Underworld at The RDS – November 27th 2010
Review by Liam Cagney
The crowds arrived in their hordes last Saturday night as Underworld hit town, a feeling of reunion setting about the RDS like a pack of dogs. From out of the woodwork came people you once partied with, shared a pill with, danced with, waxed lyrical about Beaucoup Fish with, stayed up all night with, crashed with, and had pints with the next day in a state of nervous, satisfied exhaustion. Earlier on Saturday, masses of people had marched through the streets of Dublin to protest against the proposed government cuts. But while this might have been about banding together in a spirit of civic responsibility, the evening in the RDS, no less a show of unity, was all about banding together in hedonistic rapture.
This year, as every year, rumours of dance music’s demise have been spilt liberally about the mainstream media. Commentators who don’t know any better – Shane Hegarty, for example, in this stupid Irish Times article – have happily drivelled on about something they don’t know anything about, in order to fill a few paragraphs. But for anyone who cares to listen, things are quite different. Genres, labels, parties, and drugs proliferate, with much of what’s interesting in ‘the music industry’ (shudder) continuing to emanate out of the scene of electronic musical invention. So they may carve it up, curse it, stick it with spikes, strew it with bells, cut off its head, cut off its balls, hijack it for ads, jingles, bad movies, and the music you hear when holding the phone, but still it lives, still it evolves, and still it moves on. And of course you can be assured, dear reader, that it will continue to do so, so long as humans have imagination, listeners pulse, and artists the balls to try something new.
The RDS Simmonscourt was the perfect setting for this concert. With bodies in motion everywhere, it took on the feel of a big warehouse rather than the big barn it usually is. Everything was dark, full of depth, and expansive, and you felt as if you were lost in the cave of a brooding monster. Bodies shot by or staggered by; every now and then a swinging jaw, some dilated eyes; then the beat kicked up, thumping, our of the distant gloom – the set starting, roar of the crowd, that excited feeling of everyone collectively recognising the tune and beginning to roar. And not many know how to execute this feeling like Underworld – they drew the map of the territory. Crowd-pleasers weren’t withheld, the set comprising a mixture of old numbers and tunes from Barking, their latest album. ‘Mmm Skyscraper… I Love You’ was an early highlight, and a little later, from the same early-90s period, ‘Dark and Long’, which was with many of the numbers was aired in abbreviated form.
Togged out in the black and white long sleeve of a sailor, Karl Hyde onstage showed his usual manic, hyper, concentrated presence. ‘Two Months Off’ was belted out with all the sincerity and experience unavailable to an emo group. At one point, red and brown lights flickering around him, Hyde took up a position standing on some of the onstage gear with a camcorder held close to his face, his face in blow-up transposed onto the visuals in the background, contorted. The Karl Hyde–Rick Smith duo were joined onstage by a third-party, helping out behind the stack of laptops and electronic gadgets, though it
didn’t look like erstwhile member Darren Emerson.
Building steadily in intensity, the gig in its latter portion tended towards the hits – ‘Rez/Cowgirls,’ ‘King of Snake,’ ‘Scribble,’ and ‘Born Slippy’ all whizzing by in quick succession. And it was hard to get away from the sense of this as being concert performance in the grand style. Though you might catch a diverse number of bands in a diverse number of genres filling a venue of this size, playing to crowds of the same size or bigger; not many of those bands would be capable of working the crowd up to a frenzy like Underworld, as shown here. Although they don’t inhabit the orthodox band format of guitar-bass-drums, Underworld have in their own way taken that format and moved it on to something more exciting, hitting the groove of the times. Interestingly enough, the least successful moment of the night came when Karl Hyde played guitar for one of the newer numbers, a tune that failed to light up.
By the time they closed with an encore of ‘Dirty Epic’ and ‘Moaner’, the background visuals had been dispensed with, and everything was focussed on the bodies onstage – who didn’t leave that stage without flattering the crowd with some applause of their own.