The World Won't Listen.

Gene were always unfairly regarded as the runts of the litter. Whilst around them Pulp, Blur, and Oasis ruled the world, Gene tottered at the edge of greatness before suffering as a nation turned its back and gagged at Britpop - favouring the Idiot Savant of Fred Durst instead of music with passion, wit, style, and intelligence. This DVD reissue captures one of their final concerts in Sheffield, just six months before they retired from the music business to general apathy. The concert is shot in an efficient, workmanlike fashion : documenting the music and the performers with no great flair or stylistic attempts to make the viewers life difficult or induce an epileptic fit.

Are you listening Blue Leach? Good. Because this is how it should be done.

The music is fabulous. An amalgam of classic rock riffs from The Faces and The Sm**hs, the vocal stylings of a classic crooner in the shape of the under-appreciated Martin Rossiter - a dreamer trapped in a world not of his making - offer an ethic and an artistry rarely seen in modern music, the band themselves perform material from all their sizable and under-loved body of work as if these songs were their very lifeblood. It covers material from debut “Olympian” to the final album “Libertine” and last single “Let Me Move On” as well as previously unreleased songs from the never-to-be fifth record. It would’ve helped if their final record company had paid them for “Libertine”. In the meantime, “Live” covers similar territory to 2000’s “Rising For Sunset” : a greatest hits collection presented in a live arena. They were kings and legends in their time and their star shone brightly in the small part of the universe they lived in and these songs are passionate expressions of hope and ambition in a world that sometimes seems designed to crush our souls.

In the meantime, Gene In Concert offers a final chance to see this great band during their dying days as they bravely fought apathy and the shallowness of shifting trends to furrow forward until death. Within six months, the band had split to a general shrug, but held passionately in the hearts of a handful. On the evidence of the DVD, it was the world’s loss.

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