Concert: Marina and the Diamonds

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 20th November 2015

I've been to a handful of rock and pop concerts this year (and yeah, I've neglected to blog about them), and one thing that's become obvious is that high-quality, presumably back-projected video screens have now become financially entirely accessible to, well, a lot of the sort of bands who play the Corn Exchange. Marina and the Diamonds are using theirs to show some pretty good pop-art-flavoured visuals during their current tour, but I suspect that the system isn't entirely bug-free, and may have been the cause of the dread Technical Difficulties which generated about an hour's delay between the support act (who didn't make much of an impression on me; I think they could do with something to fill the sonic space between the thud of bass and drums and the ping of synthesisers and falsetto of the singer) and the main event. At least, the screens once or twice displayed giant Windows menu bars in that time, which I take as a sign of glitches. Add in a notable amount of time spent queueing outside before the doors opened, and, well, things ran a bit late. Then, it turned out that the lighting designer had decided to silhouette Marina herself with a full-strength white spot, angled up from behind her, for some songs. Which would be fine if it hadn't meant everyone in the balcony going "Aaargh" and shielding their eyes...

All of which techie wobbliness was rather unfortunate, because it was actually rather a good gig. Marina Diamandis combines a genuine talent for writing good old-fashioned catchy choruses with a certain amount of stage presence and charisma. This in turn meant that, although she had assembled a highly competent band for this tour, she genuinely didn't need to hire any backing singers; when she wanted vocal filling, all she had to do was point her microphone at the standing audience down at the front and tell them to supply it. (Diamandis does say that the "Diamonds" are her fans, after all...) This approach did leave her slightly more restrained and introspective songs, such as the rather cool "Immortal", looking a little out of place, but overall this was an effective pop-as-in-popular performance. Diamandis manages to be a plausible feminist while wearing three different glittery costumes, one including cute mouse ears, in a ninety minute show, too.

It has to be said that Diamandis's songs aren't as clever as they maybe think they are; the message in the likes of "Savages" is hardly subtle. But then, it's pop music, and its heart is absolutely in the right place. Worth a little waiting and some being dazzled.

Concert: Alison Moyet

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 16th October 2013.

I confess I hadn't been following any news or reviews before I went off to this gig, so I came to things quite fresh. To start with, I was interested to see what sort of backing band Alison Moyet would bring with her. This is, after all, a woman who moved from '80s pop to jazz standards, a stint on a musical, and even things like Purcell operatic arias (with a voice that can work with all this), trailing a range of backing musicians to suit. Well, come the time, on came ... a couple of synthesiser players, looking worryingly like the guys who come on when Bill Bailey is doing a Kraftwerk parody. Yes, the former lead singer of Yazoo had decided to revert to electronica for this tour.

And very good they were too, actually. The two guys were actually multi-instrumentalists (and one also acted as a backing singer, often I'm pretty sure singing higher than Moyet herself), and the set was built round a really good mix of tracks from Moyet's latest album, The Minutes, and from her back catalogue. From deep in that catalogue, in fact, as she commented when pointing out that at least one of these songs was written when she was 16. I can quite believe that the lyrics of "Nobody's Diary" came from a bright, passionate teenager; if she also created that small gem of a synthesiser riff back then, she really was a prodigy.

(Alison Moyet herself was looking damn good, by the way. Apparently, she's been saying in interviews that she thinks she may have overdone the weight loss a bit, and nobody could blame her if she put a couple of pounds back on. But she sure as hell doesn't look unhealthy in a black blouse and jeans. Definitely an inspiration to her generation.)

She announced that she had been rearranging the old songs, not wanting to act as a human jukebox; some of the rearrangements were more dramatic than others - notably slowing down "Is This Love?" to a wilful extreme, and setting "Only You" (a song whose innate melancholy is a bit at odds with its poppy jauntiness) in a minor key. In general, everything worked great, and I got the impression that Moyet herself was enjoying the process. Which probably makes this the best way to handle assembling a set of songs from across a thirty-year career. Oh, and you can dance to a lot of them, too, as was probably sort of the point of putting a straightforward rendition of "Don't Go" at the end of the encores. If some of the newer songs had fewer catchy hooks than some of the early numbers, building instead on a foundation of crunching rhythm guitar, they still worked in their own way, sounding like theme tunes for a James Bond movie if Bond went a little bit gothic.

Moyet gave "Filigree", one of the key tracks from The Minutes (and a song which is loaded with gorgeous hooks), a long introduction in which she explained it was about the experience of realising that the trick is to wait for the moments when everything comes together. I think that this gig demonstrated that for me. I just hope that we might get a live album from this tour.

Concert: Blondie

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 11th June 2010.


