Throwing Muses

THE ASTORIA, LONDON

THURSDAY MARCH 20, 2003

Anyone who thinks Throwing Muses are a forgotten force would have been converted by the mob scenes tonight. Not to mention crushed. Sardines live in penthouse suites compared to this, and the venue’s bouncers are, naturally, taking their stress out on us evil, irrelevant punters. Sometimes you just want to see one of the great bands of the last 20 years play a rare reunion gig without wannabe John Prescotts killing the mood. I mean, this isn’t Linkin Park.

Then again… The Muses are heavy shit tonight. Not just in their usual sense of deep and pained and meaningful, but in that they’re rocking loudly, abrasively, sometimes sludgily, often ecstatically. With just the three of them up there, there’s little in the way of spectacle, but plenty in the way of focused, undiluted, pinpoint power. They’re still perhaps perceived by outsiders as angular, arthouse, poetry-reading girl rock, but the second half of their career was neo-metal, and tonight they’ve pretty much neglected to bother with that “neo” prefix. David Narcizo’s drums and Bernard Georges’ bass combine to sound like half a dozen musicians, and Kristin Hersh’s output on both voice and guitar is matched for obsessive intricacy only by her customary head-bobbing (and weaving) motions. Staring out at us from, as ever, somewhere unfathomably deep within her soul, she’s taking this seriously.

Backstage she’s all smiles and baby-rearing (her fourth, Bohdi, is in attendance), but that unaffected, uncompromising on-stage persona tells you why Muses fans tend to be devoted die-hards. Their zeal is partly responsible for this one-off comeback show. There are rumours it’ll be the Muses’ last UK gig, but afterwards the word is they might be persuaded to make festival appearances this year.

This particular Frenzy Reunited came about after activity on the band’s website?www.throwingmusic.com?reached a critical mass, long after the group disbanded for financial reasons in ’97. Despite Hersh’s family commitments and, of course, solo career (also, drummer Narcizo now runs a successful graphic design company), the trio were impressed by the fact that fans had initiated two huge conventions for the defunct band?in Boston and San Francisco?to be named The Gut Pageant. Instead of running a mile from these infatuated geeks, the band elected to play at the events. Their success led to the new, hastily recorded album, and shows like this. “We were all still in love with the songs, and with each other,” Hersh has said. How far it’ll go remains to be seen, but the guys stress they’re just taking time out from their day jobs, and Hersh’s new solo album, The Grotto, is of equal importance to her.

The set draws on the later, post-Tanya Donelly material, taken chiefly from the last few of the eight albums. (Donelly contributes backing vocals on the new LP, but isn’t here). “Furious” from Red Heaven opens, “Shark” from Limbo chases that. University sends envoys in the skewed shapes of “Start”, “Hazing” and “Bright Yellow Gun”. The bulk of the brouhaha comes from the ferociously full-blast, recently released eponymous opus, with “Civil Disobedience”, “Pretty Or Not” and “Pandora’s Box” among the highlights. Only at the end do we get the nostalgia some of us admit to craving, as “Two Step” from ’91’s The Real Ramona hovers and glows. As an encore, the multi-stranded “Mania” never fails to move mountain ranges, or to induce the most lyrically complex mass sing-along imaginable.

It’s as hot and crowded as it is inside our heads, as their songs invariably are. Everybody’s Hersh sometimes. This isn’t quite a eulogy, but the Muses were/are as rare and startling as a unicorn.

Sparks

ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL, LONDON

FRIDAY MARCH 21, 2003

If geeks had their own political party, they’d probably be able to organise their conferences around the same time and place as the next Sparks gig, thus ensuring a 100 per cent attendance. That’s how London’s Festival Hall feels tonight, anyway. Sparks fans make your average Trekkie look like Elvis?that’s young Elvis, of course: although even old, fat, shit Elvis wouldn’t look so bad beside a myopic thirty something in a lurid “Lights Out Ibiza” T-shirt. They’re the geekiest of geeks, bless ’em, but this?Salvador Dali goes pop?is their rock’n’roll.

