wombatwombat presents Drugstore
+ Fiel Garvie + Port Isla
Friday 13 April : 8pm
£7.50 adv : £9.50 door
Part of no scene but a world entirely of their own making, Drugstore is a truly unique band. Fall for the star-drenched charm of their midnight melancholia and discover its timeless beauty for yourself.
“A fine return for a band that were one of the most underrated and greatest bands to come out of the UK.” (pennyblackmusic.co.uk)
”Her voice is soaked in wine and cured in smoke. It has depth and strength and yet verges raunchily on the edge of guttering out. Some songs drift like dreams, others pound like blood vessels when you’re in the midst of something exciting and filthy. They’re somewhere in the same crazed town as the Tindersticks, Eels, Bad Seeds and other eclectic bands.” (londonist.com)
Drugstore is the brainchild of London-based Brazilian eccentric singer songwriter, Isabel Monteiro.
If you ask the internet the right question, you’ll find that Drugstore have been, ahem, kind of a big deal in their time.
They toured with Jeff Buckley, who liked them so much he took to covering their debut single, Alive, live.
They toured with Radiohead, whose singer liked them so much he sang a cello-laden duet with Isabel; El President reached the UK Top 20.
While the times meant Drugstore were compelled to hang around with cheery, Mod-tinged Britpoppers, their music beat a rather different path. “We had absolutely nothing to do with Britpop,” says Isabel. “We were on the shoulders of all that but we just didn’t belong.”
Had anyone actually thought about it, Drugstore would have undoubtedly been branded Alt.country – as is the case today. Isabel’s smoky vocals and pitch-dark lyrical subject matter, coupled with her new band’s minimalist, melancholic guitar and string arrangements, stick them firmly in the lovelorn, caustic company of Low, Dusty in Memphis and Leonard Cohen.
Isabel talks about “an alternative late-night Americana scene, bands like Girls and Calexico, I think we have more in common with” and this is borne out by the songs she’s written in the last 12 months, for her new Drugstore album Anatomy, out on Rocket Girl – home to A Place To Bury Strangers and PS I Love You – which had in the past tried and failed to snap the band up on two previous occasions.
So what happened to Drugstore? “I stopped overnight,” she admits today. “I fell in love, was tired of the craze touring carrousel – and overnight I just thought: ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ The rest of the band were disappointed.”
Having, over a 15-year period, started and finished relationships with three band members – “I wish I had met writers and architects, but I didn’t! I just met roadies, tour managers and musicians” – things were about to change dramatically for Isabel.
After three albums on three labels, Drugstore went their separate ways in 2002, and in Isabel’s own words, “things spiralled down” into seven undeniably gloomy years. “There were hard and dark times, my universe shrank overnight.
I became homeless, I was completely broke, telephone went dead, but I’m sure I’m not the only artist who’s experienced that sense of ‘Where’s everyone gone?’ and that all my connections were made out of sand.”
The singer survived, perhaps in spite of herself, on wine and hope. “Love for life kept me alive,” she says now, until September 2009, when a briefly reunited original band played a gig at Dingwalls in London, “just for fun”. It sold out.
This made a lot of people – Isabel included – realise that far from being stuck in any era, Drugstore’s music nimbly hopped over the ages, from 1920s Berlin cabaret through the French chanson tradition, via The Velvet Underground’s woozy melodic charm and Tom Waits’ bar-room badinage, across PJ Harvey’s earnest intellect and The Bad Seeds’ rumbling, angry sadness.
The singer felt emboldened, and inspired by a guitar donated by a fan, work started on material for the album Anatomy.
In 2010 she played London’s ICA – “I was very nervous. We were thinkin’: who’s gonna buy those tickets? Amazingly, it sold out.” – and a couple of festivals (including Glastonbury) with a new Drugstore.
As this footage from the ICA gig witnesses, apart from the interruptions of somebody taking a drinks’ delivery and the beep of another’s incoming text message, the maximum-capacity audience was silent, enraptured, reverential, embracing the sound of a feisty, freshly harvested, heart beating on a suitably sequinned sleeve.
So, everything was perfect: plenty of wine, pitch-black humour, plus a mixture of old and new songs. Of course, it’s still all about the lyrics and use of language, the performance and passion: anger and lust remain perfect bedfellows.
