Four nights celebrating The George’s birthday, ft. Dr. John Cooper Clarke, Geese, The Wameki, Lau’s Birthday Party.

“What a wonderful public house this is! And what a wonderful landlady is Pauline!”

Crowds are clambering onto every square inch of floor space, chair or table to catch a glimpse of the stage. They whoop and holler, heckle their jokes and request their favourite cuts. The diehards anticipate every moment before it begins. It’s hot. It’s sweaty. Someone faints. People need to ‘get some air’ and it’s Friday night (thank fuck).

‘Pauline’, is Pauline Forster, artist and owner of The George Tavern, the much-loved, (and much-needed) pub venue in Shadwell, East London. On stage speaking ain’t no rock band, but a man, one man, Dr. John Cooper Clark, rambling through his bubbling admixture of side-splitting stand-up routines and thunderous verse. When he’s not reciting from an oversized ledger, he’s teetering on the microphone and cantering through his most classic poems – ‘Beasley Street’, Evidently Chicken Town’, ‘I Wanna Be Yours’. He’s barely able to keep  pace with his rhymes, lunging forth like a 100m sprinter, ducks his head to come out top in the photo finish. There’s no one quite like John Cooper Clark, no one who is able so effortlessly to make the spoken word seem so exhilarating and so essential.

All through a seamless, breakneck hour-long set, the atmosphere is charged with a feverish, momentous excitement, the kind of ‘How the hell did you get a ticket?’ moments that will be gleefully shared among the attendees, and playfully envied by everyone else. 

And there’s been an awful lot of that at the George Tavern these past few weeks. Celebrating Pauline’s 21 year ownership of the venue, of championing artistic communities and battling off malevolent threats of closure, September brought with it a bumper series of special nights of music and performing arts. Spearheaded by chief-booker (and legitimate icon of the game) Katie Craik, the bill is stuffed with stars. Jeremy Corbyn is on it. Georgia from the Last Dinner Party is on it, hosting talks with the Music Venue Trust about grassroots music in the UK. A few days before the poetry, there were queues around the block for King Krule. And just a few days after, there were people who couldn’t quite believe they’d managed to get tickets to see Geese.

About Geese. Geese. Fucking Geeeeese. On the brink of new album ‘Getting Killed’, the NYC quartet held two intimate ‘album launch’ shows at The George, and were met with the kind of semi-manic fanfare befitting their emergent status as the new heroes of underground rock. Here, on the second of the two shows, they began with a string of unreleased cuts. The patient but committed crowd hangs onto the every last beat of these churning, chuntering grooves – letting the bass rip into them, the rhythm circulate unto them,  Cameron Winter deliver his awkward and prophetic utterances through them. In contrast to the soulful sincerity of their music, Winter is full of quips and smiles, keen to spread the word of the New York Mets, in full knowledge that basically no one here is quite sure what sport they play. (It’s not basketball, as I thought).

So far, so formal. But just a whiff of the barest micro-snippet of 2023 album ‘3D Country’ and it all goes ballistic. It takes just the opening line of ‘2212’ to hurry an electric shock through the room, a Pavlovian signal to descend into pogoing, limb-flying, crowd-surfing, torso-bashing screaming idiot what the fuck ‘I love Geese’ flaming ecstasy.  New singles ‘100 Horses’, ‘Taxes’ and ‘Trindad already feel like modern classics, and the only thing I care about in this dumb world at all is punching my fist in the air and screaming “There’s a Bomb In My Car!”, as if that’s the answer to my problems. And by God! it almost is. 

One thing about going to The George Tavern like this, four times in the space of a week, is that it becomes very apparent the community that has gathered around the place.  Going back to the poetry, opening for John Cooper Clark were poets plucked right from ‘the scene’. Angus Rogers from Opus Kink was delivering his macabre recitals. As was Ned Green, whose band Legss had released their debut album that day. Alexandra Dominica has promoted gigs (and spoken word nights) at the venue for years. Lucas Edwards, warming up the crowd with his comic haikus, was here the night before chairing the Karaoke. And the day before that his flute-whispering post-hardcore’ing quartet Web were opening for Japanese hardcore trio The Wameki.

Oooh yeah, The Wameki. All the way from Tokyo, their fierce music and oddball humour embodied the heroic DIY struggle and bursting creativity championed here at The George. Each of the members was flaring with eccentricity at their headline show. A drummer with just snare, kick, cymbal, and one microphone, battering, screaming, and gambolling into the crowd. A vocalist in a backwards baseball cap rapping and bawling into his harmonica. A bassist with just two strings on keeping everything just about tidy. There was a thin crowd, but the vibe was huge, and The Wameki left their mark on everyone. They are a testament to going up on a stage, taking chances and doing things, because you have to and you can and it’s awesome.

The Wameki had flown halfway across the world to be here, but Little Grandad and .roaming, say, had come from London, taking chances of their own. In between all these aforementioned unique events was a showcase night, Lau’s Birthday Party’. The flip-side of the gig goers coin, were not here to see legendary poets, or New York heroes, or punks from Japan, but four bands from London, none of whom have released any music. The line-up is a complete mystery, but we trust a promoter who has put on secret sets from Wunderhorse and Deathcrash in the past year.

A few days after their set, I would meet nearly every member of Little Grandad at Geese. But as strangers, their show was a breath of fresh air. Proud acolytes of MJ Lenderman’s ‘Manning Fireworks’, sun-burst trumpets and strident three-part harmonies imbue their Americana-indie with a rapturous positivity that’s not just a little bit infectious. Alongside the slacker-indie of Bone China, .roaming were flexing their flair for quaint technologies; vocals being fed through phone receivers, backing tracks played through a tape machine. A stripped back duo delivering sparse but direct songwriting. Shoegaze epics but with the shoes-off. Their mascot is a tiny wooden wizard whittled by one of the members. It stands stock still during the tender moments but wobbles frenetically when the music hits a peak. It’s passed around the crowd too – a cute, yet mystical totem. Finally, closing, the night, with something else entirely, Studio 20 explored a veritable gamut of indie, from immersive, suckerpunching jangle-grunge through to anthemetic Picture Parlour-esque ballads. Their talent is apparent and their destiny lies in their own hands. Like many of us, they’re still figuring things out. And thank fuck The George Tavern has a stage to let them do it.