South Pole Saloon review for Brixton Blog

Here in Brixton we have a fun game we like to play when we’re walking around our neighbourhood. Many of you will be familiar with it, even if you live elsewhere in London – it’s called ‘Try To Spot An Open Space That Somehow Hasn’t Been Turned Into Either Luxury Flats Or A Street Food Market’. Keen players of the game will have been kicking themselves recently, for having failed to spot that the rooftop of the long running shop Home ‘n’ Fashion on Pope’s Road was – far from merely a structure for ensuring the retailer’s stock didn’t get wet – also the perfect location for a winter themed pop-up night food market. Before 2017 has finished we fully expect to also witness a high-spec two bedroom apartment in each of the disused public toilets in Windrush Square, and a stall selling pork steamed buns on top of the Blenheim Gardens bus stop shelter.

South Pole Saloon (for that is its name) isn’t here to just tick off one hot trend, though. It’s here to tick off as many as possible! So sure, it’s a pop up, and it’s selling street food at night, but it’s also got immersive theatre! Warm cocktails! Staff with beards! Readers of ES Magazine will be flooding in!

Let’s look at the food first, because what’s on offer is probably why you’ll want to visit South Pole Saloon. And there’s good reasons to do so – nobody could deny it’s good news to have food vendors like Dip & Flip Burger on board, not least because it means you don’t have to go to the company’s permanent locations in the middle of nowhere (ie: Battersea or Wimbledon) to try their solid 8/10 burger & gravy concept.

Drinks wise, well, that could be argued to be more an area of concern. Pints of beer – exclusively supplied by Brooklyn Brewery – start at £5.40. Just to add some context, that’s 90p more expensive than the cheapest pint when watching The Who, Taylor Swift and Blur play British Summer Time in Hyde Park this year. South Pole Saloon doesn’t shy away from promoting its own entertainment offering of course – more on that shortly – but even the most optimistic bar manager is going to have a struggle on their hands to match the level of entertainment provided by Tay Tay and Roger bloody Daltrey.

Amongst the lengthy licensing documents that South Pole Saloon submitted to Lambeth Council back in September, the company said that they anticipated their customers will be from “all parts of London and of mixed backgrounds”. A harsh critic might suggest that at £5:40 a drink their customer base won’t so much be from ‘all parts of London’ as ‘pretty much exclusively from Clapham’, a theory we’re certainly not ready to dismiss based on their opening night. Still, at one point we do spot two women getting around this thorny pricing issue by making use of their own hipflask. For your £5:40 you could afford this fetching little hard liquor container and then just make your own alcohol arrangements. So you know, do that instead.

Still, the whole place looks okay, in a grown-up Winter Wonderland kind of way. There’s enough heaters to stop you getting cold. It seems like a passable place to come if you want an evening of dancing, and it doesn’t lay the whole Christmas thing on too thick. There’s other places you can go for Christmas schmaltz. South Pole Saloon wants to where Santa’s slightly naughtier elves hang out.

Which brings us to the Saloon’s theatrical offerings. Pretty excitingly, the website promises the venue will have “every corner designed to cater for the whims of the most fantastical, playful and debaucherous guests”, which would make for a somewhat ambitious way of describing the opening night. We can confirm that there are some young adults on stage dancing vaguely sexily. As for these promised ‘immersive performance’ elements, well, we briefly spot a woman in a costume walking on the bar, and a guy in a costume sit down next to some girls and sing them a song with his guitar. It would all probably hold up as a decent evening’s entertainment in Derby or somewhere. I think what we’re basically trying to say here is: we don’t think you should go to South Pole Saloon on the basis of their much-promoted theatrical offering.

Should you inexplicably find yourself in the mood for socialising outside this December, the Berlin-style surroundings of Brixton Bloc is both cooler and cheaper, whilst Pop Brixton is both a stronger food destination and a better thought out space. And both of them are one hell of a lot more community focused than this place.

Blues Kitchen review for Brixton Blog

Heard of the Columbo Group? They’re the new Antic in town. Heard of neither Antic or The Columbo Group? Oh, sorry. Well, maybe you’d be forgiven for having not. Antic are that big company that own all those young cool bars in our area that many people seem to mistake for being independents: Dogstar, Effra Social, Gremio De Brixton and Eckovision.

