wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I thought this was a *good* gig!!
Don't get me wrong, it was NOT perfect, but the imperfections were primarily down to it being a PROPER LIVE GIG with MUSICIANS playing INSTRUMENTS (wow! remember that?
rather than just some blokes dicking around with a laptop and backing track. Ah, how quaint!) ... as such, having seen John Foxx a scary number of times (8?) in the past decade, I thought "you know, I wish all his gigs had been like this! This is PROPER gigging!"
As someone who has spent many years doing songs with a transit van's worth of analogue synths on stage, I'd say I've learnt two things about it:
1. You need a soundman who knows the songs intimately and has rehearsed with you, cos when you have that many different machines on stage, you KNOW that at some points during the set, no matter how hard you try, some of them WILL be too loud or too quiet, usually during a key solo, and the soundman needs to be able to yank their level on the desk to the right place within seconds, otherwise that bit of the song will be ruined.
2. It does help the presentation if you position the synths so the audience can see a little bit of people's hands on the keyboards (i.e. sideways): if the players all face the audience and you can only see the backs of the synths, it can be a bit less engaging cos you can't see who's playing wot. (unlike with a rock band, where you can obviously see who is playing which guitar/bass/drums etc ... or a classical gig for that matter)
I felt John could learn from these tips ;0)
I also wished the Roundhouse would have let us sit upstairs if we wanted, cos it was a long hot day and I'm only 5'8" and tall buggers always seem to manage to stand in front of me at gigs so it can be a bit of a struggle to see ANYTHING (never mind who's playing wot - or the fancy films). But oh well......
Basically I thought the gig started off great! A selection of classic songs from Metamatic, sounding raw and messy and powerful, just like live analogue synths should! I PREFER a gig sounding like this than one where it all sounds "perfect" but is mostly coming off a backing track: I can listen to the perfect CD at home in much more comfort any day!
I love all the little bits "going wrong"
(Like in Underpass, I think the lady synth player was doing the high strings? And she had too much 'wet' signal on her delay than 'dry', so the riff ended up sounding all inside-out, an 8th-note too late. Which is the sort of brilliant V2-schneideresque wrongness you could never plan in advance
I got the impression John was rather liking being up at the front in the middle surrounded by lots of minions lol
However, then Louis Gordon came on! Bless! lol
I'm afraid it all went a bit pearshaped: the sound mix went totally t1ts up, we could hardly hear Louis' synths, just loads of drums and subbass (and, thank goodness, the vocals). OOOPS!
Rather odd choice of 3 songs, too: I'd agree with "A Million Cars" as one of their standout tunes, but the other two are hardly in the top 3? And they do have a tendancy to play 6˝ minute versions of them when a tight 4 minutes would suffice.... Still, at least we got to see Louis' dancing, ahem
Anyways so then the other lot came back on and the gig began to get back on track after nearly being derailed by that soundmix....
Although they were débuting a lot new unreleased new stuff we hadn't heard before, which is a risky way to get the audience on your side lol
Foxxy's lyrics always do teeter a bit between the sublime and the ridiculous, and I wasn't entirely convinced by the one about him being "The Running Man" and having films of stripey trainers behind him: getting close to self-parody territory there!!
However when Robin Simon FINALLY was allowed to join them on stage, the gig was properly back on form. (To be honest, if there'd been no Louis Gordon soundmixcarcrash interlude and a ton of "new stuff", it woulda been a much better gig.... harsh but fair, I feel.....)
Now the funny thing is, if I was picking a bunch of songs that showed off Robin Simon's talents, it would NOT have been these ones. There's basically no flippin guitar *in* Dislocation or Just for a Moment, and the guitar in "The Quiet Men" and "Man Who Dies Everyday" is just this minimalist tight rhythm part! The poor man did really have much to play and looked (understandably) a bit bemused by all the accolades of genius that he was getting! bless! lol I'm surprised they didn't do "WALK AWAY" as he has a wonderful solo in that....
SLOW MOTION was great (although the synths did NOT sound as good as Billy Currie's splatter-your-brains-against-the-back-wall Odyssey oscillator-sync mayhems).
MAN WHO DIES EVERYDAY sounded loads better than the attempt to play it with Louis, but unfortunately it fell foul of one of those classic live synth gotchas: the Odyssey solo in the middle was WAY TOO QUIET - you could hardly hear it... which obviously kinda ruined the middle of the song, which shoulda been one of the sonic highlights of the gig! Clearly either the main FoH soundman didn't know the song as well as all of us, or the submixing before it reached her had meant she couldn't do anything about it. Meh.
The arpeggiated synth solo in THE QUIET MEN was a bit bonkers lol
All in all, I felt John Foxx & The Maths was an EXCELLENT band that I very much hope will be able to TOUR and thus 'GET THEIR SH1T TOGETHER'
and do all these songs from their new album plus old Foxx/UVox classics in a tight and powerful fashion, having ironed out and nailed all the first-night-nerves soundmixing gaffes that lost them bonus points at the gig last night.
Not sure if we will get a tour though, as such an undertaking for over half dozen people and 4 times as many machines would be pricey, and John Foxx & The Maths are unlikely to sell bucketloads of their new album
I hope they do, though!
