Joe Costello sees The The at The Halls, Wolverhampton.
It’s not often that a musical artist outlines the evening’s itinerary to the audience but this is exactly what Matt Johnson does early in the performance, we will first have The Listening Set, a performance in full of Ensoulment, the first studio album in a quarter of a century by The The before a fifteen minute break and the Dancing Set, which he promises will be a selection of favourites from the back catalogue.
All he is asks is no talking from the capacity crowd and to put away their phones and see the show through their eyes and not a screen, he and the band, all clad in black are “analogue kind of guys, like Derek Dougan”, playing to the local crowd in one of the few moments of audience interaction.
The set split is, for me at least, an inspired move. Effectively operating as their own support act, the band can showcase the new material in isolation without drawing too much comparison, perhaps unfavourable, with the more familiar songs.
The new album draws on the themes we know well from the earlier body of work, politics and religion on opener Cognitive Dissident, love and sex on Zen & the Art of Dating also sees him address the mores of modern life with the added years allowing him to introduce nostalgia in Down By the Frozen River where he sings pointedly about his schooldays, suffice to say they were not the best days of his life. He asks the audience if they ever played truant, but not before he also ironically adopts the role of schoolmaster, admonishing certain sections of the attendees for talking when they are supposed to be listening.
A fifteen minute break and then as good as his word we launch into the dancing set with the frantic Infected opening the second half of the show, segueing into Armageddon Days Are Here
Again, slightly disappointingly lacking the Ballroom Blitz pastiche spoken intro of the original recording but otherwise a suitable follow-up before The Sinking Feeling and a welcome breather with a gentler paced, musically if not lyrically, Heartland and other similarly down tempo songs drawn predominantly from their mid-eighties to early-nineties imperial phase with obvious highlights including This Is the Day, maybe the last pop song to utilise an accordion, and a glowering Sweet Bird of Truth.
The main set closes with the Lonely Planet and a rare moment of optimism in its closing couplet: “If you can’t change the world, change yourself. And if you can’t change yourself change the world” before they return with Johnson introducing the band and the moment perhaps everyone was waiting for, Uncertain Smile and its famous piano solo outro originally performed by Jools Holland.
The evening ends appropriately enough with his debut album’s final track GIANT, included partly on the basis that Johnson wanted to finish with a song the crowd could join in with, the refrain “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” bookending the show perfectly.
