Stealing Sheep presented one of the best Christmas gifts of all at the Kazimier, Getintothis’ Laurie Cheeseman bowed to the mighty Ice Dragon.
As we all know by now, the Kazimier don’t know how to do a ‘normal night’, and that is why we all love it right?
This year Stealing Sheep and the Kazimier have really pushed the boat out for their annual Crimbo bash; pushing the boat out as in an icy Chinese dragon; as in backlit paper icicles all over the shop; as in hauntingly ethereal Oriental background music. Y’know, the standard stuff you have at a Christmas party.
And what better way to ease people into the alternative Christmas spirit than an un-festively and moody black-clad Bird?
With tribal drums, snaking bass-lines and spartan guitars, of course, and don’t forget about the icy, ethereal vocals that gel with the theme almost too well.
That is, until it all goes squelchy and discordant; it’s like the band know when to ramp it up and drag the audience out of their hungover torpor and into another weird night of revelry.
Bird take flight at Night of the Ice Dragon at the Kazimier, Liverpool
This is when the ice-goblins (well, they looked like what can only be described as ice goblins anyway) come out to play and dance around the dragon as if it were the maddest May Day in history; it all feels like it’s happening in the woods outside Twin Peaks.
Of course, the spirit of Afrika Bambataa (aka the golden Pharaoh-garbed Paddy Steer) comes to visit and take us to another plane of existence entirely with his cosmological Chucklevision jazz-funk. Boy, do the audience lap this up mad; not a soul in the place was not grooving along nicely.
This is all whilst the ice-goblins do another round of maypole dancing about the arctic dragon (with a healthy dose of limbo too) before Snapped Ankles take it all Mighty Boosh.
Snapped Ankles take it to another dimension at Night of the Ice Dragon at the Kazimier, Liverpool
Well, they are dressed as giant, hairy yetis playing metronomic funk-rock at least. But things don’t get really weird until they get their psychonaut stream-of-conscious thing going on; it’s gone from Twin Peaks to a pagan ritual in a forest on the moon very, very quickly.
After the weirdness, it’s a breath of fresh air to have something relatively normal, in the shape of the Harlequin Dynamite Marching Band do their New Orleans-by-way-of-Liverpool jazz party.
On any other night, this group of rabble-rousers would be the most extreme thing of the night; it says something of the evening’s calibre that their relative normalcy is well received.
Normalcy that is until the dragon finally comes alive (to a track that sounds worryingly like GroundForce.
Nothing quite tops an evening off like watching a dragon tour the theatre and gardens to the maddest swing you can imagine whilst everyone’s treated to fortune cookies.
Pictures by Getintothis’ Gaz Jones.
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