Death In June + Spiritual Front

“Are you going to see Death In June?”, “Are you going to see Death In June?”, “Are you going to see Death In June?”: I've been hounded with this question all week, in a decidedly nagging, intrusive way, but one that well conveys just how much interest there still is around the masked Douglas Pearce. As if further proof were needed of the unwavering “faith” that (certain) audiences still hold for Death In June.

On the surface there's a certain harmony between the desolate landscape of Ciampino-by-night and Our Man's suffocating musicality: the only thing breaking the spell, if we can call it that, is the venue chosen for the event, namely the Orion Club. A gaudy, hammy venue, already sadly notorious for far more apocalyptic nights (those, yes, truly) across Douglas Pearce's entire thirty-year career.

The last time we'd heard anything about it, the multi-purpose venue still looked like the home base of "Diabolika" or of countless anonymous graduation parties. Today we find it, apparently, recovered and refurbished as an enormous "rock" auditorium, even beyond the needs of this particular evening. As we queue up, the lobby is already teeming with a decidedly mixed crowd. On the sofas, usually reserved for VIP use, portly gentlemen with white hair sink down flanked by neo-goths wearing t-shirts of bands that were already dead before they'd even let out their first cry. Bundled-up, chilly old-timers rub shoulders near the stage with young punks who are "two apples tall, or thereabouts."

In front of them, the lush gear of Spiritual Front stood ready for use: stools and microphones, a drum kit with a bass drum worthy of Bregović's Wedding And Funeral Orchestra, lit up with a tangle of white bulbs. You can really feel their basic urge to entertain, where "basic" should be understood in its best possible sense. In their inexhaustible tribute to Johnny Cash, as if Cash had lived in a decidedly Pasolini-esque Rome. Styles overlap and blur together into blues, folk, wave, pop, soul. Hellvis plays his guitar with real emphasis and fervour, thrashing about and staging what we might call little dances with his twelve-string "beloved." In the hour allotted to them, Spiritual Front viscerally reinterpret what not everyone managed to fully grasp from the record.

Once Simone Salvatori's band's set time is up, everything is dismantled and the stage takes on the typical look of a recent Death In June set, that is, Julius with only his trusty John Murphy at his side: four drums, four cymbals, a few ciboria there more for show than anything else, and the same old little red guitar as always. Anyone who had hoped for a collaboration between the two bands is forced to come crashing back down to earth. At least until he takes off the mask, Douglas Pearce's presence visually manages to evoke the album's atmospheres quite well, but musically he's worth less than half of that: bloated, listless, senile, it bodes ill for what's to come.

Despite the usual camouflage jumpsuit, once he takes off the mask, it's all over. The former godfather of neofolk, now almost a grandfather figure, seems anything but interested in his own performance (if a backing track fails to start or a couple of strings snap, he just carries on regardless through the setlist, without even turning to the mixing desk to try to fix things), and this blends perfectly with the shared feeling of a show cobbled together more to give the idea of what a Death In June concert might be (or might have been?) than an actual live performance by the band itself.

In between, some twenty tear-jerking songs, faded copies of the four or five everyone is actually waiting for. Strategically placed near the end. An unrecognisable "Fall Apart," a "Little Black Angel" with no trumpet solo, a "She Said Destroy" as bare-bones as ever, and "But What Ends When The Symbols Shatter?" and "Runes And Man" barely passable.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of time to reflect on just how long it's been since the last decent record put out under the former Crisis man's name. Twenty years or so. On how things should be, and on how much imagination and verve have drained away over time: some mutter about how "it was so much more fun with Albin Julius," others go off to smoke whole packs of cigarettes outdoors, while others still, over by the bar, shout out old song titles that never even got a mention, sparing us the embarrassment of having to do it ourselves.

Then again, we wouldn't be surprised if some in the crowd would have preferred a full rendition of the shaky "All Pigs Must Die" to tonight's cyanotic ("God Mourning Sun") and petrifying ("Ku Ku Ku") performance. Aside from the obligatory applause, the room responds as if in the presence of a liturgical mass: composed, polite, and unable to wait to leave. Even a diligent DJ notices as much and, the moment Douglas seems ready to leave the stage, quickly cues up something gothic-coated à la Sisters Of Mercy to keep the crowd from filing out. Pearce, however, gets annoyed, returns to the microphone, tells them to turn off "that shit," and promises an encore.

Unfortunately, he keeps his promise: after a few seconds he pulls out another little sketch complete with a traffic warden's whistle, in which the thin line between "avant-garde" and "taking the piss" becomes obvious to pretty much everyone. On this logistically ill-fated evening, we fear that few will have found what they were really looking for. The apocalypse excluded.

Photos by Massimo Monacelli

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