If Tinkerbell had a band... - Haiku Salut and Kate Goes @ The Buffalo Bar

A few Thursdays ago, a friend invited me to a gig of a band that he described as a ‘nerdy girls band’. I had no plans in the horizon and I hadn’t seen my friend in a while, so I accepted his kind invitation. I have to admit that his description also triggered my curiosity. Nerdy girls band... what would that sound like?

The gig was at The Buffalo Bar, right next to Highbury & Islington tube station. I struggled to find the venue at first, because I relied on that small and thin and rectangular device I never leave home without, which I usually use to answer calls, reply to messages and other delights of the 21^st century. I trusted too much in the technological sense of my little black friend, forgetting my good old common sense. Almost like when you tell your mother to stop calling a friend in primary school because it’s not as fun to play with him anymore. Mistake. I ended up wondering around in the cold like a muppet, looking for secret  entrances in Kebab stores, before realising that I had walked next to a perfectly normal venue entrance 20 minutes ago.

When I finally got in, I left my jacket with the girl at the door, who also happened to be the Cloakroom Manager. She suffered from high cloakroom stress or something. She looked quite annoyed when I gave her my coat and paid. She looked even more annoyed when I asked her to include my scarf in the bundle. Strange vibe, I thought, and I went in.

Shortly after I had bought my first beer (small San Miguel bottle, 3.50, only cash accepted), Kate Goes, one of the supporting acts, started playing. How should I describe them? It was a 3-piece band, playing keys and all kinds of other instruments, ranging from a triangle to one of those rubber cubes for babies that make high-pitch noises when squeezed. These girls would shyly smile to the audience, almost constantly. They would occasionally look at each other and wink both of their eyes, lifting her shoulders up and showing her white teeth in an accomplice gesture. They probably started doing this with their imaginary friends when they were eight. Now that I think about it, they probably keep those imaginary friends nowadays, and they were amongst us in the crowd.

I haven’t yet said a word about the music, but there’s not much to say. The tunes were written for a kindergarten audience, which is not an uninteresting concept at all, but the execution was poor. Even some parts of the show felt a bit like that scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding, in which Cameron Diaz sings Aretha’s “I say a little prayer for you” in the bar, starting scared to death and singing like shit, but then managing not to crack and go on (still singing like shit though) with the support of the crowd. I guess the main difference here is that these girls where never scared. That was good. It was probably because they felt protected by magic fairies and flying unicorns.

Before the main act started I had some time for a second beer, and to look around a bit. The venue was quite cool, very small. The sound was very low as well, so low you could hear all kind of conversations even with music playing. The crowd was female predominantly; a kind of Daria meets Annie Hall type, most of them thin, tall and with thick round glasses in black frames. You could smell yoga and organic courgettes in the air, with bits of Simone de Beauvoir and a hint of suicidal thoughts. Definitely a different crowd from the ones what I´m used to.

After a long interval, Haiku Salut strated playing. Again a 3-piece band, again all girls, but this time not only with keys but with some other “traditional” instruments (classic guitar, a few drums) and the coolest  kid in school, the Mac Book Pro. I had listened one of their songs before the show and I thought it was interesting, definitely worth hearing more of. So I was looking forward to the start of the show, especially after the traumatic childhood regression from a few moments before.

The show started low... and continued like that until it finished. I’ve read somewhere that there’s nothing wrong in “borrowing” stuff from other artists for inspiration; Picasso even used to say “good artists copy, great artists steal”. But nothing of what I heard from Haiku Salut sounded remotely original. I don’t think they even bothered to combine the diverse thefts in a creative way to arrive to something different. Everything sounded too three-four metered and too much like Yann Tiersen and Beirut, but in low res. Pixels all over the place. They even had a problem coordinating the samplers with the live instruments. All this would have been fine if they displayed some kind of energy on stage. Nothing. Flat lines. A black hole. The previous Tinker Bell girls at least had a good time while they were playing. These behaved as if they were undergoing surgery on stage.

Somehow I managed to keep up until the end of the show. After it finished I went straight to the entrance, where the Cloakroom Manager was having an argument with someone who couldn’t find his tiny receipt. I’m glad she didn’t have a Cloakroom Assistant; that would have been one poor devil. I asked for my coat almost timidly, grabbed it and took off, still thinking about the imaginary people that remained inside for one last drink.