BRILLIANT NIGHT!!! The Damned were EXCELLENT and put on a truly exciting, entertaining performance. Thanks to The Shadow who flew out from Texas USA and warmed up the audience for a night of moshing, laughing and music. There was indeed some stripping too! Thanks so much to everyone who came. Thanks especially to co-promoter D.Vision International, with whom, we were delighted to make this night happen.
love Chris B xx
The Shadow (USA 美國)
Setlist:
1. Punk Rock Agent
2. There is No Excuse
3. Dogville
4. Mosquitomen
5. It’s All Gone Wrong
6. As the Sun Sets in the West
7. Cure For Culture
8. Single Line Letter
9. Give
10. Anna Manni
11. Love Song
12. Nothing Will Last Forever
13. Your Love is Suffocating
It was truly the sort of show that I never imagined I would have the good fortune to be at. A truly sizeable crowd, including an immensely heartening number of locals. Naturally, the opening spot for a band that is not inaccurately described as “legendary” is a patent double-edged sword; a promotional boon, but the possibility of an impatient audience and insuperable expectations is massive. Luckily for everyone involved, it was a genial and quite chipper audience present at Grappa’s. The Shadow’s bassist Kika, unfortunately, couldn’t make it to Hong Kong owing to logistical difficulties – luckily, again, the very able hands and Shin-Chan bass of Yanyan Pang (Logo/Tyger Feb) ably took her place despite just the one day of practice, so no harm done.
The band’s sound is a polished, Noughties’ amalgam of a Bob Mould-ian take on pop-punk (similar buzzsaw guitar tones but played with a slight grungey lag) and heavy-handed, explicit riffage of metal (something like SSD), but without the abrasiveness implicated in either. The drumming too is an amalgam of this sort, but more in the direction of nu-metal’s (and I assume this expression is all but incoherent) more ‘trampoline-y’, bass-drum focussed style. This style is, undeniably, physically demanding, but not one that’s much to my liking (3 decades of aesthetic distance away from most jazz influences is off-putting). But, it’s a style that suits the vocals well, which are in the excellent tradition of women like Ann Wilson, but with a huskier voice, which the suits the songs composed with sustained melodic phrases quite well. Conversely, the guitars don’t always fit within this scheme; but that’s when they work best. They deserve the benefit of doubt because the equipment wasn’t conducive to the sound they like, tailored to contrasting singer Raquel’s range. Still, it was by no means bad; the searing overtone that the guitars had probably made them fit in a bit more with the Damned. When the approach didn’t work it became the kind of catchy but generic pop-rock song that one hears on the radio. When it did work, all of the stuff I mentioned earlier made the guitars sound a bit like Greg Ginn with Greg Hetson (in the Redd Kross days) with all that off-kilter feeling that this combination would imply.
The vocal flourish that opened Punk Rock Agent made the show hit the ground running; while the chorus’ lyrics are somewhat trivial, it’s bloody catchy. Dogville (Alexis de Tocqueville?) had many trappings (or the lack thereof) of a Minor Threat song, as did Mosquitomen (though the one false start made it clear just how dangerously they were teetering towards sounding like nu-metal). Quite a few of the songs were made interesting by slightly changing time signatures (quite strongly correlated with when the guitars became more metal), of which As the Sun… was a particular standout (also, it sounded like a dissonant and extended take on the riff from the New York Dolls’ song Jet Boy (like the Captain’s/Damned’s Jet Boy Jet Girl, hey!), so well done there). The songs I had problems with were mostly the ones in which the vocals had a disproportionate role, like Give and Cure For Culture (and Punk Rock Agent to an extent). Nothing Will… sounded a bit lost between its urges to be pop or semi-lo-fi punk. But, they made the wise decision of ending with their most obviously punk and fast-paced song, with a whiplash-like riff; a great note to leave everyone on in anticipation of The Damned…
— Shashwati Kala
Our Awesome Audience…
The Damned (England 英國)
Setlist:
1. Wait For the Blackout
2. Lively Arts
3. Silly Kids Games
4. New Rose
5. I Just Can’t Be Happy Today
6. Feel the Pain
7. I Fall
8. Shadow of Love
9. Love Song
10. Thrill Kill
11. 13th Floor Vendetta
12. Neat, Neat, Neat
13. History of the World (Part 1)
14. Plan 9 Channel 7
15. Fan Club
16. Ignite
17. Anti-Pope [Encore]
18. Disco Man [Encore]
19. Eloise [Encore]
20. Smash it Up [Encore]
In all the time that I’ve been writing these (what I’m pleased to call) reviews, I’ve never had to write one like this. For starters, The Damned are heroes to generations of people, including me, so it’s very hard to avoid hagiography, or nerdily comparing whether two notes in the solo were different from some outtake version or not (okay, maybe that’s just my problem). Even more crucially, They are my standard of reference for style and quality of bands…whom can I compare them to? It’s basically just hard to say something about their music that hasn’t already been made trite (by people who’re much better writers than I, at that).
