Humanz (Deluxe), by Gorillaz (Parlophone) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Gorillaz have produced a series of innovative, experimental and listener-friendly albums, and being cartoon characters has undoubtedly helped, freeing them from many of the expectations and audience-imposed boundaries that often plague bands. Think of the pushback to Radiohead going electronic on Kid A or to David Bowie dabbling in jungle on the underrated Earthling. All we expect from Gorillaz is that they will give us something new every time – new collaborators, new sounds, new approaches – and that’s exactly what we get from them on Humanz. It’s like a top twenty from the future, a stylish album that in its variety sounds to me like a tenth generation descendant of the Beatmasters’ Anywayawanna (someone reissue that, please!), especially on tracks like Sex Murder Party, combined with a techno crispness that reminded me of Inner City’s marvellous debut album, all those years ago. There are twenty-six tracks in total, although seven are (brief) interludes. Highlights include “Momentz” featuring a turbo-charged De La Soul, “Ascension”, with an angry Vince Staples, and “Charger”, in which Grace Jones slowly uncurls, regal, like an aural version of the Alien queen. “Provocative!” It’s a joy that this song exists in the world. Apparently Grace Jones was in the studio for hours improvising her lyrics, and if there’s a four hour version of this track I’d love to hear it. It also features 2D at his most delightfully feeble. Conversely, “Andromeda” features one of 2D’s strongest vocal performances, on a track that could almost have been drawn from the Pet Shop Boys’ sleek and groovy work with Stuart Price. “Submission” contrasts Kelela’s gorgeous vocals with Danny Brown’s hyperactive cartoon rap in a way that seems inexplicably perfect. “We Got the Power” is bottled inspiration, just when we all need it. The deluxe edition (surely the version most people will want) adds six tracks (one of them an interlude) to the twenty on the standard version, including another of the very best songs, “Out of Body”, a herky-jerky dance number featuring Kilo Kish. The album is unpredictable but consistent, every song a novelty, full of weird noises and unexpected movements, with a multiplicity of voices woven into a whole by virtue of a consistently funky, tight sound. ****

It Follows: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, by Disasterpeace (Milan Records) | review

This eighteen-track album collects the score from the film It Follows, directed by David Robert Mitchell, about a young woman infected by a supernatural curse. As with the film, there are strong echoes of John Carpenter’s early work in this electronic music, especially in tracks like “Title” and “Playpen”, while moody tracks like “Anyone” and “Detritus” will appeal to those who enjoyed the eeriness of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume 2, but it’s an imaginative work of electronic music in its own right. I bought the album before seeing the film, and it stands alone very well. Watching the film makes it even better. On screen the music is used to create an uncanny sense of derangement in the viewer, its jarring strangeness accentuating the horror, and delicious echoes of that carry across to subsequent listens to the soundtrack. Stephen Theaker ****

Theaker’s Fab Five: October 2014

My Panasonic five-CD changer stereo is still going strong, though I don’t use it as much as I used to since getting an iPod. Some of my recent purchases are still in their shrinkwrap, thanks to Amazon auto-rip. I still love my stereo, though – there are times when the iPod is out of power, and I just want to set a few albums going with a single button press, and not have iTunes grinding away at my PC’s innards. Last week my iPod got into a muddle after I duplicated a playlist and it made all the music on the thing invisible. Needs a reset but I can’t be bothered. So back to the stereo, and that means a new blog post. Here’s what’s in those five slots right now.

1. Syro by Aphex Twin

If you were to put an individual track on from this and ask me which Aphex Twin album it was from, I’d have no idea. But I’ve never listened to his music as albums, and I couldn’t tell you the names of more than half a dozen tracks. I just treat it all like one big album. Listening to this as a CD for the first time, it’s very similar to the Analord EPs I love so much: they’re pretty much my idea of perfect music. It’s what I imagined acid house would be like before I actually heard it. This won’t stay in my CD changer long, though, because of a bit of swearing. Tut, tut!

