London
8 November 2023
Last time I saw Laibach, it was here in this very theatre, and after a set comprising both the entirety of The Sound Of Music (as previously performed in North Korea) and a slew of “greatest hits”, they’d confounded everyone by having Milan Fras come on in a big white cowboy hat (worn ON TOP of the iconic hat with earflaps that makes him instantly recognisable, even as a lo-fi videogame character — of which more later) and sing “Love Is Still Alive”, a jaunty little country and western ditty that made a fleeting appearance in the Dinosaur-Riding-Hitler-In-The-Hollow-Earth epic Iron Sky 2: The Coming Race. And now they’re back, and that’s the song they’re touring.
But, as always with Laibach, there’s a LOT more to it than that. Marina Mårtensson begins by strumming out the melody on an acoustic guitar surrounded by the rest of the band before Milan himself takes the stage, dressed all in white and, yes, OBVIOUSLY wearing that hat (did I mention the hat got its own ovation last time?).
A title card has told us that this is their Post-Apocalyptic set, which basically consists of playing “Love Is Still Alive” — the whole record. Which, for the uninitiated, is an eight-track EP which takes the song, Gustav Holst-like, on a trip through our solar system, mutating and adapting it to each different planet. And as far as I know, it’s astronomically accurate, too, because from what I hear they really DO fucking love krautrock on Venus. This is a blissed-out, pilled-up Laibach, and for the first forty minutes it’s alarmingly (and wonderfully) reminiscent of a Club Dog event in the ’90s. See, the thing is, you never really know what you’re gonna get with Laibach. You just know it’s gonna be intense, even if it does start off with an 8-bit Milan in a side-scroller collecting hearts from the back of a tiny spaceship.The other thing about Laibach that always remains true, however, is that they’re the most confounding band on Earth (or indeed in space). Just when you’ve got a handle on what they’re doing, they pull the rug out from under you. And under that rug is another, equally baffling rug. And if you start pulling on any of the threads in that rug, well … I hope you don’t have anything planned. You’ll be there for a while.
So after a loved-up kosmische set and some light joshing with the title cards (“We’ll be back”, later to be followed by “We may be back” prior to the encore and “We won’t be back” at the end) we enter their War set. And this is where things get scary. Starting with “Das Nachtlied” from 2017’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, we get Laibach at their most martial and totalitarian. From REALLY deep cuts like “Smrt Za Smrt” and “Ti, Ki Izzivas” to more recent tracks from Music From The Red District, this is more marching music than dancing music, though thanks to the miracle of late-twentieth century industrial rock, the borders between the two have become … let’s say “disputed”. Images of hammers abound, reminiscent of Gerald Scarfe‘s work on Pink Floyd‘s The Wall, only this is a far more monochromatic affair. This is why people are afraid of Laibach, and this is what Slavoj Žižek, in his 1993 essay “Why Are Laibach And NSK Not Fascists?”, meant by a strategy that “frustrates the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation, but overidentification with it — by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, overidentification suspends its efficiency”. And, as such displays are specifically and explicitly designed to be, it’s exhilarating as all hell, even when it’s asking you way more questions than is strictly speaking fair on a Wednesday night. Because Laibach, like David Lynch, are not in the business of giving you answers.And then it’s the third set / encore, titled Repent, which is, I guess, what you’d call a “pop” set, though remember this is still Laibach we’re talking about. Most bands evolve or die — Laibach accrete, plundering the history of music and culture for things to add to their empire of benign musical dictatorship.
See, all of this sounds great on paper, but you need two things to make it actually work in real life. First, you need the musical chops to carry off that kind of many-layered eclecticism, and Laibach definitely have those. And secondly? As the other great media manipulator of our age, Dr Chuck Tingle, has proved, you need sincerity to carry that much irony without just coming across as a dick. And Laibach ooze sincerity from every pore, even while laughing at it.
Well, that’s obvious. Love, of course.
See what I mean about pulling threads?
-Words: Justin Farrington-
-Pictures: Dave Pettit-
