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The inaugural Don't Look Back concert series, starting with The Stooges' blistering run-through of Fun House and continuing with performances from the likes of The Lemonheads, Mudhoney, and Cat Power, has seemed like manna from heaven for attending audiences, who unsurprisingly have been able to attend performances knowing full well what they're about to hear. With tonight's performance of 1994's Orange, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (or Blues Explosion as they now like to be called) revisit thirteen songs that introduced their blend of 'rock-em-sock-em' trashed blues-rock to a wider audience. It's a dubious selection, especially since 1998's Acme was the band's most consistent offering, but hearing Orange for the first time is the closest you'll get to a Blues Explosion show on record without being there, and less sweatier affair to boot. It's also a chance for the band to reclaim the bravado lost after last year's disappointing and disjointed Damage, on which the band sounded uninspired and at times almost a parody of their former selves.
Whereas Blues Explosion shows are notoriously hit and miss, it's immediately clear that the added focus of performing an album from start to finish has given the band extra impetus, especially in front of an audience who know the material almost as well as the three men on stage. Opener 'Bellbottoms' still sounds startlingly fresh today, and even without the string section that appears on record it's a powerful start to the show, allowing Spencer to scream the band's name for the first time tonight (one down, six-hundred-and-twenty-three to go), and marks the signal with which guitarist Judah Bauer and drummer Russell Simins let loose and shift into high gear.
Over the course of the next forty minutes, the band play to their strengths, with the occasion of the night only serving to help the band squeeze whatever extra juice they can from their instruments. Simins in particular is in fine form, his mop-topped frame providing the pounding beat in 'Sweat' as if he was driving a big rig down Route 66 whilst nodding his head aggressively to an all-night rockabilly marathon on K-RAWK. To the left of stage, Bauer looks as relaxed as ever, providing nodding glances to the ladies at the side of stage whilst providing the steady foil to Spencer's guitar histrionics. The primal screams of Spencer meanwhile are toned down during the first half of the performance, until the whiskey-soaked 'Brenda' and a particularly raucous 'Blues X Man' show he's merely just warming up.
'Full Grown', the down and dirty tribute to older women (sample lyric: 'BABY, BABY, YOU SURE LIKE TO....FUCK!'), goes down well with an audience who are certainly old enough to meet Spencer's criteria, and, judging by their participation throughout the song, have certainly subscribed to his sexual manifesto. There's only one question left unanswered towards the end of the first set - who will step into Beck's shoes during the rock-rap breakdown at the end of 'Flavour'? Step forward Mark Lamarr, whose embarrassing 'cool-dad' performance was definitely the evening's low point.
Returning to the stage for a second set, with Spencer and Bauer trading in the orange leisurewear worn during the first hour for the band's standard low-key mobster chic, Spencer strode up to the microphone and declared that while Orange was 'a look back into the past, we're now gonna go into the future.. into outer space!' Well, actually more like into a second selection of back catalogue tracks. Thankfully, cuts from Damage were kept to a minimum, although the cut-and-paste aural assault of 'Fed Up and Low Down' came close to matching the giddy thrill of the DJ Shadow-produced original, itself a spiritual cousin to 'Blues X Man' and the Alec Empire blitzkreig of 'Attack' from Acme.
'Son of Sam', 'Afro', '2Kindsa Love' and 'R.L Got Soul' all draw appreciative cheers from the crowd, the latter followed by a cover of 'Goin' Down South' in tribute to the recently departed R.L Burnside, the blues stalwart with whom the Blues Explosion collaborated with in the mid-Nineties. There's also time to pay tribute to New Orleans, with Spencer agreeing with Kanye West's recent outburst, and even raising the stakes by saying that "George Bush doesn't give a fuck about black people". As to whether the audience agree, the wild cheers which follow provide proof enough.
The evening ends with two typical Blues Explosion moments; a long theremin-led jam session conducted by Spencer in full southern preacher mode, before the self-proclaimed 'number one blues singer in the country' swings his microphone into the air and smashes it into pieces against the stage, bringing the night to an end in true Blues Explosion style. With a roaring audience in front of them, and two-and-a-half hours of sweat soaked blues-rock behind them, maybe the chance to look back on Orange will push the band to a higher level. That, or another 12 songs packed with dirty fuzz and shouts of 'BLUES EXPLOSION'. Yeah, probably the latter.