Ever the benevolent dictator – “It was true then, it’s still true now. You’ve gotta have someone leading the boat downwards…” – Isabel held open auditions for Drugstore at legendary London bar The Troubadour, and all the while she wrote the “liberating” Anatomy blog that would eventually inspire their new album’s title and lyrical content. “My blog is part of the band,” she explains. “Anatomy is about exposing yourself to the core, whether it’s pretty or ugly. I think it’s both: an analytical inspection of a state of mind.”
So now we have a freshly stocked Drugstore – “new cowboys”, Isabel calls them. “Ultimately, the outcome has been totally rewarding and really productive,” Isabel says of the process. “I could have been dead now, but there was this desire to still see the sunshine another day, and I knew I just had to release those songs, tell those stories”.
This tiny sliver of optimism eventually led to Drugstore convening at a remote studio on Platt’s Eyot – an island on the River Thames near Richmond – to create Anatomy’s 12 stripped-and-whipped tracks together.
“It’s painfully intimate, shamelessly simple, devastatingly sad,” says a disarmingly candid Isabel. “And right in the middle of this fucked-up seascape, the twisted heart of our little Drugstore still beats pretty.”
Reviews for Anatomy
“The odds would have been long that, 18 years after their formation, they would reappear with some of their strongest material. Drugstore have been both placed at the dreamier end of the indie spectrum and compared with Leonard Cohen. Anatomy shows that there’s more of an overlap there than one might have imagined.” (BBC Music)
“Isabel describes it as “painfully intimate, shamelessly simple, devastatingly sad”. I’d agree on all three counts, but also add “heartbreakingly brilliant” to that list.” (Norman Records)
“A long dark night of the soul, with Monteiro’s whiskey-sour so intimate, though you know she’ll be back for more.” (Mojo)
“Up there with their earlier efforts. It is a more considered, grown up record, with added depth and charm.” (drownedinsound.com)
“Anatomy is an uncommon display of fragility: eerie but strangely compelling.” (Uncut)
Drugstore: definitive purveyors of perfect soundtracks for every heaven, hell, heartache and moment of deep joy since 1994, and coming to an arts centre near you as one of a very limited-run of specially selected shows: don’t miss them.
Drugstore have hand-picked two local bands to complete the auditorium line-up for this show.
Norwich’s much-missed dreampopsters Fiel Garvie – last seen performing anywhere on 26 May 2007 alongside Emma Pollock and Emmy the Great, as it happens at wombatwombat, Norwich Arts Centre – reform for a one-off gig, playing main support.
The quintet’s most recent album, Caught Laughing, was mixed by Geoff Allan (Camera Obscura, Teenage Fanclub, Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai) and released worldwide on various labels in 2006 to critical acclaim and an ecstatically-received Japanese tour.
“There’s the hushed coolness of Kim Gordon with that childish, slightly wonky vocal delivery that Bjork loves so much, the band are loose and soulful, the ethereal quality recalling early Mercury Rev, with the bare boned attack of Shudder To Think, and the songs, well, they’re just beautiful, aren’t they…?” (Subba Cultcha, UK)
“Exploring a vein of reflective, melancholy, and stately rock and roll equal parts solo Nick Cave, Pulp and Tindersticks, to name just a few inspirations.” (All Music Guide, US)
“Attractively lo-fi, dreamy, floaty and has a nostalgic touch. You will feel magical, as if you were dreaming.” (So-en, Japan)
“Fans of the emotions invoked by Mercury Rev and Cocteau Twins will want this.” (Blow Up, Italy)
“Like Low and Stereolab, they achieve more by trying to cram in less, to let the moments hold.” (Vanity Project, UK)
“Spellbinding… A mighty sweet album steeped in a lush dream pop sound accentuated by the breathy voice of singer Anne Reekie. Her voice will remind you of a cross between Isabel Monteiro from Drugstore meets Cerys Matthews from Catatonia, with the heavy British accent found on vocals by Sarah Nixey of Black Box Recorder. Sweet stuff indeed.” (Lunapark6, US)
UEA music school undergrads Port Isla open proceedings with their harmonytastic twinkling mix of semi-acoustic summer sounds and perfect pop.
“A potent blend of Fleet Foxes, The Shins and Belle & Sebastian.” (Concrete)
Plus Howlback Hum featuring The Winter Berries + Mao’s Dynasty + Ruby Nectar and the Purple Rats in the cafe bar.
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