Hardsparrow, who’s set up was an ipod and his voice, kicked off the night. Strangely all the males in the audience had a beard, maybe this is the kind of music that people with beards gravitate to… and Hardsparrow has a beard. I too have a beard, though there was no sign of Chris Brown, the King Of Beards. So, I’m not really sure what that means.

In the course of the set we were given a Skitanja Cover and a costume change where he took off his trousers to reveal some blue tights. The Club Anemone myspace states Hardsparrow is well known for “shambolic performances” and his “ridiculously dressed approach” and this turned out to be true as the only song he seemed to play all the way through was ‘Dark Pages’, the running gag seemed to be that he’d constantly forget the words or his ipod would break bringing the song to a halt. The absolute card.

I visited his myspace after the concert, ‘Go Home Mr Magpie’, ‘Eugene Landy’ and ‘Shell Shop Bw Old Rolling Sea’ are pretty cool songs and for some reason Hardsparrow reminds me of Tiny Tim at times, and Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle. Hardsparrow is also a fan of Stevie R Moore, and this music sits perfectly next to his and I’m sure its adored by fans of Stevie. Unfortunately he didn’t play these live this time (or maybe he did but I didn’t recognize them at all).

I’m not sure how often he performs with his ipod, but I don’t think it did him any favours, even if he had of played the songs all the way through without mistakes. To be fair, having an ipod play the music while somebody sings just never sounds good to me anyway, it sucks all the life out of the music and there’s just no energy. Its not live music, why do people do it? I’d love to catch him play without it, and maybe with more of the instrumentation that I heard on the recordings on his myspace.

Animal Magic Tricks was next, another pretty unique quite Bournemouth-y thing, last time I saw her play was a year ago and it’s got even better. Before I’d only seen her sing along to a tape recorder, on this set she also used a little keyboard (an SK-1 I think?) and a guitar in addition to the tape recorder, which sounds even more interesting than ever, and really creates this cool vibe and atmosphere… which is great. One particular song she sung over what sounded like monks chanting being processed.

The small capacity here at the ibar and nice quiet appreciative crowd really allowed the music to reach everyone and pull people into her magical land for the duration of the song. Kid Amy guested on a song, though only to twiddle with a knob on an amplifier, not really worth mentioning… but there you go. In between two songs a tape recording of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ was played, which worked very well. Oh, and the last song was about Donald Sutherland.

Regardless of if these quirky as custard ideas work every time or not, it made me very happy to walk into a venue in Bournemouth and find all the bands on the bill were doing something pretty unusual and fun and I hope this means fun bands out number the pub rock bands, especially since we are seeing much less of the likes of Sludgefeast, Betika, Henry’s Phonograph and lots of other super fun bands I used to love about two years ago (and still love). Hardsparrow has definitely created a niche with this Club.

The last group was OLO Worms (pictured above) from Bristol, The line up frequently changed instruments, some songs being the whole group on percussion, which is brilliant as I’d like to see more multi-drummers and extra percussionists in bands. The band had some interesting ideas, one of them ‘played’ gaffa tape (with the sound of it unravelling) and there was some of that electro clap sound you get with Peaches and CSS etc.

As with the previous acts, it wasn’t a set for people who like three minute pop songs; mostly sparse jamming and musical experimentation. I remembered the bit with the gaffa tape, like I said, but I just don’t really even remember much else and got a bit bored. Maybe if they had great songs to go along with their production ideas that would be a really good band in my ears. I don’t know what to say about them, somebody said they sound like a “lounge core Hot Chip” so pretend I came up with that.

The winner of the night was Animal Magic Tricks with 476 points. Oh, and sorry girl behind bar, I forgot your pen.