On April 12, the Sound of Watford will fill the town with music
You wouldn’t call Watford a musical town. It used to be known for two things: printing newspapers and making beer. Although The New European newspaper is still printed in the town, the Sun Printers building at the very bottom of Whippendell Road was converted into flats. The Benskin Brewery, just down from the High Street, is now awaiting new tenants, with the new Watford Museum soon to open as part of the Cultural Quarter beside the Town Hall and the Colosseum.
Yet Watford, a town of about 100,000 people at the very point that London stops and becomes the bit just north of the city, is associated with some of popular music’s biggest stars. Elton John, who grew up in Pinner, owned the football club and used to play benefit gigs at Vicarage Road, while his friend George Michael worked at the Regent Cinema as a teenage usher. In turn, George’s friend Geri Halliwell grew up in the town too, as did Bradley Walsh, who has also been known to sing; he will be out on tour this spring with Brian Conley, Shane Richie and Joe Pasquale in the self-mockingly named Prat Pack, singing swing and big band music with a 15-piece horn section.
We will hear a lot about this tour, with starts at the end of the month but which doesn’t come to Watford (yet), although the Milton Keynes show on May 12 is a quick hop on the train away. In the meantime, the town will entertain its folk on Record Store Day (RSD) across six venues and 25 bands or artists. This is the Sound of Watford event, which officially begins at 8am outside the LP Café on The Parade when dozens of folk queue up for an exclusive RSD release which promotes the glory of shopping for physical product.
As well as a live DJ at the Café, the other big live music venues in town, sited within a mile’s radius of one another, are hosting the two dozen Sound of Watford acts. This allows fans of live music to hop from gig to gig and sample as much music as they can. High up on my list are The Cloak of Starsky, part of the Pump House’s bill from 7-11pm; they put out four fuzzy tracks last year which sound as sweaty as the tiny rooms that would reverberate to them.
The other five acts on Saturday at the year-round cultural hub, which hosts jazz, folk and musical theatre, include Gender Crisis, Phil Matthews, Gurt and ‘industrial nu-punk duo’ Pest, the chorus of whose new single O121DO1 goes ‘scare humanity, increasing entropy’. Ellie Capocci, whose new EP is due in July, released Pretty Girls at the end of last year, which would fit on to the daytime playlist of Vibe 107.6, a local station with a Sunday night Raw Vibes show playing music by local acts.
Johnny’s Bar, which hosts regular goth nights, welcomes Seethe, Trashed, Mishikui and Skarlet Envy, who are all set pulverise the eardrums. Far more sedate are the three acts set to play The Mad Squirrel, the craft ale venue with a Watford FC mural, during the evening: The Romulus Jazz Society, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and Momajoja.
The last of these acts has a residency at The Castle in Harrow and released a funky four-track EP called Soul Dive last year, the best track on which is the immediate Misinformation. Meanwhile, the Rickmansworth-based duo Vampires describe themselves as ‘uneasy listening with a death mariachi vibe’, which rather distracts from how good their music is. Their 2024 release Psychedelic Soul & Trash Vol 3 falls under the genres of ‘bubblegum sci-fi/horror indie pop’, which sounds like they just picked them out of a hat. Some of the drum loops they use are recognisable: Be My Baby on Rialto, Superstition on A Long Walk Home, 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover on Season of the Witch.
Then there are six acts playing The One Crown, the olde pub which is equidistant between Watford High Street Overground station and the Mad Squirrel, opposite the street entrance to Boots. Opening band Fused are on just after 5pm, followed by Stray Fox, The Nevers, Trainwrecker, Nick Byrne and headliners Ramona Marx, all playing 30-minute sets. It will be amusing to hear the segue from Byrne’s ‘indie-folk melancholia’ into the ‘spunk band’ from Hemel Hempstead who close things out at 9pm with songs from their recent EP Splenectomy.
The LP Café will set up speakers at 11am at the Pond, the plaza at the very end of The Parade which is filled with sand or deckchairs every summer. Paul Terris from the venue is gearing up for the busiest day of the year but took a few moments to tell me his view about The Sound of Watford.
‘It picks itself,’ Paul tells me of the lineup. ‘Ninety percent of the acts are local submissions, then it's up to us to do with the acts what any good record shop does with their records: organise and curate them.
‘I take great pleasure in the scheduling and coordinating of the line up, giving each venue their own vibe that fits with the character and history of each one. We work with many of them all year round to promote new and independent acts.’
The lineup playing by the Pond includes six more acts, including The Tiles, guitarist Callaine, indie-rockers Blueshift, the quartet Safe House and the trio Them 71s, who also played outside the café on a warm day last August. The act I am most looking forward to catching, either at The Pond or anywhere else, is Harry T Pope.
Pope is a piano-playing songwriter – hmm, I know another one of those – from Croxley Green. He put out his own five-track EP A Different Kind last year, which includes the outstanding and jazzy Stay Away and the seven-minute 11:11, with strings from the Czech National Symphony Orchestra playing Pope’s arrangements. Catch him for free before you have to pay large amounts of money to see him.
Paul Terris marvels at the eclecticism of the event’s two dozen acts. ‘As big as it grows the line-up is barely scratching the surface of the populous creativity in Watford.’
Visit The LP Café on Instagram here, and for a full events listing on what’s on in Watford, visit the Watford Actually site here