My experience of the Orbital / Plaid show (I saw them in Cambridge) was
somewhere between the two views - awesome / boring - expressed on this list
so far.
Plaid sounded like they could've been great, but as Mark found, there was
just too much bass and percussion drowning out the melodies.
Orbital were good, but I didn't get into it nearly as much as when I saw
them on the last tour. I guess it was good that they played the new suff,
and it did sound like quite strong material. I get pretty impatient when
acts just play their greatest hits every tour. But to me it was a shame that
so much of the show was from the new album which nobody's heard yet. If only
they'd found time in the set for The Girl with the Sun in Her Head, or Lush.
And that Belinda Carlisle / Bon Jovi thing is getting pretty tired now. All
in all though it was a good night out, certainly worth the price of entry.
Paddy
np: Jedi's Night Out
quoted 79 lines Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 02:49:47 GMT
>
> Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 02:49:47 GMT
> From: mark@sonance.demon.co.uk (Mark Stevens)
> Subject: (idm) Orbital and Plaid (live)
>
> Hello.
>
> Orbital & Plaid
> Brixton Academy, London, UK
> Saturday, 27th March 1999
>
> Plaid wandered on stage just after 20:30, when the venue was only half
> full. I'd already been there over an hour and I'd already sussed that
> this wasn't really an IDM crowd, so about 70% of the audience just
> carried on chatting and guzzling beer throughout their forty minute
> set. The remaining 30% seemed to be "in the know" and cheered at all
> the recognisable tunes.
>
> Well, perhaps "tune" singular. The only track I recognised was a
> heavily modified 'Scoobs'. They didn't play one single cut from 'Not
> For Threes', 'Android', 'Undoneson' or 'Peel Session'. I haven't heard
> much of 'Mbuki', so I don't know if they played anything from there.
>
> Despite that most of the tracks were probably new, the style was very
> much like their Bytes-era Black Dog stuff -- in fact I swear I heard a
> few snippets of old Black Dog tracks in there. Lots of analogue
> mayhem, pulsing basslines and punchy rhythms. I think the engineers at
> the venue were giving the bass a bit too much bias, because I could
> just about hear a few melodies straining to be heard in the mix above
> the head-spinning bass.
>
> Overall, a solid performance, but nothing outstanding. The highlight
> was definitely the final track of their set, a really energetic
> acid-techno work out with squawking basses, 808/909 percussion and
> lots of raw analogue drones and meldoies.
>
> The Hartnoll brothers arrived on stage just after 21:30, to deafening
> cheers. Gone were the trademark 'torch goggles'... in their place were
> fucking huge (and powerful) car headlamp goggles! Phil Hartnoll's
> beams were piercing right through the smoke and hitting the back walls
> of the Academy.
>
> To sum up their set in two words -- fucking awesome. They were on
> stage for two hours (yep, two!) and played all of the new 'Middle of
> Nowhere' album, spinning in various classics (Chime, Satan, Halycon,
> Impact and The Box) along the way.
>
> If the crowd were a bit nonchalant during Plaid's set, then they
> underwent a complete change once Orbital arrived. Now, at most gigs of
> this sort, you tend to get the dancing types right down the front,
> whilst the beard-stroking sit-down types sit at the back. Not so with
> this crowd. Every single person in the building was jumping around
> like crazy. I've never seen anything like it. I had an excellent
> vantage point -- a clear view of the stage (including the excellent
> projected visuals) and the mass of people. *NO-ONE* was standing
> still.
>
> What was also amazing that people were mostly getting off on the new
> material. Again, at your average gig it's the new material that stops
> everyone in their tracks, but the new tracks went down a storm. And
> with good reason too -- they were amazing. I sincerely hope they're a
> good representation of the album's feel, because it means we'll get
> the pace and energy of 'Brown', the sophistication of 'Snivilisation',
> the production trickery of 'In Sides' and the huge fun factor of
> 'Green'. Don't worry if you were a bit disappointed with 'Style' --
> the other tracks will knock you for six.
>
> It's hard to pick out individual highlights. As far as the old stuff's
> concerned -- the new version of 'Impact (The Earth is Burning)' was
> amazing; snippets of Belinda Carlisle and Bon Jovi were effortlessly
> woven into 'Halcyon'; their reworking of the Doctor Who theme was
> fall-down funny (and much better than KLF's). As for the new stuff,
> well it was all excellent.
>
> I only wish I'd booked another set of tickets for the extra Brixton
> show on Sunday. Ah well, only two months to go until Lamb (drool).
>
>
> - --