Rock by Richard Cook
Rock likes to think it overturned everything that came before it, but rock package concerts - which have been with us since the birth of the music in Britain - instead hark back to music hall's paradigm of providing variety and value for money on a single bill. Maybe we don't have such bizarre pairings as we did in the sixties, when the Walker Brothers once toured with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but it seems odd to observe those once deadly rivals in the charts, Culture Club, the Human League and ABC, together on a nostalgia ticket.
Their Wembley concert this month comes after an American tour which has rekindled the appeal of these old-timers. Duran Duran, those exemplars of pop's most foppish period, had been doing nicely with their own wretched revisionism on the American circuit, and even if none of these groups is likely to sell many records again, their shows can offer a reunion rite that lets the audience participate as well as pay for it. Could there be any reason to attend such a performance other than chiming in with "Don't You Want Me" or "Karma Chameleon"?
Surely not in the case of Culture Club, one of the thinnest conceptions of its day, its personnel now a paunchy troupe of wizened men. George O'Dowd isn't a bad singer, but it seems incredible to think that he was once compared with Smokey Robinson, or that he could command respect when someone like Joe Cocker was ridiculed as a mere irrelevance. Culture Club's reformation invokes memories of a band that was always going to be too sweet for whatever period they came from. In their time, they got away with it, since that was a dreadful time. Today we need them like a tooth needs a glass of cola.
The Human League have had a career in the nineties, with a few hits off an unremarkable album, and Phil Oakey's manly baritone and romantic doggerel have some life in them yet. But this was a group born only to make records, and the awkwardness that Phil and his two female companions display on stage and screen tells how it should never have existed outside the studio. If Culture Club are like a tray of bonbons, the Human League are a very cold sorbet. They started as a sub-zero synthesiser band; they have finished as a pancaked novelty act.
The solitary figure worth reconsidering in this package is ABC's Martin Fry. As pop stars ABC bought into the brief excitement which swept them through the early eighties but were unworthy casualties when the era fizzled out. Fry's over-expressive singing isn't his strong suit. His penetrating lyrics and unlikely gravitas, though, were just the right dash of bitters at the time, and it seems a pity that Fry has made little impact since.
Rather than the better-remembered first album, ABC's second set, Beauty Stab, is the one to return to, a peculiarly cogent snapshot of a young man adrift, footloose and bothered by it. Fifteen years on, the valedictory "United Kingdom" seems more pertinent than ever. The album's opening track also spawned a cliche which will do to justify this reappearance from players who just want to have a career before they hit middle age: that was then and this is now.
Culture Club, The Human League and ABC play at Wembley Arena on 17 and 22 December and London Arena on 19 December
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