Point that thing somewhere else

Saw The Clean play on Friday... they melted my face. In the last few years, I've seen some really good performances by reunited punk bands from the 80s, but this was undoubtedly the best. (Better than Gang of Four, better than Wire.) They opened up with a weird, jamming version of At The Bottom and got better from there. Reunion bands tend to fall into one of two traps: either they lurch through out-of-practice renditions of their hits, or they play new material that's unfamiliar to most of the audience. The Clean avoided both. They revived searing numbers like Point That Thing Somewhere Else and Fish, updating them in small ways to fit alongside later, more melodic songs like 2009's In the Dreamlife U Need a Rubber Soul. And yeah, as it was a 30th anniversary gig for the reborn Flying Nun label, they played Tally Ho! as an encore.

So I liked it.

Because they were playing on the eve of the election, they threw out a few comments about politics. They won't have been happy with the result, and nor am I. But regardless of how the voting went down, I'm encouraged to know that people like the Kilgour brothers - and Chris Knox, who can't speak these days but nonetheless expresses similar views - are basically on the same page as me, politically. They're the ones who know how to create new things rather than just stripping them off and selling them down.