Sep

25

Pocketbooks

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The Pocketbooks

At 8.00 p.m. we quite magically waltzed through the black door in the brick wall. There we were, the Goonite Club, 69 Rosebury Ave, Clerkenwell, London, ECIR4RL, a location that not even MapQuest could find that we reached through a metro station of which no one seemed to be particularly aware. Never mind, we were there, and on time. A muddy hall opened into a dark room with brightish youngish punkish things vaguely rocking out, and a man in a striped shirt shook my hand. “Ian,” he introduced himself, “Shall we have a drink?”

Next door at The Wilmington at Arms, the entire band gathered around the table and we fell into the land of Pocketbooks– the everyday world of a pop band in London that hasn’t jumped the Atlantic.  Spidery strings trail from their niche to those celebrated puddles of genius across the British Isles and Europe. A week before we came, Pocketbooks opened for their old friends, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and a few weeks later, they planned to participate in Indie Tracks, a music festival held on a 1950’s steam railway in the middle of the Derbyshire countryside.  This isn’t about where they’ve featured or who they’re connected to, though, this is about Pocketbooks, an unassuming, unaffected indie-pop group of the pure at heart from central London with pure voices and the innocence of the undiscovered

“How did we get our name? That’s a good question ‘cause we literally have no idea,” says Ian. Andy, the band maestro and song-writer, admitted that he doesn’t know the answer to this particular question – but a pocketbook is something that you might carry with you everywhere, like a note book, and that’s how he envisions Pocketbook songs.

Andy writes with the lyrical wit of Belle and Sebastian that rhapsodizes on the charm of an ordinary day, and, rather than believe that circumstantial trivia is a mundane necessity, I’ll take Pocketbooks word for it that that moment just might have changed my life. His songs describe that moment at the bus station, the glance that you catch from across a street, the “Fleeting Moments” that perk an ordinary day.

Back in the Goonite Club, standing tiptoe in the audience, and skipping across the playground and swinging up, up and up into the sky with the helium bubble-pop, I felt that Pocketbooks would be lifted up and float away if I let go of the string, just like that pink balloon that slowly became a black dot and was lost beyond the clouds once at the county fair.  Andy’s tenor and Emma’s sparkling voice harmonize about a little of this and a little of that – sugar and spice and everything nice, their songs are made of things that I would be delighted to find in my pocket any day of the week.

Pocketbooks’ 1st album, Flight Paths, debuted into the hard world on July 13th ‘09. Cheers.

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