Dega Breaks, Haunts and To The Bones

03 Feb 2009

Just over my left shoulder hangs a large black and white print of the late, great Muddy Waters, the celebrated ‘Father of the Chicago Blues’. As a struggling country blues musician in Issaquena County, an impoverished patch of pre-war, segregated Mississippi, Waters scraped a living playing to illegal juke joints filled with gamblers, brigands and the whisky-soaked promise of flesh.

Here tonight in Camden’s Proud Galleries, The Dega Breaks are about to take the stage. The great and the good of Camden’s indie scene are assembled as the band prepares to embark upon their set of danceable, electro-synth pop.

The young man next to me, replete in skinny jeans and wonky haircut, is videoing the throng on his mobile phone as a roaming barmaid offers me a shot of something green and expensive. The girls on the sofa, replete in skinny jeans and wonky haircuts, are browsing the band’s website on a Macbook. It’s a world away from the Depression-era American Deep South. In a moment of sepia-tinged nostalgia, I wonder what Muddy would make of it all.

This feeling of incongruity is however perhaps the over-riding emotion of the night. The walls of the gallery are adorned with dozens of prints of the great blues artists of the last century: John Lee Hooker, BB King, Nina Simone, Jimmy Reed and more, as part of the current exhibition The Blues Anthology. The words are even emblazoned upon the stage wall behind the band.

Yet the gallery also hosts gigs and tonight the music could not be more up-to-the-minute fashionable. Both Dega Breaks and headliners Haunts are clearly alert to contemporary musical trends and have painstakingly constructed their art to draw this crowd of some 200. Not to say they don’t love what they do. Quite the contrary; there is both an energy and a conviction to all of tonight’s acts (including the metal-infused final band To The Bones) that is pervasive.

The music is up-tempo, the hordes of revellers are dancing (rather strangely in some groups) and each band member looks suitably aloof-cum-happy. Distinguishing one song from another is not easy – a syncopated semi-disco beat seems to underpin them all – but this is not a show built necessarily on song-writing, rather on the considered mobilisation of a crowd and its scene.

In truth, galleries are surely not the most suitable venues for electric gigs. They are, quite literally, nothing more than large, square concrete rooms and one does not need a degree in audio engineering to imagine what a snare drum crack sounds like in such conditions. Proud Galleries’ exhibitions are recommended, their gigs are not. Unless, of course, they get BB King to play.

Proud Galleries
The Horse Hospital
Chalk Farm Road
NW1 8AH

Tel: 0207 4823867