This Sunday, 29th January, Michael Chapman, Dean McPhee and Daniel Land are playing ‘The Resurrection & Revenge Of The Clayton Peacock’ live at the Lexington.
It promises to be an enjoyably eccentric undertaking – Chapman’s ‘… Clayton Peacock’ can’t ever really be replicated live, because its wayward picking, drones, percussive clangs and manipulated feedback were conjured up spontaneously.
The story runs like this: Chapman, a guitarist/songwriter from Yorkshire – championed by John Peel in the early 1970s, ploughing his own resolutely underground furrow ever since – was asked by Thurston Moore to make a limited-release album of improvised guitar music, which he did readily, despite having never undertaken such a thing before. This weekend, he plans to perform it live, with a band that includes two singular Northern guitarists a few generations younger than him, to launch a UK reissue of the album on Blast First Petite.
Dean McPhee’s subtle, spacious electric guitar style, while it shares some DNA with Chapman’s eclectic jazz-folk-psych blues, is its own thing entirely, described by us recently as “within an electric ancestry that includes Michael Karoli’s solos in Can, the hymnal rock of Popol Vuh’s Daniel Fichelscher and the sonic spaciousness of dub, as well as the emotional punch of John Martyn’s dawn-lit Echoplex epic, ‘Small Hours’.”
Chapman and McPhee are joined by Manchester-based Daniel Land, whom Chapman got on board after seeing his band, Steals, play with Meg Baird. Land is a prolific musician, with the heavy-textured shoegaze groups Engineers and Daniel Land & The Modern Painters, and Riverrun, a solo ambient project, also on the go.
There’s no telling exactly what will happen on Sunday, but you can expect the fertile ideas laid down on ‘…the Clayton Peacock’ to take on some spellbinding new forms with this extra personnel. McPhee and Land will also be playing solo sets.
Miles of Smiles and the Quietus in partnership with Blast First Petite are giving away a pair of tickets for the show at The Lexington this Sunday 29 January. To enter, just email info@blastfirstpetite.com with CHAPMAN/QUIETUS in the subject line, by the end of Saturday (28th January).
Dean McPhee photo by Graham Wynne
