Mr Twizz Twangle has a reputation for dividing rooms like no other performer. Such polarization certainly occurred at The Port Mahon last night. Some cheered and interacted, even to the extent, later on, of receiving Mr Twangle’s electrically illuminated jacket as a gift (he said he wasn’t going to use it any more). Others, early in his performance, fled for the relative calm of downstairs. To be fair, some of these others had been ambushed with a trumpet.
So what is so wrong with the chap? While the vocal microphone betrayed all the acts at various times by taking random breaks from function, it must be admitted that singing is not Twizz’s strongest suit. Such a handicap might deter a lesser spirit from performance. But Twizz Twangle, in addition to rather weak vocals, has a guitar, a trumpet, abundant energy and enthusiasm, and a breezy disregard for the norms of performance, and he puts all these substitute qualities to work without hesitation.
He bounces. He climbs. He makes forays. He strums. He trumpets. He tries to sing. He bounces some more. Sometimes the songs are classics where you know the words, or quiet ones where you can just about hear them. At other times I found myself wishing I could hear what he was singing, because the small bits I could hear were quite funny.
He’s like a puppy, really, albeit a bald one in a cloth cap. His eagerness to please made me want to be there. I can sympathise with those who have different priorities.
Certainly he was more fun than the following band, who caused even more people to leave the room. They seemed like two nice chaps, but their music was too depressing for me to want to work out the lyrics, a different thing altogether from being keen but baffled. “Too many minor chords” said a friend, and he may have been right.
The Gs, who finished off proceedings, are numerous in number and have a consequently huge sound. I would have preferred to hear them in a large outdoor location where I might a) get a tiny bit further away and b) dance around a lot. They are all clearly accomplished musicians. Sometimes their jam lacks clearly defined fruit pieces, other times it’s just fine. In the confined space I was slightly relieved when the bagpiper had to leave early. I enjoyed the expressions on the faces of the many drummers when they could just contain themselves no longer and erupted in accelerated thumping, though I think the guest flautist found these outbursts a little tricky to work with.
All in all, an enjoyable evening, marred only by the gents’ toilets being an inch deep in water of uncertain provenance.
Ian Threadgill, 08/11/05
I have only ever heard one musical performance (barring primary schools) worse than Twiz Twangle, and that was at an open mic night in the backwoods of New Zealand. Twiz Twangle is awful. He’s an inoffensive-looking cloth-capped bloke, with an inoffensive bass player accompanist. He’s not a bad guitarist, but unfortunately spends most of his time singing and playing the trumpet with hideous enthusiasm and total lack of talent. We sat through the first few bars waiting for the joke to stop and the music to get going. Halfway through the third song this still hadn’t happened, and when he descended among the audience pointing his trumpet into people’s ears we were so shaken by the experience that we retired to the bar and missed the rest of his set and the entirety of the next (The Dots and Stops – sorry!). However, even here we were unsafe. The mangled trumpeting sounds from upstairs got louder and louder, and Twiz Twangle, carried away by his own exuberance, burst into the sanctity of the lower room waggling his horrible instrument in people’s faces like the maddening little man from the Lurpak ads. Apparently he’s been inflicting himself on audiences in this manner for some thirteen years, and is the only artist to have appeared on the front cover of Nightshift and in the demo dumper of the same publication within the same year. The sooner someone takes his trumpet away from him the better.
The Gs, by a pleasant contrast, are a bunch of real musicians. There were about eleven of them on this particular night, but apparently it can vary. They do rollicking, high-energy, semi-improvised folk-funk-rock, heavy on drums and light on organisation. Three guitars provided solid support to three kinds of drummers, two block percussionists, a saxophone, vocals, bagpipes and flute, people swapping instruments and dropping in and out of the limelight as the mood took them. It was rather like listening in to a friendly if frenetic jam among professionals. Like any other jam, there were moments when there was a lack of consensus as to key and direction, and you wouldn’t necessarily want to take a recording home with you, but the players were so well-matched, the collective style so energetic and free, that the effect was uplifting, exciting and altogether satisfactory. It’s not easy to get people dancing in the Port Mahon, but the floor shook with bouncing boots from the opening moments of the first number (which was, incidentally, my first experience of pleasant bagpiping). They’re well worth seeing, despite the likelihood that the line-up may have changed radically by their next performance – their policy appears to be that they’ll only play with musicians who are sufficiently talented to jump in at the deep end and improvise randomly while still making good music. Should cut out Twiz Lurpak Twangle then.
Miranda Rose, 08/11/05
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