Bang 2003 - live reviews
THE MUSICKINGS OF LEON
VENUE
Empress Ballroom, Blackpool
DATE
May 2nd 2003
The glamour of the looming Empress Ballroom is only plaster-deep. It seems stuck on like the pink bit on an Iced Gem, majesty thwarted by the redolence of tea-dances and jumble sales. That old-lady funk (the funk of 40,000 years?) is itself masked tonight by the fug of testosterone through t-shirts. It’s so beery and Lancs-y as to make a Southern softy quake. This is a crowd that wears its balls on its sleeve. Afterwards some bloke walks along puking as he goes, leaving others to skid and swear in his wake. These boys party hard.
The rampant English-blokishness is dissipated somewhat by the magnificent, delightfully manly Kings of Leon. Skinny of leg and lush of moustache, they play dusty, ramshackle rock’n’roll to make the devil spit and The Datsuns weep. Without fuss, without flounce, they are the genuine article, and it’s impossible to describe them without images of old Westerns crowding round the campfire. It’s heavy shit done with a feather touch - Bourbon rock, Mount Rushmore rock, immaculate Yankee road rock. You can’t be clever about this, although it isn’t dumb. It’s just. . .natural. Single ‘Molly’s Chambers’ has a sort of seismic cheek and they rip through it in one breath. They could be QOTSA divested of the unappealing prog pomp moments, all sunset warmth and colour. Pure escapism.
The Music, for all their freewheeling psychedelia, are a kennelled young pup. Not that they don’t create an atmosphere of fists-aloft freedom – the sprung floor heaves under pounding feet, the beats suggest there’s been a lorry full of drums overturned on the M62 and the unearthly voice of singer Robert Harvey sounds like youth filtered through a PA. There’s glory here, but it’s paddocked by a lack of imagination. The songs snowball, building momentum but melting into senselessness as they go. Harvey’s vocals start to sound like the cries of a particularly tuneful seagull, just skimming the consciousness, smudging into the background. Its pleading, incongruous beauty is hemmed in by pedestrian vocal lines, like the brightest pupil writing out ’the cat sat on the mat’ over and over. ‘Take The Long Road And Walk It’ has a terrific groove, as does ‘Getaway’ – you can dance to them, it’s just that there’s nowhere upwards of the ground for your heart to go. They sometimes clip the fenders of spacerock, but seem to have a fear of floating.
The Music have vast scope but you can’t get lost in it. Your feet won’t leave the ground.
* * *
SUGABABES
VENUE
Guild Hall, Southampton
DATE
1st April 2003
Sugababes have pulled off a comeback as gobsmacking as any in rock. Pop’s ephemeral nature forbids second chances – take the cheese, your mouse ass is done. When schoolmate Siobhan left and Scouser-than-thou ex-Atomic Kitten Heidi came, they perhaps crossed some kind of (production) line; but who cares if your orchid was grown in a greenhouse?
The professionalism hasn’t obliterated their ingenuousness. They look small, and they are. Their image is restrained cool – behind it they’re a hesitant huddle. Heidi grins. Mutya semi-scowls. Keisha gives it lots, the most at ease. They almost pass the charisma between them like the grey sisters passing the eye, but it doesn’t detract a bit. It’s the music that moves you, the way the songs fan out their feathers and strut. Like all the best pop it’s slick, dark, glossy and moody. Soul and invention in swathes, titanic synths and space-boot beats. It’s self-consciously Noughties but it refers to the 80s as instinctively as rock’n’roll refers to the 60s and 70s. Nothing gets you like this if you grew up in the 80s, its butterflies are always ready to unfurl in your guts. They aren’t really stars but the music is galactic, fulsome and shiver-bringing.
There are moments of real sass and sexiness – the swivelling pout of ‘Round Round’, a spike heel in the eye of innocence. That first fuss-inducing single ‘Overload’ puts sly teenage truths over beats and breaks that move like, y’know, trains. Lolita meets Freud. Yum. They haul a hapless lad onstage and serenade him with the hilarious, outrageous ‘Virgin Sexy’ (“just thinking about it really scares me like Freddy”). They laughingly purr and cavort around him just this side of a lap-dance. Boy looks frightened to death. It’s power that any female in here over 16 either feels or soon will.
Then there’s ‘Freak Like Me’. There’s not that much dog in these pretty flowers, and your average ruffneck brotha would, you suspect, squish them like girly grapes. But the bravado of it
. . . the initial thrill is in the insouciance of the thievery, but more than that, it’s simply The Ride of the Bootleg Electrosoulclassic Valkyries. It’s almost too big to live up to live – it blows a fuse. That’s what a great pop song is, a neon flash recorded and never replicated.
Fearless and delicate, these are the mice that roar.
posted by lethalbuzzle @ 12:33 PM
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