Alison Groldfrapp is the gift that keeps on giving. During her bands short 8 song support slot , dressed like a cut-out-and-keep extra from Bladerunner, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d strayed into the wrong exhibition hall. Alison’s fuck-me boots, sequinned 40’s top and WAF hat, not to mention the blonde My Little Pony tail make it difficult to keep your eyes off her. But the best part is she looks like the coolest thing that ever stalked the earth and that’s before she’s even bothered to open her mouth.
Despite the crowds luke-warm reception GOLDFRAPP play a great set, proving themselves to be far more than the sum of their recorded parts.
Perhaps the best example is their performance of ‘Lovely Head’, a clever but stilted track on the album ‘Felt Mountain’ which positively crackles onstage tonight as Alison’s operatic soloing transforms into something thrilling via live vocal synthesizer, half sonar pulse crunching against soaring metso-soprano. This kind of performance with Alison’s dry humour (after simulating masturbation during a Theremin break she remarks from the stage ‘Every girl should have one’) and the strength and dynamism of her voice make the audience's indifference almost criminal. Unfortunately they’re here for one band and one band only.
DURAN DURAN only have to walk on stage to receive a hearty standing ovation. Simon Le Bon however is a little slower to warm up, his nasal delivery only shifting a few songs into the set. But what a set. Few bands have this quality and the quantity of hits; "Notorious", "Wild Boys", "A View to a Kill", and "Reflex" are all racked up long before the encore, and the hydraulic lighting rig, built on a Hollywood blockbuster scale, is more than enough to entertain you through the less salubrious and more recent material – which falls firmly into the Adult Orientated Rock category without bothering to resurrect any of the hooks or quirky pop sensibilities which made Duran Duran the phenomenon they are.
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The crowd are enthralled, but there are still odd moments. Following ‘A View to a Kill’ (video screens full of glamourous and scantily clad model covered in her boyfriend’s blood or somesuch) Le Bon introduces an anti-war song written about a mixed up world (a world full of death Simon?). Later we’re asked (in these no smoking times) to wave our illuminated phone handsets in the darkness during ‘Ordinary World’.
Mixed messages abound and Le Bon’s inarticulacy is at times embarrassing. But the tunes are there, all of them – re-union tour, crowd-pleasing and home-coming go together like a horse, another horse and carriage for Duran Duran. Whether they can bear each other long enough to get into the studio or on the road again, however, who can tell?
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