Damo Suzuki sets Broadgate Alight

Ex-CAN rock star Damo Suzuki played the New Continental last night, with backing from the Three Dimensional Tanx. I was there to see it, and I met my old friend WB there. He's emailed me this review of the gig, he seems to have enjoyed it even more than me:

Hi River,
great to hook up with you again after all this time. I wrote this as soon as I came down from the Damo Suzuki gig, I wonder if it's the kind of thing you'd like to put up on the 'Broadgate Is Great' blog?

Damo Suzuki and the Three Dimensional Tanx played a blistering gig at the New Continental last night. Noone would believe that they had never played together before.

The night began with a gaunt, bespectacled guy creating ambient sound with his electric guitar, looping it artfully to create layer after layer of texture, emotion and power. I found myself gradually, imperceptibly, drawn into his vibe - a cool spacy mellow harmonic playground for the mind. I felt the audience applause was not adequate for the skill and musical instinct displayed by this guy, had his work been enhanced by video images or polychromatic lighting effects I guess more people would have understood the journey he was taking. I wish I knew his name, he's one to look out for in the future.

Then the great legend Suzuki took to the stage. Like a long haired Japanese Napoleon, his charisma instantly grabbed hold of the audience like a bailiff grabbing an old man's throat. 3D Tanx started laying down a sound rocking muscal platform that Damo quickly began to build on.

The musical alchemy took hold within minutes, dark insatiable beats began to take the audience to dangerous psychic places, a thrusting thrumming rhythm that for whole periods of time began to make the whole room vibrate in harmony with the universe. The 60's time traveller opened a pathway back to 68, and the souls of the greats, Janis, Jim, Jimi could be heard mingling their voices into Damo's sideways thrusting lyric.

The audience twisted and flickered like flames, consumed in a cosmic moment where we were locked into experimental infinities, as the boundaries of music, space and time were pushed back, ever so slightly.

Before it even seemed to have begun, the night was over. Slowly we came back to reality, the coolest and most beautiful people in Preston, gathered together in one performance space, each knowing we had witnessed and experienced something that would leave an indelible mark on our essential selves until the heat death of the cosmos.

WB

Wow! Loads more great gigs coming up at the New Continental - it's making the Broadgate the place that everyone wants to be.