The Columbo Group, meanwhile? They’re the new boy in our neighbourhood. We’re intrigued by their arrival. We’d been re-thinking our long running romance with Antic for a while now, and now this young, flashy new boy has arrived in town. We somehow got chatting to them on the N109 home last month, and we must admit they did catch our eye a little bit…

Long story short, we somehow gave The Columbo Group our phone number as we got off the bus that night, and before long they were eagerly chirpsing us, with the successful launch of Phonox nightclub last month. Now, with Blues Kitchen, we’re at the ‘exchanging graphic Snapchats’ stage of our relationship. The first two branches of The Blues Kitchen are in Camden and Shoreditch. A suspicious eye might spot a pattern with these previous partners: this is clearly an organisation interested in our area for our ‘coolness capital’. You sense that if we blurted something wildly unhipster out on the third date – something like how we wished Ritzy cinema would hurry up and fully convert to a Cineworld – then The Columbo Group would be off running down the road and hopping into bed with Tooting before we’d even had a chance to suggest going shopping for matching knitwear.

If this all feels a little more corporate than your ideal vision of Brixton, then you may have to force a smile for some time yet: alongside the Blues Kitchen and Phonox, we also had the opening of the Brazilian chain Cabana last month, and next weekend it’s the opening of Caribbean chain Turtle Bay (with a whopping £800,000 investment in the branch). Seemingly, we’ve hit a new era of corporate investment in Brixton. Is it because rents are now too high for independents? Is the most a local business can hope for now a six month stint in Pop Brixton?

Best to put all that out of our minds right now, as we’ve got a romantic dinner date with The Columbo Group to get to. And we have to admit, Blues Kitchen know how to treat a neighbourhood like us to a good date. For starters, they make a great first impression. They’ve put money and thought into doing up the former (independent venue) Electric Social.

Meat cuts, barbecuing and marinating across the board are excellent. You can gnaw away at, say, the pork spare ribs for what feels like an eternity. If the beef brisket isn’t quite as good as the astonishing 10/10 effort from street food favourite Smokestak, it does just about manage to be better than the locally available brisket from Miss P’s BBQ at Pop Brixton.

Hard shakes will instantly win over anybody with a sweet enough tooth to stomach them. Anybody ruling out meat will find their options unsurprisingly thin on the ground. An underthought out vegetarian platter would be entirely lacking in imagination if it wasn’t for the solitary – yet excellent – parmesan and artichoke dip at its centre. The creole bean burger is huge and has clearly had far more care directed towards its inception. And here’s a strong bonus: as standard they’ll offer to pack up your leftovers for you to takeaway.

Visiting during the soft launch period, it was unclear how the live music prospect would fare in comparison. Blues Kitchen Camden has been responsible for some great live music in the past, even on weeknights, but every time we attempted to listen to the live music on our visit it proved itself too immediately ignorable to maintain any attention.

There are arguably bigger problems: the bill includes the standard 12.5% service charge. Taking our money, we told them we’d like to pay £27 each. Against this specific request, they kept all of our change. Due to a last minute round of cocktails we weren’t given a final receipt – being told that the till had already been shut down for the night – and that we’d have to email requesting one. A week later, there’s no sign yet of it showing up.

All of which we hope are teething problems, because based on the food here, and the clubbing at Phonox, we’ve kind of got the hots for The Colombo Group right now. We’re forgiving it some of its flaws for the moment, because of how dependably it pulls off the stuff we’re really looking for in a partner. We’re happy to keep seeing where this one goes…

Eckovision review for Brixton Blog

 

 

There’s a trendy new bar in Brixton’s arches. You may not exactly need reminding that it’s a sensitive time for the businesses in the area. The #savebrixtonarches campaign is in full swing with Network Rail looking to redevelop the area, then triple the rents it charges retailers. Even Wahaca have been canny enough to put the campaign poster up in their restaurant window. For the last decade or so Network Rail has (if you think about the major ones you use regularly) been on a mission to develop its stations into money-spinning shopping centres with a few train platforms attached.

All of which is fine, if you’re adding a Bella Pasta and a second Marks & Spencer Simply Food to Euston station. It’s arguably somewhat insensitive, however, if it will contribute to the social cleansing of Brixton. Network Rail has defended its plans, pledging to ensure that any new businesses that replace ousted ones will be independently owned. But as has been pointed out, it doesn’t matter how independent they are, as the process still forces out businesses that were there to affordably serve the established Brixton community, and so further erodes people’s ability to maintain their deep-rooted connections with the neighbourhood.