2. Ultraviolence by Lana Del Rey

The same thing applies to this one: quite a few naughty words, so I can’t have it popping up in the rotation when the children are doing homework in my study! I only got interested in Lana Del Rey recently, I think because of all the chat about the possible return of Twin Peaks, and David Lynch seems to be a big influence on her music – it just clicked. The Lana Del Rey persona feels like she stepped out of a movie, or a novel, perhaps by Philip K. Dick. Maybe this will become a favourite album, even if it’s a bit too creepy for everyday listening, or maybe it’ll end up filed with the fads. (I can’t even imagine the thinking process that once led me to buy albums by Dido or Blink 182!) But right now I’m really into it. I love the wooziness, the character, the melancholy, the odd tempos and structures. Feels drunk and high, like an album made after most people are in bed. (That weird pattern on the CD in the photo seems to be the reflection of a bookcase.)

3. Lost Sirens by New Order

My first reaction to this – eight songs that were originally planned to form part of their next album proper – was that it’s woeful. The lyrics aren’t great (“You’re one of a kind, high on my agenda”). The music is a bit MOR. And I still think that, but it’s growing on me. I’ve caught myself singing bits of it while doing the dishes. And at eight songs it has as many tracks as some of their proper albums. I’m not one of those people who ever wishes their favourite artists would just stop releasing records. Even a sub-par album can produce a great track – I doubt I’ve listened to Get Ready more than a dozen times, but “Crystal” is one of my favourite songs ever. Tentatively looking forward to their next record – Hooky’s left, but Gillian will be back, and they said in Mojo a while back that they had been looking again at Power, Corruption and Lies, which is my favourite studio album of theirs. I liked them best when they were being weird and cool, the tracks that were about noises and moods rather than verses and choruses.

4. The Virgin Years: 1974–1978, Disc 1, by Tangerine Dream

It was late at night, I had internet access because I had been doing an online thing for work, and I’d been listening to Phaedra by Tangerine Dream and been surprised by how good it was. I noticed two Tangerine Dream compilations on Amazon, The Virgin Years: 1974-1978 and The Virgin Years: 1977–1983, compressing all their albums from that time onto eight CDs, for about twenty quid in total. I’m a sucker for omnibus editions, so now I own far more Tangerine Dream albums than I really need to. Some of the later stuff sounds (at first listen, at least) to be abysmal, but this first CD is Phaedra plus side one of Rubycon, and it’s very good. I like space music. (And I reserve the right to change my mind about the later stuff once I’ve given it a better listen.)

5. Indie Cindy by Pixies

One of only a handful of albums I’ve reviewed for our magazine, I like it no less now than when I wrote the review. Super stuff. Black Francis never stopped writing great songs, and I never stopped buying his records (Teenager of the Year, Fast Man Raider Man and The Golem are all excellent), but songs on albums like Bluefinger and Petit Fours felt like they had been written for the Pixies, and I’m so glad they finally got it together. Just wish it had come in a proper jewel case. And it feels odd that “What Goes Boom” is first on the album when it was last on the EP. How can it be both a final track and a first track? It boggles me.

What next?

I’m looking forward to the new album from Public Sector Broadcasting. The War Room EP was great, their album too, and I hoped they might one day apply their dialogue-sampling techniques to old science fiction films. They haven’t quite, but it’s close enough: their new album is about the real-life space race. I think that’s going to be a real treat. But will I be writing about it in the next Theaker’s Fab Five, whenever that may be? Will the five-CD stereo survive another year? Will I ever find anywhere to keep all these bloody CDs? There’s only one way to find out: keep reading our magnificent blog.

Indie Cindy / review by Stephen Theaker

The return of the Pixies with Indie Cindy (PIAS, CD) has not been universally welcomed, coming in for particular scorn from those unhappy that Kim Deal is no longer involved. Her absence is certainly a shame, and there is a space on the album where her backing vocals should be (as there was on Trompe Le Monde), but it’s a bit hard on the remaining members to hit them with that stick. They did wait a decade for her to agree to recording new material, and she only pulled out after the studio was booked and the gear transported to Wales. You can’t blame them for pressing on in those circumstances – and I’m glad they did, because we now have a new Pixies album.

A good test of a new album by a long-established band is whether any of the songs would make it onto a Best Of. Indie Cindy passes that test standing on its head: it’s impossible to imagine a Best of the Pixies without “Greens and Blues”, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see “Snakes” and “What Goes Boom” on there either. (The latter is surely destined for a long life of soundtracking sporting montages and movie trailers.) An aspect of the band’s success not often mentioned is here in spades: these songs are immense fun to sing along with! Impossible to sing “I’m the burgermeister of purgatory!” (“Indie Cindy”) or “felt a burning in my solar plexus” (“Blue Eyed Hexe”) or “I’m the one with all the trotters” (“Bagboy”) without enjoying yourself.

