CAFÉ OTO have afforded TRASH KIT the rare honour of removing the tables from the area in front of the ‘stage’ to allow extra standing room. There are still some people sitting at tables at the sides though, and you have to make sure that you’re not blocking their view, so it’s still a little bit awkward.
I arrive just in time to see the start of the opening act’s set. THE PLAN play angular post-punk with sawn-off guitars. Literally: the body of the singer’s guitar looks like it has been made from the sawn-off end of a bench. It’s kind of utilitarian post-punk. I’m convinced that at least one of them is an English teacher. One of their songs is called Annotate the Text, so I may not be entirely wrong. NB: some people are actually dancing. In Café Oto! I know!
I pop out after their set to get some cash. There’s a group of homeless men hanging out by the cash machines. The way they talk, they sound like pirates, and I imagine that in the old days they would have been off sailing the seven seas. I check my phone. Wife has sent me two texts. She writes, ‘He's still screaming just in case you cared x’. And then a couple of minutes later: ‘Sorry, it's getting to me, still going, he’s super unhappy. Please enjoy x’.
When I get back to the venue the next band have already started. CHILD’S POSE play a sort of upbeat angular post-punk. The angles are perhaps less acute than The Plan, but it’s still angular nonetheless. Arriving after they’ve begun, I’m a few rows back from the front, and I can’t really see much. I realise why Café Oto usually has seating around the stage. It’s because there isn’t a stage; there’s no raised platform, and so, when people are standing, if you’re not in the first couple of rows, or you’re really tall (Geoff Dyer would be OK - see Chapter Five), you can’t really see anything. I can just about, however, make out that the guitarist looks a little like a young David Foster Wallace and is wearing an illustration of a screaming baby on his t-shirt, which reminds me of wife and I send her a quick text message: ‘Sorry,’ I write. ‘Hope he’s asleep now x’.
“This is a new one,” says the singer, a woman with short blond hair, not that it matters what colour or length her hair is. “It’s called October,” she says, “which is the next month,” she adds, helpfully. I’m pretty sure that none of this group are English teachers. I don’t actually think they’d get past reception. More people are dancing. It’s almost as if they have come here to have a good time. At Café Oto! I know!
About four or five songs into TRASH KIT's set I realise that since they started I’ve actually just been living in the moment. I haven’t thought about what I’m going to write, or checked my phone, or looked around at the audience, or anything. And when I do look around I can see people really losing themselves, people who had been sitting quietly sipping red wine before the band started contorting themselves into all sorts of shapes. It’s quite something. I’ve never seen Café Oto like this before. It’s normally so reserved. When I saw Eliza McCarthy here a few months ago people were so reserved they didn’t even applaud after she finished her first song, and you could almost hear people thinking, “Should I applaud now? I really think I should applaud now.” But no one did. Not one person did. I didn't. No one did. So reserved, sometimes, it’s embarrassing. But tonight people are actually properly dancing, and looking like they’re actually having a good time.
Rachel Aggs conducts a kind of musical mayhem, charging into the crowd, and virtually giving you no choice but to dance. Even I am, well, you might not actually call it dancing, but I am definitely moving my body in a rhythmical fashion. The drummer, Rachel Horwood, is excellent too, without ever doing anything too obvious. I saw her playing (a weird sort of banjo thing, kind of like a space banjo, that’s how I remember it) with Rozi Plain at Oslo in Hackney earlier this year, just before I started writing this book, and Rozi Plain is here tonight as part of the six-person choir that joins the band on a few numbers, chanting, ooh-ing and aah-ing raucously in the background.
The set is rapturously received, and the crowd start chanting for one more song. “One more song!” the crowd chants. “One more song!” It is an oddly specific chant. Why not two more songs? I’d quite happily stick around for two. After the encore is over, the audience seems rooted to the spot. The applause doesn’t stop for quite a while.
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