Callum reconnects with his teenage years after watching Nine Inch Nails in Birmingham.
My teenage musical tastes embarrass me, well my teenage everything embarrasses me really. As an adolescent I was a mess of long, unkempt hair, black T-shirts and sheer misery, all I listened to at the time was watered down pop-punk that does for music what WKD does for human dignity and some vague, tertiary forays towards the world of metal (but not far enough towards it to be of any real merit, I call it ‘Lib Dem Metal’). Virtually none of the music I was listening to at that time has survived into what I can only hope are comparatively wiser years but there are a smattering of survivors, bands I’m glad I was minded to discover back then and Nine Inch Nails sit comfortably at the top of that tree.
The first album of theirs I really delved into was 1994’s The Downward Spiral, recognized even today as the strongest release to their name as well as a stark, painful exploration of the human psyche. It also contains the lyric “I want to fuck everyone in the world” so there’s that. From there I listened to their complete back-catalogue (finding ‘The Fragile’ to be my personal favorite, it still remains so) and was primed in time for Year Zero to be released in 2007. I’d say that since then the quality has been of a consistently high standard, every album’s been different and the only lackluster one was The Slip, which was free, so you can’t really look a gift horse in the mouth. I’ve kind of gravitated away from them since then but an abiding appreciation prevailed and I was quick to snap up Hesitation Marks, their release from last year. It’s a tad inconsistent but some of the more electronically lead tracks are fantastically inventive. Their live shows are also legendary, so when I found out they were doing a world tour I leapt on it like an Italian union worker on a goomba.
I don’t really like big shows, I’m of the opinion that the magic number to make an ideal gig crowd is somewhere in the hundreds, not in the thousands and certainly not in the tens of thousands. I still have a sizeable, barrier-shaped indentation where my stomach should be as a result of seeing Rage Against the Machine in Finsbury Park and it was extremely difficult to groove to Sir Duke to an appropriate degree when the MDMA fueled lunatic to my right kept repeatedly attempting to beat me to death with his girlfriend. Smaller gigs usually mean a more devoted clientele, more room to dance and less chance of losing everyone else, so on that front I was a tad dubious about this sold-out stadium concert. At first it seemed like my suspicions were justified, the actual process of entry was woefully arbitrary as we had to arrive 3 full hours before the gig started to take advantage of the priority booking I’d used and once inside we couldn’t leave, which meant 3 hours of pottering around the foyer area waiting for something interesting to happen. The term ‘beer o’ clock’ applied pretty hard here. In fairness it was a nice evening so it didn’t put too much of a damper on things and the promoters had put on a decent spread, the usual horrendously overpriced food, drink and merch kiosks were present and correct alongside a small stage for local talent.
The support act rocked up at 8, Cold Cave, who had kind of an 80s synthpop vibe evoking Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, The Cure and other similar stuff. The front man had the look absolutely nailed down, with fringe worth at least 1,000 Bowie points and a style of dancing akin to someone writhing around because they’ve had their shirt pulled over their head. They weren’t bad as opening acts go but nothing to go wild over, I can only recount perhaps two or three instances when a supporting act has really stuck with me after a show. After Cold Cave finished their set and packed their dark feelings away we all settled in for the usual drawn-out wait for the main act to emerge. As it turned out we didn’t have to wait that long. Cold Cave finished at 10 to 9 and Nine Inch Nails came out less than half an hour later, so quickly in fact that the crowd were caught unawares. This wasn’t the hard playing Nine Inch Nails of yesteryear. The friend I went with was actually quite taken aback when she saw Trent Reznor, being that she was more familiar with the 90s incarnation of the band she’d expected a lithe, twitchy mess of black hair but what arrived on stage was a clean cut fortysomething dressed less like he was about to play a rock concert and more like he was going to assemble some decking or something. This was the new NiN, they’re prompt, they dress practically, they don’t dawdle between songs and they only leave about 30 seconds between the main set and the encore, no nonsense about it (I’m starting to see why they have such a big German fan base). Does this workmanlike attitude to proceedings dampen the energy of the music though? Hell no.
After a relatively somber opening recital of Me, I’m Not they ran a breathless cycle through the new track Copy of A straight into Beginning of the End before rolling out the bombastic frenzy that is March of Pigs. Reznor absolutely owned the stage, endlessly switching out instruments, changing positions and dancing like a maniac whilst a roadie scurried around at his footfall to rescue the microphone stand every time he knocked it down. The stagecraft was absolutely staggering, it started out simply enough with the band framed behind a black curtain and haloed by a set of mobile rigs, but about 5 songs in the curtain dropped to reveal an even more complex lighting display behind, later still a video wall came down which alternated between light patterns, video footage and when backlit it became silhouetted with cracks and holes like a dilapidated house. The pixels that it projected could be made larger and moved further apart to alter the fidelity of what appeared, from full hi-res video to just a series of blinking dots or strips. At times it seemed like the lighting effects were reacting to the way the band moved in real time. Each song had its own unique feel: the raw red and black of Closer, the blinding greens and whites of The Day the World Went Away and the landscape and animal imagery of The Eraser. Perhaps the highlight from a technical perspective though was The Great Destroyer, a track from Year Zero which features the most brutal, chaotic drop in all of musicdom, it sounds like Megatron having a violent seizure and the lighting display reflected that vibe perfectly. Predictably, they closed out with Hurt, every bit as powerful as it’s ever been and that was that.
Nine Inch Nails are one of those bands that take live shows very seriously. They recognize the fact that they have access to the biggest, best-equipped venues in the world and they take full advantage of it, pulling out all the stops to give you a complete audio-visual experience. I’ve never been to a gig with such intense music where the people were all tempering their dancing so that they never lost sight of what was happening onstage. The new tracks fit in with the old stuff, since the group have made a gradual transition into more electronic, almost garage fare, the stuff from With Teeth and Year Zero almost acted as a middle ground so that nothing jarred with anything else. They may have outgrown the rock and roll lifestyle but that doesn’t mean they can’t still put on an intense, mesmerizing performance. I briefly reverted back into a teenager, just with none of the shame and hair that’s far easier to manage.
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