REVIEW: Beastie Boys
- Posted on September 24, 2007 9:59 AM
- 0 comments
Beastie Boys
Carling Academy Brixton
4th September 2007
Review by Matt Killeen
Time. It flies, it passes, it occasionally heals. Not in my case.
Twenty one years ago, a skinny mop haired boy sporting the latest in fluffy facial hair is interrupted by two security guards, his index fingers wrapped around the badge on the front of VW microbus. It takes valuable seconds to extricate them, but youth is on his side and our hero legs it clear of the car park and off down the road, the middle aged rent-a-cops trailing in his wake. He escapes because he is young. He is fit. He doesn’t get sick, except when he’s had too much to drink and then he just drinks on through and sleeps through double history. If he has to spend the night in a bus shelter so he can see a band finish, he will. He is the sweet bird of youth personified, with acne.
Present day, and the bird has grown. He may still be ‘ill’ but today he is also sick. In hospital sick, having ‘procedures’ kind of sick, being unable to do things sick. It may be pushing the point to claim that time has been unkind to our hero, but time is unquestionably pointing and giggling.
I didn’t make it to see Run DMC at the long lost Birmingham Odeon, so I missed the young white support band, with their ten foot inflatable penis and cage girls in tow. This was because my dinner money was a fiver and the tickets were nearly tenner pounds. Being poorly would not have stopped me so it is in this spirit that I am helped into the Academy to see the 2007 Beastie Boys, a group that are handling their advancing years much better than I am. It seems inconceivable that they are entering their fourth decade in the music business. MCA may now sport natural grey hair where once he wore a wig, looking more and more like his alter ego Sir Stewart Wallace, but they are still doing what they have always done. With verve and vigour.
It is unfair to suggest that anyone should still be changing the World at that stage in their career, and ‘To the Five Boroughs’ was not a World changing album. They are, on the other hand, not flushing away their legacy for the sake of mammon or ego and for that fragile maintenance of integrity we should all be grateful. Despite the threat that the gig might consist entirely of instrumentals from ‘The Mix-Up’, the Beasties eschew ‘maturity’ for a mixed set of hip–hop, funk and turntablism, similar in make-up to their last arena tour. They touch the hits, they uncover some lost nuggets and, heaven be praised, they do ‘No Sleep ‘til Brooklyn’ for the spotty youth inside this man. They keep their self indulgence to a minimum, and as a result the crowd howls enthusiastically with immense tolerance whenever we get the full band.
I sound negative. In fact I am being negative. It isn’t that their instrumental stuff is bad, in fact their funk and psychedelia is a worthwhile and welcome change in dynamics. The issue is that there is just a smidgeon of ‘Jazz Odyssey (and Puppet Show)’ about it. One can reasonably assume that they know, being intelligent chaps, but they have a track record of revisionist history – it is claimed that the ‘Licensed to Ill’ Budweiser swilling frat boys were an act, a persona. Will they later claim that ‘The Mix-Up’ was an elaborate joke?
The sound was predictably awful, as live hip-hop done old school is want to be. Had I been fit and well, or maybe just twenty one years younger, I would have leapt into the mosh-pit and not cared. As it was, shortly before the encores, and the inevitable ‘Sabotage’, I limped towards the exit and waiting taxi. For the first time in my life I left a gig before the end, leaving the boy in his ‘get off my dick’ t-shirt at the door.
Were you there? What did you think of the concert? Tell all in the comments section. Unleash the reviewer inside!
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