Only too happy to play the bull in the Brixton Arches’ china shop, then, is Eckovision – a new bar that’s opened opposite Argos on Atlantic Road, where Atlantis bar used to be. Eckovision arrives via Antic, the bar company that has the good wisdom to fool you into thinking you’re not drinking in a chain bar, by adopting a different name for each new venue they open. Those not familiar with the umbrella company will surely be familiar with the portfolio : Dogstar, Effra Social and Gremio Brixton are all already local, or you’ll perhaps know them from across the rest of London, from Tooting Tram and Social to Farr’s School of Dancing in Dalston, to Sylvan Post in Forest Hill.

There’s a system, then, to opening an Antic bar: take a property; restore it; keep the same name. Indeed, it’s a system that’s proved impressively unyielding in the past: in 2014 the company opened in a former Job Centre on the historically dilapidated Deptford High Street, and then refused to change the décor or name it had chosen – The Job Centre – in response to fierce public criticism from campaigners who suggested that it was turning the locally widespread experience of being unemployed “into a style feature for the amusement of those with disposable cash.”

Visiting on a Thursday night – the bar’s opening night – we order beer. At £4.50 it seems lightly at the expensive end of the spectrum, until we realise that they’re serving in 2/3rds of a pint measures, which tips the pricing from ‘lightly expensive’ into ‘hastily downloading the Wonga app’. We pop back into the bar 48 hours later on Saturday night to take photos and we bump into the manager – the smaller measures are explained with, “we don’t want to be the kind of place where people get drunk”. Which could be the reason. Or the reason could just be profit maximisation, of course. It can be hard to tell in these situations, but the fact that just 30 seconds after this conversation a customer walked past us carrying a tray of seven Jägerbombs suggests that they shouldn’t give up on the job of refining their customer base just yet.

On a similar note, if anyone is seeking nominations in the ‘worst bit of retail signage’ category for fictional Brixton awards, we’ll happily direct you towards the bar’s huge, hideously self-contradictory “Kitchen coming soon… but until then eating’s cheating (but drink responsibly, yeah?)” sign. For anybody who has spent the last decade considering the phrase ‘eating is cheating’ to be an infallible idiot-detector, it doesn’t bode particularly well.

And so you could argue, the Claphamification of Brixton continues. Eckovision is unquestionably a well-designed space to drink in. There can be no doubt that the gin, elderflower, apple and mint cocktail we sample has been thoughtfully executed. But one wonders what other fresh, independent businesses Network Rail has in mind to replace the remainder of our retailers. For now, we’ve got a grim early preview of future Brixton.

Taylor Swift/Foo Fighters/Florence + The Machine/Muse: Radio 1's Big Weekend review for Drowned in Sound

There’s a lot of 'I can’t quite believe this is happening here', and 'this is so exciting for our city' sentiments in Norwich. It’s much like how I imagine Radio 1 would be as a lover: they swing by your town suddenly and give you the best day of your formative years. You spend the whole day together. You both upload emotional vlogs saying how wonderful it’s been. But then Radio 1 don’t stick around afterwards to meet your parents. Radio 1 are leaving out your window. They’re off in search of a new lover in Carlisle or somewhere, and you never hear from them again.

Try to live in the moment, Norwich. Take it from someone who saw Dave Pearce’s Dance Anthems as a teenager in Nottingham. Don’t ruminate over it. Don’t wonder why they’re reading but not replying to your WhatsApp messages.

Radio 1’s Big Weekend is a fairly unusual prospect: people grab free tickets to a day out, before the line-up has been announced. It tends to be as mainstream as crowds get: they don’t so much only know your hits, as only know two lines from the chorus of your hits. Throughout the weekend, many an act will turn the microphone on the audience and beckon them to sing lines of their hits, and will get nothing back. That’s not to say people aren’t here to have fun. People are definitely here to have fun. People are really quite desperate to be here. But the audience are going to make them work hard for their affections.

And the festival can dwarf even Glastonbury in terms of the names it can attract. Last year's Glasto headliners Kasabian were reduced to headlining the second stage at Big Weekend that year. Calvin Harris is a regular headliner at the likes of T in the Park/V Festival/Coachella; last year he had to make do with being second to last on the main stage here.

This year, everybody got tickets thinking Taylor Swift was headlining. This was already a great day out in the making. Then Tay Tay seemed to be, erm, swiftly bumped for Foo Fighters; you can only imagine the 'we can’t turn down Foo Fighters, can we?' conversations that were presumably happening at Radio 1. For one, Foo Fighters are also headlining that other really major event BBC Music stream each year. And having both Muse and Foo Fighters headline is something of a dominance of guitars, and we’re regularly told that the kids don’t listen to guitar music anymore. Big Weekend had also quietly established a format for these headline slots: the Saturday night would always be ‘somebody Zane Lowe would’ve interviewed’ - Coldplay, Biffy Clyro, Jay-Z – whilst the Sunday would be ‘teen pop icon’ night – Katy Perry, Bruno Mars and Rhianna being the three most recent examples.

