Forthcoming presentations and recent papers presented

FORTHCOMING

'Mapping the Beat: Rock, Literature and the British Counterculture', lecture, Britain in the Late 1950s and 1960s, Contextual Lecture Series, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, January 12th, 2010


RECENT

‘You only sing when you’re winning: Rock rivalries in Manchester and Liverpool’, paper, IASPM international biennial conference, Liverpool, July 13th-17th, 2009

'Crashing on the same shore: Charting notions of new wave', presentation, 'New Wave, New Views: Re-visiting the Post-Punk moment', day seminar, Leeds University, June 26th, 2009

'Versions of Cody: Jack Kerouac, Tom Waits and the song “On the Road”’, paper, Research Seminar Series, Hull University, February 24th, 2009

‘Jazz Journey: Jack Kerouac’s musical soundtrack’, talk accompanying exhibition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Scroll manuscript, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, January 15th, 2009

‘Talking the Beat’, discussion, panel member, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, January 8th, 2009

‘Rock’n’roll Road: Rock culture and its homage to the Kerouac legacy’, ‘Back On the Road’, paper, conference celebrating 50th anniversary of UK publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Birmingham University, December 12th-13th, 2008

‘You only sing when you’re winning: Rock rivalries in Manchester and Liverpool’, paper, ‘Locating Popular Cultures’, Popular Cultures Research Network, Leeds University, September 10th, 2008

Simon Warner, live rock reviews in The Guardian

A selection, 1992-1995

Rory Gallagher
Town & Country Club, Leeds

November 2nd, 1992

It was always likely to be a heavy onus for the guitarist Rory Gallagher to bear when it was confirmed that he would be the curtain-raising act for the new Town and Country Club in Leeds. Founder Oliver Smith, who runs two similar ventures in the capital, had hoped for Happy Mondays, almost had George Clinton, but, in the end, the Irish blues man, a fine practitioner in his field but hardly a name for the 1990s, took the hot seat.

As it transpired, Smith had managed to rustle up a bill which never set the house alight but generated enough sparks to suggest the latest T&C will ultimately breathe with life. With Brendan Coker in wistful form and Dr Feelgood providing some welcome fireworks, Gallagher at least had worthy support.

The physical character of the hall, once home to a Victorian indoor circus, later a cinema, is cavernous, and, while the sightlines are certainly to be commended, the sound, particularly during Gallagher’s set, seemed to rise to the rafters in a glutinous soup.

Perhaps it was the volume, perhaps it was the attack of Gallagher’s band, in essence a three-piece recalling the unmourned days of the power trio, with guitar as main strike weapon underpinned by the thudding artillery of bass and drums.

Much better were those  moments when keyboards and, most notably, the mouth harp of Mark Feltham, lent extra texture and colour. The slow blues Mean Disposition, for instance, caught the band in more contemplative mood.

Principally, however, Gallagher’s fast and fearsome fretboard work, interspersed with some dagger-like slide, was to the fore and the encore, enthusiastically earned by a sizeable audience, of Bullfrog Blues typified most of what gone before.

While Eric Clapton has slipped easily into Armani and retained a high profile in the process, Gallagher, still clad in his trademark lumberjack shirt, remains the artisan, technically well-equipped, but an echo of another time.


The Stranglers
Leeds University

February 8th, 1993

In the sub-cultural flow, punk rushed headlong in a bid to create the spontaneous, ephemeral and disposable. Some irony then, that 15 years on, the Stranglers should still be peddling their musical wares. Not that the band fared well in the credibility wars that dogged New Wave. They were the renegades of the movement, failing papers on both style and content.

Perhaps that is the reason the band has retained an audience. Things have changed nonetheless – the original quartet have now lost Hugh Cornwell and expanded to a five-piece. Yet this, on the evidence of their Leeds University gig, has been a rejuvenating process.

New front man Paul Roberts is a juvenile lead among seasoned veterans. While the Stranglers offer new songs, they are finely balanced by items from the back catalogue.

