Having first bought a 1970-80 boxed set of Tangerine Dream, this was the first album of theirs that I bought directly after it came out, in 1981. 1981 was also the first time we saw them live. At Brighton Dome on 17th October, to be precise, with Jeremy, Skander G and Simon S.
I was expecting something special from this gig — I think I played a big part in cajoling the others to come — and I got it, though not in the way I was expecting. I was expecting a trippy lightshow, but that turned out to be one of the less remarkable aspects (notwithstanding effective use of a gauze curtain in the second half). Since we were all still under-age drinkers, we had too many pints before the gig, and I think the first 30-40 minutes passed all of us by, as synthesiser noodling often does. Then one of us was bold, or desperate, enough to get up and disturb the whole row of slumped afghan coats to go to the loo. The other three seized the opportunity to follow. After our return, bladders relieved, everything changed. It seemed like the music was playing through me, my legs jittering along with the rhythm of the sequencers. Then Edgar got his guitar out and things really took off. I think he might have been playing some of the Beach Theme from Thief (also released earlier in 1981), but mostly the music seemed improvised, emerging out of the performers and their sense of the audience. To sixteen-year-olds, unversed in jazz or any other improvised form, this was heady stuff. It's still one of the ten best gigs I've been to.
[Trainspotter update, 2010: subsequent listening to official bootlegs of the '81 tour, suggests the piece in question was more likely to have been Diamond Diary, also from Thief, rather than Beach Theme.]
But the music on Exit isn't much like what we heard that night. 1981 was the transitional year where Tangerine Dream stopped doing tracks that filled a whole side of an LP (except on their live recordings), and became more concise. Choronzon is the clearest statement of that intent, at just over four minutes long, and with a catchy (if not quite melodic) hook that could have almost made it a single. The best track, however, is still the longest one: Kiew Mission, with a brilliant spoken vocal in Russian in the first half.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
|
Comments