Concert Review: Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction Soundtracks Live at the Civic       10 July 2021

The music of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction is brought to the live stage in spectacular fashion by a magnificent ensemble band featuring four of New Zealand’s outstanding singers. Laughton Kora, Tami Neilson, Milan Borich (Pluto) and Booga Beazley (Head Like a Hole).

Pop Art is long established now as a vital art form. It is guilty pleasure for many people. Guilty because it also generates a lot of wealth, as if somehow that invalidates it as serious.

Quentin Tarantino. For someone like me who devours Popular Culture, you couldn’t invent a more perfect character. An obsessive fan of the best of American music, classic television, Hollywood, The Beats, Psychedelia, Pro-Wrestling, and especially cinema across the broad spectrum of American film-makers. Often given lesser weight, unfairly, than their European counterparts.

He had been instrumental in some key scripts (Natural Born Killers). But when his first movie Reservoir Dogs arrived into the cinemas, it was a revelation. With Pulp Fiction, it was a total capitulation to an Art genius.

Witty and sharp dialogue. The philosophy of the Beats. Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. They had their fair share of spectacular stunts and gratuitous violence. But the more disturbing violence was contained in the profusion of dialogue. The movies looked more like stage plays.

With them came the carefully curated soundtracks. Pop gems and cult classics. All had some deeper story behind them.

Reservoir Dogs

The big screen back drop starts with Tarantino’s monologue of Madonna’s Like a Virgin.

The stage fills with musicians dressed in black suits and skinny black ties. This could be the Jake and Elwood Blues Brothers too. But it’s Mister White, Mister Pink, Mister Orange…..and Mr Dog who wanders across the stage repeatedly all night.

Little Green Bag and the players kick off, Laughton Kora and Booga Beazley sharing the vocals. Distinctive bass guitar lead.

Joe Tex’s I Gotcha and Kora gives this a great workout as a Northern Soul floor-filler paving the way for the Disco Boogie which was about to come.

Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan were Folkies who had a big hit with Stuck in the Middle With You. A perfect Dylan-Beatles pastiche and the centre-piece of the original soundtrack and the movie. Milan Borich sings and the capacity audience give the first huge cheer of the night, and get up and dance. A tasty guitar solo mid-song from Brett Adams.

Many people post-show, expressed how upbeat and punchy the band was for the whole night and they could have danced to everything.

Magic Carpet Ride starts with tribal rhythms and guitar pyrotechnics before exploding with I like to dream/ right between the sound machine. Huge drum attack.

Hooked On A Feeling, the Blue Swede version with the distinctive American Indian war chant.

Both sung by Beazley, and the band is hot and riding high in the big theatre.

On-screen there is machismo humour and malevolence. Michael Madsen does his knife dance torture routine.

Pulp Fiction

After the break and straight into Dick Dale’s classic Miserlou. Double-picked electric guitar and Middle Eastern beat. Dale was a surfer, unlike Brian Wilson, and brought the thrill of riding waves and roller-coaster speed into Surf music.

This soundtrack was also responsible in re-igniting some long overdue interest in the instrumental bands of the Sixties and Surf in particular.

The band charges with on-point versions of Busting Surfboards, Bullwinkle, Comanche and Surf Rider.

And of course, the movie resurrected Link Wray’s Rumble. Primitive and elemental, the origin of the power chord in Rock music and essential manna for many guitar heroes to come including Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend.

Tami Neilson always stamps her presence wherever she performs and tonight she is definitive on two songs especially.

Son of a Preacher Man and she can match Dusty Springfield’s original, and brings a little Country cadence with it. Tasty trumpet and saxophone riffs round it out.

On Maria McKee’s If Love is a Red Dress, the band drop out and its Neilson with her acoustic guitar. Country music full of pain and regret. Quiet, aching singing which she then rides up in huge peaks and brings it back down. A masterful performance which she owns and stuns the audience.

Then it’s that time. The world-famous Jack Rabbit Slim’s Twist Contest. Jenni and Jamie, Will and Navara, Lisa and Topaz and a Twist-Off on stage while the band play Chuck Berry’s You Never Can Tell. 

On the big overhead screen, that dance scene with Uma Thurman and John Travolta still captivates and the couples do their best to capture that magic.

There it is. The biggest one-two punch in Pop Art since the Beatles Please Please Me and With.

Laughton Kora and Booga Beazley are dressed in board shorts and t-shirts at the end, just as Travolta and Jackson end up after changing their blood splattered clothes. Kora acknowledges the quite magnificent band tonight.

The music of the world of Tarantino. Sex and Dance and Rock’n’Roll. Roses are red, Violence is too.

Rev (Mister) Orange Peel

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