The King Arthur is an unassuming pub in the back streets of Glastonbury, and what a friendly drinking establishment it is and very cool venue to boot; our purpose for being so far from home tonight. Tonight we had traveled to see Sentient, a four piece comprising of Steffe Sharpstrings (of legendary Here and Now fame amongst others) on guitar and vocals, Anand Gary "Subs" (of Dave Howard Singers) on bass, Joie Hinton (of Eat Static, Ozric Tentacles amongst others) on synths and keyboards and Tanya Smart (of the Oroonies) on drums and percussion. I've wanted to see Sentient for some time and had high expectations. The room was empty really, a few people sat about but as Sentient let loose like psychedelic pied pipers preparing to lead a merry dance the edges of the King Athurs back room filled with people drawn by their music. As the band took the audience on a journey through some outstanding magical musical soundscapes, the room quickly filled and folk started, slowly at first, to move on to the dance floor, until it was filled with strangely moving and gyrating people, lost in the music. Imagine, as I did, a Romero zombie film or maybe the video to Thriller but the zombies have been replaced by colourfully clothed, very happy and smiley 'heads' all blissed out on what were some sublime sounds. Made me smile; everybody was having a great time. The band too, appeared to be enjoying themselves, which is aways nice. With plenty of glissando, fine guitar work by Steffe over Joie's wild synthscapes, all underpinned by Subs solid bass and excellent drumming by Tanya, they brought the back room of the King Arthurs to life. Beautiful. I enjoyed every minute of it though was particularly taken a groovy little jazzy number about halfway through, as the Jazz Club guy might say.....niiiice. The band played a nice long set of 2 hours or so, though as with all good things it appeared much shorter and ended far too soon. Bloody marvelous. I said I had high expectations, well I wasn't disappointed, if anything Sentient managed to exceed expectations; what a fantastic night.
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