Last night I went to see the last date on Miracle Fortress’s tour, at 93 Feet East, a tiny little venue next to the Pink Bar on Brick Lane in London’s east end.
The night started with support from the Swanton Bombs – just a guitarist and drummer who are obviously just at the start of their musical career but they could go far. Their music has a rockabilly/punk vibe and the singer/guitarist certainly has some raw talent – a nice rockstar haircut too…
After a short break it was time for the main act – Miracle Fortress. The band is usually just Graham van Pelt on his own as he plays every instrument and sings every note on his recordings – for the live tour he’s roped in other musicians so that his material can be performed in front of an audience. Because of this approach to music making, seeing Miracle Fortress live is obviously a very different experience to listening to the first studio album, Five Roses. On stage it’s a rather more raw experience and lacks some of the sophistication of the recordings, but there was certainly a lot of energy there.
In Graham’s vocal style there’s definitely a lot of Brian Wilson – my friend and I were discussing their likely influences just before the gig and sure enough, during the encore featuring the track ‘Next Train’, which Graham performed on stage sans the band, towards the end he started singing ‘ God only knows what I’d be without you’ (from the seminal Beach Boys track of the same name) over and over again as the song closed…
With that and the manic guest guitarist taking a break from strumming for a while to bang together half-full bottles of wine to make beats (obviously they shattered, leaving broken glass all over a stage that was already strewn with balloons…) it was a very interesting gig!
You really must check them out if you have any pretensions to being an open-minded music fan – you might love them at first hearing, I certainly did…