The Whip are a four-piece electro band from Manchester, and one of the sweet memories of my time in the city. I saw them live there about a year ago, at a time when in all of Germany, no one had heard of them yet. Now they are the next big thing (if you wanna call it that way) and you can hear them on the radio and read about them in music mags. With their debut album X Marks Destination released very recently, it was time for them to tour the Continent for the first time ever. I very much looked forward to seeing them, as nostalgic feelings for my time in Manchester keep growing and growing and I think the music is fucking awesome.
I recently started to learn playing the drums and one of the things I learned to play is the thrilling beat of their single Trash. It sounds very simple, but is hard to play because you have to be absolutely exact. I mean, everything has to be in sync, even more than with any other drum pattern I have worked on so far. I decided to make a little research project out of the gig. I wanted to watch the drummer Fiona as much as possible, to learn something from her. It looks like what she does is hard work. She does not seem to stop playing the bass drum at all, and it is all very straight-forward, energetic, like a computer. In fact, she must be a human drum machine!
However, for the first few songs I was not concentrating on watching her drumming at all. Instead, I was dancing wildy, jumping up and down and enjoying the music just as the rest of the audience did (they were not at all as lame and hesitating as a berlin crowd in front of an unknown band is usually). A few years ago I was listening to electronin music extensively and I had thought it was time to go out dancing to electronic music again soon. However, I despise the typically electronic dj sets you usally get, because I know there will always be music I think is absolutely shit, silly and not worth dancing to. Not with The Whip! I was enjoying every single minute, every single beat - the ones I watched carefully and the ones I moved my body to.
The gig was over with no encore after 45 minutes, but what else can a band do than play their reportoire, which naturally isn't that extensive after they've just released one single album. I bought the cd afterwards from their very nice bass player Nathan, and so should you! It was a marvellous evening.
