Concerto for Voice and Machinery Re-enactment (snippet)

[mandkshow266]

...Sounds like crap to me..... Might as well go visit a wood shop to hear stuff as good as this...

[jeremiasjeppe]

@mandkshow266: ... you just don't get it ...

[BuoancyQuest]

I can't help wondering just how much of the original piece was 'scored' and if this re-enactment followed it?

[beuys47]

it was scored and Mark Chung lent Jo his score which she followed

[averilleX]

Could you fill in a little history please, for those of us who weren't there? Who was/is Jo?

[parakeetofvirtue]

Jo is Jo Mitchell, an artist. She won a commission to stage a re-enactment of the original 1984 performance.

[averilleX]

Thank you, I used to be a big Neubauten fan in the early-mid 80s but kinda lost touch. This is an interesting piece, but without the danger of early Neubauten. Weren't they the only band ever to be banned from the Hacienda? For demolishing one of the club's structural support columns as an unscripted part of the gig? They were incredibly nice guys, but/and complete radicals.

[msimmo4]

Thanks for posting this...I was there... it was brilliant, especially the 'safe' fake riot at the end (persons wearing pink wrist bands. It would be interesting to hear views of people who were there at the original back in 1984.

[parakeetofvirtue]

I thought the "safe riot" was where the re-enactment failed. Very contrived.

I don't know why the night's audience didn't get involved. I considered it, as I'm sure did plenty of others.

I guess we were all just "Typical middle class arty tossers" Sean O'Hagan says in the pamphlet.

Quite odd.

IMO a performance of the piece alone without the 're-enactment' would've been just as interesting.

[oldcolonyfire]

My dad was there in 1984. The difference between then and now is that, at the original, his friend was almost killed by a piece of flying glass from the cement mixer. And he was part of a group trying to pull down a speaker stack that would most definitely have killed them had it gone...

[erranmaya]

I was there in 1984, and it was an extremely strange gig. First we were watching what seemed a normal gig, then there was drilling through the stage, a lot of smoke and confusion. I don't remember it as particularly wild - but in comparison to the Re-enactment, 1984 was spontaneous, edgy, dark. You have to see it in the political context at the time, with the Miner's Strike about to go off, Thatcher/Reagan Cold War politics, and social paranoia. So Neubauten pretty much summed up the time!