Re: Patti - Meltdown - 17 June 2005

[Andrew F Wilson <andrewfwilson>]

Muffled sounds of the Seventies
By Keith Shadwick
Meltdown Festival: Carbon/Silicon & Rachid Taha, Royal Festival Hall, London 
The Independent, 21 June 2005

It's a clichi that history repeats itself. Sometimes history seems
condemned to repeat itself in clichis. Patti Smith's Meltdown series
at the South Bank completed its first week's worth of concerts with a
curiously backward-looking pairing of painfully hip acts.

Mick Jones's Carbon/Silicon, a guitar-driven quartet dressed in the
mandatory middle-aged rockers' dark suits and open-necked shirts, were
introduced by Patti Smith and wasted no time in establishing what
could best be described as a T.Rex boogie groove.

Apart from the fact that the band weren't wearing glitter and Mick
Jones's lyrics weren't about Jaguars (well, they probably weren't -
the sound system was so awful not a single sung word was
decipherable), everything else fitted into that 1972 Bolan Boogie
time-warp. In fact, Jones's first two guitar solos, spare and laconic
as the man himself, could have been lifted direct from Electric
Warrior. But somewhere along the line, Jones jettisoned the concept of
melodic lines for his vocals. Given that the sound was so bad you were
left trying to hang on to the thread a melody brings to give the
performance some sort of continuity and defining shape, it all became
sadly unravelled. Still, Jones and his crew were enjoying themselves,
even though the band sounded as well mixed as a Bay City Rollers
wardrobe.

It seemed that things must get better with Rachid Taha. Well, if
Carbon/Silicon were T.Rex, Taha was Gary Glitter. His band were a
septet - drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, bouzouki, percussion and
himself as vocalist and front man - but only the drummer, bass-player
and Taha himself need have bothered to turn up in terms of audible
sound, for the rest was smothered, apart from the occasional stab of
scuzzy rhythm guitar. The bass was at least twice as loud as
everything else, apart from the bass drum, which was probably three
times as loud as the bass.

Taha's vocals floated in and out of this mjlie. Well, if it was a
night for rhythm (and the crowd certainly thought so, for within a
couple of numbers they were up and jerking away down the front and in
the aisles), then it was good that we had something to look at while
we sat waiting for something to happen in the music.

Like Gary, Taha didn't disappoint his fans: he, his bass-player and
his guitarist were all in black leather trousers (the guitarist, a
Brian May lookalike, had what looked like patent leather trousers and
a shiny blue guitar), and Rachid himself swapped between black shades,
sitting on a bar stool, posing with a variety of cigarettes lit for
him by a stage hand, dousing himself with mineral water, and gobbing
spouts of it on the stage to show how exhausted he was. Not quite
James Brown, but then that's another era again.

Speaking of eras, I'm not sure which one the diminutive keyboardist
came from - he was in a fire-engine-red boiler suit and jumped around
like it was a little too hot for comfort.

Anyway, whatever else this band were, they were seasoned pros, just
like Gary Glitter's were back in the early 1970s, when their
back-to-basics trip-shuffle boogie held whole arenas enthralled. As
Taha and his band built to their thunderous set-ending and the crowd
swayed in Ibiza-like ecstasy, it became a ritual Dionysian curve to
the inevitable climax and release that stretched back way beyond early
1970s to Elvis and beyond.

So, there you go - the cutting edge of a bygone era comes back to cut
you up all over again, in another guise and with a different set of
faces. History repeats its own clichis.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=648599&host=5&dir=230