Not From Bury

Scenes come and go. Fashions and fads fly by in the post-everything breeze. Holes in the ground open up, and are filled by Landfill Indie. Empires rise and fall.

Camden remains a ropey old place, on a chilly weekday evening, 7.30pm. I wait at the World's End for Mark, as pale characters and hurried youngsters drift and rush at the junction of Camden High Road and Parkway. There are plenty of people about, but nobody really wants to be here. There's an echo of an echo.

So when better to be seeing the Fall?

The support act at the cavernous (though eye-poppingly full) Koko is the band that MES harvested the 2nd- or 3rd line-up ago of the Fall from. Darker My Love. Yes, it's a shocking name, and their charisma-free Doors & Byrds lite is teeth-gnashingly uninspired. Going through the (bowel) motions. The sort of group that tribute bands think is pinching their audience.

I don't think that I've seen anyone in the Fall look more worried than the new guitarist did. Even in the days of Steve Hanley (who looked almost permanently on edge; the first time I ever saw The Fall, with Vanessa back in '92 at the Brixton Academy, I couldn't even begin to understand how performing with this creature could be so anxiogenic) there wasn't a brow so figuratively furrowed as this one.

Smith is back on form. We know this, because he is now noticing enough to want to faff about with the controls on the amplifiers. We also know this because he tolerated his partner, um, guiding him away from her keyboard with a gentle hand, without so much as a scowl. We also know this because a lean and muscular and very well-organised Fall punched through the (almost entirely new) material for an hour and more with little ceremony and just a hint of gruff, gritted-jaw panache; Smith was with them every step of the way.

"Unseen Facts" indeed.

Apple-Hard-Seed-Core

"Appleseed" is a frenetic, frenzied

military-political thriller, driven by an apoplectically technical plot involving the storage of genetic material, hidden species loyalties, and a plot to save humanity from itself using "Bioroids", a Philip K Dick-esque race of emotionally and reproductively suppressed lifelike robots.

The movie's most affecting passages are those where the deliberate deadening of the Bioroids' emotional responses is debated by hovering Council of Elders; the political and governmental benefits of keeping the Bioroids in a state of technical ecstacy. The action sequences are far in advance of anything that Hollywood was producing at the time, amid a juicy mixture of decayed dystopian and Star-Trek-Shiny environments.

When Proggers Get Dumped

Chris asked if I'd been too traumatised or outright disappointed to actually blog this. We met up with Sean for Porcupine Tree, at the Hammersmith Odeon, with high hopes of an evening of florid arpeggiating, hopelessly overblown musicianship, wildly optimistic conceptualising, time-signature-changes coming thick and fast, and an overall picture that would make Tales From Topographic Oceans look like Closer.

Crashing disappointment broke over us, though.

No solos. None to speak of, anyhow. How can you be in a prog band and not pepper your songs with solos, for crying out loud?

Woeful slo-mo, out-of-focus video montages of vague malaise. The sort of thing that made us want to see Meatloaf's masterpiece of histrionics, backlighting and windmachines, "I'll Do Anything For Love". Well, it made me want to see that, any road up.

No pretension. Where is prog without pretension, I ask you?

The audience looked like the uncles of the audience we were expecting. The band issued an announcement demanding no photos or videoing, and, get this, the audience did as they were told.

If there's one thing that prog doesn't need, it's real feelings. The singer's pinched employment-consultant's soul was all over this gig like a rash.

We admired the drummer for all the technical ecstacy he provided, but the poor bugger is in a band that has read the manual from cover to cover, and has learnt all the requisite tricks, but has no idea why.