My biggest grumble about the album is that it is really just a compilation of the previous EPs, or to put it another way, it’s now clear the EPs were just the album doled out a bit at a time. Every song from the EPs is on here, so buying this meant buying most of the tracks a second time over (and the other three appeared on EP3, not available at first in MP3 format) – though that does make it feel like a greatest hits in itself. I hoped, and I wonder if the band hoped, that Deal might return by the album’s release to add her vocals to the previously released tracks. That didn’t happen, but “Bagboy” at least is a slightly different version to the original MP3 release, with the “Cover your teeth” chant coming in much later. It makes the song somewhat sleeker and meaner.

The most exciting thing about a new Pixies album having been released – apart from the existence of the album itself – is knowing that Black Francis never stops writing and recording, so there will probably be another one pretty soon. If it’s as good as Indie Cindy, let alone better, expect lots of articles and reviews applauding their return to form, because everyone loves to tell that story. By then Indie Cindy will be part of the landscape, another part of the back catalogue, maybe not a Doolittle (how many albums are?), but certainly the peer of Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde, and maybe their better. And if the Pixies don’t make another new album, at least they’ve said a proper goodbye: the album’s last song, the jolly “Jaime Bravo”, ends “Goodbye and goodnight / Goodbye”.

Live_Transmission: Joy Division Reworked, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The publicity material for Live_Transmission: Joy Division Reworked (The Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 28 September 2013), performed by Scanner and The Heritage Orchestra, made it clear that one should not expect a Joy Division covers band, a niche well served already by Peter Hook and the Light. However, what it did not make clear was that these were not, on the whole, Joy Division songs at all, but rather entirely new pieces vaguely inspired by Joy Division songs. From time to time the slightly repetitive short films by Matt Watkins that illustrated the performance (for example by moving through cross-sections of the human body or showing space invaders fighting over the pattern from the Unknown Pleasures cover) would display snatches of lyrics, which was fortunate because otherwise listeners would rarely have had any idea which songs were theoretically being reworked.

But it began quite promisingly, with a building swell of white noise and light that burst at last into a thudding, percussive take on “Transmission”, the bassline and drums used to drive a Krautrockish instrumental version. But it went on a bit too long, and there was (as the case for most of the concert) no sign of anyone singing the song. A few snatched samples were pretty much all we got in that line, aside from a closing performance of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (over apparently random orchestral playing) that left you wishing for Paul Young. Unfortunately that take on “Transmission” was the concert’s high point for me, as from then on the Joy Division elements of the performance became ever harder to discern.

Other songs performed included (I think), “She’s Lost Control”, “Isolation” and “Dead Souls”, but billing the concert as Kraftwerk, Bowie or Hans Zimmer Reworked would have been almost equally plausible, given the scarcity of obvious links to the originals. Since watching the concert I’ve read interviews with those involved, who stressed their desire to avoid being a “crass tribute act”, and that’s a reasonable goal, and I’m sure there are subtle connections to the original songs that were difficult to spot on a first listen, but it’s being sold as Joy Division Reworked, not as original avant garde pieces. I did try to take it on its own terms, but as avant garde music it felt uninspired and unchallenging, putting me in mind of nothing so much as the ambient remixes of Moby’s cover versions played loudly.

More positively, the players were well-rehearsed, the performance going without any apparent hitches, and it was all appropriately moody and atmospheric (so dark in fact that we could rarely see the performers from our position). There have been tweets from other attendees who thought it was wonderful, though in some cases even they note the high numbers of people dashing off to the bar. If these compositions are released as an album, I’ll probably grow to like it. Perhaps if I’d had a chance to get to know the music first, or if I’d been able to see what the musicians were doing, I might have enjoyed the performance more. Even now, though I remember being unimpressed and rather bored during the concert, there’s a part of me thinking, Joy Division songs, ripped up, remixed and played by an orchestra in the Symphony Hall: that sounds great. So why was it so dull?

The show is on tour for a few more days and you may like it much more than I did. Further dates here.

