Ratboys @ The Garage, May 21st 2026
Last year, maybe the one before, a band called Ratboys were playing at the Windmill, which is a tiny music venue about ten minutes down the road from me. Because it was at the Windmill, the ticket price was probably less than a pint.
At that point, I only knew the band from Black Earth, WI, a meandering 8-minute jam about getting lazily lost in Wisconsin backroads - and it was great, justifying every second of its not-inconsiderable runtime, but I was feeling lazy and it was only one song so I didn’t bother going.
God, past me is a fucking idiot.
In my defence, they had not yet released Singin’ To An Empty Chair, which is a shoo-in for best album released this year and will feature heavily in any conversation about best albums released this decade. It was still a dumb-ass decision.
I did not make the same mistake this time, and fortunately got in early, as The Garage, which is a considerably larger venue than The Windmill, was entirely sold out.
Support came in the form of Former Champ, a Scottish janglepop outfit. I’d listened to their one album before coming out, and enjoyed it. I don’t know that they’re particularly distinctive from any other janglepop outfit, but the melodies are good and Claire McKay’s vocals are crystal-clean.
Former Champ, trying to get through the mix
Live, they were less impressive. Clear guitar lines and vocals on record were turned into mush by the mix. And this is not necessarily - or even likely to be - the band’s fault, venues have a highly annoying habit of muddying the sound on the support acts to make the main event sound better, but still a bit of a disappointment. I like the album enough that I’d try them again at a gig they were headlining.
Second up was Sunday Mourners, who I’d also listened to and written off as fairly average post-punk. But live, these guys killed it.
Sunday Mourners, rocking
The influences are worn on their sleeve - I had to laugh when the frontman said ‘This one’s a Television cover’ because my dude, they are all Television covers. You’ve clearly been mainlining Marquee Moon since you were seven years old. But when the influences are that good and you’re doing such a good job with them, who cares?
It was spiky, standoffish, and full of shuddering beats. Loved it, would definitely go and see them again.
Ratboys themselves absolutely owned the stage. They do country-accented rock, not afraid of letting a song stretch out when it needs to, but just as capable of three-minute bouncers, and that variety was what made the set so good.
Obviously it was helped by the fact they were touring a truly superb album, and we got 8 out of the 11 songs on it, but there’s something special about a band who can so easily switch gears. Too often, there’ll be a set full of rockers and a token ballad, or a parade of folk songs and then some fanfare when the singer briefly straps on an electric guitar. Ratboys do whatever the hell they want and it still always sounds natural.
They kicked off with Open Up, Anywhere and Penny In The Lake, going from road-rock to dancer to singalong in just the first three songs. The gentle Strange Love slid straight into the significantly more frantic Light Night Mountains All That, a song that sounds like rising paranoia in a horror movie.
The centrepiece of the album and the set was Just Want You To Know The Truth, another lengthy meander, but this one through memories of a relationship, addressed to the partner no longer there, who left for unspecified but not good reasons, the one not occupying the empty chair of the album’s title. Live, the pained guitar which sits as an undercurrent on the studio track came right to the front, a howl of rage and frustration at the one who ran away.
Ratboys, who I intend to see multiple more times in the future
The main set closed with Black Earth, WI, so I did finally get to hear it live. It’s a song that would reward being stoned. You could get lost to that song. You could get lost with that song. You probably wouldn’t care. The guitar solo in the middle is the single best three minutes of music committed to record in the last five years. It’s such a perfect thing to drift out on it was almost a shame there was an encore.
I suspect the next time I see them will not be as good. There’s a perfect time to see a band - you’ve just got into them, you love their new stuff, and they’re performing every one of the bangers you want to hear. By the next time, the band’s career will have drifted on like the solo in Black Earth, WI, and you have to hope enough of your past favourites make it onto the list. But for me, this caught Ratboys at the perfect time. Very glad I wasn’t lazy again.
Brockwell Park, 3rd May 2026
I wasn’t carrying my camera on this walk. The idea was to have a quick pound around Brockwell to get some steps in and I didn’t want to get distracted.
I got distracted.
There’s a lot of flowers coming out at this time of year - even a casual walk around a park can find a load in different shapes and colours, so obviously I ended up hunting them.
Since I wasn’t carrying a camera, you’ll have to make do with snaps from my phone.
Herb Robert
The little pink one that looks like a geranium is, in fact, a type of geranium. Generally found in the shade; this one was next to the middle pond.
Freshly picked leaves are said to be good at repelling mosquitoes.
Hawthorn
The hedges are full of flowering hawthorn at this time of year. Also called ‘Mayflower’ because it flowered in May, the Olden Times not having much energy to spare on imagination. These days it’s flowering by April and often as not done by May, as the year gets warmer earlier.
Leaves can apparently be used as a salad and the berries can be turned into wine. Haven’t tried the leaves, the wine is interesting but no Georgian red.
Green Alkanet
This stuff comes up on every verge, and until I looked it up I called it ‘speedwell’, but it turns out that’s a different little blue flower that I’d find on the lanes in Cornwall.
The roots used to be roasted and ground as a coffee substitute. Since they are toxic, I will not be attempting that.
