Off: Faust at the RFH

[Alastair Lee Sumner]

I saw Faust for the first time at the Royal Festival Hall last night as
part of the Mind your Head season. Hawkwind are my favourite band but this
was definitely the best concert out of the three so far despite the small
crowd attendance and a nasty looking fight that erupted in the darkness
during the second song. Faust didn't have much of a sophisticated
lightshow, just a few coloured lights around the band and a big clock face
in the middle that fell away to reveal a revolving cement mixer during one
of the songs.

The music was intense. I counted 9 musicians on stage playing guitars, bass
guitars, double basses, synthesisers, a highly distorted organ, chains, all
kinds of rusty metal things, hammers against metal sheets, grinders with
sparks flying all over the place, weird vocal noises and tapes. At one
point some kind of incendiary device went off with a very loud crack that
blinded me for a split second.

Most of the songs were structured experimental industrial noise with a
repetitive and hypnotic underlying drum beat, evil sounding bass and
wailing distorted guitar and they just went on and on for ages getting more
and more intense. One song consisted of very distorted feedback with no
rythmns at all, a flashing strobe light and about 5 members of the band
walking up and down the gangways around the audience with megaphones
shouting out something about a radio so that you could hear the sound from
multiple directions. Two other guys came on for the last song and twiddled
some knobs for a kind of techno/Krautrock hybrid that was totally awesome.

Unfortunately that was meant to be their last tour which is a great pity,
but at least I finally got to see them live.

Alastair.