Mike Bones at the Fly

Mike Bones at the Fly

29 May, 2009
by: Domzig

The sins of soft rock are both long and varied. In fact, I like to think of the genre as a version of Dante's Inferno – in the inner-circle there's Leo Sayer and Chris de Burgh trapped in a freezing hell being forced to listen to 'Crossroads' on repeat, whilst somewhere out on the periphery are the people who are only soft-rock by accident.

Witnessing Mike Bones play The Fly tonight, you'd definitely have to put him in with the latter. A veteran of the New York underground, his gravely toned tales of unrequited love, depression, poverty and drug use point towards a pretty hard life, but you'd never tell that from listening to him speak. His easy-going, self-effacing manner just makes you like him and judging from the reactions of some of the female members of the crowd – maybe a bit too much.

Anyway I could wax lyrical about what a nice guy he is all day, but what about the music right? Well, for those that are unfamiliar, Bones is basically cut from the same cloth as his on-stage banter. Melodically his songs are like being wrapped in a warm blanket of classic Americana, that is all fine and dandy until you realise that the lyrics are like little biting, scratching bed-bugs of despair and misery. It adds an emotional weight to his songs that hits you when you're least expecting it.

Working through tracks from his new album, his music is so engaging that I forget that I'm standing crushed into a basement 5 metres below New Tottenham Court Road, where 1 in 3 people seems to be a photographer with a brand new Nikon 6000 stuck in the poor guy's face. There's a lot of interest around Bones at the moment and it's not hard to see why. If he keeps this Leonard Cohen-when-he-was-good routine up, the Pyramid Stage is looking like a strong possibility.

The set ends with Bones asking cheekily for a decent place to find a cheeseburger. 'Macdonald's' comes the sardonic reply. 'You're a funny guy,' counters Mike, leading Mrs Witty to have a sense of humour malfunction and act like the singer had just had sex with her mother.

It seems that you can be as nice as you want, but it'll never change the fact that some people are just jerks.

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Domzig