The Bungalow, Paisley
02-02-24
Last night, the good ship Mickey 9s embark’d upon its world tour of Scotland, a great battleship of funk that will be tearing wide-open the everyday merchant shipping lanes of our Caledonian lives. Like any good Atlantic battleship raiding party, they’ll need some destroyer escorts, & so to Motopia, their chief support this voyage. With a classic format of bass, drums, guitar & vocals, the band is a Catatonian, Echobellyesque three blokes & a bird, led by the sparkling Mairead Feighan, whom I first encounter’d at last year’s Eden festival. It was reyt hot, it was my birthday, I was absolutely blooter’d from the previous night, & this is what I had to say;
At 1PM, kicking off the Wee Timorous Stage at the back of Rabbie’s Tavern, I was delighted to witness for my first time the ethereal & uplifting fairy shamanics of Motopia, fronted by an acoustic guitar strumming kneeling lady call’d Mairead Feighan & occasionally join’d by a guitarist & percussionist. It really was an enchanting affair, with lyrics that really mean something – like a give-a-fuck-about-humanity-with-a-hard-dose-of-truth kinda something.
…& so to last night, & the Bungalow venue in Paisley – Scotland’s largest town, & a place I’d never been to after dark. Writing this proves I surviv’d the escapade, but it’s not one for the faint-hearted, believe you me. The town has always loved its music – an appreciation that was ratched reyt up after Glasgow’s city councillors bann’d punk music in the 1970s, leading to open defiance, a 12-minute train ride to Paisley, & some proper gigs at the old skool Bungalow (it has moved in recent years), where perform’d The Clash, The Buzzcocks, Siouxie and the Banshees & The Skids. Reyt bands, reyt voices, reyt vibes!
The new Bungalow is a cool venue on this strip of clubs – I bet its mental in summer, a spacious enough place with a biggish screen showing the live action on the stage. I was only there to see Motopia, & last night, as I was watching Mairead weave her punkishly politiz’d, industro-sermon magic, I was getting some proper Mark E. Smith in the room, while the awe-struck spirits of The Fall were crawling up & down the walls like curious zombie ghouls, going ,who the fuck’s this chick?
Miraed is a newcomer to the scene – her second ever gig was only a year ago, & in the very same venue, a terrifying experience which she delighted in telling us about in one of the chirpy banter-balloon interludes between every song, most of which involv’d her admiring a punter’s fancy boots & wondering what shop she got ’em from. Then she’d introduce the next tune with some expression of truth, such as “this is where we find our power, find who the fuck we are,” or “this next song, in a roundabout way, says fuck the Tories!”
From the folkiness of Eden Festival, to last night’s mini-triumph, Motopia’s trajectory seems akin to that of the rapid aeronautical evolution between the gangly efforts of the Wright Brothers daddy longlegs flying machines, to the sleek & superb Supermarine Spitfires downing Goering’s finest over the docklands of the Clyde. I could hear future anthems breaking out; hooky melodies fused to the music by snippets of forceful lyricism. Her boys are cool too – solid riffs, solid beats, solid back-up -, noting too fancy, but with many a fancy flourish, indicating well-thought song-crafters were grafting behind the scenes.
I was also digging the way that with every song, the connection between band & audience warm’d & swell’d in kundalini fashion, like a storm slowly growing in a harbour, with applause growing exponentially. Then, I swear down, I started bopping about & shit, & it was all cool as fuck! We were all fans of Motopia, & Mairead’s Indian hand dancing by the end, & I left the venue reyt optimistic for 2024, the Year of the Dragon, the year of the artist’s roar! Yes, I’m really glad I brav’d Paisley to see Motopia on the verge of what could well be their break-thro’ year.
Words: Damo Beeson Bullen
Photography: Zewen Lai
Mumble Music 