By Dan O’Farrell.
Music is memory, as everyone knows. The power of that moment when you really fall in love with a song, album or band will guarantee that your brain magically transports you to that moment every time you subsequently hear it. That’s my only explanation as to how I can be stood in Southampton’s cavernous Guildhall (ok, ok – O2!) with tears streaming down my cheeks listening to They Might Be Giants(1/11/24).
Yep. You heard me right. They Might Be Giants. There are many reactions that you might expect TMBG to produce, if you are at all familiar with their considerable oeuvre: laughter, an amused grin, even, for many I know, a kind of nauseated irritation…but tears? So tonight I feel weirdly humbled by one of the strangest bands ever to emerge from Brooklyn, New York, and I’m left with a feeling that the method in their madness is even more impressive in 2024 than it was in 1990, when their breakthrough album ‘Flood’ was released.
Tonight, to a healthily packed hall, the two Johns who started the band in 1982 (Flansburgh – guitar/vocals and Linnell – keys/vocals) front an eight-piece ensemble, complete with show-boating brass-section, who bring the whole of ‘Flood’ to vibrant life. The ‘Flood’ songs – defiantly not played in order – are scattered liberally between their two sets and interspersed with cherry-picks from the rest of their sizable back-catalogue.
John Linnell seems in fine fettle – beaming like a surprised clone of Malcolm Gladwell who has unexpectedly found himself centre-stage at a massive rock concert. John Flansburgh plays the disgruntled politics professor, constantly roaming the stage – mic-stand and guitar in hand – and giving us some hilarious background on the upcoming US election (they may not return if the worst happens…) and recounting early discussions with lawyers after some primitive sampling violations.
The word that the two Johns of TMBG probably hate to read the most in their many reviews (as Flansburgh says on stage: ‘we’re forty years into this shit!’), has to be ‘quirky’, but it still fits. Quirky, of course, is a double-edged sword, with connotations of wit, originality but also – let’s admit it – the annoyance-factor that I mentioned earlier.
Lets tackle that first: it can still happen. There is a keening nasal quality in the two John’s voices that – to the uninitiated – can resemble being sung-at, full-pelt, by two close-harmonising Kermit The Frogs. Musically, too, TMBG has consistently refused to stick to any one genre, establishing a frame of reference and then honing it like any reasonable band. Nope – not for them. Instead they gorge themselves at a revolving buffet of styles, hopping from pop, to show-tunes, to swingin’ jazz, to psych, to country, to indie… this is by no means an exhaustive list. It can feel dangerously close to parody, until you let yourself relax and go with the flow.
Besides this, there’s the oddest collection of lyrical conceits found this side of…well, anyone really. There are touches of Tom Lehrer’s New York wit, a soupcon of Jonathan Richman’s childlike innocence, and flights of scientific fancy that justify the Wikipedia tag of ‘geek-rock’. Even as someone who considers myself a fan, I wince slightly to find myself singing along to lines about ‘everyone’s wearing prosthetic foreheads on their real heads’, or the epic tale of ‘Particle Man’ and ‘Triangle Man’.
But – and here’s the killer – I was singing along. I couldn’t help it. TMBG must be responsible for more earworms per dozen songs than pretty much any band since The Monkees, and they had teams of songwriters. Their melodies are supreme, as anyone who has found themselves running ‘not to put to fine a point on it/say you’re the only bee in my bonnet’ or ‘now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople…’ through their brain – on a loop – can attest.
So the show is a pure joy from start to finish. Band-members amble on and off. It all sounds amazing, with particular highlights being ‘Road Movie To Berlin’ and a stripped-down version of ‘Dead’ where those keening-Kermits fill the O2 with a soulful lament. Not content to fulfil the ‘legacy album’ template by just playing the record straight, TMBG play ‘Sapphire Bullets’ completely backwards, then reverse the just-taken video footage so we can hear it the right way round (sounded bloody weird, to be honest, but a genuinely original idea and very entertaining). Most songs are kept lean and mean – no TMBG song ever outstays its welcome, another plus! – with the exception being encore ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ is milked to its full potential (and beyond!) with solo turns from all assembled brass-players. No-one minds – grins abound.
And the tears? ‘Flood’ was one of those albums that I got my dad into, and ‘Your Racist Friend’ was still a fixture on his playlists as he cared for my mum in the years leading to both their deaths in 2021. The memories cut deep, but I’m glad they do. It’s what music is for.
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