I know that there are more than a few people who didn’t come to the show on account of fear of disappointment (and after the bland Sex Pistols reunions shows and stuff, they seem to have a point). Well, first off there’s a HUGE difference; The Damned have been actively recording and touring for years now, so there’s really no question of them being rusty. Second: a little bit of research into their more recent shows would’ve dispelled any such unfounded fears. The videos from their 35th anniversary tour last year, in which they performed two full albums (“Damned Damned Damned” and “The Black Album”) in their entirety on stage, give unequivocal testament that they’re not a diminished force. Third: their lyrics haven’t dated, at all, mostly because they never chose to preen or whine in them, and neither have the aggressive-yet-fully-realised eclectic musical motifs. Combine this with their decades of being in the business and perfecting their (anti-)art, and you have to be a sucker of the fairly massive variety to have deliberately missed this show. (*Nelson Muntz laugh* Ha HA!)
The “new” people in the band are absolutely solid, especially the rhythm section of bassist Stu West and drummer Pinch (whom I’d first heard of a few years ago after I discovered his old band English Dogs, contemporaries of Charged GBH). The keyboards of Monty Oxymoron added a layer of dimension and richness to the Captain’s lone guitar; the arrangements had the admirably judicious use of keyboards that tailors songs for a live setting (in my opinion; mainly because ‘keyboards’ and ‘rock’ always make me think of Emerson, Lake and Palmer….the horror.). [Plus, he looks like Rob Tyner, and is quite the jovial spirit on stage!!] Captain Sensible was awesome as always, even though there was no breaking of guitar-necks or anything. His soaring, sinister, melodic, cheeky and all those other dichotomies that his guitar style encompasses are strong as ever, and he still looks like he’s having the time of his life on stage. Dave Vanian’s voice is startlingly well-preserved; he still sings with that paradox of sounding totally agitated yet wholly indifferent, but now with a somewhat richer voice, while prowling around the stage. The pace of the performance may be marginally slower, but the music is played at benzedrined speeds; you know how the second a truck starts whirring, you feel exactly the same way you did the last time you heard it? From start to finish, their set was like that, but in terms of impact and awesomeness (and not in my usually trivial sense of that word either).
They plunged us all headlong into the wonderful morass of sound right away with the very epic-sounding Wait For the Blackout, and continued unabated (except for the undercurrents of mocking melancholy on songs like I Just Can’t Be Happy Today or Lively Arts, for instance) for a while, with the Captain and Dave Vanian climbing on to speakers, jumping about, and generally making friends with the crowd. The whole mood on stage was one of revelling, and even more so in the crowd (if you can get a crowd here to indulge in superfluous nudity, you’ve done your job…a little Q.U.E.R.-Queer, as Billy Connolly put it.). To say it was fun to watch would be to insult the atmosphere, such was its surging joy. Before 13th Floor Vendetta, there was praise of the great Lemmy, and a request for a Jimmy Savile-style yodel (I wonder who in the crowd got that), and got things in gear again with a somewhat oriental-sounding version of their own song. A nice dose of contrast was added by the levity and sweetness of History of the World. Their first encore, Anti-Pope, was closer to the “Fiddling About Version” of it, as far as I could tell. Smash it Up was given a Bill Bailey-style faux-diddly jazz treatment, instead of the very atmospheric opening it normally has, before it, characteristically, got the crowd going with its refrain one last time (and how).
In the end, I could barely discern that it was over, such was the unflagging tempo of the show. I was completely floored, and as far as I could tell, so was everyone else there too. In the interest of ‘fairness’, I will present my litany of what niggled: they didn’t play Lovely Money, I Think I’m Wonderful or Stab Your Back. That’s it. The show left nothing wanting, and was tremendous fun. I’m glad they’re still touring and making music, ‘cause it seems that’s what they were destined to do. Thank you, come again.
— Shashwati Kala
photos © Copyright 2011 by ANGUS LEUNG
Poster by MANDRILL
