It is difficult to know what to say about this gig. After all, the Mondays themselves, or what is left of them, which in essence means Shaun and Bez, are riddled with contradiction, enigma and puzzle.
Take Bez. On the credits for Pills Thrills and Bellyaches, after the usual vocals, guitars keyboards etc, is listed “Bez – Bez”. So the Bez that now appears before us, working up the crowd, jigging laterally from one side of the stage to the other like a demented Space Invader, or doing his trademark bent over shuffle, is it the real Bez that was, or is he now just playing Bez, or was he always just playing Bez?
Bez
And Shaun, demented genius. We demand of him that he is permanently fucked. Anything other than a Shaun who is smacked off his skull and incapable of standing, let alone “singing” (or what approximates for it in the Ryder universe) for more than ten minutes, as in the legendary debacles at the height of Madchester, leaves us feeling bereft of the real thing. We want to pay £30 to see a band that are too fucked to play. That they manage to play for close on an hour and a quarter is wrong. That the audience politely observe the no smoking ban is wrong, let alone the almost total absence of the sweet grating smoke of a forest fire of weed.
the ghost of the memory of Shaun Ryder
Yet it doesn’t feel like simulation either, nor pantomime. The band are loud, and get pretty close to the demented concoctions of the classic works. Rowetta is dynamite; her voice has grown more powerful, richer and deeper over the years. Without her the show would descend into farce, she covers for Shaun, she belts her lungs out, and it sounds, for the most, part tuneful, soulful even.
Shaun remains barely there, a black hole in the centre of the stage, dressed in black, with a black hat at a jaunty angle, black shades. Often we only know he’s there because of the shadow he casts over the back lit stage.
Bez plays the Bez as only Bez can, a crazed Figure from the Commedia dell'arte, the Mancunian Marcel Marceu.
Bez as Pierrot
The crowd are full of southerners pretending to be Mancs, civil servants and librarians pretending that they are on E, everyone fancies themselves as some dodgy geezer.
I write a review pretending to be Paul Morley, arch observer of Mancuian inflected pop culture.
What can never be denied or forgotten is that out of all this came something incredible, an album, Pills, Thrill and Bellyaches, of such wonder, of such extraordinary beauty. And ultimately this is a celebration – of how amazing those tunes were, of how amazing it is that Shaun is still alive and now solvent and maybe straight, that Bez won Celebrity Big Brother, that Tony Wilson was actually right about something, namely Shaun’s genius. Shaun's most celebrated line, from Kinky Afro, opens the show, everyone in the crowd singing along: “son, I was thirty, I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty”. Thereafter people don’t know and can’t hear, but it doesn’t matter.
Another thing about the Mondays, despite all the obvious associations, with Manchester, with Factory, with flirting with physical, mental, and financial disaster, is that they never played the tortured artist, never blamed anyone, never asked for sympathy, They just accepted what life threw at them and lit another spliff. And another. Maybe it is this attitude, so in contrast to the angular jutting attitude of a Gallagher or a Brown or the manic jerkiness of a Curtis, is why people love them so, why we want them survive, why we celebrate their survival.
No comments:
Post a Comment