I see artists supposedly past their prime on a regular basis
and it’s usually a case of focusing on the good parts, glossing over the not so
good, and cutting them plenty of slack on account of credit earned in previous
lives. At times it’s even enough to have
a few beers in their company as a small payback for the pleasure they’ve
given. Occasionally though, like the New
York Dolls, they can still cut the mustard by dipping into their illustrious past yet
remaining firmly in the present. When
done well, devoid of showbizzy revivalism, it’s unbeatable. The Primitives on Friday night, on whatever
gig measuring tool one uses, were unbeatable.
They took ten songs from their past and with beautiful
symmetry matched them with ten songs from their present. The white-knuckle ride of early single “Stop
Killing Me” was thrilling and yet near equalled by the tambourine battering given
to Suzi Jane Hokom’s “Need All The Help I Can Get”. The dreamy psychedelic jangle of debut 45 “Thru
The Flowers” (which received the loudest cheer of the night) was suitably twinned
with their folk pop take on Polly Nile’s “Sunshine In My Rainy Day Mind”.
Most of the current material was taken from their recent 60s
girl-sung covers LP Echoes and Rhymes
but old favourites, with their baa-ba-ba-ba-bas and their sha-la-la-la-las, sound
like girl group covers anyway. The effervescent
“Spacehead” was a prime example, albeit a girl-fronted group covering the
Ramones covering a girl group. Hearing “Spacehead”
followed by a powerfully petulant “Sick Of It” was the best back-to-back songs
I’ve seen played in a long time.
Tracy Tracy remains a beguiling performer, possibly a
more confident one than before, and sparkled from her kitten ears to her
glittery toes. She always, of course, received
all the attention (one man on Friday patiently waited at the front of the stage
to give her a bunch of red roses, not sure where that fitted on the sliding
scale of kind gesture/creepy weirdo) but I always loved the way Paul Court looked
on the cover of their second LP, Pure. He’s still got a decent Barnet and an eye for
a nice Chelsea boot, and Tig Williams kept standing behind his petal painted drum
kit in shades of Keith Moon, whose picture adorned a vintage lamp stood on Paul
Sampson’s bass amp. The Primitives have
lost none of their style and class. I
wonder what they do for day jobs. They shouldn’t
have any.
There was no reminiscing, no do-you-remember when?, so it
didn’t feel like an exercise in nostalgia, it felt like watching a fresh band with a great bunch of songs. The
only reference, and a telling one, came in their introduction to “Crash”, “This
is our take on a song from the 80s by a band called the Primitives”. I remember them, they were good, but these
Primitives are blooming marvellous.
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