Smoke is billowing from the crushed cigarette on the empty dance floor. Beside it a long and pointed foot is twisting in time with rock and roll music. It’s jarring to see cigarettes indoors and I’m trying to to remember if the the no smoking indoors rule has made it over here to Italy yet. Of course even if it had, the gig we’re waiting for is in what looks like an abandoned restaurant and is being ran by the first people I’ve seen all weekend who’s scarf didn’t cost more than my entire outfit. I’ve been to a few illegal raves in my Dancing Days and this looked very much like every one I’ve ever been too. Warm beer served in plastic cups and hasty graffiti covering the numerous Health and Safety violations, dirty floors and furniture found on the side of the road. Toilet facilities that start bad and degenerate over the night and the signs on the walls are makeshift and the ones that aren’t are wonky, all these are pleasingly familiar and more so to know that the these markers cross borders.
Venice is surprisingly free of subcultures and even in this very niche environment most of the crowd still look no more than casual, maybe ‘studenty’ at a push. There is one punk behind the hole in the wall serving as a makeshift bar and he’s either stoned, stupid or both. But that’s fine as most people seem to have bought their own anyway.
Zona Bandita is on a backstreet hidden by the bus station, the entrance is no more than a wooden shed door. We arrived at the time we saw advertised on the photocopy I pulled off a pillar while sightseeing at 11. We see perhaps three people at the bottom of a path and decide to go for a drink until it’s a little less sketchy. There is literally nowhere else open, we spend an hour wandering down alleys and side-streets, of which Venice is blessed with an abundance. An hour later we return, the place isn’t exactly jumping but there is music so we give a man with a beard five Euros and walk in. One of the most interesting things about travelling is not only learning the similarities, but also learning the differences, the customs and cultures of other places. Tonight we learnt that, in Venice, if a gig is advertised to start at 11, only tourists turn up before one.
The music is Rock and Roll, not the abstract Rock and Roll that most guitar based bands use as an ideology and excuse to throw bar stools at groupies. But actual Rock and Fucking Roll, the music that invented the teenager. Switch blade steel guitars, 4:4 heartbeat time and Brylcream hair. It’s ace. The DJ’s, and a little later, the bands, are wearing tight sharp suits, slicked down parted hair, and sport some sort of trimmed facial hair.
Somehow the DJs signalled that the gig was about to start without moving, speaking or stopping the music and the room went from ten to a hundred people and a lot of smoke. The first band is a two piece called Wildmen, it’s a lucky break for them that the makeshift stage has just enough room for both of them. I’m always happy to see a singing drummer, although Phil Collins probably poisoned that well for good in the eighties. They described themselves as ‘Garage Blues’ on the flyer, ‘garage’ seemingly being Italian for ‘raw unpolished screaming passion’. Any two piece with guitar and drummer are now going to be compared with the White Stripes, in this case the Wildmen stand-up to that comparison delivering stripped down bluesy rock and roll that occasionally bubbles into breakneck guitar and fast driven thumping drums. The crowd don’t applaud between songs but rather stand baffled like participants in a musical hit and run.
Then there is a hassle of leads, people and steel, the sort of hassle that can only come from trying to fit a six piece band on a stage that struggled with two. Just as the crowd start drifting away the front man of Vomit Tongues throws his mic into the air, catches it with a flourish and a guttural scream kicks off a sound that is somewhere between early punk and diet-pill speed rock and roll. The performance is a blur interspersed with gaps so the guitarists can retune their guitars and plug the leads back in, some would point out that this could be overcome by not smashing the necks of their guitars against the cymbals, crowd surfing and spitting at each other. But fuck those people, they know nothing of Rock and Fucking Roll.
These gaps are odd, but give the now dancing, bouncing crowd a breather. When the songs finish the band go from being Dionysian infused raw nerves, screaming personifications of our unconscious passion of life, and go back to being shuffling awkward young men, then with a rebel yell and a slam on the bass drum they go back to being avatars of abandon.
Not only one of the best gigs I’ve been to in a while, but the sort of gig that gives you back the joy of loud music back to an old tired heart.