Theaker’s Fab Five #4: soundtracks

Been over a year since I did one of these, and that’s because I’ve gone through one of those periods where I don’t use my stereo much, other than to output meekly the sound from other devices. First I went through a phase of recording lots of radio on the TiVo, and running it through a long audio lead into my office. Then I realised how many good BBC and NPR podcasts there are now, and had a brilliant time listening to those. I signed up to an Audible monthly plan again and listened to lots of audiobooks. And I’ve pretty much stopped buying CDs, because I don’t have anywhere left to put them. Amazon MP3s are very convenient, downloading automatically or available in the cloud wherever I need them, and they’re often very cheap, so I’ve taken to them in a way I never did with iTunes.

But this week I was in the mood to stick in CDs and leave them to play, and so we have a new Fab Five filling the five slots of my five-CD stereo. Let’s hope it never dies.

1. The Definitive Horror Collection, CD3: 1983–1977

The newest CD here, one I bought out of sadness that there was never a science fiction follow-up to the three volumes of Silva Screen’s Space and Beyond (see below); this was the closest thing I could find. The four CDs work their way back into the history of horror, this one starting in 1983 with Mark Ayres’ version of the Nightmare on Elm Street theme and ending in 1984 with Ghostbusters. Haven’t had much of a chance to get into it yet, but I was a little disappointed that some of the tracks seem to be repeats from the Space and Beyond series (Ghostbusters, Aliens), and a noisy instrumental version of “Bad to the Bone” from Christine drags on a bit too long. On the other hand: The Thing! Halloween! The Fog!

2. Alien Invasion: Space and Beyond II, CD1

One of my favourite CDs of all time, with suites from The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dune, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (how could music as vibrant as Jerry Goldsmith’s “Klingon Attack” emerge from such a ponderous film?), When Worlds Collide, The Thing from Another World and the original Battlestar Galactica. I’ve been enjoying it so much I bought The Definitive Horror Collection, above, and sought out a CD copy of the original Space and Beyond (featuring Lifeforce, Capricorn One, The Black Hole, Enemy Mine and lots of Star Trek), to replace one of the very few cassette albums we hadn’t yet thrown away.

3. Final Fantasy S Generation, Official Best Collection

Strange listening to this again. I know these tracks, composed by Nobuo Uematsu and selected from the first three Final Fantasy games on the Sony PlayStation (hence S Generation, as opposed to the companion album’s N (for Nintendo) Generation), used to mean something to me, but now they just remind me that I used to feel something when I heard them, rather than making me feel anything again. Instead, listening to this makes me reflect sadly on how little I enjoy most Japanese games these days, with their frustratingly jobsworthian approach to game saves, cut scenes and grinding. (“These days” in this context meaning: since we had children.) I haven’t finished a game in this series since Final Fantasy VIII. Having said that, “Liberi Fatali” and “One-Winged Angel” still give me a bit of a shiver, just on their own merits.

4. Space 3: Beyond the Final Frontier, CD1

Aliens, It Came from Outer Space, Robocop – I love the music on here. The recordings are so clear, use stereo so well, and sound so brilliant played quiet or loud. There are a few reviews of these albums on Amazon that go on about them not being the original versions. Pshaw! That’s what I like about them. The original versions are usually out there if you want them, in crackly mono in stop-start sequences that make little sense in isolation and feature a handful of refrains repeated ad nauseum. This is something different, with the highlights of the soundtracks made into short, elegant suites, played by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, and mastered to perfection. A Space and Beyond IV pulling together some of the best science fiction and fantasy themes of the last decade would be brilliant.

5. Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Vol. 2: New Beginnings, 1970–1980

I barely remember listening to this before, which makes me think it must have been a Christmas or birthday gift, quickly overlooked in the rush of new toys! It includes “music, effects, atmospheres and ambiences” from four Doctor Who stories from the Pertwee years, “Inferno”, “The Mind of Evil”, “The Claws of Axos” and “The Sea Devils”, compiled, produced and remastered by Mark Ayres, who was also involved with the three Silva Screen albums mentioned above. The Pertwee era isn’t my favourite period of the show (although oddly I loved the Target adaptations, perhaps because the overlong stories made for fast-paced books), but this works well as an album, spoilt only by featuring five too many variations on the theme music.