Oxford Ragwort
I love these little sunshines. They spring up all over the place, both in the verges and patches of it in the middle of any unman bit of parkland.
Like Green Alkanet, it was an 18th-century introduction which spread rapidly, this time via the train tracks, as the ballast was a close match to the kind of ground it liked where it grew in its native Sicily.
Cow Parsley
This is one of the earliest and most prolific signs of spring, and for me they pretty much define the smell of country lanes - which makes it a little odd to find in the middle of London. But cow parsley gets everywhere, enthusiastically. Each plant produces a huge amount of seeds so it spreads easily.
Apparently everything you can see above ground is edible, tasting similar to chervil or parsley with a hint of aniseed. You need to be careful when foraging, though, because it looks similar to hemlock, which is very much not edible. Or at least, not more than once.
And finally…
No, they’re not flowers. But the babies are back, another full set of 8 hatched and cheeping.
Beddington Farmlands and Mitcham Common, April 22nd 2026
Look who’s back:
This is the earliest I’ve seen swifts in London. I wasn’t expecting to see them for another couple of weeks, but the skies above Beddington Farmlands were full of them wheeling and screaming.
They’re a bittersweet arrival for a winter-lover like me, but I do like them. Part of the reason I like them is that they’re so hard to get a decent picture of, being, as you might expect, swift.
Swifts jack-knife through the sky, and getting them in frame is distinctly non-trivial. My method is always to let the camera get focus, fire a burst for as long as I can hold the frame on them, and hope one of the hundreds of pictures I just took is decent.
This time I got a couple of nice ones. I like the feather detail on the one above, they’re so smooth they look almost scaly. It’s things like that which remind you that birds are just dinosaurs with ambition.
And in this one, I like the pose with the outstretched wings, like it’s ascending to heaven:
Standard composition advice for something like this is to put the empty space in the direction the bird is travelling, so it looks like they have somewhere to go. With this one, I did the opposite - I wanted it to look like the little goth angel was rising, and positioning it toward the top of the frame does that better.
The skies were also full of these guys:
Kestrels are always a great thing to see. They ignored the swifts completely, rather looking for mice and voles in the scrub. Nothing that isn’t a hobby has any chance of chasing down a swift anyhow.
The lakes themselves were relatively empty this time, though I did get a good view of a heron flying over the south lake:
And I spent far longer than I should have done chasing a swallow. For whatever reason I barely see swallows in my bit of London at all, so having one in the crowd of swifts was a nice treat.
What I didn’t get were much in the way of great pictures. I almost binned this one, but then I spotted that it didn’t just have the swallow, but also the bug it was chasing. God only knows if you’ll be able to see it, but trust me, it’s there. Raising the shadows and whites on the swallow and then pushing down the blacks gave the glow through the feathers.
Beddington Farmlands is a good start for a few good walks. The one I’ll do most often is to turn left through the woods at the end of the reserve, then catch the Wandle trail from Watermead Lane and walk from there up to Morden, but this time I went the other way, to Mitcham Common.
On the way, I found this wren staking a territory claim:
I am, you may have noticed, a sucker for a silhouette.
Mitcham Common is a strange space, huge and empty and entirely out of place for somewhere that’s really still quite a long way inside London. I walked up from the One Island Pond area, and walked around the pond to find a greenfinch hiding in the branches:
There were also a couple of spots that weren’t birds.
There seem to be terrapins in every pool in South London. I assume they’re abandoned pets, and probably aren’t great for the ecology since they’ll eat basically anything.
Climbing over the Mill House hill, there was also a native invader:
I see foxes everywhere in London - it’s unusual not to spot at least three just on the way home from the cinema - but usually at night, when I’m not carrying a camera, so seeing one in daylight is an event. Right now they’ve likely got cubs to feed, so are more likely to be out and about at all hours.
This one stood there and watched me for a couple of minutes, but turned tail when I attempted to get a bit closer.
The final spot of the day was another first for the year:
Whitethroats are summer migrants, just starting to arrive from Africa. Their song is a complex trill at high speed, mixing short and long phrases, the notes tumbling over the top of each other. There’s nothing quite like it from the birds which stay here all year, and they (along with the Blackcap) are a major reason why spring and summer have a different soundtrack to autumn and winter.
Almost makes summer worth looking forward to.
Pictures at an Exhibition 1: Samurai, British Museum, 6th April 2026
Every time I’ve been to an exhibition at the BM, they put in a showstopper piece right at the start to grab attention, an immediate ‘this is what you came here to see’. This means it tends to be both very impressive and surrounded by people at all times.
This time, there was a 16th century suit of full samurai armour, created for the Mori clan.
I think that’s true. I didn’t expect to be writing about it afterwards, I did not take notes. This post may be full of lies. Anyhow, I like how everything about it distracts from the samurai inside, from the glaring dragon headpiece to the intricacy of the threadwork on the chest. It’s bright and colourful and keeps the eye anywhere but the samurai’s face, which is masked and shadowed.
