Notes - The music blog
Notes: Exploring Sheffield: Marta visits... The Harley
Every Wednesday, Marta brings a slice of the Mediterranean to Sheffield to see if the music scene really differs at all.
A very rhetorical question: when you go to a club for a gig, is the sound system or the whiskey selection more important?
Obviously, the whiskey selection is far more relevant. But if you run a club and decide to bet everything on that, you should also make sure you hire a band so good that the beauty of their music will overcome the whistling and the distortion of the terrible speakers. From what I’ve seen so far, The Harley really manages to do that.
As many will probably know, above the Harley Bar there is the Harley Hotel. What is less proverbial is that when you rent a room there, included in the price they give you earplugs. A friend of mine slept there for a week and told me that this is absolutely unnecessary: it is not the music that keeps you awake, although without the earplugs you couldn’t even hear your inner thoughts; it’s the vibrations produced by the sound that makes it impossible to sleep. Apparently, he would wake up every morning with severe land sickness.
So no offence, but the acoustic is really not The Harley’s thing. Of course, the alcohol is amazing and the Lagavulin whiskey particularly fantastic, so who cares. But they must take extra care in who they invite to play, and indeed they seem to always organize little great gigs. Last time I was there I was really conquered by Dirty Weekend. They are a classic, electronic-with-soul indie band from Teesside, which would remind of Editors if it weren’t for the fact frontman Danny Spooner’s voice is about five octaves above Tom Smith’s – which makes the music less gloomy and far more enjoyable.
If you look at their website it looks like they’ve been around for the past 20 years, which shows just how useful online DIY can be. But they still haven’t signed with a label and that is a pity, as they really deserve it. They go well with Lagavulin as well as the shittiest beer, and if you missed them at the Harley you can download their album from their website, so then you’ll really want to see them live – and that’s exactly how it should work in music.
By the way, they are named after a 1973 Italian film by Dino Risi starring Marcello Mastroianni. I don’t know if they did it on purpose or not, but that adds extra coolness to the band.
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