MUSIC | Previews 82 THE LIST 17 Oct–14 Nov 2013
]ARENA SYNTH-ROCK DEPECHE MODE The Hydro, Glasgow, Mon 11 Nov
According to their label EMI, Essex-boy stadium synth originators Depeche Mode have sold over 100 million records around the world in their lifetime together as a band. Since the millennium, they’ve enjoyed nine top 20 UK singles and four top 10 albums, the latter as recently as this year’s Delta Machine. The legend that is now attaching itself to them is that this makes them the most successful electronic group in history. Where once upon a time that would have been a mark of resounding futurism, in 2013 it already sounds a somewhat dated claim to fame. After all, what music in the top 40 these days isn’t electronic in some form or other? Of course, at the point of their formation in 1980, following
various school-band experiments between the various members, there was very little like them – and this despite the debt they already owed to earlier overground electronic pioneers Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and despite the fact that Vince Clarke’s (later of Yazoo and Erasure) songwriting guidance lent them a distinctly commercial edge, enough to turn ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ into a big hit at the time and an enduring school reunion favourite from the era.
Yet while Clarke’s departure in 1981 saw them through the rest of the 80s as a significant cult band (the transatlantic success of ‘People Are People’ and ‘Master and Servant’ in ’84 aside), the progressive darkening of tone lent by Martin Gore’s songwriting and Dave Gahan’s increasingly turbulent relationship with drugs cultivated 1990’s Flood-produced Violator, home to ‘Personal Jesus’ and ‘Enjoy the Silence’, and the reason their name is known around the world today. To many who go to see them here, these songs will remain some of the only ones they’re hopeful of hearing, but the fact that their peak period stands out from a far obscures the band’s more recent successes. (David Pollock)
POETIC POST-PUNK NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS Barrowlands, Glasgow, Thu 31 Oct; Usher Hall, Edinburgh, Fri 1 Nov
The Barrowlands and the Usher Hall – how many other artists could play both venues on consecutive nights and look equally at home in each? Dark Lords of both the grubby and the grand, Nick Cave and his cohort of mean-looking backing musicians the Bad Seeds are a poetic post-punk institution of singularly elegant poise, as reaffirmed by their beguiling latest album Push the Sky Away. It’s maybe the most stripped-down, discomfortingly intimate Cave album since 1997’s illustrious
The Boatman’s Call – an atmospheric swirl of restrained menace, whirring loops, cool organs, slithering strings and tumbling drums, awash with mythical lyrical allusions to the Australian’s adopted home of Brighton – making it sound like some kind of frontier town where lost souls go to be extinguished or saved. And awash with sex. Lots of sex. If you thought Cave got all that out of his system with his horny garage-rock side-project
Grinderman (signature song: ‘No Pussy Blues’), sample the very memorable opening line of ‘Mermaids’: ‘I was the match that would,’ ahem, ‘fire up her snatch’. Think something akin to the sound of Leonard Cohen with a massive erection and you’re close. It’s a song collection that will sit fascinatingly among the epic vastness of the Cave and the Bad Seeds canon, between tormented, scuzzy blues laments to the heavens and down-at-heel torch songs of the most stirring kind. Whether experienced in the gloomy intensity of the Barrowlands or the ornate splendour of the Usher Hall, it’ll be appropriately special. (Malcolm Jack)
SONIC ARTS/TECHNOLOGY FESTIVAL SONICA 2013 Various venues, Glasgow, Thu 31 Oct–Sun 3 Nov
Even knowing that mosquitoes have sex lives is possibly too much information. But what they do is quite amazing. Both male and female mosquitoes need to be able to sing in tune with each other, and when they do, mid-flight copulation is what it’s all about. ‘They get sexy and tune in before having a little fun,’ says Cathie Boyd, one of Sonica 2013’s three curators. What has that got to do with music? Well, this year’s Sonica in Glasgow presents the UK premiere of Truce, described as ‘an interactive sound installation exploring a mosquito’s natural synchronisation behaviour highlighting the musical interactions between insect and computer’. For Boyd, also artistic director of art producers Cryptic, Sonica gives ‘an opportunity to
showcase some of the most exciting sonic art in the world’. Elsewhere in the event, Picture Window returns after being part of the 2012 event. Based in Glasgow, it is an ongoing public art project that puts unexpected contemporary art practices into unused shop fronts. Artist in residence is Australian composer Michaela Davis, who uses live percussion and MIDI scores to control performers’ motor function through electronic muscle stimulation. Key to Sonica’s success, Boyd feels, is the city that hosts it: ‘There’s a huge audience in Glasgow, and a lot of what is fantastic about the city is that it takes risks.’ (Carol Main) ■ Truce, CCA, Glasgow, Thu 31 Oct–Sat 2 Nov. See Sonica listings in Classical Music, page 102, Visual Art, page 113 and Theatre, page 108. For full listings, see list.co.uk
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