I almost didn’t get into this sold-out show. Fortunately, after standing outside of Irving Plaza for an hour, I got the first of 20 or so extra tickets that the venue had left over. After having dinner with some friends, I arrived just in time to catch the BUZZCOCKS light up Irving Plaza. They went on at about 10:30, and by 11:45 or so it was all over. However, they were so loud, catchy, fun and intense that it still felt draining afterwards, in the best possible way.
At first, this show didn’t seem so promising. Starting off with seven or eight songs in a row from their new album Flat-Pack Philosophy, they ran the risk of losing the crowd’s attention. Fortunately, the new songs are uniformly strong (though, like with other recent efforts, nowhere near as potent as their best work) and short in length.
Furthermore, the songs ran into one another quite well, and the band played them so loud that it was almost impossible to ignore them anyway. As a reward for the crowd’s patience, the rest of the show mostly consisted of ‘70s and ‘80s classics. The crowd sang along to each and every one, providing harmonies in many cases as well. The hits kept coming one right after the other: “I Don’t Mind,” “Ever Fallen in Love,” “What Do I Get?,” “Autonomy,” “Why Can’t I Touch It?,” “Noise Annoys,” “Harmony in my Head,” “Boredom,” and so forth. All of it was enthralling and almost magical.
What made this show better than the other times I’ve seen them in recent years is the addition of their new drummer DANNY FARRANT. As our very own Big Takeover editor, publisher and fellow blogger JACK RABID (a drummer himself) explained after the show, instead of playing slightly behind the beat like their last drummer, PHIL BARKER, Farrant played slightly ahead of it. This difference in tempo drove founding members PETE SHELLEY and STEVE DIGGLE, and long-time bassist TONY BARBER, to play faster and more in-your-face.
If there’s one downside to this approach, it’s that Farrant hasn’t yet learned their more esoteric material (such as side two of their classic A Different Kind of Tension; in fact nothing from that album was played on this evening). But hopefully that situation will remedy itself in time. For now, though, expect more all-out rockin’ and absolutely ferocious Buzzcocks shows in the near future.
Discuss this review in The Big Takeover Forum