Le Voyage dans la Lune, Air – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Le Voyage dans la Lune (EMI, CD, 32 mins plus DVD, 17 mins) isn’t the first soundtrack work by Air (that would I think be The Virgin Suicides (2000), an album so heartbreaking I could only listen to it once)—but it is nevertheless very special. The music began as pieces to accompany the restored colour version of Georges Méliès’ 1902 film, which is included here, and so, before discussing the music, a few words for the film. Though most right-thinking people have a natural abhorrence of the colourisation of black and white films, this is something rather different; it was made at the same time as the original film under the supervision of Méliès himself, with every frame of the story hand-painted: the debate at the academy and the preparation of the rocket; the journey to the moon; the hallucinatory sleep sequence; the battles with the insectoid lunar inhabitants; the triumphant return home. Every bit of it is visually astonishing, and the colour is amazing, the brush strokes clearly visible. The film has lost none of its interest or entertainment value: the only disappointment for my children was its short length. If someone made the same film today you’d be impressed by their cleverness; that Méliès did it in 1902 is beyond belief. Or rather, it would be, if we didn’t have the evidence on DVD. And what about that Jules Verne, eh? Inspiring hit films for over a century now! (Shame they’re not all as good as this one.)

The album takes a slightly different order to the film. It opens with the drums, spikes and querulous voices of the “Astronomic Club”, but ends with “Lava”, which begins like something from a seventies film and turns into the theme from Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (or “Journey of the Sorcerer”, as Eagles fans might know it), music that comes from the mid-point of the film. The “Retour sur Terre” takes place in track three, a short piano-led piece that could have been drawn from the Moon Safari sessions. It leads into track four, the exuberant, punchy Geoff Lovesque “Parade” which soundtracks the final sequence of the film, and then we’re back on the moon with “Moon Fever”—imagine an extended version of the ambient introduction to Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now”—and the aggressive synth-funk march of the “Sonic Armada”. The rocket departs at last in track nine, “Cosmic Trip”, with a breathy glide that probably doesn’t quite replicate the experience of being shot into space in a huge bullet. Which is all to say that this isn’t a science fiction disco opera in the style of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds (for all that it makes you wish Air would write one). But it works wonderfully as an album, the order of the tracks making musical, if not logical, sense, the shifting moods—from pleasant drowsiness to the bold loopiness of your very best dreams—constantly provoking interest. Where vocals appear, they tend to be slow, often spoken, mostly in English, usually with a sense of disorientation. The announcer of the countdown to ignition in “Seven Stars”, for example, sounds rather like a drunk Tom Hardy (and so of course that is one of my favourite tracks).

Easy listening for science fiction fans, perhaps, but I’ve listened to few records more often this year and anything new I buy will have to do very well to catch up. It’s the kind of album of which you simply cannot tire. Unless you get up and march around your office whenever “Parade” comes on. Which I don’t.

Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

As part of Portishead, Geoff Barrow has created four of my favourite albums of all time. Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One (Invada UK, 56 mins), in collaboration with film and television composer Ben Salisbury, may be a side project, but it is very nearly as superb as his other work. This isn’t actually the soundtrack to the forthcoming Dredd, whose composer is Paul Leonard-Morgan. But it did apparently begin there, as exploratory sketches, and it says a lot for the music that although they didn’t end up working on the film, the musicians involved felt those ideas were too good to leave unexplored, and came back to finish them off.

The nineteen tracks begin with “Lawmaster/Pursuit” and end with “Helmet Theme (Reprise)”, the titles between having titles like “Justice One”, “Iso Hymn” and “Titan Bound”. It’s fair to say, though, that while one hopes the actual Dredd film matches the one this album evokes in your head, without a tracklist you might well think this the music for a new outing for Snake Plissken or MacReady, so closely does it stick to the template of a John Carpenter soundtrack. Track seven “Exhale” is an exception, but even that sounds like a lost track from Blade Runner. If that makes the album sound derivative, well, it is—but it’s also exceptionally good.

Musically it doesn’t seem to be very complex, most tracks simply contrasting ambient hums and noise with a repetitive synthesizer line or two, but it is extremely effective. I loved the parts of Third where weird sf sounds would poke through, so to have that element unpacked over a full album was for me an unexpected treat. One criticism I could make is that the short cover of the card case, while very dramatic, leaves part of the actual CD exposed, but that won’t be a problem until the CD leaves my stereo, and it seems to have settled in for a very long stay.

Roger Waters: The Wall Live – reviewed by Jacob Edwards

Roger Waters: The Wall Live, Brisbane Entertainment Centre, 2 February 2012. “I’ve got a big black pig with my poems on.”