The rhythmic base of the group remains a solid as ever, ornamented by the spidery lines of another more recent arrival, guitarist John Ellis.

While the Stranglers communicate a somewhat sinister machismo, they have managed to sustain a live energy long after most of their punk contemporaries have hung up their safety pins.


Tamsin Archer
St George’s Hall, Bradford

March 9th, 1993

A black woman based in Yorkshire, singer-songwriter Tamsin Archer might be seen as a figure on the margins in almost every sense. Add to that the fact that music she makes is distinctly out of step with the techno-led dance explosion and her recent rise to prominence seems all the more inexplicable.

Yet she has, in a mere six months, topped the charts with her debut single and carried off a Brit award as best newcomer. Not long ago, making coffee in a Bradford studio, she could hardly have expected this sudden rush of acclaim. Now she can the take the stage of a major venue in her home city and feel she has truly arrived.

What has brought all this about? Archer certainly possesses a voice more powerful than pretty, but she applies it with a maturity that belies her lack of big league experience. She also has a body of songs, penned with fellow band members John Beck and John Hughes, that are a cut above the rest.

Those vocal and musical virtues, backed by a partisan home crowd, carried this gig comfortably. From the acoustic textures of Writ Inside, a potent lament, to the smash hit Sleeping Satellite, stunningly staged against a canvas of midnight blue with twinkling stars, she gave good account of herself. Things can and will get better, though. The shift from shadows to limelight has left Archer short on stagecraft.

On a broader front, however, her six-piece group didn’t always provide the perfect platform. On the up-tempo tunes, as bass tremors hummed through the hall, Archer’s distinctive instrument was all too often swallowed up in the mix.


Wedding Present/Pulp/Kingmaker
The Leadmill, Sheffield

April 7th, 1993

The Steel City, commemorating its centenary and celebrating soccer success, turned rock capital as a week of music events, including concerts, seminars and workshops, got underway. Sheffield assumes the mantle of Sound City ’93, at least until Saturday, with over 30 name groups appearing at two principal venues over six days, in a festival backed by the local council, the BBC and other industry organisations.

Raising the curtain at the Leadmill were three groups occupying various rungs on the rock ladder – one well established, one hotly tipped, the other suffering the tag of last year’s favourites.

Kingmaker have slipped back in the race and their opening set reflected their uncertain status. Stabs of muscular guitar quickly forced my retreat. Much better were Sheffield’s own Pulp, led by idiosyncratic vocalist Jarvis Cocker, serving up a delicious buffet of pop pastiche, echoes of earlier decades colourfully reconstructed, and their prospects, on this form, look extremely good.

To close, the Wedding Present, 1992’s indie league champions with a remarkable 12 hits, delivered their taut, fraught tunes in impressive style with Dave Gedge’s preference for the short, sharp shock in evidence.

A trio of acts at Hallam University – Blammo, the Frank & Walters and Cud – were beamed in on screen. In “the most complex technical test since Live Aid”, Radio 1 FM not only broadcast both gigs live, but also brought the Leadmill audience band instant taste of the action down the road.

It plans to repeat the feat each night of Sound City and with Dutch, Finnish, Danish and German radio companies buying in concerts for later transmission, Sheffield has the chance to raise its profile.


Suzanne Vega
St George’s Hall, Bradford

April 13th, 1993

A graduate of that renowned star academy, the High School of Performing Arts, Suzanne Vega has achieved a transatlantic profile without the need for glitz and glamour. Once a dancer, she has sustained that serious tradition begun by other female troubadours like Nyro, Mitchell, Previn, by constructing fragile, intimate works.

Yet Vega has transcended that sixties style. Her visions are more observational than confessional, fragments of life in New York City described in spare poetry, then dressed in tender, yet haunting, minor key melodies.

