The Magnetic Fields, Royal Festival Hall, April 25th.
It seems so late in the story of pop music that a support band hoping to make their way in it now appears touching and quaint. Three girls and two boys called Tender Trap had all their credentials in place with 60's pop harmonies, aspiration and enthusiasm and they were very good. Clearly the history of pop hasn't finished yet from the point of view of their age group. Quite fittingly, the sensibility was something like that of the early Magnetic Fields albums with gorgeous harmonies and retro aesthetic, as if anything can be anything but 'retro' by now. Most movingly, they finished on a cover of X-Ray Spex's Germ Free Adolescents.
Those of us mean enough to recognize it might be thinking that the Magnetic Fields are in a slow decline with each successive album providing fewer masterpieces than the last although somehow that is inevitable. Luckily they have a back catalogue of such quantity and quality that a completely wonderful set can be left in the dressing room and there's an utterly sensational one still to give. Yes, four or five songs from Love at the Bottom of the Sea underwhelmed in comparison with the classic titles and what wouldn't. Some of these are like exercises from a songwriting class, litanies of same rhymes from the rhyming dictionary made to fit, but done elegantly enough. This can be done to great effect but even Stephin is not Paul Muldoon or Roddy Lumsden when it comes to making it work properly.
There were outings for a few lesser known items from the early albums like Get Lost and The Charm of the Highway Strip and they were welcome but the major hits included here were Chicken with its Head Cut Off, The Book Of Love, Buzby Berkeley Dreams, No One Will Ever Love You, It's Only Time with the glorious All My Little Words in the encore and, until you hear them all lined up in the same set, you realize how easy it is to forget just what an oeuvre this is.
Many songs, perhaps in Bob Dylan fashion, were in new arrangements and Stephin, Sylvia and Claudia took the lead on pieces originally sung by one of the others, like Stephin singing Come Back from San Francisco,
Come back from San Francisco
and kiss me, I've quit smoking.
but there were further innovations, like Shirley now playing a ukelele and virtuoso guitar parts played by John Woo. Stephin sat at a harmonium with a synthesized mouthpiece that recalled Peter Frampton's heyday for a few of the horror-struck amongst us but mercifully he didn't use it much. In fact, he was as low profile as a lead man can be, but with such an ensemble to his right, he presumably takes the view that there's no point having a dog and barking yourself. You wouldn't ever accuse him of the happy, endearing demeanour of Tender Trap but the lugubrious nature is well practiced and all ironies tacitly understood.
So although nowadays I have precious few contemporary popular music acts to compare them with, The Magnetic Fields are surely the best in the world. Surely by a distance.
