Last December, when we got tickets for this show, we had no idea it would eventually clash with the final of the European football championships. The show should have taken place in February and we've had the original poster for the show on our wall here since January. The gig was postponed twice, but thankfully this time it went ahead without any problems in the smaller hall at the Islington Academy.
Up first was DAS FLUFF'S set of goth mimimalism. They consist of a guitarist, keyboard player and female singer and opened with a song about ruling the world. It was ok but the keyboards were just providing a rhythym section while the guitarist added a bit of colour over the top while Dawn, the singer, tried to bring us into her world. Happy People, their dancefloor-friendly single was next and it does sound like the sort of song you'd hear at Club Antichrist or one of the Batcave reunion nights.
Rage didn't really have enough rage to it to work for me and the keyboards were a little too weedy and one dimensional which no matter how much Dawn tried to charm the audience didn't seem to change through Free Falling (not the Tom Petty song) or Look Brash. 100% was a bit better but by the time they finished with Hey You I was more than ready for something a bit more interesting.
I think it's the third or fourth time I've seen THE CESARIANS and they are always well worth the experience: a very cool, 7-piece who play caberet or musical-based dark noir pop of the first order with interesting, quirky lyrics and no guitars at all. The opening song was about John Lennon and had several references to Bootle (area of Liverpool - Ed) in it, the band's violins and brass sections working really well in tandem with each other. They followed that with a song about Raoul Moate, the notorious northern Mmurderer who terrorised Cumbria during 2010.
They aren't afraid of tough subject matter then, and they also sang Post War Blues which is about the butcher of Sedgefield, oh sorry, no, Tony Blair. It's a brilliantly bitter and twisted look at our former leader. Now not all the songs were about murderers or the murdered. Some were about twisted sex lives like the brilliant Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde: a song that really sounds like it should be from a movie of the same name - a very dark, twisted horror movie it would be.
But then Broken Hearts don't matter to this lot and they give the impression of needing to break some more hearts whenever they can for the sheer hell of it. Just to surprise us, they also played a lovely little pop song called Just Fuck Off, the old charmers. It was the only time they got us to sing along to anything and it was only to the chorus which was great; a nice twisted caberet feel to it. That was also true of The Column which followed it about a friend who died too soon. It pulled off the trick of sounding bitter, twisted and at the same time life affirming with the Tenor Horn coming to the fore.
It Was Bad was nothing of the sort but you wouldn't want to be caught up in the psycho drama that Charlie Finke is singing about, that's for sure. They closed the set with a very dense song about Creation Theory that seemed a really good way to finish off a very cool set which could almost be the soundtrack to a very arcane musical for the sort of people who hate mainstream musicals!
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Soon enough it was time for BIG SEXY NOISE who tonight were playing as a stripped down trio of Lydia Lunch on vocals and James Johnston on Guitar with Ian White on the drums and sadly no Terry Edwards on Sax/guitar/keyboards. They opened with one of the newer songs from the still unreleased second album that I think is called Mahacalla Calling? Whatever, they sounded awesome and ferocious with plenty of distortion spinning out from James' guitar.
While he was making enough noise for three people, Lydia was spitting the words at us and the full force hit us in the face on We're Desperate(?) another new song that managed to go into Pusing Too Hard for the last 30 seconds or so.
Lydia was in good form, charming the audience between songs before she got back to singing about Balling The Jack but not the old blues tune of the same name. As usual with this band Your Love Don't Pay My Rent is the centre piece and it remains the closest thing they have to a hit. Damn, it sounded righteously angry and as full of bile as it should. It is, after all, about throwing the worthless man out of her life as she won't lend him $10 as he's done all her drugs and eaten all her food and broke her TV tripping over his boots - the idiot! I love this song and it sounded a great as ever in the stipped down band version we got tonight.
If Lydia is singing about Self Defence you know she means every word she is spitting at us and if you're a man you'd better watch out because as she sings about The Swamp we could easily be sinking into one right now and you'll need to make sure that you're not on a Collision Course either. That's a song that is every bit as coruscating as The Crumb was all those years ago.
They did a great cover of Lydia's earlier group Harry Crews' classic Gospel Singer. It's a song I've loved almost as much as the book it's about since first hearing it on the Naked In Garden Hills album. It was then that the Baby Faced Killer took a walk among us with James Johnston seriously abusing his guitar over some very forceful drumming that will then allow us to Trust The Witch. Lydia tells us there is something Witchy in the air tonight, of course there is.
They came back for an encore of Lou Reed's Kill Your Sons. As ever it was played with more bile and hate than Lou has managed in many years. It was a fitting ending to a full-on set that did miss Terry Edwards Sax in some places but on the whole was still far more powerful than most other bands could only dream of being.
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