Different Strokes
Nov. 2nd, 2024 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eiffel_71Went to see They Might Be Giants at Southampton Guildhall last night with Jade. The Johns had announced that they’d be performing the whole of the Flood and Book albums. I was very much looking forward to this, as Flood was the soundtrack to my fresher year at QM. My late legendary pal Alistair, who lived on my floor in the Halls of Residence, had the album and played it day after day. I came to know those songs very well and love them - I’d bought the album too before the year was out.
The guys and their backup band appeared on stage to a mighty cheer, and played a song I wasn’t familiar with. Bear in mind that my knowledge of TMBG’s output is limited to Flood and the 1992 single The Guitar, so any songs I didn’t know were probably from Book. After their opening song they announced “We’re now going to perform Flood - completely out of order!” Sure enough they launched into a superb rendition of Particle Man.
They went on performing Flood songs interspersed with presumably Book songs, and the odd dash of witty onstage repartee. Early on they got an ovation with the comment “We don’t want to make this show political - but we hate that guy.” Still in the first half they said “Other bands perform their albums all in order. We want to do Flood as a living breathing document - like the Constitution of the United States of America.”
Women And Men was a standout, and took me right back to the night towards the end of our fresher year when Alistair held a party in his room with about a dozen of us squeezed in there. Next came a fantastic version of Your Racist Friend.
The guys announced “Talking of terrible presidents, here’s a song about our 11th president.” I hadn’t heard the song about James K. Polk before but absolutely loved it. During the interval I Googled and found the song was actually called James K. Polk.
Being They Might Be Giants, the guys had to do something unusual. They announced that they were going to perform Sapphire Bullets Of Pure Love “sonically in reverse - like what you hear when you play a tape backwards.” They explained that they’d then play a video recording of the song backwards at the start of the second half. Naturally their performance sounded odd, but it wasn’t a complete cacophony.
After the break they did play the video of their “sonically in reverse” performance backwards. To do them credit, the backward recording was a pretty good approximation to the original song.
Midway through the second half came three of my favourite tracks all in a row - We Want A Rock, Whistling In The Dark and Lucky Ball And Chain - all performed superbly, although I was sorry they ended Whistling In The Dark at the end of the main body of the song, omitting the coda, so there was no “Whistling … whistling … dark, dark, dark”. At the end of the main second half set the Theme From Flood leading into Birdhouse In Your Soul - naturally the hall exploded when that started.
There were two songs from Flood we hadn’t heard, both favourites of mine, Dead and Istanbul Not Constantinople. Those two numbers comprised the encore and didn’t disappoint.
With my tight budget this month I had to resist the temptation of the merch stall and we made our way out of the venue. It had been a magnificent gig. Jade loved it too.
The guys and their backup band appeared on stage to a mighty cheer, and played a song I wasn’t familiar with. Bear in mind that my knowledge of TMBG’s output is limited to Flood and the 1992 single The Guitar, so any songs I didn’t know were probably from Book. After their opening song they announced “We’re now going to perform Flood - completely out of order!” Sure enough they launched into a superb rendition of Particle Man.
They went on performing Flood songs interspersed with presumably Book songs, and the odd dash of witty onstage repartee. Early on they got an ovation with the comment “We don’t want to make this show political - but we hate that guy.” Still in the first half they said “Other bands perform their albums all in order. We want to do Flood as a living breathing document - like the Constitution of the United States of America.”
Women And Men was a standout, and took me right back to the night towards the end of our fresher year when Alistair held a party in his room with about a dozen of us squeezed in there. Next came a fantastic version of Your Racist Friend.
The guys announced “Talking of terrible presidents, here’s a song about our 11th president.” I hadn’t heard the song about James K. Polk before but absolutely loved it. During the interval I Googled and found the song was actually called James K. Polk.
Being They Might Be Giants, the guys had to do something unusual. They announced that they were going to perform Sapphire Bullets Of Pure Love “sonically in reverse - like what you hear when you play a tape backwards.” They explained that they’d then play a video recording of the song backwards at the start of the second half. Naturally their performance sounded odd, but it wasn’t a complete cacophony.
After the break they did play the video of their “sonically in reverse” performance backwards. To do them credit, the backward recording was a pretty good approximation to the original song.
Midway through the second half came three of my favourite tracks all in a row - We Want A Rock, Whistling In The Dark and Lucky Ball And Chain - all performed superbly, although I was sorry they ended Whistling In The Dark at the end of the main body of the song, omitting the coda, so there was no “Whistling … whistling … dark, dark, dark”. At the end of the main second half set the Theme From Flood leading into Birdhouse In Your Soul - naturally the hall exploded when that started.
There were two songs from Flood we hadn’t heard, both favourites of mine, Dead and Istanbul Not Constantinople. Those two numbers comprised the encore and didn’t disappoint.
With my tight budget this month I had to resist the temptation of the merch stall and we made our way out of the venue. It had been a magnificent gig. Jade loved it too.
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Date: 2024-11-03 09:43 am (UTC)