(TV) Berlin report

["leif joley" <leifjoley@hotmail.com>]

Since it was their first appearence on German ground, it was only 
appropriate that Tom Verlaine yelled a "Hello Germany!" to the Berlin crowd, 
then struck a power chord before leading the band into "The dream's dream", 
an instrumental improvisation that served as an intro as well as an outro 
this evening, and which to my ears had nothing at all to do with the 
"Adventure" track. Tonight the orchestra will perform in the small city of 
Heidelberg and the day after tomorrow in the bigger city of Hamburg; no 
second Berlin show on Monday, due to bad ticket sales.

All this took place Sunday the 13th of June at Volksbuhne, an old venue in 
the eastern part of Berlin, with two art cinemas and the headquarters of 
PDS, the reformed Communist party, as closest neighbours. This auditorium 
may at some point have served as a cinema, and as there was no feel of a 
rock'n'roll club whatsoever the harsh Germans might have labelled it all as 
an "akadaemische eksperientze" - the rows of chairs denied any outbursts of 
excitement other than applauses, and as the audience seemed very serious and 
behaved well, no one seemed to be put off by the circumstances. I decided to 
sit pretty far back, almost alone in a row in the half-full - or half-empty 
- building, and to listen carefully to the group's music.

This was by far the noisiest Television I've seen (I have encountered them 
twice 1992 and then in 2001). Five new songs: "Squaggle", "Baloon", 
"Persia", "Stax" and one that I can't recall the title of, but it wasn't 
"Sleep all day" that have been mentioned in here - at least not with that 
title according to the mixing board play-list. As I didn't took notes, I 
can't tell anyone much about them, apart from that one had oriental 
influences ("Persia", probably); at a first listening, they all seemed to be 
strong on chaotic atmosphere, and - perhaps - weak on melodies. My 
reflection, or theory, is that they might be an extention of the audioally 
idea that once formed "Rocket" (also featured this evening) and this 
experimental attitude was shown even more in the encore, "Psychotic 
reaction". As Joe Bob Briggs might have put it, this was "Guitar Fu". They 
shot the poor tune into pieces; imagine a cross between "Yonki time" and the 
tracks from that French EP from '92 and you come close to what kind of 
musical insanity we're talking about here.

> From "Marquee moon": "MM", "Evil", "Venus" and "Prove it". No songs from 
"Adventure". "1800", "Mr. Lee", "Rhyme" and "Rocket" from the third album. 
And "LJJ", in what seemed to be a rather short version. Verlaine's best work 
appeared, I think, in "Prove it"; as usual, he improvised all through. 
Lloyd's finest moments, I believe, came in the new songs. After all this 
years, his soloing in "MM" and "Evil" is practically the same as when the 
compositions were recorded in 1977. Some may argue "well, why change solos 
that already are perfect?", but as was Verlaine's and he still try out new 
ways to play them.

If someone find it hard to believe that Verlaine actually said and did the 
things I claimed he did in the first paragraph, of course he didn't. I just 
wrote it to cause a bit of confusion.

Leif J, Sweden

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