Concert Review: Spell On You, The Civic Club, 20 March 2021

Is everybody in? Let the ceremony begin. Spell On You. Lights go down and six people make their way onto the Civic Club stage. Candles and the smell of burning incense. There’s Delaney Davidson wearing a crown, Shayne Carter the old Rock Star, Theia the new Pop siren.

You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling. Skeletal and pared back. The beautiful melody coming from some stark place for those banished from human company. A resurrection of love for the hurt or the wicked. Nell Thomas is shimmering on a harp. The Girl Group voice lifts and pierces. It builds but doesn’t explode to orgasm. You shiver.

Screaming Jay Hawkin’s I Put A Spell on You remains a powerful voodoo Rock’n’roll masterpiece ever since it first landed. Black cat bones and a Little John the Conqueroo. The spell is cast with the great Pop classic.

E Pa To Hau. A waiata sung as a slow incantation by Theia.

Carter leads his song I Know Not Where I Stand. Theatrical and dramatic Pop, with fuzztone guitar wails. A theremin emanates disembodied electronic violin tones.

Exuma’s song Dambala and Delaney is in full Dark Preacher persona. Tribal drum beats from Chris O’Connor. Buzzing meshed guitars. Off-kilter Blues and incantatory vocals. Down by the water/ Satan will be there.

Love Will Tear Us Apart. Beautiful tune forever linked to death and suicide. Played stark and minimal until the music wells up like a dark wave and rolls on through with Surf tones, Joe Meek style disembodied electronics from that ghostly theremin. Jol Mulholland on guitar, bass and keyboards.

By now the hooks and trance effects are well and truly embedded in your head. Robbie Basho’s Blue Crystal Fire starts with the siren voice of Thomas and continues with Carter’s angst. Fire burn brightly in me my love.

You Cheat Yourself. Shayne and Theia sing. Rolling riffs and tribal drums. Abrasive squarks from the guitars and of course the Velvet Underground rise up. The deep mystical tones and dark literary themes driven by the Rock’n’roll engine began with that first Banana album. The influence from that is lurking in the background tonight.

My Love Will Never Die from Otis Rush. As influential as Willie Dixon to all the great artists who emerged from the Sixties onward. A tortured soul of an artist and Davidson’s singing stands out on this one. it would shake off as many people as those tonight among us that would rush to embrace it and bow down to its power. Incantatory and possessed singing. Voodoo moans. Absolutely weird and intense and just wonderful.

Being honest most people I talked to afterwards were thrown off at some stage by this dark beast and its myriad hydra heads.

A good example of this, their version of Donna Summers I Feel Love. Voice high, piercing and flying free. Pretty close to the original vocal but Theia has an operatic sustain in her singing. Then out blasts some Surf guitar and pyrotechnics from the gadgets. I found it strangely full of Church. Others just thought it weird.

That’s what made this a great show for me. These players, most of whom I have seen in many settings, stretching back to my younger days with Shayne Carter, were fearless in taking their art to the limits and beyond.

On Davidson’s Shining Day, he pushes his vocals into the eerie and unsettling while Carter bends notes on the guitar. The harmony voices come in soothe the nerves.

They do bring us back into more peaceful waters with two stunning covers.

Christine Aguilera’s Beautiful is bright and sunny Pop and sounds like the Beatles of Abbey Road.

Then Always On My Mind, slow and soothing and just beautiful. The King makes his presence to close the evening.

You’re such a lovely audience/ We’d like to take you home with us/ we’d love to take you home.

Rev Orange Peel