From The Wallscratcher Archive: Lunar Engine
Lunar Engine were bedevilled with difficulties setting up. (The stage was a mess with leads – and I’ve since vowed to only have one act with a complicated tech-spec per night!) A faulty connection, and Gary’s vocal effects had to be ditched – which proved, in the circumstances, no bad thing: We had his powerful, raspy voice, with its delicious London enunciation “in the raw” - and I actually preferred it that way… THOSE words and THAT voice needs to be heard and savoured… and at their last gig here, both got rather lost in reverb soup.
Gary Perrett is a real character – and his stage presence is like no one else’s. He invited us to admire his new pair of shoes. He usually wears one of the waistcoats his mother makes for his gigs. Tonight it was too hot – and he jokes, wiping his brow, that this has brought on the bad luck with his gear. He had no need to worry of course: Lunar Engine wowed the audience with their songs of suburbs and sorrow from start to finish.
Next to Gary, with a blaze of slightly quiffed auburn hair, stands James Eastwood, who is fantastic guitarist and also a bit of whizz with effects. His set-up is a mystery of wires, boxes and gaffer tape – I can’t even guess what it’s all for, but he certainly knows what he’s doing. Lunar Engine’s songs are built upon repeating melodic motifs, which are looped, layered and played over. This steady, structural element provides room for Gary’s vocals: whether they soar and plunge (at times vertiginously!) or whisper or mutter - or simply sing.
Lunar Engine have a great affection for Indie Pop (much more than I do!), but there is something so integral and stark about how they perform even their Pop-pier numbers, I can’t help seeing them in the context of Folk. Of course I don’t mean the bland rubbish our music industry calls Folk – but the old, wild, primordial stuff: The folk of stick and stone and mud.
“Games Of Cars And Houses” is my favourite song by Lunar Engine (or anyone else for that matter). It opens with a minimal guitar line by James, which brilliantly sets the mood for the song Gary introduces so tenderly:
“Hey there, are you doing alright? I thought it was about time that I should write”… There follows a catalogue of memories from long ago and far away. He reminisces: “I built an Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks/ I saw a dead dog in a dustbin”. These details are invoked against his monotonous experience: the endless roads that lie between each rare encounter: “Sometimes I wonder if I should be happy, you know, standing by the car, waiting to go….”
His voice drifts off. Three minutes through (when time’s up for the standard pop-song) the guitar seems to slow to an end… but after this feint, the song rallies for a second half: This letter has a long Post-Script:
“I met a girl and she was pretty/ I left her back in an ugly city/We cut through Grey Town in Blues-Borough/ and ended up in Dullsville…I’m living in Dullsville!”
He howls that sentence like a lone coyote: across the wastes of urban sprawl, the “anywhere, everywhere, somewhere’ of tarmac-covered separation - hoping to reconnect with his absent friend, dreaming his hopeful dream. Perhaps he might move down by the sea…
“and maybe you could visit me?” He wonders and then pleas, hopefully and hopelessly: “Do you think you might visit me?”
This is what it is to feel confined - and confounded by the modern age. There’s a resonance with old Pete Seiger’s ditty – but “Games Of Cards And Houses” is a charged with 1000 megawatts of emotion – and humanity:
“I’ve seen a thousand roads and too many homes/ Till the cars and houses all look the same!” and the song slowly fades away with the Doo-Wop’s and Sha-La-La’s of a long forgotten chart hit.
Mid-set, Lunar Engine played an instrumental piece called “Husks Ablaze”. Gary pulled the vocal mic over a tiny xylophone: He stuck a bar of melody ended by two sharp raps on the table-top. This was repeated continuously, until the reverb-soaked melody started to float in the air: like a tune from a child’s toy; or the hail of an ice-cream van, tantalising from the distance.
Great song came after great song, including a new one I had not yet heard, called “Louder Than Saints”. On it James creates an impressive flurry of flamenco arpeggios, while Gary sings:
“…A musty mixture of sage and sageness,
And you wouldn’t come home with me
On account of your trajectory…
We’re louder than saints and better than fame
And a penny short of paradise too..”
The second person features large in Gary Perrett’s writing: There is this “you” he sings to, with such passion and yearning, it could move us to tears. Lovers, kindred spirits, members of the scattered tribe - He is inviting them to enjoin; to engage with beauty and strangeness. This theme is particularly powerful – and romantic - in Lunar Engine’s final song “Underwater With Me:
“People criticise, but what the hell do they know? Come underwater with me, I just want to be your friend, Kick off your shoes and socks”…
And so we should! We’re in a deeper, richer, better world with Lunar Engine.
