Father and son

Although it's something I shy away from, I've no issue with the 'nostalgia circuit' - the bands that tour based primarily on past glories - but I far prefer working bands. That's why I still like to go and see acts like Wire, Shriekback, and Blancmange, who have carried on making new music.

Blancmange admittedly took a long break, between 1986 and 2011, but since then Neil Arthur has been pretty prolific, and this evening he was playing at Scala with his son Joe, who makes music under the name of Kincaid.

Kincaid doesn't have much music of its own but that didn't really matter: we were treated to performances of tracks by Blancmange - 'Feel Me', 'What's The Time?', and 'I Smashed Your Phone' - as well as Kincaid's own 'Big Fat Head'. A lot of what I enjoyed was not the songs themselves, although they were great, but the processing of the sounds, which both father and son constantly manipulated, much like Elsa Hewitt who we saw on Saturday. That and how happy Neil Arthur obviously was to be on stage with his son. I've never seen him happier!

And like Saturday, tonight's main act was Creep Show. I think the sound was better, this evening, heavier and denser, and the band seemed to enjoy themselves. High points for me were the new single, 'Uneffable', and the encore when they covered Cabaret Voltaire's ''Sensoria', as they did at the weekend.

However, unlike Elsa Hewitt and Kincaid, where there was always something interesting to watch and listen to, Creep Show are aren't that great to watch live: one guy playing some electronic drums along with the sequenced beats, two guys - Stephen Malinger and John Grant - behind their laptops, and Benge tucked away on a keyboard. 

This problem with live electronic music was anticipated by Jean-Michel Jarre nearly fifty years ago, who put on light shows with his music from the outset, a solution taken up by everyone from Kraftwerk to Orbital. Other bands got 'round the problem with a great frontmen such as Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan or OMD's Andy McCluskey. But in the absence of any of that, I did find that much as I was enjoying the music, I was visually bored after twenty minutes.

****
-11.7 kgs
Reading: 'In Aleppo Once' by Taqui Altounyan