Purveyors Of Fine "Indie Dance" since 1989.

Reformations are those most random of things.  A band previously unloved that was last seen playing a college restaurant to 200 people comes back to headline Wembley. A band that headline a football stadium at the height of it’s powers now struggles to sell out a 1400 sized club. And an act that split up at just the wrong time after staying around a little too long plays to tiny rooms.

Memory doesn’t forget. Some bands that were never huge come back bigger than ever. Others come back as if they were starting again.

So it is like the old days. Sure. The cliché is fatter, older, wiser. But that’s not really the point. The point is – are they as good as they ever were? Time has not necessarily been kind : the clothes, as they readily admit, were awful. The shuffling Indie-Dance beats reworked to be less obvious. The biting guitars and adrenalin-rush is still there. Were it not for the bassists shaven-head and devil-goatee it’s almost as if nothing has changed.

With nothing to promote, no agenda to follow, Jesus Jones just go out there and play their tits off. The determindedly Greatest Hits set neglects some of their obvious,older singles – and yet never feels like it.  For the first hour, the crowd shuffle and jiggle in their slightly repressed, very British fashion, as the Jones execute their finest moments with no shortage of wit : “Right Here Right Now”, “Real Real Real”, “International Bright Young Thing”, “Never Enough”, “Zeroes And Ones” – the song that predicted the internet as much as Kraftwerk’s “Computer World” – exist in a vacuum. As much as any classic song of any classic era, these songs are timeless and yet always of their time. Slices of perverse pop from an ancient, analog world.

It all kicks off near the end. From nowhere – as top 60 single “Info Freako” swoops into view – 300 Brummies turn into one amorphous, sweaty, pogoing mass. Album tracks become anthems of “Indie Dance”* to the wobbling throng of 30 somethings in white trainers. If only they’d started the set with “Info Freako”, things could’ve been very different.

But the public are fickle. There is no magic formula that defines how a band becomes legend or lepers. And no correlation between talent and fame. And every band is reforming anyway. 

Jesus Jones sure as hell aren’t in it for the money. More I suspect a chance for people with day jobs to go out and play pop star for a few weeks a year and pay off the overdrafts.

'Purveyors Of Fine “Indie-Dance” Since 1989' read the T-Shirts, and never a truer t-shirt there has been.

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