What is the rockistest idea ever? Well, we have to acknowledge that MTV’s Unplugged notion set a good mark, but I think the Don’t Look Back series of gigs in London, which started with the Stooges at the Hammersmith Apollo last night, sets a new standard.
“Have you ever gone to a concert and wished your favourite band had played your favourite song, then gone home disappointed, because it didn’t happen?” the booklet on the seats starts. Except it isn’t a series where they publish the set list, or promise all the greatest hits – instead they invite, in their words, “artists to present a retrospective performance of one of their works in its entirety.” You probably won’t be surprised that the ‘works’ are albums, not singles. Nor that they seem not to have recruited the Spice Girls, Public Enemy, Willie Nelson, Daphne & Celeste, Dr Dre, Culture, but instead Mum, the Lemonheads, the Melvins and the Dirty Three. How much more rockist could this get?
This isn’t to say it’s bad – I was very keen to see the Stooges reunited to do Funhouse, and tempted by the Dinosaur Jr show, and I’m sure some people around these parts were interested in the Belle & Sebastien gig. The Stooges were great, though actually it was the second half of the gig, when they played other things, that I enjoyed the most, when we got ‘No Fun’ and ‘1969’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’. Sadly, despite the booklet’s intro, they didn’t play my favourite song, ‘Search And Destroy’.