Credit: Found On Internet

Gigs and clubs have an uneasy alliance that’s never really suited either. On the one hand there’s that gig-urge, to stand at the back and drink over-priced under-strength lager while you wait for the support acts you don’t, won’t, and couldn’t ever really give a shit about, ply their trade. But if the whole caboodle is upped-sticks into a club, then there’s all sorts of additional demands put on the gig go’er; the clubbing aesthetic demands punters get up and move about and get involved and pretend like we’re having it large, and other such embarrassing club clichés that were probably out of date a decade ago. Which is why Music Towers feels a stab of trepidation in the pit of our stomach as we roll up to the SEOne club in South London for what’s billed as ‘An Evening With The Rakes’.

SEOne is a giant cavern of a club, hidden amongst the arches of the old brickwork of London Bridge. It was where The Insomniac’s Ball starburst as the all-too-brief pinnacle of the indie-electro club revolution, before being swallowed up by the vacuous gravity well created by the lack of heart that the scene had right at its centre. The Rakes, who always surfed on the edges of the Shoreditch set, are hoping to be the new standard bearers to their own carned out niche of the London indiescape, by headlining a brace of acts interspaced with some DJ action from some of the leading lights of the indie club world.

But the world has moved on – the collapse of the Insomniac’s is merely part of that story. It’s not been the easiest of years for London’s stick-thin urban storytellers, The Rakes. Their new record, ‘Ten New Messages’, failed to set most of the critics alight, and they weren’t able to produce anything near the scatterbrained genius of the singles from their first album. And to top it off, their label, V2 Records, was bought out by Universal, only to be torn to pieces in the cogs of the majors, with the fate of most of their bands – The Rakes included – still unknown.