Misty's Big Adventure / Kate Goes

Not many people know this but King Tut’s stage was built by a tribe of dwarfs from the leftover bricks belonging to Hadrian’s Wall. That’s why it’s so small. Honest, it says so in the Domesday Book.

Whether you believe me or not it’s quite clear that the stage wasn’t designed with 9 band ensembles in mind. Which is why I was more than a little intrigued to see how on earth Misty’s Big Adventure were going to cram onto the tiny Tuts platform.

Happiness was awash tonight, and there was no place for the self-indulgent drones of indie monotony that had been festering throughout many of Glasgow’s musical havens over the last couple of weeks.

Support act was the insanely weird Kate Goes… (insert random place), who are rather like one of those psychedelic drug induced movies from the 70’s, seemingly devoid of narrative, structure or coherence – but somehow, it all works brilliantly.

Dressed in scuba diving gear and fisherman costumes, today Kate’s going to the seaside, apparently. They open with arbitrary female beat-boxing from lead singer and band name-sake Kate Thompson.

Peculiar in every conceivable way, Kate Goes relish on discordant montages of uncontrollable noises, like an autistic child who has been given a keyboard for Christmas and become obsessed with the effects settings.



The only thing screeching louder than Thompson’s indiscriminate vocals is the bands unparalleled originality. This is a fantastic, if slightly outlandish, mish-mash musical fusion of uncorrelated genres, blending sublime nursery rhymes with electro-inspired rhythmic intervals. Quite simply, this is musical mayhem at its very best.

At various moments in the bizarre set their music sounds child-like, and playful mannerisms titter beneath the surface, but it’s all a case of eccentric duplicity, and within moments the band have transformed themselves into a swirling mess of squealing unintelligible sound, before crashing back into those simple keyboard melodies, leaving the neutral bystander bewildered.

They are constantly varying their instruments, performing with mandolins, clarinets, guitars, keyboards, and of course a child’s squeaky toy. This band are exactly what was going on in Coleridge’s head just before he started babbling on about pleasure domes in Xanadu.

Kate Goes is the musical personification of the children in ‘Village of the Damned’, delightful and charming for one moment, but they must not be trusted as something clearly more sinister and deranged lurks beneath that genial surface. You have been warned!

Just when my mind had begun to relapse from the oddity of Kate Goes, another bunch of idiosyncratic oddities took to the stage, riding on a carpet of transcendent psychedelia.

The Misty’s Big Adventure collective, are of group of slightly eccentric individuals with a passion for dancing like crazed Neanderthals and spurred on by an uncontrollable desire to spread happiness throughout the world. Oh, and they like to take the piss a lot too.

While Coldplay are busy destroying mankind with their self-depreciating melancholic drivel, Misty’s Big Adventure are embracing all the good things in life, with two outstretched hands and a big, cheeky grin.

There’s only one word that can be used for such lyrically inspired songs about copper bashing paedophilic priests and cannibalistic children turned radioactive through mobile phone masts – and that’s genius.



Within minutes some absurd looking creature bounds on stage, looking like a terrifying contestant thrown off the first show of the Muppet version of X-Factor. I’ve since been reliably informed this is Erotic Volvo, a err...blue faced monster kitted out in a red and blue suit, from which is hanging a load of blue painted gloves. Crazy dancing and miming ensures from the overenthusiastic monster, spurring the crowd into a similar hyperactive dance style. If you couldn’t hear the music you’d swear the whole of King Tut’s had been possessed by the spirit of Screaming Lord Sutch and his monster raving loony party.

Grandmaster Gareth is the great curator of this hallucinogenic masterpiece, and orchestrates both crowd and audience, while beaming mischievously and ranting like Jack Black’s English cousin.

‘Evil’ starts off as a chirpy piano/drum exchange that’s suddenly overrun with trumpets, transforming it into a literal all singing/dancing skank fest. Other tracks include the harmonious ‘2 Brains’, capturing the essence of an escapist dream “A lady entered my sleep and told me ‘Gareth, you exist in a parallel universe.’ Am I exactly the same I asked? In every way she replied...except...everything you’ve forgotten he remembers. Everything you remember he forgets”.


At one point everything breaks down and the PA grinds to a halt, leaving Gareth and his crew to perform a little bit of freestyling and provoking the audience into a mass sing-a-long, before the PA kicks back in and the party continues.

They end on their new single ‘Fashion Parade’; an ironic track that rips it out of bands that copy other bands… by copying the riff from another band. The jibe is poked at Franz Ferdinand in particular but takes the mick out of any band recording records in this ‘bland age’.

You can’t help but smile. Misty’s Big Adventure are brilliant. All you have to do is open your mind and escape into their chaotic world.

FUTURE GIGS

sorry, we currently have no gigs listed for this act.