What a difference a day, or decade, can make. Last night I was watching a reformed Van der Graaf Generator and bemoaning the fact that their setlist didn’t contain enough crowd-pleasing favourites from their back catalogue.
That band share little common ground with the reunited Monochrome Set, aside from being outsiders from their respective ‘scenes’ – like the prog act who found many fans in the punk and new wave scenes, similarly the Set always operated on the fringes of the scene by dint of their intelligent lyrics and pure pop tuneage.
It’s quite a coup for the We Can Still Picnic crew to get the reformed indie legends to play this show, and Mono is packed out with a mix of those who were ‘there’ first time round and the curious, younger folk who have latterly picked up on the band’s legacy.
The band take the stage with Bid looking every inch the Indian prince, resplendent in a regal silk shirt, while Lester Square looks every inch… well, with a cravat, pipe and a moustache you could hide Tom Selleck in, he’s as anti-rock as you could expect. Original bassist Andy Warren, however, lurks behind the speaker, despite calls for him to join his bandmates centre stage. The lineup’s fleshed out with keyboards and drums from Scarlet’s Well, and in fact, we get a (very decent) tune from Bid’s solo project mid-set.
However, from the opening eponymous ‘Monochrome Set’ it is, pretty much, about The (should-have-been) Hits. The bulk is drawn from pretty much the classic first three albums from the first incarnation of the band – so we get a jaunty ‘Lighter Side of Dating’, and perhaps their finest moment, ‘Jet Set Junta’ thrown in early, while ‘Alphaville’, the band’s second-ever single, also makes an early appearance, Bid dedicating the tune about the “small highland village” to his Scottish heritage. Though this may be the happy ramblings of a man pleased to find that he has a large extended Glasgwegian family.
There are dips into later material of course and the diehard fans sing along to tunes from Dante’s Casino and Lost Weekend (including ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, the closest the band ever got to a genuine Hit, peaking at an derisory 81 in the charts).
They play for an hour, but it’s all over too soon, although given the short ’n’ sweet nature of most of their songs, they get through a power of work, including personal favourite ‘Cast a Long Shadow’ and ‘The Ruling Class’ whose influence on a certain pre-Franz Ferdinand act looms greatly. They’re unsurprisingly ushered back for an encore, and Alex Kapranos is hauled onstage, as Bid does a solo acoustic ‘Goodbye Joe’, and then, it’s 1979 all over again for’He’s Frank’ (known to some Iggy Pop and Norman Cook fans as as ‘Circular Joy’) with Alex delivering a spirited vocal far removed from his efforts in his previous band, the Bid-produced Karelia.
With Bid’s voice on the wane the final act is ‘Lester Leaps In’ – a instrumental that’s as revered by the fans in the crowd as any of the actual songs that preceded it. In all, a very pleased crowd that, should the band return, will be there to welcome them with open arms.