HW: All the Christmas Parties No. 2: HW at Walthamstow

[Eric Siegerman]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 12:29:42AM +0000, Jon Jarrett wrote:
>         [Litmus], well, they're really quite good aren't they.

To me they seemed, um, mostly very loud -- and that was with my
25-dB plugs in.

> [...] it's like there was a bunch of
> punks who got so bored with both punk and all this modern heavy metal
> everyone wanted them to play that they stopped for a bit,

Ah, well that's it then.  I never was much into either, having
come to HW via prog and Kraftwerk, and via synthy classical
renditions by Walter/Wendy Carlos and imitators thereof.

> [HW's] sound was OK for once,
> but there was one spot stage right that shone right in my eyes for most of
> the set and did cause me some synesthesic can't-hear-properly
> problems. Bah.

Ummmm ... I think that actually was my fault :-(

If I recall, it was originally aimed above peoples' heads, to
shine oil projections on the back wall and ceiling.  But for
Lighthouse I wobbled a prism around in front of the lens to make
bits of oil projection dance all around the room.  Very cool
effect ... but to see what I was doing I had to turn away from
the projector, and so to keep the prism aligned properly I leaned
a finger *very lightly* on top of the lens just for the tactile
feedback ... but the projector was so heavy that my little finger
was enough to make it kind of sag down in its mounting, so that
it shone right in peoples' eyes once I took the prism away.  I
tried to re-aim the thing afterward, but it was too heavy for me
to do that during the set without potentially making the
situation even worse, so I had to leave it.

Sorry, Jon and everyone else up there!

(In case you're curious about the device that caused your pain,
you can see a blurb for it here --
http://www.optikinetics.com/project2A.html -- it's the K4.)

> Anyway. First thing that must be said is Dave played
> guitar. Lots of it. It sounded damn good. I was happy just with that.

:-)

> Arthur Brown was very himself, but the band don't really know what to do
> witgh him any more than they do with Blake sometimes. The songs don't
> *need* a man with a three-octave range singing them, they were never
> designed for that sort of voice and he doesn't have anything much he can
> do with them.

Musically perhaps, though I thought he found his way into the
material as the tour progressed.  But for stage presence, sheer
front-man-ness, I like him.

I agree about his talent; he can do that Ian-Gillan wail far
better than Gillan himself can these days.  Damn I'd love to hear
him sing Highway Star!

> I think having neither Simon nor Huw to do
> lead brings him out of his shell, or stops him being able to retreat into
> it. If I didn't love them so much I'd wish they never come back.

Well said.

There were persistent rumours that Simon would put in an
appearance, so I was eagerly awaiting Spiral Galaxy, but it was
not to be.

>         Arthur Brown returned for `Time Captives', which wa sprobably
> quite good from the floor where Brown standing on an amp to give a
> something like nine-foot height to solemly declaim from would have made
> the whole thing very haunting.

That climbing-on-the-equipment thing started part way through the
tour.  Northampton, wasn't it?  Can anyone else recall?  The
first time, it looked like impromptu silliness, complete with
grabbing onto one of the venue's disco-lights for balance.  I
guess they all decided it worked, though, because it became part
of the act after that.

> From above it all though I was rather bored
> with it. The lyrics were lame; I was expecting better by Arthur Brown, and
> it has no progression either lyrically or musically.

Agreed.  The song left me rather cold.

>         Then, `Master of the Universe', and well, I've seen better. Arthur
> Brown did seem to be, if not remembering the words, at least singing words
> of his own he was prepared to remember,

Yeah, there was a fair amount of that throughout the tour.  He
never made it off-book for Sonic Attack.

But there was the one night he flubbed a line of Aerospaceage
Inferno -- made the natural mistake of singing "set the controls
for the heart of the sun" -- and then on the spot improvised two
more lines to rhyme with it!  I remain in absolute awe of that.

> `Hurry
> on Sundown'. All well and good, little you can do wrong but I'm bored of
> it now, sorry.

I'm not; I'm still thrilled to be hearing it live.  What more can
I say?

> Not as good however as
> `The Watcher' where Dave again put foot to the floor and let rip.

Oh yeah!

>         `Assassins' is never bad but it's predictable and we had to come
> down somehow. We did so in the techno mid-break

On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 02:20:05PM +0000, M Holmes wrote:
> The night before, in Brighton, they extended this techno riff and it
> really came alive. If they produced an album of that quality then it'd
> be what Electric Teepee should have been.

That break actually had two parts.  First the "Space is Their
(Palestine)" part (though this year that riff just wafted through
like the merest hint of nargileh smoke on the breeze), and then
...  something else.  It started off as a short bridge between
the SiT(P) break and the end of Assassins proper, but as the tour
progressed, that something-else got longer and hotter, until by
Brighton and W'stow they were just cooking!, and that segment had
become pretty much my favourite part of the set.

So, I'm sure I'll be really embarrassed when someone tells me,
but I gotta ask anyway ...  What the $!,)~ *was* it?

Jon again:
>         I confess I don't really remember `You Shouldn't Do That'.

It rocked.  Hard.

> The encore `Somic
> Attack' left me a little underwhelmed; too drawn out, and they did insist
> on playing `Spacebrock' under it, which doesn't fit with any rhythm you
> can give the lyrics at all.

Agreed.  On the other hand, it was cool hearing it live.  On the
other hand, for me The One True Version is the one on Space
Ritual; all others are pale imitations (Zones included, sorry).
On the other hand, in Liverpool I had a moment of sheer
strobe-light bliss during Sonic Attack -- one of those silly
spur-of-the-moment ideas that worked out about three times as
well as I'd imagined -- so I can't really complain.

> So we got two songs at once which
> would both have been fine separately.

Well, once Spacebrock got going I think I pretty much ignored the
rest of the Sonic Attack part :-)

> But they followed it with `Silver
> Machine' and that was lots of fun.

Now here's one I can take or leave.  All week it just felt wrong
that it *didn't* explode a few bars in :-)

...

There's supposed to be a conclusion here.  Can't think of one.
Oh well.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
Just Say No to the "faceless cannonfodder" stereotype.
        - http://www.ainurin.net/ (an Orc site)