May 12, 2024

GIG REVIEW – Curiad Pulse Festival (Friday) – Bangor

03.05.2024 – Grant Sharkey / Charlie Garlic / James PM Phillips / Andy Bob Beaumont / Jodie Melodie

Curiad Pulse is an annual event held in Bangor, North Wales, showcasing the wild, the weird, the unnatural and the wonderful; be it in poetry, prose or punk rock… and everything in between.
This year, cleverly held at one venue on each of the five nights, allowing much needed business to ring their cash tills on that particular day, Curiad Pulse raised over £1000 for their chosen charities in aid of our recently fallen heroes, Duncan Black and Emyr Ankst.

I was lucky enough to catch two of those days, and for the purpose of this review, my attentions turn to the Friday night at The Skerries. Like Outpost in Liverpool, I regard The Skerries in Bangor as a spiritual home, a place where the tragic and the magic can, and does happen.

Tonight is the calm before tomorrow’s (full on band) storm… There’s no drum kit set up, no big amps, just a mic and a monitor. This is an evening with friends and we gathered round, huddled together, cupping our beer glasses and reading the latest issue of Gutter zine … Let the evening commence…

Promoters, HighVoltage plied me with beer and drugs and cajoled me into being the MC for the evening. I nervously introduced the opening performer, Jodie Melodie. This scouse naturalised North Walian filled the room with golden light through the medium of quirky ukulele driven songs, with the odd bongo thrown in for good measure and the added ingredient of audience participation. A great ice-breaker who is threatening recorded material soon.

Andy Bob Beaumont is an endearing chap, and not the prophet of doom he sometimes claims to be. I’ve not caught a solo set from him for a while and his albums are three releases never too far from the various audio devices I have strategically dotted around my house / vehicle / person. I can wistfully while my time away listening to his bluegrass jug blues guitar with many a story to tell, which is exactly what I did this evening.

Up from behind the sound desk and an immediate presence on stage, with a head full of rats sits James PM Phillips. The avant bard of Bangor, never fails to delight with his uplifting medieval bile, beauty and spite. With last December’s album being a bit of a renaissance, it’s great to see this bearded wizard involved in music and back on stage where he belongs, giving us all wings.

Twitching in the corner like a rabid bull caught in a hot soup is the idiosyncratic altered ego that is Charlie Garlic. Making his first public appearance since the sad demise of danger-punks Rabo De Toro, and with a brand new book to sell, he gave a spoken-shouted word performance. This invoked / provoked smiles, laughter, tears and anger at our own existence and the world that suffers it. It was forty minutes of servitude with Venn diagrams and forty minutes you’d happily endure / enjoy again.

No stranger to these parts, having been accepted into the family a good eight years ago is the travelling troubadour that is Grant Sharkey. He has tirelessly (or extremely tiredly) spent six months touring a musical called ‘Are You Worthy’ and releasing his 23rd album ‘While My Guitar Gently Seeps’ – Grant tonight did the festival thing and played a greatest hits set, which is basically that very album! Like Charlie Garlic, Mr Sharkey attacks the status quo [and their three chords], but from a different angle. As ever, it was merriment, mirth and that urge to knock a few pillars and make a change to this sick society.