Few lovers of speculative fiction would hold anything but affection for progressive rock band Pink Floyd (or, as they were billed in their psychedelic early days, The Pink Floyd). From Syd Barrett’s typically edgy brainchild “Astronomy Domine” through warp-driven and ethereal juggernauts “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, the Floyd were like a hippie’s conception of spaceflight.

(Mind you, one doesn’t have to be stoned to hear echoes of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme materialising in and out across the background of “One of These Days”. Just listen closely. It’s particularly evident in the Delicate Sound of Thunder live recording.)

Moving slightly more towards the mainstream—and very much into the big time—Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, and while this album, with its iconic, dispersive prism cover art, encapsulated much of the band’s cosmic otherworldliness, subsequent releases saw the Floyd drawn slowly yet ever-increasingly towards Roger Waters’ solo compositions and the war-torn diatribes of The Final Cut. Post-Waters Pink Floyd may have upped the ante on fantastic cover art and afforded more compositional room to David Gilmour’s eerie, cavernous guitar (“Sorrow” a notable example), but the split could do nothing to regain or hide what was lost. Occasional solo performances notwithstanding—“Astronomy Domine” and “Set the Controls”, by Gilmour and Waters respectively—the early Floyd spacey-ness can now only just be seen, spinning further and further out of orbit, soon never to be recaptured.

But as time goes on and visual media soars to new and greater heights, Roger Waters has chosen to revisit the other (perhaps even more famous) speculative aspect of the Pink Floyd legacy: his militant and nightmarish, at times Kafkaesque conceptual rock opera (then film and concert stage extravaganza), The Wall.

Of those who discovered Pink Floyd through their epic double LP (and although Pink Floyd did not release many singles during their concept album phase, there are three from The Wall—“Another Brick (Part 2)”; “Comfortably Numb”; “Run Like Hell”—that crop up regularly on radio), many will have thought to themselves, Surely this is part of something bigger? Isn’t there more to this than just music? In equal measure, there will have been those who watched the film of The Wall and thought, Fuck, this is awful! If only it were just music. But as much as fans may love the songs while loathing the relentlessly grinding imagery of the film, The Wall’s most satisfying manifestation probably does lie somewhere in-between. In the 1980–1981 concert productions of The Wall, Roger Waters’ former descent into self-isolation (or lead character Pink’s, to maintain the pretence of fiction) and his subsequent re-emergence through delusion and hallucination, were allowed to play out against a backdrop of Gerald Scarfe’s grotesque animations and marionettes. The animations were projected onto an actual wall, which roadies would construct onstage during the performance, gradually blocking out Waters and the rest of the band from the audience (or vice versa), and at the end of the concert this wall would come crashing down—Phantom of the Opera, eat your heart out—exposing Waters to begin the cycle again.

Which, fast-forwarding to the present day (and with due deference to his one-off performance in Berlin, 1990) Roger Waters is now doing. Five years since previously appearing Down Under—his Dark Side of the Moon tour, which thankfully dispelled any fears raised by a rasping Live 8 outing alongside Dave Gilmour in 2005—Waters revisited the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on 1 February 2012, tickets ranging in price from $100 (binoculars not included) to $400 (proverbial spitting distance). Despite the venue’s reputation for making all music sound like the hammering crash of a thousand sadistic basketballs, Waters’ return was all but sold out to a clamouring throng of Brisbanites. People handed over their bags for inspection on the way in; queued for (pricey) merchandise; consumed alcohol in lieu of watching a non-existent (not even a surrogate) support act…

Then warning chimes; the crowd inching its way forward, like worms; lights down in the auditorium; a half-built wall on stage; a fascist-looking jacket hung in bleak isolation from the coat stand mid-set; faint refrains from the olden day bridging music that links the end of The Wall back to its beginning; then—

With a jolting guitar strike, each chord accompanied by a geysering fire-hydrant burst of sparks, “In the Flesh?” crashes through the quaint almost-silence. The audience gasps. This is The Wall—

“So ya / thought ya / might like to / go to the show”

—its opening number a bombastic parody of the performer/audience relationship, rendered even more ironic by the gusto with which it is embraced. A flamboyance of Brisbanite Floydies strain forward in their seats, enraptured to the point of ummagumma’d befuddlement by the two acts of Roger Waters’ magnum opus. (During intermission, at least one person tries to fire up a cigarette using a USB stick instead of a lighter.) And as Waters asks, “Tell me, is something eluding you, sunshine? Is this not what you expected to see?”, the most objective answer must surely be a combination of “yes” and “no”.