But if much of her output functions perfectly well in acoustic setting, Vega’s band for her current UK tour has added a new jazz dynamic to her performance. While her four musicians are certainly only supporting players, they lay down a solid rhythmic canvas on which the singer carefully applied her musical strokes.

At St George’s Hall in Bradford, an ideal, human-scale venue for this visitor, she revealed a growing confidence. Still best known for her folk-based songs like Marlene On the Wall and Small Blue Thing, Vega has added fresh dimensions, toughening up and exploring new territory.

If When Heroes Go Down has an invigorating ring of Elvis Costello – his most recent producer Mitchell Froom did the same job and is the keyboard player for this tour – then the live version of Blood Makes Noise offers no such obvious pigeon hole.

A rugged unnerving slab of expressionist noise, the composition is constructed on a jarring scaffold of metallic percussion, reminiscent less of Greenwich Village than Manhattan’s rock avant garde. Even though Vega chose a more comfortable encore – an a capella Tom’s Diner, delivered despite a failing voice – she had already made, through her striking marriage of melody and energy, a distinctive mark.


John Shuttleworth
Buzz Club,  Manchester

April 28th, 1993

One-time punk parodist in the guise of Jilted John, actor Graham Fellows has emerged in a new incarnation – a singer-songwriter of dubious pedigree by the name of John Shuttleworth, a middle-aged low brow from Sheffield with high aspirations, who is more happy ton share his top showbiz tips.

Shuttleworth on stage offers A Guide to Stardom, the accumulated wisdom of a man destined to remain a nobody. Yet, by the wonders of irony, Fellows’ creation has already wowed the Edinburgh Fringe and, as his return to Manchester’s Buzz Club confirmed, is filling houses to capacity on his current tour.

The joke is that there isn’t really a joke at all. Shuttleworth plays every move, every moment of the act, straight, as a cavalcade of musical banalities spills from his Yamaha electronic keyboard, spiced by an ear-tweaking battery of instant rhythms.

The results are a mixture of the utterly absurd and ridiculously commonplace, as pathos and bathos hold hands in a hilarious cabaret which sits curiously somewhere between Frank Sidebottom and Vic Reeves.

His compositions – Pigeons In Flight, Catch The Fox, Incident On the Snake Pass – have naggingly hummable melodies and irritatingly catchy choruses, but the real humour is derived from Fellows’ immaculately observed detail, from the stage clobber to the everyday domestic references.

Caught in a time-warp where New Faces still makes and breaks the stars. Shuttleworth is the sort of hard-working wannabe who plus away on the working men’s club circuit.

But even his agent Ken Worthington, TV’s Clarinet Man, can’t always guarantee success, let alone fame. “I wrote this next one for the kiddies’ pageant at the local church,” Shuttleworth enthuses. “But they didn’t use it in the end.”


INXS
Town & Country Club, Leeds

July 9th, 1993

It is one of rock’s great anomalies – as soon as bands graduate to the football stadium circuit they long for a return to the bars, away from those oceans of anonymous faces and back to a time when the audience was within touching distance.

INXS, one of the greatest draws on the globe, are facing that schizophrenia head on, escaping the auditoriums where musicians turn matchstick men
And undertaking a back-to-basics small hall, mystery tour, announcing precise venues only a day before they play.

The UK leg of the Get Out Of The House tour opened in Leeds at the Town & Country Club, not exactly a back room joint but a hall of human scale where stars and stargazers can briefly breathe the same air.

The Australian combo warmed to the experience – the vocalist, Michael Hutchence, has talked about being able to smell his fellow musicians again after years of singing 60 feet away from them – and the crowd, packed armpit to armpit, certainly entered into the party spirit.

Hutchence aside, INXS exude scant style and still less fashion sense, but they are a highly compact, highly competent live unit that rocks like a beast. Each slab of sound is underpinned by a solid rhythm-and-blues underbelly, as the three Farriss brothers and Garry Gary Beers on bass lay down the canvas and Kirk Pengilly embroiders economically on guitar and saxophone.

