Woo! You know, I've been to see John pretty much annually now since whenever that Mean Fiddler 'Pleasures of Electricty' gig was (I think I saw him THREE times last year, lol!) and last night's gig was the best one yet!
Why? Mostly cos there were 4 people on stage, all doing stuff, including Steve D'Agostino on some REAL analogue synths (a Roland System 100M modular, fact fans, and what looked like a Roland SH1 or SH2...) - this just all added an extra layer of spit, blast and sizzle to the proceedings - live music is at its best when it's live, not when a couple of blokes mime to a laptop
So who was that lad at the back? He looked like John Foxx Jnr! He had a laptop and a MIDI keyboard, I dunno if he was just on visuals or was playing music too, I couldn't really see.
Louis has grown his hair into a Kevin Kegan footballer perm!
Frankly I think we were all getting a bit BORED before the gig finally started ... most of us had been hanging around Cargo since not long after 7, and we were let into the stage area a little after 8... but we were left to bob our heads to the DJ and watch the same 20 minute video loop in there until a quarter past 9!
But when the lads did finally come on, they kicked ass!
BURNING CAR, for instance, was bloody sh*t hot, if you'll pardon my French - compare it to what it sounded like when they first began all this again in 1998 - no more d*cking around with "modernizing" it, just stick to the original searing arrangement and crank it up to 11! With footage from the original video flaming on the screen behind them. Excellent.
If there was one criticism of the proceedings, I might say that sometimes the arrangements were actually *too* "turned up to 11" - they'd start the songs with Louis & Steve making the nastiest ear-shredding bowel-troubling sounds they could, and that doesn't leave much room to build for the next 4 minutes! lol They were making a very full-on racket at times
But that's all part of the fun.
The "encore" was a bit odd - John said "goodnight"... then about 30 seconds later they came back and played for another hour! /laughs/ Most amusing.
Then when they really DID end, the audience were well up for an *actual* encore, and we had a full on slow hand clap going for a good 3 minutes, before someone obviously told the DJ to send us shuffling out.
The new song they opened with was pretty decent;
THE GARDEN was lovely (although I couldn't help giggle at a stray raspy note on the wrong sound at the beginning: "We've been waiting in the Garden - THWWWARRRP!" lol )
"YOUNG SAVAGE" was very welcome although be honest I felt it didn't quite come off - probably cos the main bit is the 'blistering' guitar riff, and that just seemed to be sequenced rather than anyone play it, which made it a bit less exciting - whilst John was a bit out-of-breath on the vocals (not that there's space to breath in all those lines, but that's the way he wrote it!) - still, cool to hear them do it.
Basically a smashing gig.