Ferrous Ruler's Off Day

Rejected alternate titles for this piece were Reed It & Weep, Metal Mickey Take, and Velvet Underwhelmed.

METAL MACHINE TRIO, AMG, Academy 18/4/10


What with the O2 Academy, Cornbury, Cropredy and Brookes, Oxfordshire gets its fair share of big names, if that sort of thing matters to you, but it’s not often the area plays host to a musician as celebrated and influential as Lou Reed. Tonight his Metal Machine Trio is playing homage to his infamous Metal Machine Music LP, quite possibly the archetypal “difficult” album for rock fans. Theories abound that MMM was variously a joke, a stoned indulgence, a vicious contract breaker or a serious work of avant garde composition, but the fact that Reed has resurrected it as the inspiration for a live show so long after the furore has died away tends to edge us towards the latter suggestion…although with Reed’s scabrous prankster image, who really knows? The truth is that we weren’t sure what to expect from this concert, but the one word we didn’t expect to use about this single ninety minute piece was “average”.

The trio is a decent little unit. Self styled “electronic alchemist” Sarth Calhoun (did his parents’ decision to name him like an extra from a David Eddings novel inspire him to come up with such a ridiculous job title?) used two laptops and an array of electronics to sample and treat the sounds made by his colleagues, and he’s clearly a quick thinking musician, although his predilection for cacky drum pad sounds did make the opening twenty minutes sound like duff Pete Namlook. Ulrich Kreiger’s saxophone playing is meaty, and he came up with some surprisingly jazz-inflected lines later in the performance; to be brutally honest we would rather have listened to him playing solo for the duration, although the suspicion remains that someone like John Butcher could blow him off the stage.

And then we come to Reed. We’ll give him two pieces of advice for free: a) get a jacket that’s actually big enough so you don’t look like an aged kiddy-fiddler, and b) if you’re going to make music based upon sounds of feedback, why not try to arrange it so you sit where you can reach your fucking amp, so you don’t have to shout at some brow-beaten roadie to run on and make adjustments every few minutes? Are you trying to teach the concept of latency to pre-schoolers, or something? Beyond this, it’s tough to tell what the brittle little despot actually does. Now, we’re perfectly aware that this is Reed’s music, he doesn’t have to embody it onstage, and we’re wary of being the person who states “I went to see Otto Klemperer and all he did was wave his arms about”, or “What’s so great about that Hitchcock guy, he just walks about a bit in the background?”, but every time it became possible to pick out Reed’s contributions, he seemed to be playing some clumsy and facile guitar phrase, or giving a mike a desultory grunt.

The fascinating thing about MMM is precisely how much it enraged listeners, critics and, most importantly, bloated 70s record execs. The thing is, the music world has moved on, and whilst there may have been one or two unhappy Academy punters hoping for a trundle through “Perfect Day” – and we salute the unbounded optimism of two lads who started clapping along to a repeated guitar motif about an hour in – we suspect most of those at the Academy had a decent enough grounding in leftfield music to know that what they were witnessing was pleasant but (and here it comes) average.

So, we’re not iconoclastic enough to state that the gig was rubbish. It wasn’t. It was alright, and had a few searing moments - mostly when Krieger was on a roll - and a surprisingly satisfying conclusion; but, there are any number of Oxford improvisors who could cook up something equally interesting (we spotted the excellent Alex Ward in the crowd, for example), and we’re not overstating the case to say that our very own Euhedral can make far more immersive drone music with a guitar, a violin bow and a cheap amp. And for less than twenty five quid, too.

It wasn’t even that bloody loud.