But it was the singer who provided the focus, the Antipodean sex-god slithering slickly and slyly, perching Puck-like on the monitors, cascading fountains of mineral water into the sweltering front rows or tantalisingly reaching out to make contact with the rising mass of outstretched hands.

The night provided a rich mixture of material, some from the forthcoming album, but the foundations of the show were built on a string of band standards: the slinky Need You Tonight, New Sensation, hung on that nagging jagged riff, and the doomily intense Suicide Blonde.

As Heaven Sent and Mystify offered an extended encore there was a real feeling that the golden age of rock was gone. The days when even the largest groups played in this sort of place as a matter of course have passed but INXS, if only fleetingly, rekindled the embers of memory with their 90-minute set.


Iggy Pop
Town & Country Club, Leeds

July 30th, 1993

Bridging a quarter of a century of rock, Iggy Pop has been one of the music’s perennial cult objects. Feted by David Bowie – the song Jean Genie was jointly inspired by Iggy and Jean Genet – he has flown the banner of determined individuality at full mast.

For all his critical recognition, however, in terms of chart action, Iggy has rarely troubled the scorers on either side of the Atlantic, cultivating instead a reputation as an exotic eccentric on rock’s fringes, a pop anarchist who has neither embraced the mainstream nor been embraced by it.

The audience at Leeds Town & Country Club reflected the fact that his campaign spans generations. Post-hippies, post-punks and heavy metal fans gathered in numbers, evidence enough that Iggy has never been easy to pigeonhole.

He is about to unleash a sprawling new album, American Caesar, yet, typically, he made no attempt to treat the gig as  a promotional platform. For the Michigan-born rocker the stage is holy territory, a place to burn adrenalin not hold sales conventions.

Hooked up to a tight, economic three-piece – a basic drums, bass and guitar, augmented frequently by Iggy’s own rhythm playing – he did a handful of songs from the forthcoming release, but in a tour de force display of hyperactivity, with the sculpted torso of old still in great order, he tore through most of the songs that have made his name.

The Passenger and Lust For Life, two tunes which signalled his revival as the British punk scene exploded, hummed with frenetic life and the psychotic derangements of I Wanna Be Your Dog, from the early Stooges era, still had the power to disturb.

Yet Iggy, the father of raw power, never one for manicured noise, has built a small group here that is actually too crude, too raucous, for some of his songs. They turned down the volume for a poignant treatise on the tortures of solitude from the new record, a piece with a definite Velvets texture, but by the storming encore – Mixin’ the Colours and Louie Louie – the needles were flickering into the red zone once more and the lead voice was losing the battle.


St Etienne
Hacienda, Manchester

September 14th, 1993

Britain’s national popular music convention In the City, Manchester’s five-day jamboree of industry chatter and on-stage over-drive, adds weight to the argument that the place, even post-Factory, remains the UK’s  rock capital.

The event, now in its second year and a home riposte to the New Music Seminar in New York, allows the record company faces, band managers and the name producers to gather for an intense taste of the music’s current flavour. It also provides a platform for a battery of unsigned groups to make a mark.

Yet the launch party, held appropriately in Manchester’s most significant pop venue, the Hacienda, suggested that if In the City is about the future of music, then the standard-bearers of nineties rock are still relying on a nostalgic vein for their inspiration.

If St Etienne and the Rockingbirds are the best that the contemporary live scene has to offer, then the tidal wave of dance rhythms seems likely to retain its position. The Rockingbirds’ anodyne country rock had lost most of the audience’s attention long before the end of their set.

Fortunately, St Etienne offer a more ironic reading of pop’s recent past, unashamedly plundering the sounds ands styles, the issues and the icons of the sixties, but lending the resultant mix an infectious modern gloss.

Vocalist Sarah Cracknell, a Twinkle for the new age, is inevitably the focus, her winsome warbling an ethereal embellishment to Bob Stanley and Peter Wiggs’ appealing soundtrack. With a full rhythm section and two female backing singers, the performance had wit and colour.

