event - health at ec2 warehouse, london

16th october

Coming on just after midnight, HEALTH were the main event at the first night of Lanzarote, a new club night and live music venture in London. The idea is to put bands and DJs on at hours

normally expected of clubs and to do it in mostly improvised venues. Tonight's event took place on Great Eastern Street in the basement of what looked like an office building, and featured several DJs including Hounds of Hate, Richard Fearless and Andrew Hung. There was also a support slot from upcoming post-dubsteppers Dam Mantle, who built up a fair bit of atmosphere in their twenty five minutes on stage.

So the night worked. Sort of. It was a sloppy conversion, with minimal toilet facilities and a simple paint job. But the worrying part of it was the set up of two lighting rigs and two speaker stacks. They looked precarious, placed on either side of the small stage, and later pushed to their limits during HEALTH'S set. Either through inexperience or laziness, or maybe the fact that the only act anyone was here to see were coming on after midnight, the place had a sterile atmosphere for a long time, only really broken up by Dam Mantle's funky, energetic shuffles. All that was about to change though.

About fifteen minutes after soundcheck, HEALTH returned to the stage, and singer Jake explains that there was nothing rock 'n' roll about their

disappearance: "we walked up to the top of the stairs, and then I started crying, and..." But he suffers an aural ambush from the rest of the band and never finishes, instead hurling glitchy, violent tones into the burgeoning mosh pit. What was a tame, slightly bored crowd has been turned on its head, and quite literally for those taking part in the projectile crowdsurfing that begins straight away. Hours of no readmission have taken their toll, and people are snatching the opportunity to lose themselves in HEALTH's onstage intensity.

The songs from their latest, Get Color, just feel so much more important live. The breakdowns in Nice Girls are tight and ominous, giving John a breather from his sinusoidal bass-swinging and letting his hair calm down. The dynamics are fully accentuated in such a small live setting, and it's the range of volumes, tempos and instruments playing at the same time that really excite, not just the fact that they can recreate their spooky sound perfectly in a whitewashed cellar.

They play some new material, which sounds very promising, and close the set with Heaven from their debut, recent semi-hit singles Die Slow and We Are Water and USA Boys from their latest release, remix album DISCO2. The speakers look like they're actually going to fall over on many occasions, the light fittings rock around from time to time, and inevitably the band decides the crowd is 'pumped' enough for an encore. Finishing up at about half past one, HEALTH are certainly a band worth sticking around for.