The Underworld, London
5th November 1999
Back at The Underworld for the second time in six months, follwowing on from an absence from their founders’ homeland of six years, The Legendary Pink Dots bring home their unique format of intense live musical performance at the tail end of yet another whirlwind European tour organised due to public demand. Tonight there’s no support, just two hours of the finest Dots songs, honed and polished to perfection.
With old friend Martijn de Kleer back on guitar and sharing drums with Ryan Moore (who also sometimes plays bass simultaneously), and The Silverman intent in his electronic grotto, the Dots get into gear as Edward Ka-Spel arrives barefoot and canary-yellow-coated. As the show kicks off, it rapidly develops into an event replete with its own incandescent contributions to Firework Night, including the irrisistably funky groove of the cynically post-apocalyptic “As Long As It’s Purple And Green” and their boomingly paranoiac classic “Disturbance”. The band’s closest record to a hit single, “Princess Coldheart” is a marvellously moving, enchanted mix of brightly textured reeds and pipes from Nils van Hoornblower (who thrills the front row with his up-close, gleefully thunderous tenor saxes, and who goes walkabout with eyeline headlights), but with Ka-Spel’s chilling post-fairytale vocals, the spine-tingling is both from pleasure and discomfort at the less seemly aspect of human relationships. Likewise, when he mesmerises the crowd during the rolling thunder of “Premonition 13”, the charismatic hold he develops becomes sublimely, disturbingly intense, with one woman drawn on stage thrown into excited awe as Ka-Spel writhes on the floor, seizing total control of the venue as the band produce some of the most stunning music on the planet.
Specially for the 5th November (the half-disturbing night when Britain marks a Seventeenth-Century attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament with fireworks and the burning of symbolic traitors on bonfires), the Dots re-interpret the cycling music-box groove of “Nine Shades To The Circle” with Ka-Spel’s intention to re-ignite history with a match displaced by the sad face of the clockface of Big Ben. Ka-Spel is a master of these surreal, dreaming parables, and once again the effect is simultaneously humorous and uncanny. However, the more optimistic side of the bands output is well represented by the gently lolloping dubscape of “Close Your Eyes, You Can Be A Space Captain” with its imploring message “You can be anything you want to be!”.
There’s also the spaced-out otherworldy prison drama “Zoo” for a truly alienated, Scheckley-esque anguished buzz, or the soaringly sad “Fate’s Faithful Punchline” with its demand for a noble death, but as ever “Andromeda” is almost overpowering in its intensity, its suite-arrangement making for one of the ultimate chord-frenzied, space-trip mindrushes ever to bliss out a crowd. Cruelly ignored by many, but once heard and witnessed live the Dots are quite deserving of their ability to win lifelong converts to their multi-layered blend of genre-defying music on the basis of their utterly mesmerising sound.
-Antron S. Meister-
