A Certain Ratio effectively personified the chance encounter between post-punk’s arch dourness and funk’s infectious energy, the moment grey raincoats were paired with dancing shoes. Which meant that the mid-Eighties, for so many in music a slamming set of dividing doors, was to them an opening drawbridge. A Factory band, they often played the label’s in-house venue the Hacienda, which equally segued neatly into the siren beats of Acid House. So much so that to this day the whistle is an on-stage instrument.
Except for me… well, call me an old grey raincoat but there was something compelling about that initial ice-and-flame combination, foregrounded in album titles like ’The Graveyard and the Ballroom’. Perhaps what made it compelling also made it unsustainable. But what came after sounded more assimilatable, more regular.
And as the gig gets going I wonder if they’ll spend the night crossing and re-crossing that dividing line, like an explorer finding the equator and excitedly hopping back and forth between Northern and Southern hemispheres. There’s tracks which, while there’s nothing wrong with them, just aren’t going to lodge themselves in the memory. At least, not mine.
Though things turn out to be much more unpredictable. One instrumental number, for example, is based around a Balaeric beat so regular it could have come out a tin. But the players sinew around it like Miles Davis had discovered Acid House and pledged to make it his own.
What this band do best, at least in this incarnation, is combine the insistency of repetitive beats with the free flow of jamming, getting in a groove and soaring off simultaneously. It’s a shame they don’t just do that, but you don’t want to miss it when they do. I’d rate this gig above their last showing three years ago, in fact it’s the best I’ve seen them. (Admittedly, only of three. Don't spoil it.)
Which could be to do with the release of a new album, ‘Loca Remezclada’, the first in twelve years. And I was later to read the album’s blurb boldly asserting they were “revitalised by their most successful tour in over two decades” and so made an album which “distils the different directions and styles that have run throughout the band’s career.”
Alternately, or perhaps additionally, there’s the enlivening presence of two new, much younger members, on vocals and keyboards respectively. Though the presence of the new second singer, Ellen Beth Abdi, has a somewhat tragic cause. Longstanding vocalist Denise Johnson unfortunately died last year, with a track dedicated to her memory. Still, virtue springs from adversity.
Same tour, from London…
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