St George Day and Easter music

Swindon has a St George Day festival with a couple of stages set up around the Parade and the Brunel.  Mostly, the holiday just stirs up anti-immigrant and/or anti-skintone sentiments and most English folk don’t even know when it is.  The funniest description of St George and the Dragon I heard was, “yeah, we’ve all heard some fat Turkish guy exagerating an encounter with a lizard before,” [apologies to the comic that wrote that if I’m wrong, but I think it was local boy Jon Richardson]. Thinking it would just be a laugh, we decided to loop past and see some bad local acts on our way to and back from the grocery.  However, the local acts ROCKED.

The photo, above, shows the BisKitts, an incredibly talented bunch of kids playing mostly covers (like you might expect) of reasonably obscure punk and psychedelia and psychobilly which was pretty surprising that they would attempt this set and then that they would just blow away the small crowd like they did.  The old man of the group is 12-years-old…these kids have a future ahead of them.

We also really enjoyed the Costellos, a somewhat older group (at least they can probably have a beer if they want one.  Their set was mostly (maybe all) original and I definitely want to catch them again.

But, this weekend’s recommendation to the larger world has to be the Beatholes.  They were at the Rolly on Sunday with an act that might just be gimmick in worse hands but their punk reworkings of the Beatles was some of the most entertaining shit I’ve seen in awhile.  There was this band in Atlanta, the Coolies (I worked for founding member Clay Harper for a couple weeks when they were the shit), that set a bunch of Simon and Garfunkel songs to the tune of other, more avant garde ones and that is the closest I can come to describing the Beatholes.  Watch for them in your shit town.