The Hoxton area of Shoreditch is a strange place for gigs by bands with general appeal. Specialist acts bring specialist crowds who know what they're going to get, but any like Music Go Music – whose records show a huge pop sensibility – will attract a fair few curious local scenesters, which sadly in Shoreditch means a load of drunk posh twits and Peaches Geldof clones falling over themselves to photograph one another every three seconds and show how fabulously bored they are with everything. These were out in force last night and it didn't, frankly, set up a celebratory atmosphere for the Californian band's show.
It didn't get much better as we waited for the band either, as someone (the soundman? The band themselves? Surely not a professional DJ!) blasted out some of the worst music ever created by human hand. It was like a contest to find the most un-pop genre possible - industrial goth techno, prog-metal, funk-metal: all blared from the soundsystem at ear-splitting level, yet somehow managing to sound muffled and indistinct too.
And when the band took the stage, thankfully on time, they didn't cheer us hugely either. Keyboardist Kamer Maza began playing a twinkling take on Grieg's “Hall of the Mountain King" theme, but was then joined by guitarist Torg and a bassist who appeared to have escaped from Lynyrd Skynyrd in the early 1970s, who struck up the same theme in heads-down hard rock style. It was all a bit grim for those of us who were expecting the lush arrangements and Abba-like melodies of Music Go Music's debut album Expressions.
Even when singer Gala Bell joined them on stage, fantastically elegant-looking with Greek godess hair, the rocking out continued. The pop songs of Expressions were there, but Bell's voice struggled to be heard over the volume of the band; it was like listening to Blondie with Debbie Harry trying to sing from inside a hessian sack. It wasn't until several songs in that “Light of Love” really showed what they were capable of: the song is full of space, led by pianos not guitars, and features Bell singing in a higher register and thus able to take her rightful place in the arrangement.
“Light of Love” is an astounding song. Like Abba performing a Phil Spector girl-group song, with an added undercurrent of Fleetwood Mac in their most straightforward country-boogie mode, it manages to press an amazing number of “perfect pop” buttons, without ever slipping into arched-eyebrow pastiche, nor into sparkly-eyed shrillness. And Music Go Music have other songs to match it; it's just sad that those songs were not allowed to shine last night.
Their playing was fabulous, Bell struggled womanfully with the sound limitations, and given a bigger stage and better venues with better sound, I have no doubt they can sound world-conqueringly good. A few people punched the air during better songs, showing that there were dedicated fans among the Shoreditch trendies. But this is a band who balance pop and rock, delicate and macho, and unless they learn to adjust that balance for the particular stage they are playing on, they may turn off those whose support will put them on the bigger stages.
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