MINISTRY are performing, as is their onstage habit, behind an enormous wire fence. Back in their early 1990s prime, you’d simply call it chicken wire. Today the effect puts one mind of a bunch of Guantanamo Bay inmates thrashing out on stage, a sign of how the dark injustice and oppression of the world has very little twisting to do to fit into the band’s mindset.
This is - so mainman Al Jourgensen has been proclaiming - Ministry’s last tour. They certainly aren’t the vanguard force of industrial heaviness they were fifteen years ago, having, since the departure of bassist / programmer Paul Barker in 2003, mutated into a fairly straightforward politically irked thrash outfit.
Thus they take the stage - a clean-shaven Jourgensen in dark glasses and a top hat which sees him resembling a cross between Ian Astbury and Ozzy Osbourne, his sidekicks a regulation set of dark t-shirted and tattooed metal guys. With the late and heavily lamented Paul Raven playing somewhere in the celestial choir it is left to shaven headed Static X four stringer Tony Campos to take up bass duties (and it’s more than a little disappointing that Jourgensen, in his infrequent between song communications, doesn’t make any references to the departed bass player).
Behind them, a backdrop screens a series of images of war footage, Bush’s chimp-like attempts at statesmanship, and horror films, and the band fire off a succession of songs from their career-closing trilogy of Dubya-centric albums. They’re decent enough tracks but, to these ears, nothing outstanding, and a treble-heavy sound mix means that the effect quickly becomes tiring. It’s like watching a muffled steam-hammer soundtracking a film student adaptation of JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. Granted, no-one turns up to a Ministry gig expecting subtlety, but the one-note performance is swiftly numbing and after an hour or competent sledgehammer riffing they depart.
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Just as the whole retirement thing seems a timely decision, they return and remind us what the fuss was about in the first place, firing off a quartet of Barker / Connolly / Rieflin era classics – So What, a manic Thieves, the juggernaut groove of N.W.O. and a still colossal sounding Just One Fix, containing the riff which has formed the career of the mighty Rammstein.
Departing again, this time looking genuinely pleased with themselves, they promptly return for a knockabout set of covers – ZZ Top’s Just Got Paid, an entertaining million-mile-an-hour Roadhouse Blues and a stripped-down Tom Waits-ish It’s A Wonderful World.
As a package, two hours of relentless, well-played metal is hard to quibble with. But as a career closer - and it’s presumably the last time most of the crowd will ever get to see the band - it’s hard not to feel a little short changed by the set-list. It’s far from the classic-strewn farewell to a two decade career that I suspect many were hoping for (I can’t shake the poignant image of a cyber-goth to my right forlornly yelling for Stigmata as the house lights came up). Instead it was more of a dogged see-how-relevant-we–are-now affair of a band with a back catalogue more cherished than their present. Still, Ministry’s career has been a blast for sure, and they’ll certainly be missed, but hopefully they’ll forgive me if I nip home now and listen to The Mind is a Terrible Thing To Taste...
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