BRAIN: London gig review

[Jon Jarrett]

        Dear All,
                  sorry to be late off the mark with this, work pressure
and so on.

        This was, it has to be said, a top gig. I want to go to more gigs
at the 100 Club (and happily Nikwind are playing there soon), they have
seats and tables for them as wants them and real beer. Anyway. We arrived,
and there was this hard-core of mostly silent people who'd got all the
seats, which was faintly worrying; we think these must have been the
Otway fans. They made it quite difficult for Ed Tudor-Pole, first up,
playing solo acoustic, to get a reaction, because they just didn't care
and we didn't really know him. He said he'd never played bottom of a bill
before, which I thought was a bit on the arrogant side, but then this man
is Richard O'Brien's vicar on earth, isn't he, so that's to be expected.
Either way, he was working very hard to rouse the audience but they didn't
want to be roused and his actual material wasn't very memorable. Sherman
said she'd like to see him with a full band, but I have to admit I thought
he badly needed one.

        The same could not be said for John Otway. I'm not sure what he
does need: some would suggest `shame', perhaps, but that would be a
terrible pity; he might stop. The trouble is, it's very hard to review his
performance without giving away most of the gags. I can say I shall never
hear The Sweet's `Blockbuster' in the same way (for a start, he made it
possible to hear the words, and yet that's so inadequate a description),
that I have never seen a step-ladder used by a musician in this way before
and that one track in particular more or less justified the invention of
the drum machine, though it did little for the reputation of the
theremin. He can't sing, and I've still no idea whether he can play
or not, but what's that got to do with it? Clearly the man is a legend in
his own lifetime for a reason, and I haven't laughed so much at a
suppsedly musical performance since I first saw Hacksaw, but anyway. I
can't tell you any more, it'd spoil it, you'll have to go and see him for
yourself. I don't know who put this bill together or whether any of
Otway's fans stayed for the Brain Surgeons and enjoyed it, but it must
have helped get the crowd in and I think John Otway probably counts as a
quintessential English tourist attraction for any transatlantic visitors
:-)

        By now there had been Brain Surgeons wandering about for a
while. I managed to catch Al briefly and send Tania Ruiz's apologies (she
was laid low with `endometrial pain'), but none of us dared approach Deb
:-) And in fact it did seem as if jetlag might not have made facing the
public too easy for her, later on she was emphasising how out of it they
all were though if so it seemed to have hit her a bit harder than the
others.

        So yeah: I did try and take a set-list but so much of the set was
new songs that I gave up :-) Happily Charlie's superior memorabilia-
snaffling skills have served us:

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005, Chas wrote:

> Set list:
> It Lives!134
> Jimmy Boots 153/132
> Gun 132
> 1864 136
> Lonestar 115
> Constantine Sword 124
> Verboten 122
> Dark Secrets 100
> Plague of Lies 160
> Tattoo Vampire
> Cities (xtend) 92
> Chng Wrld Henry 171
>
> All of the above are as written on the set list - all (except Tattoo
> Vampire) have numbers written after the as above - I'm not sure what they
> mean unless they are the bpm - Albert?
>
> they then played Dominance and Submission, then The Red and The Black (both
> as requested by the audience)

        I did dance a lot. This apparently rather annoyed a guy behind me
who opined to those with me that he `hadn't come to get a faceful of hair'
but well, what can I do, he could have stood back a bit.  You couldn't not
dance, anyway, well, I couldn't, though lots of people did seem to be
fairly rooted--I figured they were the Otway fans not really knowing what
had hit them. Rhythm section up this performance, everything starting from
the drums. I've known Al was a fantastic drummer ever since I got my first
BOC cassette but it's nice to actually *see*, and to find that yes, he is
*still* a fabulous drummer, and also clearly so so into his playing.
Everyone in the band was, though, but Al, as I saw it anyway, was the only
one really going over the top. Ross, particularly, is the kind of
guitarist whose skill lies not so much in excess as in precision;
everything he played was *right* on the mark, *just* right, and I don't
know about you but this left me more or less ignoring his performance as
it satisfyingly fell into exactly the right places without disturbing my
audio envelope while I concentrated in the drumming. David's bass also
faultless and tasteful, his beret clearly making him the `artist' of the
group. Deb, maybe, alone, seemed as if the plane journey had hit her too
hard; I don't know how she normally is live of course, but she seemed
oddly quiet, both in stage presence and voice. I was expecting her to be
front more, but in fact Ross was given most of the stage emphasis, and
though if anyone was fronting it was Deb, Al did most of the talking and
the band thus seemed oddly without focus other than the drums. Which, you
know, was fine with me.

        The new stuff all seemed well up to standard: `Dark Secret'
especially sounds as if it might be the best Helen Wheels track BÖC or
tBS ever put to master tape and I'm lookng forward to many of the
others. One thing that particularly struck me was Al's introduction to
what I guess must have been `1864', a song about a Civil War battle in
which his (great?)-grandfather got the Congressional Medal of Honor. The
evident choked-up pride with which he said this drove it home, if we'd
needed telling, that the power behind this band is a man who still feels,
who's still alive and still has something to say. Sherman said that it
felt more like a new band than the dinosaur performance she'd been
half-afraid of witnessing and I agreed; we're, what, six albums down? and
this band is still bursting to say its piece, it is the keen kid in the
classroom who knows the answer, waving his arm to get the teacher to pick
him. Let's hope someone is listening. `It Lives!' Yours all,
                                                             Jon

ObCassette: Pink Floyd - _Ummagumma_
--
                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)