UNDERWORLD
Brighton
Dome, Sat 7th
March
When
dance music first showed up on our fair shores, it appeared to have
cut quite a separate channel for itself. Attempts to mix it with
other music styles just seemed to disrupt its flow, and divert it
into some stagnant pool. The charts were awash with attempts to cram
it's trance-out tracks into three minute ditties, in the process
losing the essence of both dance and pop. This was the period where
any old number suddenly found itself re-released with a four-four
beat grafted onto it, less a remix than the musical equivalent of a
shotgun wedding. While the Madchester scene, the main attempt to
marry dance with rock, ended up with Oasis. In an era of tribute acts
they were the biggest tribute act of all – a tribute to rock
cliches in general rather than to any particular band. It marked a
risible return to square one.
But
then as we hit the Nineties people finally started to figure out the
combination. And as a fan of most of those outfits at the time - the recently-seen Orbital, Leftfield, the Chemical Brothers – it now seems inexplicable that
somehow I skipped Underworld. I always took to them when I heard
them, but somehow never ended up hearing them that much.
And
if 2015 seems a somewhat belated date to catch up with a band from
the early Nineties, then better late than never...
Frontman
Karl Hyde mentions at one point his “revisiting” his old lyrics.
But the term, with it's poetry associations, seems the wrong one for
his words. Rather than neat encapsulations of thoughts and feelings
they come across as completely stream-of-consciousness. This is most
obvious on their best-known track 'Born Slippy',
with its torrent of repetitive phrases passing by in an
impressionistic blur (“Drive boy dog boy/ Dirty numb angel boy/ In
the doorway boy”), images succeeding each other like a film
montage. But its pretty much true of all of them. (Hyde has said they're “first-take a lot of the time”.)
And
this in-the-moment flow marries much better to the driving beats.
Structured lyrics belong with song structures, they'd just interrupt
things here. There may be some antecedents in the more free-form end
of rock music, for example Patti Smith tracks such as 'Birdland'. But its
on-the-beat style seems closer to toasting or MC-ing than regular
singing. (And if dance music didn't go in for MCs very much, it was
based in other genres which did.)
And
speaking of 'Born Slippy' (inevitably saved for
the encore)... I tend to think it's to dance music what Black Flag
were for hardcore punk – the epitome of a scene thats
simultaneously a critique of it. It has the de rigueur sandwich
structure of a dance track – pounding beats/trance-out part/back to
the beats. But it's less a ecstatic trip to a blissed-out nirvana
than a collaged impression of life reduced to a jumble of basic
drives and motor functions. With the euphoria comes the derangement,
that's how it is. Ironically if the video to the Prodigy's 'Smack My Bitch Up' – widely seen even at the time as a blatant
and lame attempt to evoke some push-button notoriety – it might
have actually been effective. Hyde has said of the track:
“it's
me walking through the streets of Soho trying to get back home to
Romford in Essex. I was referring to myself reduced to a piece of
meat, due to the fact that I'd drunk too much. The bigger story is
that I'm fascinated by the kind of snapshots that one retains when
you've had a couple of drinks. These kind of very precise snapshots
one has of a little piece of street, of a tape-recorder or of a
rubbish bin.....”
(NB A source of pedantry states we should really call this track
'Born Slippy.NUXX'. Just so you know...)
But
however great a track this is, perhaps the most memorable moment for
me – largely through being so unexpected – parried those
electronic beats with a flurry of blues harmonica. At one point the
beats fell away and Hyde won a rousing cheer for what was essentially
a solo straight out the delta.
All
in all, quite splendid stuff. Hi, Underworld. How have you been
getting along?
'Born Slippy', inevitably enough, from 6 Music...
ALTERNATIVE
TV
The
Green Door Store, Brighton, Sun 8th March
Roughly
a year after their storming set in this very venue, as further
evidence they're not ones to rest on their punk survivor laurels,
Alternative TV return equipt with several new tracks. And unlike most
bands of this era, the announcing of these doesn't herald a rush to
the bar. And yet that wasn't even the most memorable thing about this
gig...
I previously commented they played 'Splitting in Two', while
bringing together so many different styles of music. Whereas this
time they don't play that track, and instead
do it.
After
the last time, seeing Blyth Power play the following night, Jospeh
Porter cheekily enquired if they'd played anything from their
'experimental' second album, 'Vibing Up the Senile Man'.
Clearly expecting the answer “no”. The lyric “but the people
were still disappointed/ And disjointed” proved prophetic on
release, it quickly became notorious and gigs were often halted by
glue-sniffin' punks who'd only come for something to pogo to. Yet the
answer to his question was that they had. And this time they serve up
two sets – purely so they can devote the first one to it.
Not
that its all the second album. Some of the new
songs get filed in there too. And, allegedly for the first time since
'79, they play one of my favourite tracks - 'Fellow
Sufferer', with its remoseless tick-tock guitar pattern,
like a condemned man striking the days off his cell wall. But the
alternative side of Alternative TV is definitely to the fore. The
opening line being “the terror is on the radio” (from 'The
Radio Story'), I mentally dub the set 'Alternative Radio'.
(I'm quick like that, you know.)
At
the time Perry described it as influenced by the free jazz of Sun Ra.
Tonight, as he slips on his specs to read the lyric sheet, he
jokingly compares proceedings to a jazz poetry night. But it always
sounds to me more influenced by the space jamming of festival bands
like Here and Now. (With whom ATV often toured back in the day, to
the point it got harder and harder to remember who was in which
band.)
Except,
and particularly in this live setting, it retains something of a punk
edge – it's intense nonsense, street-level Lewis
Carrol, less floating free and more total derangement. The guitars
hold rather than play chords, like summoning up a sonic haze, through
which other band members emit strange theramin-like sounds from black
box gizmos.
And,
despite an odd decision for the support band to play between their
sets, splitting in two prove effective. The strange stuff is given
the space to get stranger, while served in undiluted form the spiky
punk stuff gets sharper. I loved both sets. I'm glad they played
both. But I guess I loved the first one more. I guess that makes me a
radio listener. A punk contrarian.
'The
Force is Blind', actually from last year's gig (though they
played it both times), is a good demonstration of how the new live
versions depart from the old recorded...
...and
as I probably haven't said enough about the new songs, let's pick one
of them. 'The Visitor'...
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