DRY CLEANING

DRY CLEANING/PVA AT THE WEDGEWOOD ROOMS, PORTSMOUTH – 1/3/22

It’s raining. It just won’t stop raining. It feels like it’s been raining forever, and I’ve got a headache. It feels like I’ve had a headache forever too.  

“Have you got a ticket?” says the lady at the door, who is smiling but looks as though she is tired of smiling and doesn’t want to smile any more.
  “Yes,” I say.
  “Can I see it?” she says, the smile wearing thin.
  “Well, I don’t have an actual, physical ticket,” I explain. “It said to pick it up from the venue.”
  “OK, what’s your name?”
  I tell her my name. She checks her list.
  “OK, go on through,” she says, drawing a line through my name.

PVA start with an electronic beat. Then a real drummer starts playing along. It feels like they want us to dance and probably can’t imagine why we aren’t. 
  There’s a really tall man standing in front of me. It’s quite annoying. He’s blocking my view. He’s part of a group of three men and I scan left and right to see if there’s a way to get in front of them. There isn’t, really. I mean, I could, but it would be a bit intrusive. When one of them goes to get a drink, however, I take my chance, stepping into the gap he leaves, and that’s better, I think, I can see better now. 
  PVA. Like the glue, I guess, but it’s not sticking. Not for me. And my headache’s getting worse. And I bet it’s still raining. 

PVA – ‘not sticking’ – such a lame gag

I am trying to remember – surrounded by bad breath – who I saw here at THE WEDGEWOOD ROOMS in the ‘90s, and I think it was Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, and I wish I could go back in time.

When DRY CLEANING started appearing on virtually every end-of-year list going, I began to wonder whether they were any good after all, as it is a hard and fast rule with me that if everyone really likes something then it must be shit, or at least not as good as everyone thinks it is. 
  Their dynamic is actually quite similar to PVA in that there are these blokes providing a kind of stodgy and predictable backing to a genuinely interesting female artist, but rendering her largely inaudible in the process. 
  For most of the gig, you can’t really make out what Florence Shaw is saying, which is a shame because hearing what she is saying must be, kind of, the whole point, I would have thought. The band seems to only have one setting, which reminds me of a lorry driving on a motorway at a steady sixty miles per hour, maybe occasionally hitting sixty-five, and without being able to distinguish the words, I find myself getting quite bored, and notice that my headache is still getting worse, and wonder when it will finally peak. 
  “Portsmouth is where we had our first mosh pit,” says Shaw. “Just saying.” 
  There’s no mosh pit tonight. Most people are either too busy filming on their phones, or too busy being tired middle-aged men.

 

Florence Shaw – ‘largely inaudible’

It’s still raining.