Clerkenville East-West at The Betsey Trotwood is stoked to present the debut gig by The Penrose Web - the new cosmic garage psych project of Allan Crockford (The Prisoners/ Galileo 7) and Ian Button (Papernut Cambridge/ Death in Vegas). Special guests Trimdon Grange Explosion...."the new inheritors of the Pavement-Albion Band crossover sound"....will open this killer double bill matinee. Just £12 (+fees) in advance, £15 cash on the door, if available.
Tickets here: www.wegottickets.com
THE PENROSE WEB: Allan Crockford and Ian Button probably first nodded a cursory “Alright?” to each other in 1986 when their respective bands - The Prisoners and Thrashing Doves - were on the same bill supporting a late-era Ramones at Hammersmith Palais. Their histories from that point are fairly well known. Crockford moved on after The Prisoners into the James Taylor Quartet, The Solar Flares and beyond, while Button followed up Thrashing Doves with 10+ years as guitarist for Death In Vegas before moving more into production, and his own projects.The two current bands they lead - The Galileo 7 and Papernut Cambridge - have been operating out of Kent for the last decade or more…paths have crossed...gigs have been done together….records have been exchanged.
In summer 2023, a casual conversation at a Rochester covers night run by Kevin Younger of The High Span, led to Button and Crockford deciding to start a new project together. They began swapping backing tracks, song skeletons, lyrics and ideas, and very quickly had enough raw material for an album, and a project name - The Penrose Web.
As you’d expect, they both bring items from their own musical wardrobes to this: their own takes on sunshine pop, psych, garage, (northern) soul and indie combine in a set of dual-vocal led songs with layered harmonies and crisp punchy production. Crockford’s Medway credentials and Button’s SE London via Kent Coast retro pop chops merge geo-musically somewhere halfway along the M20.
Their first EP 'It’s….The Penrose Web' is a 4-song mix of sinister horror garage ("Hexapod Scene", "I Dreamt I Woke Up Dead"), phased mod energy ("Leap of Faith") and no-frills power-pop ("Geraldine") - and it’s the first 7" record pressed on a new bioplastic compound called Evovinyl. Their debut album is due in June on the fab Spinout Nuggets label. For this gig they'll be joined by some musical compadres to form a veritable Kent indie supergroup.
https://thepenroseweb.bandcamp.com/album/its-the-penrose-web-ep
TRIMDON GRANGE EXPLOSION is an improvising psych-folk ensemble from North-east London. Forming in the wake of acclaimed folk rock outfit The Eighteenth Day of May, TGE is a grand continuation and expansion of its previous incarnation's melding of 60s West Coast psych & The Velvet Underground's modal rock – with their own English traditional music and indie rock roots.
A seven-inch release on The Great Pop Supplement – a cover of Judy Henske & Jerry Yester's 'Raider' b/w 'The Trimdon Grange Explosion' – emerged in 2010, with their debut album released by Borley Rectory in 2017. The long-awaited follow-up, 'Dreams Buried Under The Sea', is due on Feral Child later this year.
“Has Acid Folk ever sounded so mesmerising and as incendiary as this...Open tuned guitars chime out hypnotic raga model notes against viola and rolling drums to create a droning wall of Spector like sound .” Optical Sounds. "Trimdon Grange Explosion marry a love of traditional music with the spirit of psychedelic improv, a modal approach where the threat of discordancy saves them from the ersatz comfort zone of "acid-folk". It's like Fairport Convention sparring with The Velvet Underground," Shindig!
https://trimdongrangeexplosion.bandcamp.com/