Regurgitator playing Lou Reed’s odes to bondage and heroin to a seated audience in Adelaide’s premiere theatre was evidence that the Underground are no longer subterranean; their influence is etched upon the surface of popular culture.
John Cale’s viola featured prominently on the iconic ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ album and is notably cacophonous on the dirge, ‘Venus In Furs’.
As part of OzAsia Festival, Mindy Weng Wang’s Chinese guzheng replaced the violin’s older brother, infusing all 11 tracks with an exotic Orientalism. The enormous guzheng is a versatile instrument. While it can sound as dainty and whimsical as a jewellery box and as lush as a harp, when necessary, it can emit a roaring din. An audience intimately familiar with the source material could easily find new pleasure in simply observing this new element’s seamless interaction with the faithful reproduction of the original parts.
While Regurgitator are notorious for persistently reinventing their own sound, they mostly presented the 1967 album as written. ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’, though, was a drastic departure, as Quan Yeoman fiddled with loops instead of vocalising Lou Reed’s poetry. Quan also energetically took the vocal lead on ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and ‘There She Goes Again’. The German-born Seja was appropriately stoic and statuesque on Nico’s trio of tracks, although she sung without the thick and distinctive accent. It is very hard to sing “clown” with the same disdain as Nico. This was a tribute show, though, not an imitation.
It was Ben Ely, meanwhile, that took the lead on the sprawling jams, ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus in Furs’; songs which, in the 60s, lyrically and musically shattered the paradigm; they are compositions that have retained or even increased their sonic and emotional heft with the passage of time. Although patrons could bring plastic cups of beer into the theatre, tracks like these belonged in a neon wonderland; a seedy, smoke-filled dive. During this show, the audience were simply voyeurs, not active participants, in the drugs and debauchery.
It was a happy high without the come-down and when the final note was played, the audience went bananas.
