Watching Hot Chip and Friends' eight-hour rave from my garden shed felt like 2020 in a nutshell
What a curious year 2020 has been for music. And nothing summed up this oddness more than Friday night’s Hot Chip-curated eight-hour virtual club night in aid of homeless charity Crisis.
Covid-19 has pushed live music online, and so it was that the synth-pop group kicked off a night of streamed DJ sets from the likes of Jarvis Cocker and the bands Superorganism and Django Django, all beamed in from separate locations.
It was around 50 minutes into the shindig that it really hit home how the parameters of entertainment have been utterly uprooted by the pandemic. Hot Chip usually perform to thousands of euphoric revellers in a field somewhere.
Yet here I was, solitary in my shed office at the bottom of my garden, watching on my laptop as Joe Goddard, Al Doyle and Alexis Taylor performed at a bank of decks and vintage synths. The scene was more than mildly dystopian: one middle-aged man nodding his head to a machine displaying three more middle-aged men nodding their heads to machines. But that’s entertainment, lockdown style. Eat your heart out, J. G. Ballard.
In one sense, it was dissatisfying. The publicist had warned me that the show’s production budget was almost non-existent, since it was for charity. And so it proved: Hot Chip performed in a brightly lit studio with a couple of cameras capturing the action. Then there was the lingering sense of frustration. Having broken through 15 years ago, Hot Chip are the go-to band for former ravers now kept indoors by offspring and dirty nappies.
Their live shows are packed with bleary-eyed parents whose sole recent experience of repetitive beats comes from the techno pastiches in the CBeebies cartoon Hey Duggee. I’ve seen Hot Chip play countless times and I’m always surrounded by people who – like me – can hardly believe their luck that they’re dancing to actual ravey synths under actual lasers rather than to a big brown dog wearing a Scout uniform at home on a screen. So having to watch the band at home on a screen felt annoyingly workaday.
But these limitations were trumped by two things. One was the joyous music. The deeply funky disco of Make Me (Go Crazy) by Italian-American group Change and the bouncy house of DJ Jose’s Bring Me Back made the event irresistible. How my fingertips tingled. The other thing was the fun that Doyle, Taylor and Goddard were having. If dad dancing was an Olympic sport, this trio would be on the podium every time. It was infectious. My screen soon became a mirror.
Cocker followed, performing next to a Christmas tree in a dimly lit room. The former Pulp frontman’s whispered and eerie set included tracks by the late Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green and US psychedelic dub trio Khruangbin. London-based collective Superorganism came next with a peppy hour that included Strong by Sault, the song of the year from the album of the year. And so it continued into the small hours. “2020 was like a detour,” Cocker said at one point. “We can get back on track.”
Hopefully. But then again, there was something poignantly current about the whole affair. After-all, isolated boogying in a shed to a streamed concert? What could be more 2020 than that?
For more information visit www.crisis.org.uk
