Tom Tom Club, The Psychedelic Furs, and Devo play at Red Hook’s 30th Anniverary Celebration at the Red Hook Brewery in Woodinville Saturday, September 17. Tickets: $40 at the gate, are still available. Doors open at 3 p.m.
Yeah, the bands playing at Red Hook Brewery’s 30th Anniversary Celebration in Woodinville tomorrow will ensure a thorough wallow in nostalgia as well as beer, but what the hell? With a whole generation of musicians pilfering from them wholesale, all three veteran new wave ensembles should still sound pretty fresh, live.
The easy-going-yet-insistently-catchy funk of Tom Tom Club, the groove collective led by Talking Heads Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, feels like it’s always existed; partly because The Club’s music has been sampled to death and rebirth and back again by everyone from Mariah Carey to Rich Little to any number of hip-hop artists; and partly because its organic allure can’t be denied. Their most recent release, the concert CD Genius of Live, includes a bonus disc sporting eleven different remixes of the band’s ageless 1981 jam, “Genius of Love,” rejiggered by folks like Money Mark and Ozomatli. Weymouth and Frantz still know how to bring a dance party to a room, if their showing at the Island Life Festival in 2009 is any indication.
Being fodder/inspiration for a John-Hughes-produced teen flick has a way of casting a warm-fuzzy glow over a band, so it’s easy to forget how haunting and all-around-great the first three Psychedelic Furs records still sound (though bands like Interpol and the Strokes sure didn’t). Happily, the Furs’ live show at Redhook should lean heavily on the band’s eponymous 1980 debut, 1981’s Talk Talk Talk, and the band’s masterpiece, 1982’s Forever Now. Richard Butler’s broken-glass David Bowie croon remains reassuringly, enchantingly ragged.
Tom Tom Club may have dropped a new record, and Richard Butler did recently release a solo effort, but Mark Mothersbaugh and the spud-nuts that comprise headliners Devo have everyone beat in terms of activity. Mothersbaugh’s created art, performed solo music, and composed TV and film scores in the last twenty years since Devo last put out a record; and Gerald Casale became a music-video director of considerable notoriety, too. All that, and Devo still managed to release a new album last year (Something for Everybody) packed with enough robotic hooks and snarky satiric wit to set the most cynical fan to pogoing. Expect ‘em to bust out a copious amount of hits, of course, but this is one so-called nostalgia act whose new stuff stands proudly alongside the old.