Suicide - Camden Electric Ballroom - 24/1/05
3/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Ever been to something expecting nothing in particular and still felt like what you just experienced was completely out of the blue? Suicide were heavier than we could have guessed, but it wasn't a complete surprise that they were particularly, well, heavy. They were older than expected, but hey, we knew they weren't exactly spring chickens. Given the venue isn't exactly packed, they were better received than initially thought likely, but then again they have been in part responsible for the sound of most dark electronic music since their early Seventies inception (Primal Scream and Death in Vegas to name but two would sound very, very different if this duo hadn't have paved the way) - so it's understandable if not predictable that the small numbers are so vocal. But none of these quite convey the true reason for the surprise. Dark, brooding, sinister electronica? Hell, no. This was more like a bloody rave.
Notoriously bottled off at more or less every show they played when they started up, tonight couldn't be more different. The reception is near rapturous, everything from kids going nuts at the front and ageing rockers in the balcony getting entirely entranced by it to Bobby Gillespie not being able to wipe the smile off his face about mid-way back. Maybe it's going over our heads. But you'd find it hard to convincingly argue against someone thinking this was just two ageing guys, dressed ridiculously and looking (we emphasise looking) wasted, playing pre-programmed and very basic dance music.
Where Suicide used to set trends, now they don't even follow them - they're completely removed from the fabric of space and time as far as music is concerned. Bits of it, if it wasn't so incessantly heavy, wouldn't have sounded out of place on 'Top of the Pops' in the early 90s. Martin Rev, chief song-smith, presses buttons to set off mutated backing-tracks of Suicide classics covering an entire career, and then, using the same synthesiser setting for each song, smacks the keyboard at seemingly random intervals. He loves it. He ends songs by running his hands up and down the keys and then repeatedly thumps each end of the keyboard with his fists. That's every song.
The sound at times completely takes away from whatever song is actually being played - the two often being completely exclusive. He's a very entertaining figure to watch, but not as much so as singer Alan Vega, part-'Easy Rider', part-Elvis, more than part-punk rock, he struts around as if on a mission to destroy everything. Except there's only his mate's synth on stage, and Rev's busy kicking the shit out of that as it is. All that's left is for Vega to preach to us - and his voice is the one beautiful thing here. Gone are the eerily haunting screams (admittedly, the second encore of the usually terrifying 'Frankie Teardrop' isn't the same without them), but there's still a fascinating timbre to his voice that's strikingly, worryingly commanding.
There are different songs here, in fact we recognise some as complete classics - 'Ghost Rider', 'Cheree', 'Keep Your Dreams', but sadly the queer, pre-programmed backing tracks make them sound almost identical. If it wasn't for Vega's impassioned ranting of the titles it would be very difficult to make out one track of alarmingly weighty bass thumps from another. Everything about it, however, has been delivered with nothing less than rabid fervour. It's incredibly difficult to take your eyes off. We leave utterly confused.
Perhaps stupidly, we come home and put on a live bootleg from 1978. Of course they're going to sound better when they're young and sprightly, but compared to tonight, those early creepy synths and agonised, echoed screams sound positively futuristic. But to their credit, Suicide do put absolutely everything they presently have into tonight's show. You don't think for one minute they're holding back, but now their wild abandon is for the sake of their own personal enjoyment rather than having something to prove, their status as legends duly cemented enough that one weird performance on a dingy Camden night in 2005 won't damage it. It's been highly, if entirely perversely enjoyable. But somehow you get the feeling they were better, and more gripping, when getting bottled off.
Artists in this article: Suicide
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