Ask one who’s known me if I’m really so bad.
I am.
That’s an unfair opening line: Gowan himself was the best part of Orchestra London’s Strange Animal concert tonight. Even writing the previous sentence gives him short shrift: he’s as good as ever, still the same guy who, twenty-one years ago, released the great Strange Animal album. But even he couldn’t save the performance honouring the belated anniversary of that album.
The evening started poorly with an uninterested host (probably from one of the local radio stations) reading off a list of sponsors—as if the 20-foot-high projected logo and banners all around Centennial Hall weren’t enough to make the point. (For some reason it’s the current fashion in London at concerts, theatre performances, etc., to sap any excess energy from audiences before allowing them to see what they bought tickets for.) After she left the stage and the lights came down, the orchestra launched into the Gowan Overture, a tame instrumental greatest hits medley that’s the requisite introduction for this sort of rock’n’roll tribute, apparently to remind the audience that they’re watching serious musicians who are just slumming tonight.
Once Gowan hit the stage things notched up, as he jumped into Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, a fitting (but not very well integrated) introduction to Moonlight Desires. It’s at that point, though, that the most egregious problem of the evening became evident: the terrible sound. Centennial Hall has a reputation of being a uniquely horrible place to hold concerts, but tonight was especially bad. The strings might as well not have shown up, and at times even Gowan’s piano disappeared into the mush.
Things continued as well as possible through the end of the first set, which included music from Great Dirty World, Lost Brotherhood and But You Can Call Me Larry, as well as a song from Gowan’s current gig as lead singer of Styx (which was, ironically, a cover song itself, and even more ironically, one recorded by Procol Harum, a group well known for their work with orchestras). Maybe unsurprisingly given the surroundings, there was hardly any patter between songs, although he did get off a few one-liners about his post-mullet
songs. An unexpected highlight was the rendition of the Maple Leaf Rag—or, perhaps more properly, two renditions, the second at rocket speed after a quick piano spin. The hour finished with the appropriately-named Victory from Gowan’s eponymous debut album, one of the better-balanced performances of the night.
After intermission the bored blond host came back out to do some more soul-sucking for the sponsors, then ceded the stage to a redressed Gowan, who looked for all the world as if he’d stepped out of one of his 1980s videos. This set would be, he promised, the entire Strange Animal album
… and so it was… sort of.
I’ve heard some good arrangements of popular music for the orchestra—Spirit of the West’s Open Heart Symphony comes to mind as a recent example—and I’ve always thought that parts of Strange Animal would be well-suited to an orchestral treatment. The word that I thought of early in the first set, though, was neutered, and that impression was reinforced throughout the second set. Only City of the Angels and Walking On Air—two songs that were originally fairly symphonic anyway—fared reasonably well. Strange Animal is, at its heart, a dark album, but all evidence of that darkness was missing; even Guerilla Soldier, which even people unfamiliar with the song could guess is a bitingly cynical look at the progression of a foreign war, was rendered musically toothless.
The second set ended with Strange Animal, omitting A Criminal Mind. To no one’s surprise—not least of all because it was printed in the program!—the song was the first encore piece. The concert closed with another song that Styx recently covered: a mostly-unnecessary version of the orchestra-friendly I Am The Walrus.
Dave, my friend who holds a Ph.D. in psychology, would probably suggest that this review is tainted by a primacy effect: because the music didn’t sound like it does on the CDs I’ve listened to for decades, I was predisposed to not like it. To that hypothetical argument I’d respond that I’ve listened to and enjoyed a lot of reworkings of familiar music over the years, and even prefer some of the new versions to the originals. I’ve seen Gowan perform new versions of these songs as recently as five years ago, during a festival in Toronto. So while I don’t completely rule out that there’s primacy coming into play, I think its effect on my opinion is negligible. Gowan and his music lived up to my expectations, but the arrangements, the venue, and the concert as a whole were ultimately disappointing.
