Silev Live at Stoke's Croft

104 Stoke's Croft - Secret Silev gig. No one who's anyone is here but the place is crawling with beards.

There's a woman on the front row with eyebrows like a pair of Two-Tone wraparounds. She's hopelessly out of tune with the music; head down and thrashing at even the stillest, most frozen moments. She's causing chaos, eating it up, living a bad dream.

Kek,fetchingly dressed as Jerry Cornelius, is already mouthing wordless ginobscenities from across the bar (later, these same words will see him able to walk through mirrors) while Psychbloke's attempting a little experimental breakdancing/frottage with a Sylvia Plath lookalike nine times his age. I look at them and shrug my shoulders (one at a time - a deadly secret Masonic Distress Code).

I turn around to see Gutterbreakz narrowly avoiding a flying haircut as eyebrow woman launches into a shamanic depressive 'whirling knives' dance which seems to send her years spinning off in a hundred different directions, catching people unawares and ageing them almost to the point of dissolution.

A guy standing by the stuffed tiger gets the brunt; maybe twenty-nine at the beginning of the dance, by the end he's unmistakeably seven years older and responds by leaping into the crowd singing Phil Collins 'Susudio' at the top of his voice.

Eyebrow girl's shed maybe 17 years before the dance is done: by the time she lurches sideways into the sofas next to the somewhat perplexed Cloudboy she's perhaps just nine or ten years old.

It takes a while for any of us to notice that, so far, Silev has just been tuning up and that he hasn't started playing yet. Disorientated, I lurch towards the bar holding out Russian money and demanding change from a confused looking Kempernorton/Joanna Newsom who, in lieu of anything better to do, stands on the bar and attempts a rather half-hearted and high-pitched trawl through The Eagles' Hotel California.

By the time Farmer Glitch has walked in, turned in circles precisely eight times and then disappeared in a puff of green moss smoke, Silev is playing the first number and, to everyone's surprise, it turns out to be the Christmas single: a version of The Holly and the Ivy by way of the The Blythe Sons.

Silev - Christmas Single (The Holly etc)