Jackdaw w/ Crowbar, Xmas ’22, Rugby town. At the Winter Wonder Wheel the lights spin around the room in accelerating circles and sound fx phase in stereo. The sounds stop, the lights land on two freaks in the corner, and the horror show begins - regardless of your willingness, it's happening.
Ellis slams a huge bell and thus begins the psychotic children’s tv theme-tune, known as Snafu.
The mainstream gave up on these guys decades ago, and they have re-birthed their dysfunctional environmental stimulus into music, revealing the great absurdity of life: the horror within innocence, the deviance which follows the ordinary, the magnificent shadow of the collective western psyche.
Jackdaw w/ Crowbar are wildly unreasonable, illogical, and inappropriate. They are made by Timothy Ellis and Adam Sindall, but knowing their names wont help you survive a show...
Mad-scientist Tim holds the lab, with his dark, fakepop electronics. The audience dance. His latest experiment, Sindall, makes noises with his mouth. It’s as if Sindall was the kid bullied at school by the teachers. He lost it completely and is back. Look out. But we love him. He’s not back for revenge, but just to show us what he is. Now, is it joy or fear? They come together. Sindall shows it all with wild dances and distressing fights with invisible enemies. Then leaving the safety of Ellis’s noise fortress, he embarks outwards to the audience. He’s scary. He takes on anything in his way, whilst planting flags in re-claimed lands, transporting atomic bombs, wrestling with unseen demons and his own temperamental psyche. He terrifies the front line of spectators who have forgotten altogether that they are at a gig and begin to worry. They don't notice the projected images flashing behind in a psychedelic frenzy of disorientation and subliminal programming. And they may not be the same afterwards...
Electronic artist Ellis has been re-programming the public for decades, and is an expert at re-wiring the brain via synthesiser cables and reel-splice light-flash horror. Nevertheless, Jackdaw with Crowbar fight for the side of good. They attend to the the enemies lurking in the shadows, the psychological parasites, the nefarious closed-door agenda in political board rooms.
The set rolls on in torrents of heavy contemporary beats. Excitement grows, and the audience are either dancing or just standing, drink in hand, jaw dropped - either way, they have joined the cult. Occasionally young girls run out screaming, occasionally old hippies run out screaming; it was not a manifestation of the original vision from the psychedelic 60s, but a richer and darker alternative, designed to bring us into the lesser savoury parts of the mind, and sublimate what we find there. Jackdaw w/ Crowbar are explorers. They take the first steps into the unknown and we follow them because we like who they are.
If they made it back ok, then we can too. But are they ok???
Go see ‘em.
Ben Jennings : Winter Wonderwheel - December 2022
JACKDAW WITH CROWBAR / MOTH DROP / BRUNO MUERTE
The Wheatsheaf Oxford : Review Nightshift Magazine : March 2020
While Gappy Tooth Industries enjoys its reputation for eclectic line-ups, tonight’s triple bill shares a love for all things synth and by the time the show is over people are talking about a potential gig of the year contender.
How to describe Leamington’s 80s artpop survivors Jackdaw With Crowbar in mere words? Led by Tim Ellis – kind of the meeting point of prime panto-era Peter Gabriel and Cravats frontman The Shend – tonight’s incarnation of the band is a quartet – expanded since we last saw them as a duo at The Library, all silhouetted by a shifting lysergic backdrop, quickly and sometimes disorientatingly veering between punky rant-pop, arty noise rock, pulsing electro and some stuff that’s all of those and something alien at once. A Glitterstomp Beefheart; a Toytown Faust; a Moroderpop Pink Floyd; a Dadaist Fall; Jackdaw With Crowbar are music and theatre, an absurdist spectacle where silliness is a big part of the fun but never overshadows the superb music the band throw out. The show ends with Ellis carrying an artillery shell into the crowd while wearing a Godzilla mask as the band go full-fried Suicide synthabilly. In a world of sensible, sensitive, soulful dullards, music needs this lunatic fringe more than ever. And yes, it might only be January but any band hoping to pip Jackdaw With Crowbar to the title of gig of the year are going to have to seriously up their game.
Dale Kattack
The Wheatsheaf Oxford : Review Nightshift Magazine : March 2020
While Gappy Tooth Industries enjoys its reputation for eclectic line-ups, tonight’s triple bill shares a love for all things synth and by the time the show is over people are talking about a potential gig of the year contender.
How to describe Leamington’s 80s artpop survivors Jackdaw With Crowbar in mere words? Led by Tim Ellis – kind of the meeting point of prime panto-era Peter Gabriel and Cravats frontman The Shend – tonight’s incarnation of the band is a quartet – expanded since we last saw them as a duo at The Library, all silhouetted by a shifting lysergic backdrop, quickly and sometimes disorientatingly veering between punky rant-pop, arty noise rock, pulsing electro and some stuff that’s all of those and something alien at once. A Glitterstomp Beefheart; a Toytown Faust; a Moroderpop Pink Floyd; a Dadaist Fall; Jackdaw With Crowbar are music and theatre, an absurdist spectacle where silliness is a big part of the fun but never overshadows the superb music the band throw out. The show ends with Ellis carrying an artillery shell into the crowd while wearing a Godzilla mask as the band go full-fried Suicide synthabilly. In a world of sensible, sensitive, soulful dullards, music needs this lunatic fringe more than ever. And yes, it might only be January but any band hoping to pip Jackdaw With Crowbar to the title of gig of the year are going to have to seriously up their game.
Dale Kattack
"When I discovered Jackdaw and Crowbar I knew right away that I wanted them to headline my performance event and they did not disappoint. It was an incredible performance, an adventure in madness that only a crazy genius could deliver. Hell f*cking yes! Jackdaw and Crowbar are savages. I loved every second of it."
Tommy Watkins. OVADA Oxford, OCTOBER 2018
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OXFORD DAILY INFO, 22nd May 2018
"I went in with an inkling of the eclectic multimedia style of Jackdaw With Crowbar, but what the artists created on stage and with the audience was what can only be described as surreal. And theatrical, danceable, entertaining, original, massively prepared, funny, political, engaging, insightful, weird, random, scathing, observant, and awash with imagery. Godzilla carried a huge bomb into the audience and died, poetry was belted out as social and political commentary to an ever-changing electronica / guitar backing, all this to a backdrop of thousands of images of human endeavor and folly, and films flying through galaxies, the whole integrated mass of voice, words, acting, music, costumes and film was extraordinary.
And this was just the first act of three that evening. The later acts (Lucy Leave and Father Murphy) carried the eclectic banner to extremes. I left the bar with mind intact, but expanded." VICTOR STREET |
NIGHTSHIFT, JULY 2018
Costume changes and performance
art aren’t what you generally expect to see down The Library, but Leamington weirdoes Jackdaw With Crowbar have rarely been ones to live up to expectations. In the mid 80s they were rarely off Jon Peel’s late night shows and while their sound has changed a fair bit since they reformed in 2007, their desire to mix the visual with the musical remains. Tim Ellis starts the set dressed in Crimea-era cavalry jacket, his face swaddled in bandages that do little to muffle his invective as he rattles off punk poetry about Brexit, English identity and Farage, while behind him primitive synth pulses create inspired lo-fi industrial landscapes, the overall effect something like Sleaford Mods jamming it out with Suicide. Halfway through Ellis changes into a gold lame suit and an animal mask and ends the set sprawled on the floor wrestling with a bomb. We initially think it’s a toy, but it turns out to be the real deal. Occasionally silly, often sublime, Jackdaw With Crowbar are as far from the mainstream as they were when they began 30 years ago, and in no danger of playing it safe. DALE KATTACK |