THE TEARS – London Heaven 16 December 2004


Ten years go,we were here also. Brett Anderson, on the stage of the inapropriately named Heaven, with a new guitarist, and a clutch of new-born songs written with Bernard Butler, armed with a passion to take over the world.

And now, here we are again, the massive weight of expectation, as the most potent songwriting partnership of the past twenty years - barring Morrissey/Marr – returns for the first time in a decade in probably the most unlikely reunion in music.

Firstly, whomever chose Heaven as a suitable venue needs to have their head examined : the venue is anything but, being a cavernous, squashed box rammed to capacity where you either stand stock still for hours desperate for a drink and the toilet, or you peep through cramped sightlines to maybe catch of glimpse of someone on stage. Secondly, and perhaps partly inspired by the recent onstage murder of someone from Pantera, the venue is paranoid : bags are strip-searched and metal detectors rape your skin, and you feel like a terrorist trying to smuggle bomb out of Oklahoma airport.

But it’s all about the music at the end of the day : and what do you get? Firstly, The Subways, being akin to one of the multitude of faux-NY-garage bands that seem to be infecting the world like a rash. Though unlike certain others I could mention, and yes, The Killers, I’m looking in your uninspired direction, The Subways are good. It might not be your type of thing, but there’s no doubt that The Subways, like the Pistols, they mean it maaaaaaaan, and there’s more passion, more life, more guts and glory than in a thousand Strokes shows.

But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to see the debut London performance by a new band, even though they plainly aren’t new, in any way shape or form : what other ‘new’ band sells out it’s debut London show (and only it’s second show ever) to 1,000 people in fifteen minutes when it hasn’t released a record?

Expectation weighs heavy, but when you’re dealing with Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler, former Suede colleagues, as well as being behind a multitude of other stuff since their split, we’re not just talking Tweeldedum and Tweedledee. We’re talking the songwriting duo behind one of only four albums recorded in the Nineties to make The Guardians “Top 100 Albums Of All Time List”.

So what do you expect? If you expect nothing, that’s exactly what you get. What do I expect? Well, I expect something more than this : at best, a mixture of Andersons windswept, aspirant romanticism and Butler’s vast, sweeping epics that have characterised his solo albums : at worst the kind of lazy songwriting that characterised the odd Suede b-side and the type of midpaced, monotone minor-key stuff that dulled the senses about three-quarters of the way through the solo records. What do I get?

You get songs that bear no relation to anything you’ve heard before. The opener is a manifesto setting “Brave New Century”, but there’s little brave about it. Like too many of the songs tonight, it’s a fairly standard, mid-paced, unexceptional song. Like the vast majority of the rest of the set, it’s an OK song.

I want more than OK. I want nothing less than brilliance.

The problem is that there’s nothing here, not one song that grabs you by the throat with brilliance and genius. Not one song that makes you stand up and remember why you loved this band so much . There are moments, flashes of brilliance : <>“Refugees”, which shares a title (and possibly much more) with a song Suede played live once in 2000, is redeemed by a classic 4 bar solo that instantly evokes the spirit of glories past, but that’s about it. “Two Creatures” sounds like “You Do”, but squashed and flattened ; shorn of ambition and aspiration. There’s far too many unremarkable midpaced ballads that pass forgettably in the night.

Is this the new fruit of the most potent songwriting partnership of the nineties? Times change, people change, but should ambitions change? Should we blindly adore this simply because it’s Those Two? Or should we look beyond to judge it on what we heard?

Whilst it’s an undoubted joy to see Anderson and Butler on stage again and for hatchets to be buried, this new found sense of harmony has smoothed out the rough edges of their music : the constant sense of potential implosion that always hung over the early shows has disappeared, and with it, the sense of thrilling tension is also absent. It’s almost too happy : and we all know tortured artists are more interesting, right kids?

I came here not to damn, but to praise. Of the new songs, only three lift themselves beyond the quagmire of identikit Butler riffs and uninspiring melodies. “Ghosts Of You” is a beautiful shimmering thing that recalls the things that only the best pop music does : mean something. “Apollo 13”, thematically the typical starcrossed-lovers-until-death-and-then-a-bit-longer widescreen epic of the set is fabulous (think “Sleeping Pills”, but about a hundred times better), and finally “We Are The Lovers”, which is at long last a song that could, potentially, become an instant classic : the type of song that, like all good pop music, instantly tattooes itself on the inside of your brain. It’s also the only song that evokes the spirit of why we fell in love with Suede in the first place : the idscreen, ambitious romance of perverted pop. These three gems aside, most of the set flies by in an uninterrupted strata of flattened, reheated ideas.

Maybe the songs need time to grow, to become familiar. Maybe they need to be written or re-written. But on the evidence of tonight : The Tears are nothing special. Were it not for their prior history, nobody would cling this band to their chest as The Great New Hopes Of 2005. The Tears may be a new band, but they’re not doing anything new.

Now is not the time for The Tears.

Labels: gig reviews

- posted by Mark @ 8:50 pm