories to see us through the coming dry spell.
Now, sadly, there are just two more bands before the doors close for the next four weeks – at the very least!
And the Piper booking team haven’t pulled any punches tonight – they’ve gone for two of Hastings’ more challenging young bands… The Mystic Shed and Hotwax.
The Mystic Shed
Kit (drums. Kit. Get it?) and Tom (guitar) are an avante garde two-piece force of nature who artfully blend jazz, psych, and rock to create songs that draw their inspirations from all manner of strange thought processes and observations.
Their relative youth belies a deep understanding of these decades-old musical styles – and their imaginations are boundless – as evidenced by the patter between songs, which at one point meanders into the fantasy world of dreams as Kit describes how they made large personal fortunes from using dog/vacuum cleaner hybrids to suck up the ambience from Shoreditch and sell it to M&S to put through the air conditioning in their food halls.
No songs of boy-meets-girl unrequired love here then…
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Hotwax
From two boys to three girls – and once again a young band who vibrate to the fuzz of loud guitars and whose songs are loaded with compassionate menace whilst laced with a smidgen of humour.
Hotwax have been on everyone’s radars since they first hit the local music scene as their understated stage presence masks a raw talent for precisely targeted riffs and lyrics that are way beyond their years.
Even hardened old music hacks from the North East have been talking them up in the music press recently, and it’s a safe bet these three young ladies from Hastings will be punching out into the world just as soon as lockdown permits.
You’d be daft to give up te chance to see them at the next chance you get so you can say you were there at the start.