HW:Nik/Farflung

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 12:08:59AM -0400, Eric Siegerman typed out:
> I've never seen any *bad* HW gigs myself.  I don't know whether
> that means that what I said is wrong, or that I've just been lucky.
>
> Or maybe, when it comes to HW, I'm simply an uncritical listener
> :-)  There are a couple I might have classed as mediocre if I'd
> had some more "critical distance" (e.g. St. Catharines, 1991) but
> at that point I hadn't seen them often enough to be anything less
> than ecstatic about their mere presence (especially in my
> unremarkable little home town :-)

        I get the idea that the average is much better in recent
years. I've seen a few bad gigs as I thought, and in both cases the sound
was also really awful (Shepherd's Bush 1997 and the RFH gig last
year). But the band also wasn't playing well, in Shepherd's Bush everyone
was too frantic and competing for space (partly the way the venue and
sound system combined I guess) and in the RFH they just didn't seem to
gel. On the other hand, the best gig I've seen HW play by my lights is
Blackheath 1997, Ron's first gig on bass, which was in many ways a
shambles; Dave's synths broke down, Ron spent the first three songs tuned
much too low and the `Ejection' they played for encore with both Huw and
Jerry fell apart badly in the middle and only just got everyone back
together for the end. But it was great :-) Total chaos and energy and
people having fun winging it.

        Since then I've seen a few gigs where it was good because they
were doing it all right; the Astoria Christmas Party 2000 and the
Walthamstow gig on the last tour, there was simply nothing to complain
about, it was all bang-on, and that's also very impressive, but it doesn't
drag the audience into the performance as much as the chaos ones that
somehow come together...

> Also the Hawkestra.  But as I've written before, a lot of that
> was my own crappy mood on the day, and nothing to do with the
> band.  Some people seem to agree that it wasn't so great a show,
> but then others think it was awesome, so that one's a wash, I
> guess.

        Well, different things isn't it; the performance was awful, by and
large, and the Space Ritual section particularly not very much, but the
actual show and spectacle was soimething never to forget. It probably
depends on whether you could hear anything which aspect is more important
to your memory... Yours,
                         Jon

n/p Das Ludicroix - `L'Menexe'
--
        Jonathan Jarrett                Birkbeck College, London
                 jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
        --------------------------------------------------------
  "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away." (Tom Waits)