Blackpool Scream and Shake Horror Cafe
Live Review
August 2024
Blackpool is many things, and most of them are loud and beautifully vulgar – that’s why I still love my home town. There is also an unexpected underground of weird wonk art rock and eccentric noise gurus, but even with this knowledge, Cliff Glitchard comes as a bit of a thrilling shock.
The venue is perfect for this maniacal glee – the Scream Shake Horror cafe is yet another place to play in the seaside town. It’s next door to the old regular West Coast Rock Cafe and a couple of miles from the Waterloo and joins Blackpool’s live music portfolio. A comic shop, cafe and live venue space, it’s a great environment and well worth a visit if you are in the town that’s rebuilding itself.
CLIFF GLITCHARD is a one Man Audio Visual Noise Punk/Breackcore/8bit Art Project/Band Starting out in 2002 under the moniker Not So Amazing Nik and fully evolving into Cliff Glitchard in 2021 through the NFT Glitch Noise Scene.
On stage, there’s a gonzoid vocalist screaming into a mic over a cranked high decibel laptop of Digi samples and pulverising beats like Atari Teenage Riot on steroids. Behind him is someone dressed as Mr Blobby flapping around like a cartoon maniac, which is both hilarious and somewhat unsettling – especially when the singer shags Blobby’s flapping latex leg in the set closer. The pair of them own the stage, and the audience is pinned back by their merciless beat mash-up yet entranced in the joy of the ridiculousness. Every now and then, a pop sample breaks the noise avalanche with snatches of unlikely pop garbage like Agadoo leaking out of the noise machine. Each track is merciless and pounding but carefully constructed…there is genius to this madness! and it’s dance music for twitching insects in these high octane times, a noise bible for true believers and a schizoid rush of getting your ya yas out and digital soul power.
Cliff Glitchard could be playing it for laughs, but they are also hypnotically intense. There is a danger stranger to their unruly fury and a striking dark energy humour. It’s always been a truism that the further you get from the hip frontline cities and their imposed cool the more likely you are to find the weird stuff and the boundary pushers. Cliff Glitchard by accident or design have created something quite special beside the seaside and continue Blackpool’s weird underground vision and ability to create something magical in the salty vacuum and an unexpected gem in the middle of the last resort…on the other hand in a town pulverised by illuminations, its own defiant glamour and unpretentious yet wild culture, collapsing old buildings, angry seagulls, extrovert buildings and theatres full of dust and memories and the garish yet stunning beauty of kitsch and tack a thing like Cliff Glitchard is the only logical conclusion.
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