I was at university from 1978 to '81, so Blondie are naturally an important part of my past. However, I never did get to see them back then, so the discovery that they were going to be playing Cambridge (I think for the first time ever, although I may have missed something in the last few years) was an opportunity to fill that gap in my life.


The evening began in appropriate '70s style; first, everyone had to queue up outside until the doors opened at the concert's advertised start time, and then the support band (Little Fish) turned out to be a three-piece (guitar/vocals, drummer, keyboards) with a female singer-guitarist playing jagged, slightly punky little songs; they weren't bad, but I found I was old-fashioned enough to wonder if they'd be better with a bass player to round out the sound.


Anyway, one interval later, Blondie hit the stage, starting with the inevitable assorted thin, slightly anonymous male musicians and then - Debbie Harry, wearing a platinum wig, shades, a black dress with a conical layered knee-length skirt, and Doc Martens. In other words, she looked a bit like some kind of crazy cat lady, if your neighbourhood crazy cat lady was a living goddess of power pop - complete with the voice we all remember, that coolly amused New York drawl. Actually, the voice may not be quite the subtle power tool it once was; during "Atomic", the crucial repetition of the title was first spoken, then handed over to the audience, then replaced with an apocalyptic guitar solo. Still, there was no doubt who this was.

The set actually turned out to contain a fair amount of new material - the band have a new album coming soon (and the new material sounded very Blondie) - which is great; this isn't just a self-tribute act, although many of the classics were in there too, to varying effect; this was a rock band with decent keyboards, not a synthesizer band, so "Maria" and "Call Me" were fine, while "Heart of Glass" was, well, rockier than the studio version. I never did catch who the line-ups lead guitarist was (Chris Stein, the long-time mainstay of the band, seemed to be leaving a lot of the lead work to this other guy), but he was a little bit prone to axeman exhibitionism. But that wasn't the point, was it? The audience of forty- and fifty-somethings (and some of their kids) were there to see the cool, streetwise blonde who was there before any of your Madonnas or Gagas. And we got what we came for.

Concert: Ray Davies

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 13th May 2010.

If I'd wanted to give this post a smart-arse title, I'd have been spoiled for choice, wouldn't I? "Well-Respected Man", "You Really Got Me", "Not Like Everybody Else", "Loud, But Never Square"...

Or, to put it another way - well, it's not too hard to see some of the surviving legends of Ray Davies's form and era - from the far side of a stadium, at considerable expense. But in a venue the size of the Corn Exchange, for local-venue prices? That wouldn't really have been sensible to miss.

Of course, Ray Davies was one of the lesser Big Names of his era, being the most quintessentially British of the British Invaders. But I'll put him up there with any of them, for influence as well as talent. I don't really like "If no A, then no B, C, D, or F" comparisons - influence and history don't work like that - but subtract the Davies/Kinks influence and where are you with Bowie, or the Jam, or the Pretenders, or Blur? And the blighter was productive, too; every now and again at this gig I was thinking "Hey, he's used most of his big hits already, where's he going from here" - and then out would come yet another classic pop song.

Which said, being limited to the resources of a small-ish touring band did restrict the range of effects that Davies could apply, to the point where (whisper it) some of the songs were in some danger of sounding the same as each other. He started with just himself and another guitarist, playing mostly acoustic but seriously amplified, and then brought on the keyboards, drums, and bass; the classic rock/pop configuration, playing in fairly conventional style - and at one point performing a string of heavier numbers (yes, including "You Really Got Me") that would remind one that the Kinks also got some credit or blame for Heavy Metal. (Although to be fair, they probably gave it a useful sense of melody and some wit.) The other notable feature of the performance, though, the one off-beat stylistic touch, was the way that Davies used the audience in his arrangements.

I believe that he's long had some tendencies this way - live albums with the audience sounds mixed high, and so on - and I don't think that it's exactly egotism; rather, Davies treats his more exuberant fans (and the front row at this event were definitely exuberant) as part of the show and therefore part of the music, letting them provide vocal fills when they want to. The trouble is, a bunch of dedicated rock fans aren't the most precise of instruments... Still, it was often fun, and many of the songs could stand it, including some that perhaps shouldn't have had to. I've said before that "Waterloo Sunset" can withstand pretty well anything, and that turns out to include this sort of live performance with the audience providing occasional backing vocals.

Anyway - repeatedly, throughout the show, Davies and the band would hurtle yet again into some neat little pop song that was also a small masterpiece of slice-of-life poetry. And this guy wrote all this stuff, and has been performing since about 1962. The place was full of people of a range of ages, all doubtless being reminded of important parts of the soundtrack to their lives. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.