Sunday, 08 June 2008
The sound of A Mission, but not The Mission.. It’s been a week of funerals for long standing fixtures in the musical climate I grew up. New Order release their final DVD, The Mission their farewell live box set, and Ministry says “Adios” with an unsatisfying tour.
This exhaustive collection covers the four final shows of the bands career. In a move preceeded by Suede, and followed by Sparks, The Mission - albeit not THE Mission, but a Mission - sealed their career with four exemplary shows that covered their first three-and-a-half-albums and compilation - performing every song from their 1986-1990 works, alongside a plethora of b-sides and covers of the era.
Whilst this lineup of The Mission is a band, it is not THE Band : it is not the same four people who started fresh and fiery in late 1985, with a belly of ambition. Even the longest standing member aside from Wayne Hussey, Mark Gemini Thwaite first joined in 1993, when headlining stadiums in Germany was all but a memory. Newer members Steve Spring and Richie Vernon joined in the early 2000’s, and thus, by intention of design, at some point The Mission became a name synonymous with that of The Wayne Hussey Experience Performs The Songs Of The Mission.
Of the four nights, each shows that whilst the material is both uniformly excellent and utterly ridiculous in its unreconstructed parody of rock bombast that becomes almost as monstrous as what it sought to destroy, The Mission have sadly dated : the earlier stuff seems to be written with one effects-pedal setting in mind : now, it’s a very good effects pedal, but it also limit’s the material to a homogenous uniformity that becomes, especially when the earlier stuff is all piled together, demonstrable evidence of the fact that sometimes, despite the willing the songs just weren’t that good : and no amount of passionate and furious playing can hide the fact that half of the songs on “The First Chapter” and “God’s Own Medicine” are not undisputed classics of the genre.
Third album, “Children” is the monsterwork that saw The Mission step to headlining Enormodomes and massive outdoor circuses. With a clear inspiration from Led Zeppelin (and Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones at the helm), the album was a huge conceit, aiming to be the biggest classic rock album of the decade, and, with a audaciously placed cover of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” - a song that always felt incongruous in their body of work - “Children” was ambitious, bombastic, and unapologetically huge in scope and vision. Sadly, the album suffered from being too long, and not being stuffed to the gills with absolute classics. There’s no bad songs on it, but there’s a difference between “Out Ta Get Me” (which is good) and “Paradise City” (which is perfection) is both not far, and a very very very long way.
“Carved In Sand”, the band that both made and broke the band at the hand of a relentless touring regime, is undoubtedly their singular best work, a realisation of the band’s abilities and potential, Hussey stepping beyond the lyrical and empty clichés of a tired rock language (apart from one laughable line in “Into The Blue”), a powerful cohesion of memorable song writing, superlative production, and that rarest of moments in a bands life when everything gels and becomes more than the sum of its parts. Like all four nights, the songs are played in a new and different running order that , perhaps, reflect the hindsight of time, but also the dynamics and necessities of the live show. Bonus tracks from the shows, ex-gratia the album, are also on the discs, being different arrangements of certain songs, alternate performances, and extra songs not from the four albums, including cuts from “Masque“, “Blue” and “Aura”. Sonically and performance wise the band are on their strongest form that I’ve heard from them live in at least a decade. It’s as if the band knew that, since these performances were being recorded, that the stakes were high.
Purchasers of all four shows get a fifth disc which contains the entirety of the final night. This selected of music is an exhaustive, warts and all document of the longest Mission show of all time. Instead of what one might expect with a farewell show, a precis of the bands absolute finest and best loved moments, the set is an unusual selection of album tracks and an encore that eschews traditional wisdom. Aside from “Severina” and the always majestic “Tower of Strength”, the set is fairly sparse on world-storming chart hits from their career. Overall, the main issue most people may have with this set is that it is determinedly retrospective : performing over the four CD’s only one song written after their 1985-92 salad days, there’s only one song of the 75 or so on this set that was actually written during guitarist Mark Gemini-Thwaite’s tenure with the band, and none after the rest of the band joined. The Mission - despite being a great rock band throughout their career and producing a fine body of work (albeit one that stuck determined to a relatively limited palette) - painted themselves into a corner. This set is an authentic Mission experience but the band performing these songs had nothing to do with the band who wrote this material, apart from sharing a singer. As a package, it’s a fine production : exhaustive, fine value for money, containing quality performance worthy of permanence and a suitable epitah to their career.
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