So is this set to be the toughest gig Dave ‘but he’s such a nice guy!’ Grohl has faced in years? Trying to win over a crowd that are, hand on heart, a little disappointed Taylor Swift isn’t headlining?

More on that later. Big Weekend is also a good opportunity to suss out which artists are most doggedly keen for mainstream success right now. Take Snoop Dogg, for example. Following on from the unquestionable critical and commercial success of his conscious reggae ‘Snoop Lion’ phase, he has now alighted on a new strategy in search of a pay cheque: get Pharrell to produce his new album, and tour it around events like this.

At Glastonbury 2010 I saw Bonobo instead of Snoop, which provided a sharp lesson in festival clash management. Who ever reminisces five years later about a Bonobo set being one of the all-time great festival performances? We turn up on site on Saturday afternoon just after 2pm, having deduced that the worst that could happen is we miss half of Ben Howard’s set. Nope - Snoop’s already halfway through, and plenty of people have got there before us, so there’s no getting anywhere near the tent, let alone inside it. Oh well. You can watch him below this paragraph instead if you like. I haven’t watched it yet, but I did hear from people he was good. #musicjournalism

The Vaccines seem to be having fun with the occasion. Justin Young is throwing himself about all over the stage. It’s pushing the right buttons for everybody in the field. All these hijinks don’t make for best vocal performance of the weekend, mind – you wonder if anybody watching at home is enjoying themselves, and you’re certain it will be sounding terrible on the radio. Should acts treat these sets like extended Live Lounge sessions and not play for the crowd’s affections? Discuss.
David Guetta at 6pm is an interesting prospect for a genre of music that’s usually fairly reliant on darkness and big fancy light shows. Certainly his set includes some relatively challenging beats for this time on a pop festival’s mainstage. It’s all washed down alongside Guetta’s pop hits though, that riff from 'Seven Nation Army', and a (to use the technical term) shit ton of pyrotechnics, so it’s probably safe to say he knows how to get the whole field on board.

If The Vaccines concentrated on played to the crowd rather than worrying about sounding good on the radio, Florence + The Machine’s set definitely has a sense of Let’s Turn In A Flawless Vocal Performance about it. It does perhaps help that as she’s broken her metatarsal and spends the whole gig perched on a stool, which does famously limit one’s abilities for on stage tomfoolery. It all feels a bit Jools Holland. The fact that the crowd remain firmly behind her is quite the feat.

They can seem more appropriate for Radio 2 though, don’t you agree? That’s why it’s faintly surprising to see them on this bill, but people seem delighted about the fact that they are. And I’ve certainly heard very good things about their new album. Certainly the set lays the new songs on thick, so the fact that it’s such a popular show with the crowd is a fairly remarkable achievement. When everybody is invited to pogo during 'Dog Days Are Over', the whole field obliges like they’re at a bloody Chase & Status gig or something. It seems they’re a band that can do no wrong. Anyway, as ever with Florence + The Machine, the final word goes to this tweet.

Speaking of acts that should really be packed off to the Radio 2 playlist by now, it was fun, back in 2012, to see the headlines ‘Nick Grimshaw bans Robbie Williams from Radio 1 playlist’ and speculate who’d possibly be next to lose the lucrative support of the station just as they’re releasing their latest album. Were one so inclined, it’s not a huge leap to imagine Muse - and last year’s headliners Coldplay - reading those articles and offering to play Big Weekend out of an almost desperate need to remain in the station’s affections. 'We know 18 year olds aren’t listening to us like they used to. Please keep playing us, we’ll give you such great access if you do'.
Now, do the buzz levels for this new Muse album seem a bit low to you, too? As possibly the only Muse fan that loves it when they go R&B (Madness/Undisclosed Desires), disco (Supermassive Black Hole and classical (Exogenesis Symphony), it’s difficult to get excited about this album cycle they’re embarking upon. It all feels a bit Muse-by-numbers so far. The first half of their Big Weekend set is very heavy on the new material, and for Muse, the audience seem to be having none of it. ‘Hysteria' is still the sound of a band bringing about the end of the world though, and obviously they’re fairly tight musically by this point in their career. The hits flow freely in the 2nd half. Floating voters don’t get converted though. You wouldn’t call the set a failure. But leaving the festival, nobody seems that pumped up about what they’ve just witnessed.

