Klaxons/CSS Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall 12/02/07 - Back to the old skool (Disco)

Cast your mind back to 1991. Rave. Vicks. Idiots in stupid clothing. Glow Sticks. A truly horrible time for music. It may have been a ‘scene’ but it was to me and many more, obscene.

2007 and music once more is in a sorry state. There are a few good bands around, as there were in 1991, but not enough to justify calling anything a ‘scene’. Tonight’s headliners, Klaxons made the mistake of giving their music a tag in an interview once, New Rave. Oh dear, this was all it took for the NME to vacuously decide that ‘New Rave’ is indeed, a ‘New Scene’.

Where once to be fashionable, you went to the high street and bought the same clothes as everyone else, now you pick up NME, glance over the many full page adverts and promotional features for such ‘alternative’ boutiques such as Topshop and Next, and marry that together with what NME are telling you is fashionable (New Rave), and what do you get?? New Scenesters, or New Ravers.

Klaxons are a very good band. They proved this tonight by blasting through the bulk of ‘Myths of the Near Future’ with energy and passion aplenty. Joint headliners CSS, who are about as 'New Rave' as Dakota Fanning is 'Near Grave', were also fantastic, considering the fact that they were given hardly any time to prove this. Package tours eh...

The audience riled me. I hate glowsticks, and they were here en masse, because NME says it’s trendy. It isn’t, it looks stupid. Call me miserable, but I wish they were made out of toxic chemicals that burn through skin and bones, and I wish everyone would split, as they annoy me immensely, and remind me of how bad the early nineties were. Despite this however, I remained happy that the bands themselves were fantastic and didn’t wear a glowstick throughout the whole gig, which resembled one of my old school discos.

PS Hypocritical I know, but I once worked with Altern 8. This is allowed; on the basis of they released some fantastic, innovative records under the name Nexus 21, (check your Techno history books folks). I once had to go round Birmingham with them to buy Yellow dust masks for a forthcoming top of the pops appearance, as they were fed up of painting white ones only for the paint to chip off during the performance. The embarrassment of going into Snow and Rock knowing that everyone thought that we were ‘fans of that novelty band’ as opposed to a band with some heavyweight serious techno records cum subversive novelty band, shopping for official ‘stage wear’… Those weren’t the days!