Thurston Moore – Tuning Fork December 3, 2015

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DSC_6985In 2005, Rolling Stone rated Thurston Moore the 34th greatest guitarist of all time. The man’s musical CV ranges from Sonic Youth to, occasionally, REM. He’s clearly a very talented and highly accomplished musician.

All of which simply makes the unremitting dreadfulness of last night’s show at Auckland’s Tuning Fork all the harder to bear.

Moore and his band took the stage shortly after nine, and spent the next five minutes, well, not playing. Noise came from the stage, much of it feedback howls from Moore’s and James Sedwards’ guitars, Moore occasionally imagining that lightly tapping the neck of his guitar might perhaps make some meaningful difference to the wail. Then Moore and his band remembered why they were on stage, and started playing something more conventionally resembling music, but lacking in anything resembling musical merit.

I stood at the bar, eyeing the door. A friend, there to shoot the show for a rival publication, left after ten minutes of the opening track. I asked her what she thought — “Dude’s been playing the same bloody chord for the last ten minutes.” And, indeed, he had. And this, in a nutshell, was Thurston Moore’s concert.

A typical song — I use the word liberally; it usually implies melody of some sort, or musical progression, two things that were about as rare as, well, people who seemed to be enjoying the show — was little more than a garage-band jam, a sloppy groove, little more than a chord (that’s a chord, mark you, not a chord progression) repeated again and again and again until I wanted Moore to stop. Just stop.

There were brief moments of music. Speak To The Wild’s chiming-harmonics intro occasionally threatened to become musical, but for the most part remained firmly and resolutely in atonal-hammering territory. Germs Burn, about as close as Moore came to an actual tune, was, nevertheless typically unfocussed, a meandering post-punk jam session, but one that lacked the exuberance a younger band might redeem it with. Sedwards did occasionally pick out something resembling a tune on his guitar, but the lion’s share of the set was made up of one-chord songs. Aphrodite, introduced portentously by Moore as “This song is for the Goddess. Aphrodite.” in the kind of pseudo-meaningful earnestness only Americans can manage, managed to stray a little from the formula briefly; so relentless was the one-chord hammering of the music, Steve Shelley banging on his kit like it had just insulted his mother, that even the harsh, discordant grating of Aphrodite’s intro was a merciful release.

Moore fans — I’m not sure how many there were at the Tuning Fork last night; the audience seemed rather unimpressed by the show — will, I have little doubt, fill the comments section with explanations of how brilliantly experimental Moore is, what a talented and able guitarist he can be, and how I simply failed to get it. But I know what I saw — an utterly uninspired and uninspiring performance, an emperor not only without clothes but with tailors fleeing to the hills, a jam that might well have been enormous fun to play, and which might have been much more enjoyable had I been a lot less sober and straight than I was last night. It’s entirely possible that, in a significantly less legal frame of mind, Moore’s tiresomely endless jams might reveal hidden depths. But they simply don’t translate to the stage.

An hour and a quarter in, I did something I haven’t done in maybe thirty years — I walked out. The last notes in my notebook read “Stop. Stop now. Please. You’re hurting music.” This was a bad, bad show. It was so shockingly rubbish that I had to put Abba on the car stereo to purge, to cleanse, as I drove home. Go ahead, tell me what I missed. But if you weren’t there last night, you missed nothing.

Steve McCabe

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