Sunday

Sunday begins with singer-songwriter Raury from Atlanta, Georgia in the In New Music We Trust tent. He’s broadly the upbeat type, and asks the Norwich audience 'did you come here to get inspired?', to which the woman next to us yells back 'no, I came here to get pissed!'. A moment of silence in support of the #BlackLivesMatter campaign is unusual to say the least at a Radio 1 Roadshow-style event, but it works in a varied set that makes every effort to put on a bit of a show. Raury encourages everybody to hug the person to their right, and I’d like to send my personal regards to the stranger to my right whom I immediately hugged, therefore also spilling his pint all over him. Afterwards there’s time to catch Cash + David’s playful atmospherics in the BBC Introducing tent, and - owing perhaps slightly to rain - plenty more are only too happy to join us. They’ve already got enough catchy tunes to see them playing bigger stages than this.

There’s no room in the tent for Lethal Bizzle, so it’s over to the main stage to see Rita Ora borrow heavily from hip hop culture for her production instead. She’s been kind enough to bring along quite a stage show: by this point in the day everybody’s in the mood for some well-choreographed dance routines and snazzy staging. It’s an impressively slick offer, which successfully does the job of disguising that 'I Will Never Let You Down' is the only moment of real pop genius on display here.

Everybody’s had a few gins by the time Sigma come on. One enthusiastic raver comes bounding over and tells me 'you know what: your kind of drum and bass makes people so happy'. Now, I’ve never so much as been in a DJ booth in my life, but he continues, explaining that he knows he recognises me but he can’t quite place who I am. I helpfully decide to announce that I’m (the 49 year old black drum and bass DJ) Fabio, which I (as a 31-year-old white-Irish male) thought might be something of a challenging sell, but he’s just overwhelmed with excitement at getting to meet me. That doesn’t stop him putting his finger on my lips when I talk during one of his favourite breakdowns, however. His reviews of Sigma’s set are perfectly serviceable actually, so logically extending his request that I stay silent, let’s record his thoughts instead: ‘Changing’ gets an enthusiastic declaration of 'that’s what I call art', but Ella Henderson’s guest spot on ‘Glitterball’ is less well received, with the feedback 'this is bollocks pop shit'. Meanwhile Sigma’s 'Bound 2' remix is – justifiably I’m sure we can all agree – credited as having 'clever lyrics'.

In between acts we get Radio 1 presenters DJing to the crowd (highlight: the new Chemical Brothers single), and Live Lounge videos. In the long history of attempts to whip a crowd up into a baying frenzy before shows, you have to wonder just how successful a James Bay Live Lounge video could realistically have been in building the excitement right before Taylor Swift comes on stage.

In stark contrast to Rita Ora, Swift doesn’t bring anything in the way of dancers or staging or choreography. Swift’s got the numerous incredible moments of pop genius on her side. Which should be enough. Taylor Swift’s songs dominate pop music to such an extent that it can be difficult seeing the point of all other teen pop icons. Every gig should be an easy win for Swifty. But there are problems: she only sticks around for seven songs, or 35-40 minutes, falling way short of her hour long time slot. There’s also a bit of an over-reliance on her backing tracks. But if she’s just about getting away with it, she’s getting away with it because she has those songs.

Big Weekend felt like an opportunity to see Taylor Swift without having to spend £55 on seeing her at Hyde Park, but Swift, like several acts over the weekend, hold back on large swathes of their hits in favour of their new material, and so sometimes Big Weekend sets can feel more like a teaser to get you back for a full gig later in the summer – you feel you’re being marketed at more than your typical gig.

So you can imagine how refreshing it is when Dave 'but he’s such a nice guy!' Grohl comes on stage and announces “right we’ve got one hour to play as many songs as we can” and Foo Fighters proceed to be more than generous with playing what people might want to hear. They’re skilled at bringing the whole crowd along with them for the ride. If you get the feeling that many artists see a Big Weekend show as a necessity rather than a joy, Dave 'but he’s such a nice guy!' Grohl is arguably the man who shows it least. Maybe Foo Fighters easily claiming victory in their Hardest Gig Ever is in part a testament to the magpie-like modern day music consumer that is all too happy to have an amazing time at both Foo Fighters and Taylor Swift gigs. But this felt like a full Foo Fighters gig compacted into a well-meaning 60 minutes. For that, Big Weekend belonged to them.