Chris is currently studying abroad, submitting articles as he travels throughout Europe.
Hefner @ Shepherd’s Bush Empire
London, England October 26, 2001
En route to Hefner’s performance at London’s historic Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a thought kept popping into my head: How could a Midwestern boy hold his own at an indie rock show in arguably the coolest city in Europe? Indie rock is, in itself, a breeding ground for rock snobs, and at a venue where heroes from Johnny Cash to Jonathan Richman have performed, I felt that I might be in over my head.
It is a safe bet to say that rock fans are more or less universal. The Hefner show had all of the elements of an American concert: guys in denim jackets watching with folded arms, mosh pits that smell like socks and even that one old guy with a pony tail who knows every word to every song.
Strangely comforting that, so many miles from home, in a world rife with change, all is well at the rock show.
Social commentary aside, Hefner played to the delight of the London crowd. The band’s love/hate relationship with London is best encapsulated on 2000’s We Love the City (“We love the city cause it never loves us back”), but London-centered tracks like “We Love the City” and “Greater London Radio” were absent from the set. Perhaps this was Hefner’s way of making peace with its metropolitan muse.
Touring in support of the superb Dead Media, an album that places the analog synthesizer alongside main man Darren Hayman’s wobbly vocals and chunky guitar, Hefner stayed true to the guitar-driven sound for most of the evening. Some light Moog work here, a little electric piano there, but mainly indie rock in its purest, six-stringed form.
Opening with “Hymn for the Alcohol” and working through movers like “Pull Yourself Together,” it became increasingly clear that most of the night’s songs would take the sing-along route. Yes, kids singing in unison to tales of broken hearts, girls’ underpants and former astronauts. Pull yourself together, indeed.
Hayman sat at the keyboard for a new song, which he introduced as “a song of love to Peter Gabriel.” It loped along like several of the slower tracks on the new album before morphing into a ballad version of J.Geils Band’s “Centerfold,” a sly joke that wasn’t totally embraced by the crowd but one that brought a smile to the American in the audience.
Hefner skillfully covered all of its bases, playing highlights from all four albums and a number of tunes from the B-sides collection Boxing Hefner. Of the new songs played, many appeared in a stripped-down form, suggesting that the keyboard frenzy on Dead Media was either a passing phase or a bad idea.
It was a bit surprising that they didn’t spend more time on the new material because it is some of Hefner’s best and most ambitious work.
Audience response was lukewarm for some of the new tracks but ferocious when the band kicked into classics (if you can call any song by a four-year old band “classic”) like “Don’t Go” and especially the set-closing “The Sweetness Lies Within.” Hayman and his Hefner playboys left the stage by promising that the band would return provided the audience kept clapping. He didn’t lie. The encore began with “Alan Bean,” possibly the strongest and most inventive song on Dead Media.
It concerns Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, who left NASA to paint pictures of moonscapes. A song of confusion and freedom, it ended with Hayman repeating “Ever felt like giving up/ We felt like giving up/ Ever felt like giving up all the time,” in the most oddly moving moment of the concert.
Before Hefner ended the evening with its paean to mid-80s restlessness, “The Day that Thatcher Dies,” Hayman cryptically cautioned the audience to enjoy it, for “you may never have the chance again.” Let’s hope he was being facetious. Hefner has just begun a move away from the fertile but overpopulated pasture of guitar-based indie rock and toward a more lush, adventuresome sound. To stop the music on the cusp of such greatness would be criminal.
