Trembling Blue Stars in Brighton

The boy stands awkward, posed to cry, beseech and seduce his way into our hearts. To one side, there's a girl with a bob haircut holding a tambourine, singing the odd trembling, tentative, torched harmony. Behind her, the sound man and bartender and half-a-dozen arcing clouds of smoke, a hand-chalked notice on the blackboard stating that admission is something absurdly cheap?but I guess these are unnecessary details. Trembling Blue Stars stole my heart something rotten with a song called "Abba on the Jukebox" several years ago and since then I always pay attention to the minutiae that swirls around life's edges. The taste of sourness in a partner's tears; the smell of London traffic at 1 in the morning as you trudge wearily to a tiny apartment after another unfulfilled night; such details are too strong, too loud. Trembling Blue Stars are far quieter, far more precious than that.

"Where are they from?" a drunk with a foghorn for a voice demands to know. "Some half-pissed bloke at the bar told me Scotland. Bristol, you say? Fuck me. THEY'RE NOT FROM BLOODY BRISTOL ARE THEY? I'll have to start seeing the Bristol music scene again if it's like this." Mr. Foghorn lapses into merciful silence. The singer onstage is a man name of Bob Wratten. He's slightly balding and shy, real, with a past and doubtless a history of tormented liaisons behind him. Once, he sang with an English band called the Field Mice, creating music that made Roger McGuinn seem boorish in comparison. The Field Mice and their label Sarah Records were unfairly pilloried by the UK music press during the 80s, partly for not playing the game of 7-inch singles, fanzines and zero tolerance for major labels, and partly for being so damn precious.

Trembling Blue Stars are similar, inasmuch as songs like "A Slender Wrist" and "Half In Love with Leaving" (the songs they finish with tonight, encased in some tough, jangling guitar) are both deliberately obscure (the B-side of a deleted single) and released by Matt on Shinkansen Recordings (formerly of Sarah). If the band were American, they'd be venerated worldwide. Perhaps they are already. "An American came up to me earlier," Matt confides shyly in my ear, "and told me he'd planned his whole European holidays around this one gig. I can't stand the responsibility!" Bob continues to sing, his gently becoming voice suffusing us with the very sweetest and kindest of melancholy. Songs fall from his lips like the self-explanatory "Sometimes I Still Feel the Bruise" and "Sleep" (from the Broken by Whiskers album), as well as a new one, the rather tremulous "Ammunition."

Earlier, another boy stood even more awkwardly and gracefully onstage, bedecked in a clumsy suit and buttonholes like Vegas had come home to mourn the inadequacies of modern social conventions. A former Romo (New Romantic, similar to Pomo, without the irony), name of Dickon Edwards, and a rather fine part-time music critic too. Dickon was one half of the suave Orlando, now singing tales of alienation and disillusion and love in Fosca?named after a French garbage firm, or so my partner unreliably informs me. He must have practiced for years in front of his mirror to achieve such piquant arm and hand movements, to come up with such heady intellectual brew as "Square in the Social Circle" and "The Agony Without the Ecstasy." Some of the time, Fosca remind me of the Pet Shop Boys, except you most certainly can't dance to Dickon's anguish, and occasionally they sound like the Divine Comedy or another of that affected cabaret/spoken-word mob, only with far more excellence.

My eyes are diverted to an orange light somewhere to the left, far removed from where another solitary girl with a bob is standing even more lost onstage, playing a cello? Except that she isn't a girl, of course (and nor was the other one), but a woman, all grown up and awkward. Life goes on, as it must.