Slow Club @ Heaven

This place is usually big club nights and dancing, and Slow Club opening with an incredible, slow motion, acoustic cover of Pulp’s ‘Disco 2000’ is at once an acknowledgment and a subversion of that. The audience is full to the brim and yet you can hear everything as clearly as you would if listening to a high quality recording – on an even better set of headphones.

Straight from the beginning this gig is all about the two voices, showcased both separately and together in different, awesome ways. When Rebecca and Charles talk in between songs, you may not get everything, but when they sing, you hear every syllable. They do minimal but not too stripped down, loud and quiet, slow and fast, glittery and casual all mixed up together. They are dressed down and the set list is on a paper plate, but the blinding lights ricochet crazily off the golden drum in the front. Sometimes the two extra instrumentalists come forward, are given a full introduction to the audience and occupy central spots as Rebecca goes over to the back of the stage to play the big drumkit. A minute later the band will retreat and it’s just Rebecca and Charles, switching places at the very front edge of the stage, one guitar and no microphones, singing ‘Gold Mountain’ to the crowd which is too stunned to really sing, just humming shyly to the chorus. Rebecca laughs through the lyrics.

They say they’re working tirelessly on a new EP and play two new songs, ‘Everything Is New’ (‘exclusive, unless you went to the Union Chapel gig’) and ‘Not Mine To Love’, first sung by one and second by the other, one very loud and electric and the other acoustic and slow, again showing off how different but together they can be musically. Old favourites ‘Our MostBrilliant Friends’ and ‘Giving Up On Love’ are the only other songs not off of Paradise, which is played almost in full, including the next single, ‘The Dog’. They’re both really chilled and fun and tell lots of stories, but for most only snippets reach us, such as ‘do you think Bono ever had to do that?’, ‘so suck it’, ‘we played this last night in Leeds, and’, and finally ‘clap, we’ll be like Kasabian!’.

Marta Owczarek

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