But are Join Our Club and You’re In A Bad Way appropriate anthems for the listeners of today? Can the group’s cover of Op Knox winners Candlewick Green’s seventies monster Who Do You Think You Are truly be the way forward? Or is pop just condemned to recycle the most kitsch moments of its short history in the name of progress?

Pastiche has a part to play in the cultural flow but when it becomes the group’s raison d’etre, the joking should really stop. St Etienne, retiring encoreless to the wings, are bubblegum funsters but their saccharine charm quickly dissipates.


The Cocteau Twins
Manchester Academy

February 15th, 1994

The core trio, more triplets than twins, have become weary of the media tag locating them as other-worldly beings, cult objects disconnected from the realities ordinary folk encounter. On tour for the first time in a while, with a fully-fledged, seven-piece line-up, the Twins are almost kicking ass, translating their lilting pop symphonies into something a little tougher.

At the Academy, though, the band showed scant sign that they were ready to reach out and touch their audience in the traditional way. Not a hint of “How ya doin’, Manchester?” – barely a whisper of a stage announcement all night, in fact.

Yet Elizabeth Fraser – her free-form vocalising in good fettle – Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde have always been more interested in cerebral reflection than physical jerks and the large crowd seemed content with that. No one smiled; dancing was definitely not de rigueur; intensity was the order of the occasion.

On offer were generous portions of the new album, with the sublime Know Who You Are At Every Age and the almost jaunty Bluebeard capably repackaged for live consumption, interspersed with older favourites like the well-received Carolyn’s Fingers. It was dreamy but verging on the enervating.


Pulp
Leeds Metropolitan University

April 29th, 1994

In a more just world it would now be time to set aside the macho posturings of the rock burn-out and the dead-ends of the dance marathon and settle down to the perfect pop adventures of the scandalously undersung Pulp, those Sheffield born music makers with an uncanny ability to turn the everyday into the extraordinary.

But Jarvis Cocker and his band have been plugging away for so long that it makes you wonder whether the release of their first album for a major label will be enough for them to escape the cult ghetto.

His’n’Hers is an engaging celebration of the domestic – from tea on the table to acrylic pullovers, Meadowhall shopping centre to teenage sex. Live the tunes are, if anything, better and a modest but welcoming crowd at Leeds Metropolitan University thrilled to vocalist Cocker’s stage escapades.

The bedrock of pieces like Do You Remember The First Time? and instant classics like Lipgloss and Babies is Candide Doyle’s wondrous keyboard playing but Russell Senior’s occasional loops of violin were also quite brilliant, simultaneously luxuriant and louche.

Pulp deliver a version of postmodern pop that leaves you, bizarrely, longing for the Seventies. Hints of Roxy Music, flashes of Sparks, even echoes of Gloria Gaynor on She’s A Lady, haunt their work. But this is more than pastiche. At their best they leave Suede standing and, if fate lends a hand, could still join Blur at this year’s medal ceremony.


Radiohead
Manchester University

May 27th, 1994

“There are a lot of people out there who want to tear us to pieces,” Radiohead’s vocalist Thom E. Yorke told the churning, cheering hordes who had gathered at Manchester University, communicating a surprising lack of faith in the face of such reassuring adulation.

But then Radiohead are one step removed from most of the ego surfers who ride the rock wave. Yorke’s lyrics on that extraordinary slice of self-examination, Creep, suggest a deficient sense of self-worth but, more significantly, provide a rare example of pop being used to express genuine feelings.

It was probably Creep, last year’s smash single, that had drawn most of the packed audience to the gig but, by the end, the band had shown that one-hit wonders they are not. On the contrary, they are arguably the best live act currently stomping a crowded circuit.