The first half of The Wall concert is nothing short of masterful, reflecting not only its greater cohesion—musically, lyrically, conceptually—compared to the second instalment, but also the more astute use of accompanying visual elements. While Roger Waters sings “Mother” in duet with a recording of his younger self, legendary guitarist Snowy White reinvents Dave Gilmour’s solos and the onstage assembly of the giant, eponymous wall proceeds with great finesse, serving both as a counterpoint to the unfolding story and as a screen upon which to project a choreographed maelstrom of images. The music and its multimedia aspect are perfectly integrated throughout the wall’s construction, and as the non-LP overture “The Last Few Bricks” plays (a stirring, sometimes adlibbed fusion of earlier motifs) and Waters gradually disappears from view, eventually bidding the audience “goodbye” (cruel world) and slotting the final brick into place, one cannot help but feel that the show has reached its perfect, natural endpoint. Gerald Scarfe’s giant marionettes of the schoolmaster and wife have been unveiled to great effect. “Empty Spaces” has been restored to its original, unexpurgated form (“What Shall We Do Now?”) as written in the LP’s liner notes and performed for The Wall Live in Berlin. Waters has even taken “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” and added to Snowy White’s closing guitar solo a new, rather sombre verse—call it “Part 2¾”—concerning the 2005 shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in London. Some might dispute this coda’s relevance to The Wall’s original premise, but such a quibble is nothing when measured against the overall effect—“to feel the warm thrill of confusion / that space cadet glow.” Simply put, the show has reached its zenith by intermission. The audience can go home happy.

Only they don’t, of course. There’s half a concert to go, and although this includes “The Show Must Go On” (with original opening verse restored) and familiar hits “Comfortably Numb” and “Run Like Hell”, sadly these (and others) make for little more than a protracted dénouement. By the time the bricks crumble down and Waters and Company take their bow in a revamped, more upbeat rendition of “Outside the Wall”, much of the early magic has been frittered away.

The second half of The Wall concert fails on several levels, stemming in large part from a dearth of musical structure. For all its highpoints—and there are plenty—part two of The Wall has always been something of a hodgepodge, lacking the progressive continuity of the song cycle that preceded it (only “Mother” sticks out in part one, and with the belated advent of “Another Brick Part 2¾”, Waters has now smoothed over some of those cracks). Ipso facto, the disjointed nature of Waters’ (or Pink’s) re-emergence from behind the wall is exacerbated by the first two songs (“Hey You” and “Is There Anybody Out There?”) being performed almost entirely from behind the wall. With none of its musicians in sight, the show becomes (as doubtlessly intended) little more than a film viewed from far away; and even when Waters returns to stage, there follows a tricky, quiet/loud medley where his voice—which at age 68 carries remarkably well, though more so when required to project powerfully—first struggles with the heartfelt, downbeat quiet of “Nobody Home” and “Vera”, then has its strident entreaties drowned out almost entirely by the triumphant military fanfare of “Bring the Boys Back Home”. When Waters, true to script, then swaps his normal stage attire (black jeans and short-sleeve shirt, white sneakers) for the fascist jacket and sunglasses of “General” Waters, the show loses most of its concert aspect, and puffs up instead with empty dramatics. “Waiting for the Worms” is particularly disappointing in this regard, while “The Trial”, which is a highlight of the studio recording, has its many voices performed pseudo-in-character by Waters, and relies heavily on screened images from the film version of The Wall. In fact, by this point it has become manifest that the visual aspect of The Wall concert is no longer there just to complement the performance. With the completion of the on-stage wall, it has become the performance, and although this, too, must in some way be the point that Waters wanted to make, nevertheless the music has been lost.

Part of Roger Waters’ original conception of The Wall was for it “to make comparisons between rock and roll concerts and war”[1]—a somewhat tenuous link, one might think, but one that is realised when Pink’s psychoses—all of which stem (in one way or another) from Waters, as a five month old, growing up having lost his father to World War Two—are twisted like narrative barbed wire around Waters’ real-life estrangement from audience members on Pink Floyd’s In The Flesh tour of 1977. The overt link from concerts to war is made through Pink’s hallucinogenic transformation across “In the Flesh”, “Run Like Hell” and “Waiting For the Worms”, yet one cannot help but feel that Waters has built his new Wall concert across slightly different terrain.

