The Musical Box - Portsmouth 2007

...spirit of precise reproduction!

The Musical Box provided a riveting evening’s music last thursday night and their re-staging of the Genesis show from 1974 is surely as close as you could possibly get to the real thing. I like the idea of tribute bands entering into this spirit of precise reproduction and the increasing number of such shows and their popularity perhaps indicates that I am not alone. I also think there is room for more artists approaching rock music from the past with a more interpretive spirit.
I have never understood why the cannon (cannon! Listen to me!) of rock music cannot be treated in the same way as theatre or classical music is. We will happily go and see endless re-workings, interpretations and re-staging of dramatic works and it is accepted that the work of the playwright is available for this purpose. Indeed many feel that the productions which most closely imitate what ‘the original’ might have been like are the least interesting and that those directors, actors and designers who take the original play, take it apart and reconstruct it within the context of the modern world and contemporary themes are providing the more challenging use of the material. I know that I, for one, would far rather see an experimental, thought-provoking and relevant interpretation of Macbeth or Hamlet which takes risks with the text than go to the re-production Globe and see someone’s best shot at a historically accurate stab at how Will Shakespeare’s company might have put it on.
In the same way, although The Musical Box’s painstaking accuracy is fun and the show thrillingly enjoyable, by imitating, they deny their own strengths as performers and fail to put something of themselves into the ‘acting’ they are trying to pull off. The early Genesis shows must have been shocking to witness, so unusual is the staging, so powerful the music and so prodigiously weird the imagination of the main (some might say, only) performer Peter Gabriel. The rest of the band take to the stage anonymous shadows, the stage awash with fluorescent lighting, bringing out the figures in white, hunched over their instruments like scientists all blown-out in negative white-out. What follows is two hours of strange music, often beautiful, frequently sinister, occasionally frightening and always brilliantly played. Watcher of the Skies, Firth of Fifth, Cinema Show and The Knife were wonderfully recreated as the Genesis staples that they must have been 30 odd years ago.
The musicianship is faultless and impressive, particularly Martin Levac as Phil Collins (at one point, someone shouts out ‘You should go solo Phil!’) and the guitarist, Francois Gagnon playing Steve Hackett, who manages to evoke the same blend of fragile beauty and terrible anger from the guitar as the original player and composer did.
The weak point in the set, as pointed out by other reviewers is The Battle of Epping Forest, which reveals itself as one of Genesis’ less successful compositions in a live setting. The players’ hearts didn’t quite seem to be in it and the fast and complex vocal lines just weren’t coming across. Shame – it’s a great song on the record and betray Genesis’ unlikely punk leanings.
Highlights for me were the menacing The Musical Box with its thunderous instrumental passages and mock-twee nursery rhymes reeking of Victorian gentility and the sexually perverse predator/ghost beneath the surface. Dennis Gagné as Gabriel returning to the stage as the old man was one of the night’s most thrilling moments, full of the bizarre but convincing theatricality of the Genesis frontman.
The other real high point comes with the climax of Supper’s Ready. The closing of Apocalypse in 9/8 as Gagné enters wearing what can only be described as a box on his head is genuinely shocking. The music towers above the audience, full of power and getting ever more pressing. It seems something must give or the place will explode, then suddenly, as the stage becomes semi-visible through the use of strobe lighting, Gabriel/Gagné is there, or at least something is there. He is unrecognisable, inhuman almost… 666 is no longer alone, he’s getting out the marrow in your backbone. The sequence had a cinematic feel and put me in mind of cult movies from the same period, like The Wicker Man, or, more recently, Alien. There are also elements of the Theatre of Cruelty within the theatricality. Gabriel’s look is truly unlike anything we have either seen, or imagined before.

A wonderful evocation, then, of what must have been a magical original performance. The problem for me though lies in this very strict adherence to the original. I felt that the man with the most difficult job, that of ‘being’ Peter Gabriel, Dennis Gagné,  just didn’t quite pull it off. Vocally he was astoundingly strong and uncannily like the man himself. Physically however, as well as in the strange – often incomprehensible – between song stories, he simply doesn’t have the charisma or gravitas that Gabriel brought to the part. There is a great deal of surreal humour in the show, much of which works, but some of which is unfortunately unintentional, as the singer frog marches across the stage in his body-hugging all-in-one little black number.  I wanted him to relax, break free from the script sometimes and show how this great band might take what they’ve got from the reproduction and develop it still further, adding to and maybe even (whisper it now) improving on the original. I don’t think this music belongs in a museum, after all.

Author: Chris Sculthorpe, England