In fact, this performance left their debut album, Pablo Honey, looking a strangely uneven affair. The five-piece, underpinned by some impeccably tight interplay between drums and bass, delivered a set of controlled venom, reminiscent of Bowie’s Ronson-led Spiders From Mars.

Opening with a familiar tune, You, the band switched back and forth between old and new, with Bones, an unheard song, quite sensational – taut tremolo distortions and a chorus built on layers of dissonant harmony.

“I’m scared shitless,” Yorke remarked. Well, if anxiety – sheer terror even – is the key to cracking it, this group seems to possess the magic ingredient in the required quantity.


Lush
Manchester University

June 8th, 1994

Challenged to a drinking contest by their support band, noise merchants Blessed Ethel, Lush claimed they had chosen the easier option by returning to the stage for an encore. “We’re too scared,” confessed lead singer Miki Berenyi. “We’d rather be playing.”

Such spontaneous levity was out of keeping with a rather low-key gig, tucked away in one of Manchester University’s smaller concert rooms, more bar than hall, but ideal, on paper, for Lush, returning to live action with a short series of dates at intimate venues.

But if the events never truly caught fire – the band certainly needed an excuse to come back for an encore - Lush, emerging from a two-year recording drought with a flood of material, performed well enough, suggesting that their new songs, once fully honed for live presentation, will swell their fan base.

Two EPs have already hit the racks and an album is to follow shortly and the long wait for fresh tunes has been worthwhile. Blackout and Stardust, the most immediate winners on the CD, kicked things off – short, sharp shocks of guitar sound, more reminiscent of the original new wave than any contemporary ambience.

Not that Lush had any connection with punk revivals. The dense, hypnotic canvas they sculpt has closer links with former 4AD label mates The Cocteau Twins than any of the re-born safety pin brigade.

On longer works like Never Never and Desire Lies, simple motifs slowly evolve into something frequently magnificent with the angelic vocal interplay between guitarists Berenyi and Emma Anderson quite bewitching.

Even if the harmonies didn’t always gel perfectly, the discordance perversely added to the quality of the occasion. It emphasised that intriguing juxtaposition of the solid and the fragile that Lush achieve so well.


Manic Street Preachers
Manchester Academy

October 18th, 1994

If empty intellectualism has been etched on pop’s calling card, there has always been the odd renegade determined to transform rock into an intelligent medium.

Manic Street Preachers appear to be the current advocates, riddling the songs on their latest collection, The Holy Bible, with a gallery of cultural icons – from Plath to Pinter, Lenin to Le Pen.

On stage, of course, the moronic inferno of guitar and battery quickly drowns out such detail but it hardly seems to matter. If the Manics assume the mantle of thinking men in the recording studio, they mount the catwalk of cacophony and become rock’n’roll terrorists, the Clash with higher education.

At Manchester Academy, there was only a short-lived respite from a sequence of jagged, furious strikes – PCP, Revol, Slash’n’Burn and Faster – when the brooding nihilism of From Despair to Where and the exquisite street existentialism of Motorcycle Emptiness unfolded.

Along the way, though, they confirmed what an effective unit the classic four-piece can be – no space to waste, no time to lose, a steel curtain of noise coloured by James Dean Bradfield’s economic yet sublime guitar figures.

The fact that Bradfield also had to deliver a raw vocal to accompany every staccato attack was almost beyond the call of duty, but with the assertive drumming of Sean Moore and taut but uninhibited playing of bassist Nicky Wire and guitarist Richey James, he had impressive enough cover.

The encore was less engaging. The frontman returned solo to busk a throwaway version of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. A Situationist gesture? A stab in Burt Bacharach’s back? Perhaps a moment for eye make-up to be restored backstage?

Normal service was soon resumed, with Yes and the new single, She Is Suffering, reminding us that a metal grit envelops the grey matter of the group’s lyric sheet.


Beck
Manchester University

November 28th, 1994

Is this the age of the neurotic self-obsessive? Sold out signs at Beck’s debut UK gig suggest that his curious blend of twitchy unease and languid ego-mania chimes with these strange times. Certainly, after capturing hearts on the campuses of the States, he appears set to do the same over here.