In calling on fans to submit photographs of family members killed during war,[2] and in projecting these images onto his wall, Waters seems, if anything, to be advancing the rock and roll concert as a unifying vehicle through which to decry and protest against—intrinsically, to distance oneself from—war. Indeed, if one may draw inference from the multimedia bombardment that assails the audience throughout the course of The Wall Live, Waters’ position appears to be that religious differences constitute a wall that separates and isolates people, and that, really, everyone is united by the shared abuse of having their Machiavellian and profit-driven governments send loved ones off to die in senseless fighting. The Brisbane crowd embraces his stance, but such is their love and nostalgia for Waters, Pink Floyd and The Wall, it is unclear whether they do so through sincere belief, or merely through suggestibility or even just the faint, naughty thrill of subversion.

Having secluded himself for most of the 1990s (to compose his opera, Ça Ira), Roger Waters emerged in the new millennium as something of an activist—particularly with regard to the Middle East—and has since aired (or otherwise presented) his views throughout three world tours. Nobody can criticise Waters for having and sharing his beliefs, or even for backing them with the currency of his rock star renown (after all, John Lennon did it), but it does seem a little sad—tawdry, almost—that Waters has chosen to give peace a chance while sitting astride his canon of early works. A musician and lyricist of his calibre, one feels, should be performing a new concept album; a new concert; he should be gathering up the occasional, cast-adrift compositions of the last decade (“To Kill the Child”, “Hello (I Love You)”, the sublime “Each Small Candle”) and uniting them with new material to genuinely put across his point of view, untainted by the decomposition of older songs. Would the crowd still respond with unbridled fervour? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But at least there would be a frankness to the new creation, rather than the Frankensteinishness inherent in Waters having sewn together his message from the disinterred and dusted-off corpus of The Wall.

These misgivings aside—and they should not be blown out of proportion—it must still be recognised that The Wall Live is an audacious and innovative, wholly immersive, spectacularly revamped exemplar of rock and roll theatre, and whereas the original Pink Floyd production was limited (to 31 performances) by the sheer expense of putting it together and taking it on the road,[3] Waters seemingly has brushed aside these difficulties, embarking on an epic, world-spanning tour that opened in September 2010 and is currently scheduled to continue until July 2012.[4] To the many Pink Floyd fans who missed The Wall tour of 1980/1981, Waters’ re-launching of the concert is an unexpected godsend, and even for those who hark back to the early days of The Pink Floyd, the ghostly rendition of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)”, with spectral, red waves rolling across the wall, above and around, even below the stage, making it seem like Waters and Company are standing aboard an open spaceship in flight, well, this feels like the culmination of a journey—a trip, even, sans Syd Barrett’s LSD—that started out with a dawning sense of wonder but clouded over and was broken off those many years ago.

1. Roger Waters, interviewed by Mick Brown and Kurt Loder, “Behind Pink Floyd’s Wall”, Rolling Stone 16 (September 1982), quoted in Nicholas Schaffner, Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1992), p. 10.

2. http://www.roger-waters.com/fallen.php

3. Roger Waters and Nick Mason, interviewed by Charlie Kendall, “Shades of Pink—the Definitive Pink Floyd Profile”, The Source (1984). [http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/t1483–gilmour-waters-mason-wright-shades.html]

4. http://tour.rogerwaters.com/

Teenager of the Year by Frank Black, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

I don't imagine there'll be many people out there who'll agree with me, but this is one of the finest records it is my privilege to own. Frank's writing songs purely to please himself, putting stuff in them just cause it's cool, and making a beautiful sound. None of the Pixies records can match it for breadth, style or vision. In fact, no other records at all match it for those things. Buy it, listen to it, think it's a bit dodgy in places. Six months later you'll be listening to it again, all the pieces of the weird multi-dimensional jigsaw will fall into place, and you'll be glad you listened to me today. Frank was never quite this good before, and so far he hasn't been quite this good again; credit has to go partly to Eric Drew Feldman, whose eerie keyboards create a perfect atmosphere for every song, giving the vocals, drums and guitars something to play off. Some people say there are too many songs. For me, that just gives Frank time to bring you around to his way of thinking. And every single one of those songs has a dozen new ideas to offer...

Originally posted on Amazon.co.uk.