Performance
Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, London
25/03/2010

The rolled-up jacket sleeves, the vest courtesy of Brat Pack Tailors-R-Us, the oceans of hi-octane melancholia with synths doing the heavy lifting… Yes, tonight we’re gonna party like it’s, um, 1986. But where that would usually be the cue for a host of indie jangling, Performance were clearly rather more taken at the time with the likes of Talk Talk’s ‘The Colour Of Spring’, Pet Shop Boys’ Please, and probably the first two A-Ha albums as well. That, of course, meant that they were peculiarly out of time when they first emerged, but, post-new rave, now intriguingly renders them somewhat ahead of the curve.

It also means that the new material gets the very warmest of receptions from the returning diehards, and understandably so. Opener (and title-track-to-be) ‘Unconsoled’ has the profound-while-parochial punch of the sharper recent Morrissey affairs even while tipping its hat to more electro-pop offerings, and the subsequent ‘Let’s Start’ could be a lissome young cousin to Furniture’s ‘Brilliant Mind’; its pristine sheen (chiefly courtesy of keyboards’n'suchlike-captain Joe Cross, whose patronage of the wonderful Hurts makes tremendous sense in this context) providing a suitably tragic underscore to Joe Stretch’s lost and longing vocals.

Moreover, as the proceedings progress it becomes increasingly apparent that Laura Marsden (the figure wholly responsible for the guitars and the glamour) is a further brilliantly brittle asset; spiralling the trio somewhere visually more extradimensional and chiming in with an unfathomably eerie compulsion. That’s a terrific call – they may not otherwise be as theatrical or indeed as bespoke as they might, but when they get everything right, as they do on the haunting percussive overload of ‘New Beginning’ and comeback single (and, let’s be honest, Blondie-via-Moroder moment) ‘The Living’, Performance prove they still have a thoroughly showstopping streak in them…   

Iain Moffat