The Irrepressibles (London)

About an hour before his performance, Jamie McDermott greets me warmly and excuses himself and the rest of The Irrepressibles as they go off somewhere private to plan their set list. Could this soft-spoken young man really be the same artiste, this grande dame persona, who cuts the air with his soprano later on in the evening?
 
Bringing new meaning to the term ‘pop art’, The Irrepressibles certainly put on an impressive exhibit. Their hairdos recall the Jetsons’: wild, yet still as plastic. Their necks are painted black to match their outfits, the shards of glass adorning them reflected a thousand-fold in the face-glitter. Their movements are sudden, swift and stiff, giving the whole ensemble the look of characters in a steampunk steam organ.

‘Why focus so much on the image?’ one might ask. Well, because it’s part of the music. As a performance-art band, The Irrepressibles are a rare audio-visual treat in an age of skinny ties, skinny jeans and skinny chord progressions. This is full-bodied stuff, from the range in McDermott’s powerful vocals to the depth of sound in which it dwells. Viola battles violin and cello on ‘Lullaby On The Lid Of My Eye’ in beautiful accord with such breathy expulsions as,‘I’ll be your queer.’

The flutes let rip in the climax of ‘Splish! Splash! Sploo!’, dominant in the chaos of overlapping instruments. The keyboard transforms into an organ for ‘In This Shirt’, arguably the most stately, chilling highlight of EP ‘From The Circus… To The Sea’. The arrangements are so precise, the music so richly layered and the performances so passionate that it’s a wonder anyone in the audience can find the strength to clap when a song is finished.

…Which leads us to the downside of the evening. While the band is in no way haughty (Jamie even good-humouredly complains ‘Nataaasa…’ to his stylist as he struggles to throw his guitar-strap over his gargantuan collar), the back of a bar in Hoxton seems too weak a match for The Irrepressibles’ dramatic stage presence. For such a feast of the senses, noisy chatter and clinking beer bottles are no substitute for, say, the reverential hush of an art gallery. The fact that the band dazzles nonetheless in such an environment is testament to their strength as a creative unit.

A mass of contradictions, The Irrepressibles are classical but pop, austere but endearing, frightening but beautiful. Dramatic like an opera and as precisely crafted as a Victorian music-box, who could’ve guessed they’d arrive at the venue without even knowing the set list?



Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, London, 19th March 2009.

Written by Polis Loizou.