It’s only been six months since the brothers Mael were last here in this same venue. Back then, in October 2002, their latest album?Lil’ Beethoven?wasn’t yet in the shops, so their decision to premiere it in its entirety with an accompanying visual feast of slide projections and minor costume changes, was bold to say the least. Consequently, that performance had a nervous, audacious energy about it that tonight’s virtual repeat can’t quite match, even if it’s a similarly wacky spectacle; Ron’s entry with 10-foot arm extensions for “How Do I Get To Carnegie Hall?”, Russell’s leapfrogging between four different microphones during “My Baby’s Taking Me Home”, and those same vivid projections.

Yet for all Lil’ Beethoven’s cleverness, it’s the second half of the show?when Sparks play The Hits and the geeks get to dance their pants off?that counts. From the first throb of “The Number One Song In Heaven”, bodies and bad hair-dos of all shapes and sizes are a-bouncing, hands clapping above their heads “Radio Ga-Ga”-style to every metronomic beat. You could almost forget Sparks were ever a ‘rock’ band since this, ducky, is pure 21st-century gay disco. Even the once sombre “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth” gets a hi-energy megamix makeover. Ron is doing his old “don’t look at me, I’m just a stuffed Hitler” routine of deadpan nonchalance. Russell is running on the spot like the happiest man on the planet. Just a pity it sounds horrible.

The geeks don’t care, though. They’re going bananas anyway so?ach!?when in Rome, eh? Here comes the opening cartoon gunshot of their ever magnificent glam-operetta “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us”. And it’s fantastic. Who but a real geek wouldn’t be cool enough to be going bananas with them?

What it means to be in a rock band, or have a career, seems to have melted and fused into something older and freer for Jon Langford. The Welsh leader of original Leeds punks The Mekons lives in Chicago these days, and plays with The Waco Brothers, The Sadies and The Pine Valley Cosmonauts too. The Mekons’ dissident ethos, defined by Greil Marcus as songs starting “from the premise that the singer is oppressed by everything that is empowered”, suits the honky tonk blue-collar world he’s adopted with his new bands, and which The Mekons moved into with 1985’s raw-boned Fear And Whiskey. And, with all his different guises, Langford now seems to be in something more subversive, honest and hard to spoil than a rock act; a string of loosely linked musical activist cells so small that the empowered can’t even find them, let alone crush them.

The less po-faced reason for Langford’s continued relevance is his stated desire for his most regular current outfit, The Waco Brothers, to be the most extreme hard country band in the world, with bars as their natural home. That’s surely why the Borderline’s basement is soon packed so full of fans (middle-aged men, mostly) that there’s no room to do anything but stand. Stood in ranks, still and shadowy when the lights go down, they look like a frozen, forgotten punk army. And when The Waco Brothers follow turns from The Sadies and Mekon Sally Timms, the clouds of the real war in the Gulf soon inevitably rise to envelop us all. “Blink Of An Eye”, from current Waco LP New Deal, is a rowdy, Poguesy strum, slashed by electric guitars, but its power tonight is in its chorus, evoking a president who’s “just half a man, riding in some giant’s hand”, who will, they demand, be “gone, gone, gone, GONE, gone in the blink of an eye”.

Timms then returns, in the loose spirit of things, for the wistful “Seminole Wind”, before “AFC Song” states the night’s primal purpose?”Alcohol, freedom and a country song”. Then a man whose vision of riot rock The Mekons renounced early on is fittingly invited to join us. Langford enquires, “What would Joe Strummer have said?”?about everything happening in the world now, you think?then launches joyously into “I Fought the Law”. The song’s spirit of unbowed, outgunned defeat suits the men on stage as they strum and strut their mix of rock’n’roll’s old elements, of rockabilly’s beat and country’s steel twang, and swing their guitars at the ceiling, happy in their work. Beneath the bullshit corporations have heaped on it, this simple social pleasure is what the Wacos know rock’n’roll is for.