Here’s another couple of bits I liked a lot:
I am a little in love with the bird detailing on the scabbard. I don’t know enough about Japanese birds to know if they’re representations of real species or not, but they look amazing. I wanted the picture to really bring out them and the metal engraving, so it’s cropped in tight and the background exposure lowered on a gradient.
There is a rabbit that lives in the moon. Much as in the UK we talk about the man in the moon, in East Asian - and I think some indigenous American - culture, the shadows and dark marks are the Moon Rabbit. I don’t know if that’s what this dish is meant to represent, the caption was not forthcoming. But I like the story and it reminded me of that.
Another fun thing I learned: Japan had a brief Christian period. The Portuguese brought it when they turned up in the 1540s. It gained a fairly significant following, and in the 1580s a samurai delegation was sent to Rome to found an embassy in the Vatican. The spokesman was this guy:
Ito Mancio, there painted by Tintoretto. If he looks young, he was. He was only 13, and was sent halfway round the world for this mission. There’s a movie in that somewhere.
Christianity ended up being a relatively brief thing. It was banned by the first Samurai shogun in 1614, worried about Western influence. Ito Mancio died just before that, in 1612, at the same age I am now.
This one is probably my favourite picture of the set:
This wasn’t in a case so there’s no glare, and I like how the black-and-gold contrast came out. A radial gradient mask on the background with lowered exposure created a nice glow effect.
Another set of armour, this one from the ~18th century, but this one a reproduction of something far older, a 15th century style, because in 18th Century Japan people were also bemoaning modernity and yearning for a golden past.
And that’s a very samurai thing because Samurai themselves are also, it turns out, largely made up.
They did exist, there was a warrior caste in Japan from around the 11th century which gradually became more elite, and in the 16th they took political power as well.
But the common myth of samurai that we have - the code of Bushido, the systems of honour - are retroactive 19th century mythmaking, from a new government trying to create a sense of national identity, a way to explain why We are better than Them.
The Samurai were brought down in the 1860s; unequal trade deals with the West led to widespread discontentment and sparked off a far more aggressive version of Japan under the Meiji restoration. The Emperor Meiji banned samurai, westernised the military and launched successful invasions of China and Korea, largely thanks to the modern military tactics and weapons.
Despite that, the success was credited to Japan’s samurai heritage, the ‘bushido code’, things that made Japan different from the West. It used a history-that-never-was to generate nationalism and exceptionalism.
If you’re really eagle-eyed you might notice a few people doing that today, too.
Last picture:
This is a detail from a kimono. The caption had some details of the story represented, I can remember none of them. But the embroidery is great, I love the horse’s tassel and the beaded bow.
I had some ideas for doing things with the colours here that didn’t really come off. With this one I definitely like the thing in the picture rather than the picture itself, but sometimes a photo is just a memory, it doesn’t have to be art.
Searows @ KOKO, 10th April 2026
“We’re going to play a rocker,” he says, 5 songs in. “I don’t have many of those.”
The band then launches into Dearly Missed, and it’s the best bit of the night, six minutes of grinding guitars and shuddering basslines.
I hadn’t heard of Searows (is it meant to be a play on ‘zeroes’? Not sure, only thought of that last night) until recently, when Spotify suggested the new album Death In The Business Of Whaling, and shortly after that when I felt like I should have more gigs in my life I found the KOKO listing.
And so here I was, at a gig for an artist I didn’t really know much about, with a pint of Meantime and an open mind. There’s something fun about these nights, coming into a band with no favourites you’re hoping to hear and no expectations of how they’ll sound.
Dearly Missed is an outlier. Searows is mostly drone-folk, heavy with reverb and melancholy. There’s lyrics in there somewhere, but they’re fuzzy despite being at the front of the mix, like you’re listening to a depressed Cocteau Twin. Bass and drums give you a sense the muscle is there, it’s just not often used. Accents of banjo and harmonica keep things folk instead of shoegaze.
Live, the sound is more intense. The banjo and harmonica aren’t there, and the bass and drums pick up the slack. Between songs, Searows gives the impression between songs that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing here, having just suddenly found himself on stage holding a guitar and in front of a band and so he says “I guess I should… play a song then. Yeah.” And then he does, another wave of sound slowly rolling toward you.
It was the first time I’d been to KOKO, and the venue grew on me through the night. It’s an old theatre and starts frustrating, in a maze of balconies and corridors. But once you find the main floor the acoustics are good and there’s plenty of space around the bar, even on a sell-out night. It’s probably a good club venue, which I might care about if I ever went clubbing any more. Also only £8.20 for a pint of Meantime - a sentence which should have no place for the word ‘only’ and yet, for London gig prices, is pretty reasonable.
The lighting was also bang on, the stage intermittently cloaked in a dry-ice fog that left the band silhouettes, occasional sets of spotlights piercing and framing the stage, as if they were playing in the middle of a temple. It’s a good match for music that feels like it’s coming at you through fog.
The bass player, looking badass.
It felt almost weird coming out of the venue into a surprisingly-deserted Camden. There should have been an ocean and a lighthouse and a raven wheeling over a cliff. It was a gig where, Dearly Missed aside, I couldn’t remember much about individual songs, but it sure as hell had atmosphere.