What is appealing about this young American is his determined eclecticism – an utter disregard for the pigeonhole system that suits the record industry’s marketeers.

But is variety inevitably the spice of life? Beck’s mish-mash of a show at Manchester University hinted at dozens of ideas, musical and conceptual, but at the expense of a focus.

To the songs, however, and Beck Hansen’s muse is clearly delivering at present. Fuckin’ With My Head was a powerful opener, those Neil Young-like mouth harp phrases quite exhilarating. That high spot was dimmed by a series of guitar-driven dead ends, then enlivened by the slipping and sliding of Hotel City.

The deliciously bleak Loser and sneeringly assertive Pay No Mind kept things on course as surprising marriages – delta blues and rap, folk and hip hop, grunge and boho dance – reflected Beck’s lurid palette. But the poetry sequence, pre-apocalyptic jive talk for the Bill and Ted generation, was an indulgence.

So is this boy the Great White Wonder or Swamp Doggy Dogg? The encore suggested something else again. With the ban’s big noise button switched on, it could have been Smashing Pumpkins waving goodnight.


Simple Minds
Sheffield Arena

March 23rd, 1995

It’s official. Rock, that huge, lumbering beast we thought had been exiled to the sports stadiums of the American Midwest, is alive and almost kicking, returning, not to wreak a terrible revenge, but merely to fill the hearts of ordinary fans with pleasure and a yearning for pop values of yesteryear.

Simple Minds, in a phrase, are back. Almost four years on, the band, now condensed to a twosome of vocalist Jim Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill plus assorted musicians, have issued a new album and embarked on the sort of globe-spanning trek – 25 countries, a million paying customers – that was once the expected inheritance of every successful British rocker.

Fortunately for Kerr and Burchill, they still speak a brand of musical Esperanto that engages with an international audience. Like their Celtic comrades U2, they build a solid rock structure – giant blocks of sound, the big, brash gesture – which retains an appeal beyond this isle, a trick that more recent pretenders to the UK rock crown have found difficult to pull off.

Certainly Sheffield Arena, a dream-like cavern of space, was of suitable scale to hold the group’s show – a 90 minute odyssey plus encores – an almost complacently self-assured affair lit in stunningly dramatic fashion, high in theatricality but somehow cold. If the crowd’s reaction was occasionally overpowering, the five players seemed all too distant.

The music, too, had, for the most part, a grey certainty – a plodding counterpoint to the fireworks of light that seemed, at one point, to transform the auditorium into the nave of an immense rock cathedral. The worshippers were suitably drawn in.

Until the fifth tune, Hypnotised, the canvas was like a thick, well-worn tapestry. But as Burchill’s spearing slide vividly recreated the album cut, the following song, The American – a very early single with a swaggering latin refrain – added verve to vigour.

True, Mandela Day and Belfast Child served as reminders that the Simple Minds repertoire is not bereft of a well-honed intelligence but the mainstream anthems – Waterfront and Stand By Love – had the ponderous predictability of an earlier age.

Epic keyboard chords, massive guitar figures, relentless power drumming once stood for muscular potency; now they are macho over-statements. Even Kerr’s balletic choreography could not subvert the sub-text – this is men’s music in an era when masculinity has been discredited.

There was a nod elsewhere as the band trotted back to acknowledge the applause with a version of the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. But every sinister, neurotic nuance had been excised, and it was quickly back to the humping bravado of Don’t You (Forget About Me). And in some ways that is this band’s fundamental problem – too literal, desperately short on irony.

That said, while numerous thoughtful Scottish songsmiths from north of the border – the Bible, Danny Wilson and others – have stuttered in the years since Simple Minds emerged, the two Glaswegians appear to have concocted a commercial formula with its own constituency, whose members just ignore the sell-by date.