Beyond the Turin Shroud
Turin Brakes, L2, 10-10-01

Why do people go to gigs? It’s a serious question. For the music? Do you think? You can get music delivered crystal clear on a CD, through an MP3 enabled phone, Christ, even on a greetings card, in the comfort of your own, or your attentive lover’s, home. There must be something else, something extra that makes a person pull on their shoes and winter coat and traipse out to see a gig. For the music? Are you serious?

Let’s take as our text, as our Petrie dish, Turin Brakes. They didn’t get that Mercury Nomination by accident, of course – the album is a fine piece of music, and tonight they recreate it lovingly, carefully, with the desire for perfection sought by a surgeon. And, frankly, it’s a rubbish show.

The problem is simple – good music – great music, even – is not the guarantee of a great show. Many things can make a show great – revolutionary rants; tunes being whacked out with the insistence that you dance your butt off; strippers wearing monkey masks; a lead singer who is gorgeous, or drunk, or angry. None of these things were on offer tonight. Instead, we get a bunch of ordinary looking blokes playing a group of tunes that, at their worst, veer a little too near to Del Amitri, and at their liveliest echo Dire Straits doing Sultans of Swing. Too neat to be the Tindersticks, too miserable to be Crowded House, Turin Brakes effectively ask a room full of people to stand looking at a CD playing in an overheated room. Next time the record company wants them to tour an album, they could save themselves the effort and everyone else the disappointment by literally sending the album round the venues. "Here it is – now, go home and play it, for this music is better enjoyed laying, in the dark, on your own. There is nothing to see here."

Aside from a shaky and rapidly abandoned mention of anthrax, you’d never know that as we stood sweltering, bombs were raining down on innocent heads and panic was spreading through Florida. This was the sound of life going, as normal, somewhere else.

- Simon Budgen