Concert (+ CD): Magazine

The Junction, Cambridge, 2nd November 2011.

Posting this a month or so late, but what the heck.

To start with, a boast. I first saw Magazine in (I think) 1978 at a gig in a university hall, and then again in 1979 at the Corn Exchange. So, having made it to their gig at The Junction, I think I must have seen them every time they've played Cambridge.

Actually, the '79 gig was one of Angela's and my first dates, so we weren't going to miss this one. But first, we got hold of No Thyself, their first new recording as a band for thirty years. I'm not sure if anything on this is quite up to their best work c.1980, but it's definitely real Magazine, recalling, say, the menacing pulse of "The Light Pours Out of Me" in "The Burden of a Song", and the deliberate four-letter shock effects of "Permafrost" (only more so) in "Other Thematic Material". The pushing-for-accusations-of-bad-taste lyric of "Hello Mister Curtis (with apologies)" might almost count as something new, except in that it fits with Howard Devoto's general, habitual post of punky irony. (Though that his disdain clearly extends to punk: "No decadence, no cheap thrills of hate from me...") Some of the songs could probably grow on me quite a lot, in fact; they may look like conscious recreations of the band's old style, but in the worst case, that's a fine model to emulate.

(I was amused when some critics detected a new maturity in "Of Course Howard", incidentally, given that I recognised some of the lyrics from the introduction to a collection of other Magazine lyrics published thirty years ago. Actually, the song seems to represent a dialogue between Devoto today and his younger self, which is interesting in itself.)

But anyway... For those who don't know them, Magazine were a group who evolved out of the punk scene when lead singer Howard Devoto decided to do something a bit unashamedly smarter, then vanished when Devoto apparently just got bored of the whole business, leaving a legacy that took the rock world decades to acknowledge. Unfortunately, since 1981, John McGeoch, the band's authentic post-punk guitar hero, has died. Also, when they reformed in 2009, Barry Adamson, their bass player and other most strikingly capable musician, rejoined, but he's since evidently decided that his career in film music and so forth means more to him, and walked away. The replacements, Devoto's occasional collaborator Noko on guitar and "Stan" on bass, are entirely capable of emulating the originals' playing well enough, but whether they can emulate the original synergistic, innovative brilliance is another matter.

Not that the audience at this gig were too worried (and I speak as one of them, believe me). We may not have had associations with the two guys on his left and right, but that was Howard Devoto in the middle. Okay, a lot of us were clearly there to be reminded of our youth. I haven't seen this many grey hairs and this much male-pattern baldness since ... um ...the last folk gig I was at. And I guess that Devoto, who's gone from "high forehead" to "bald" in thirty years, could feel entirely at home in this company. But enough tacky irony. That's Howard's job.

The set consisted of a mixture of old and new songs, in pretty conventional rock gig style, really, not that I'm complaining. It even used staging tricks I remember from thirty years ago, notably hitting the audience full in the face with white spotlights behind the band for "The Light Pours Out of Me". Among the new songs, "Hello Mister Curtis" was dedicated, a little strangely, to Terry Pratchett; I assume that the point there is that the song is about facing up to mortality, though whether its pose is one of acceptance or defiance - whether the lyrics are addressed to Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain in tones of wry admiration or contemptuous sarcasm - seems unclear. Clarity has never been the point with Magazine, mind; during the first song, Devoto was at one point wandering around the stage with a placard say "You Do The Meaning".

And we will, Howard, we will. Whether we were here for abrasive surrealism, or wry and twisted humour, or to be reminded of our student days, or just because we know the band will rip into that guitar riff in the encore of the monumental classic "Shot By Both Sides", we all likely went away satisfied.

The support, incidentally, were In Fear of Olive, whose country-tinged rock was competent enough, but seemed on this brief exposure to lack sufficiently memorable tunes, aside from the fact that they really didn't look to have much in common with Magazine. But the support act in '79 was Simple Minds, and I didn't think very much of them, so what do I know?

Concert: Neil Innes

(More catching up on a bunch of posts that have been sitting around half-finished for far too long.)

The Junction, Cambridge, 29th March 2011.

At 8 o'clock in the evening of March 29th - the scheduled start time, good heavens - an amiable old buffer in a waistcoat and beret ambled on stage and launched into a show which lasted a couple of hours, with an interval...


The last time I saw Neil Innes on stage was thirty-something years ago, when he was basically playing the good stuff from his TV series of the time. This older, plumper, greyer Innes was playing something a bit less formal and structured and a bit more relaxed. I think that there was stuff from a radio series, but I confess I'm not familiar enough with his repertoire; there was certainly little sense of product to sell, except perhaps for retrospective collections. There was a bit of chat between songs, some of it going back to the foundation of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (basically, a bunch of London art students bonded over a taste for not-very-good pre-war British trad jazz) and including recollections of that band's somewhat edgier leading light, Viv Stanshall, as well as some mention of Monty Python and the Rutles. It was all very pleasant. Innes, it must be said, clearly isn't very edgy at heart. Gentle comic melancholy is more his style. There were some comments that might have been taken to relate to contemporary politics, but they were at the level of general benevolence than satirical ferocity.

And yet - it wasn't hard to remember that this man has provided musical underpinnings for the defining Anglophone comedy of the last half-century. This is Sir Robin's minstrel and Ron Nasty. This is someone to catch up with from time to time.

Concert: British Sea Power

The Junction, Cambridge, 20th February 2011.

British Sea Power are one of those bands that come along every few years to reaffirm one's faith in the basic guitar-band model of rock - even if they do have a cornet and an electric viola underpinning the guitars, and sing love songs to Antarctic ice sheets or create new soundtracks to 1930s documentaries. So when they turned up in Cambridge, I went along to see how they were live.

But first, there was the support band, Bo Ningen, who I guess can be described as some kind of mutant Japanese thrash metal. They opened with the sort of apocalyptic noise that a heavy metal band might use as a climax, then carried on from there. Works for some people, I guess.

Then, after half an hour in which the roadies attached assorted foliage to the mike stands, British Sea Power were on, kicking off with "Who's in Control", the opening track from their latest album. They turned out to be a well-rehearsed, capable bunch, albeit that their down-the-line rock approach on stage lost some of the breathy atmospherics of their recorded work. It's what the crowd wants, of course, and they may have given something of a hostage to fortune with the football-chant refrain in "No Lucifer" - the front rows of the audience were anticipating it some time before it came along - but there's no denying it's a good song, and they followed it with the punchy "Stunde Null" to hammer something home. That was around the middle of the set, after "Larsen B", "Something Wicked", and "Lights Out", and some of the subsequent songs weren't quite so interesting, making me wonder if they'd shot their bolt rather - but then they delivered "Living is so Easy" followed by "Waving Flags", which nailed that worry. "It Ended on an Oily Stage" showed up, too.

From where I was standing, British Sea Power seem caught in tension between being a crisply efficient, conventional guitar band, following the fifty-year-old script of "finishing" and then playing an encore and so forth, and being something a little bit more idiosyncratic and whimsical and British-rock-surrealist, with decorated stages, violas, and back-projected movie snippets. But they're actually rather good at both, so I'm not complaining at all.