Mike’s top three indie girls as of right this minute, this minute being 10.12 on a Bank Holiday Monday evening in Camden’s Barfly:

One, my girlfriend, obviously. If for no other reason that she might be reading this.

Two, the really really really hot girl from the otherwise vomit-worthy ‘No Tomorrow’ video by horrible pop-rockers Orson*. Yeah, the song bites, but how I wish she would, too.

Three, Janet Weiss of Quasi. Man, I dig a girl (a woman!) that can hammer a kit like blam blam blam rat-at-tat-tat tsk-tsk-tsk BLAM and get me dancing like I’ve tap shoes hammering a burning tin roof. That shit – this shit – is ace.

Obviously Sam Coomes, one-time hubby of the lovely Janet and the other core member of the raven-haired drummer-cum-keyboardist’s not-Sleater-Kinney outfit, is fairly rocking, too: he flails and wails and attacks his guitar as if he’s beating away a swarm of wasps from his waist, his hair bouncing atop his skull like a rickety ship on rollicking good-time waves of foaming fun and games. He sings like a man squeezed tight by an over-the-top lover, his lungs emptied forcefully by the clasping knees of some nubile young thing; Janet faces upwards, her hands and sticks and skins expressing said violent party’s behaviour in an exclusively aural fashion.

As an advertisement for the musical benefits of divorce, it’s pretty effective.

Prior to the couple’s separation, one wonders if the Quasi live experience wasn’t slightly slushier, lacking the raw blues punk of tonight’s foot-stompingly brilliant run-through of material present and past. That the pair continue to play together is an absolute testament of the quality of these songs: if what they’d produced while married hadn’t been great, then the better-still cuts from this year’s When The Going Gets Dark long-player almost certainly wouldn’t have seen the light of day. Proverbially, you understand: this is back-alley basement-bred shit and no mistake, darker than Green & Blacks melted over the lump of coal no-good-sorts get at Christmas, melodically sound but balanced upon a razor’s edge atop a pit of venomous vipers.

Said album’s title track ripples with defeatist disharmony but packs a punch of pure fuck-you optimism: Coomes strains his roughed-up chords to breaking point as splashed and smashed cymbals attempt to drown him out completely, his story of resisting the urge to conform shattered and splintered by bombast. The subject matter – the side-stepping of conventional behaviour, of following the pack, to do something worth-fucking-while – is a repeated one. Not that everyone can make out the singer’s every word – the static’s simply that loud in this black box this evening.

Come the sweaty climax, a stripped-down encore featuring just the aforementioned individuals (at times Quasi swell to four members, at one point including The Cribs’ Gary Jarman on drums when Janet chooses to attend to keyboard duties), any atmosphere born of sexual attraction has vaporised. While drum-smashing indie-rock girls (women!) are objects of many a man/geek’s affection, Weiss’s qualities as a musician put pay to any idea of fluttering eyelids and offering a sly wink. She’s too good for losers like us, like me – too good, I guess, for Coomes even. Not that the music’s suffered any for the personal rift way back when: as the clock rolls around to almost eleven, Quasi depart our company to rapturous applause, the likes of which hasn’t been heard by these ears in the Barfly for many a month.

A little blam blam blam rat-at-tat-tat tsk-tsk-tsk BLAM on a Bank Holiday, then: does it get much better? No, silly, it doesn’t.

*Not that she’s an authentic indie girl for sure, what with the Orson association, but one can hope, yeah?

Photo by Lucy Johnston