Magazine Reveal Their Back Pages

5:49 PM GMT 13/02/2009

SOME REFORMATIONS provoke little surprise. But Magazine? Howard Devoto’s amused and above-it-all attitude to his own past can possibly be gleaned from his cameo in the 24 Hour Party People film. Confronted with the actor playing him in flagrante with Factory Records boss Tony Wilson’s screen wife in a toilet, he looks to the camera and says, “I definitely don’t remember this happening.”

But last night at the Forum in Kentish Town he acknowledged his past in majestic style. Appearing with original members keyboardist Dave Formula, bassist Barry Adamson and drummer John Doyle, with old Luxuria foil and Apollo 440 man Noko standing in for the late John McGeogh, Devoto appeared in a fetching pink suit jacket to a thunderous version of The Light Pours Out Of Me without, it seems, missing a beat from the last Magazine show in 1981.

You can’t get away from the fact we’re revisiting times past – the backdrop is the Bélmez faces-in-makeup off the cover of 1978’s Real Life album – but Kafka-esque prog punk songs like Permafrost, Because You’re Frightened and Song From Under The Floorboards don’t sound like museum pieces. Rather, there seems to be considerable delight in evidence, with Devoto paying fulsome tribute to his bandmates and Dave Formula - who brought all his old synths to get the right noises, especially important on a superb Definitive Gaze - in particular, “without whom the concert would not have happened.”

Devoto also remembers McGeogh before a powerful Rhythm of Cruelty, and they finish
with Shot By Both Sides, come back on again for their cover of Sly Stone’s Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again) and return for the last time with a burn through of I Love You You Big Dummy. We can only hope this reformation is not a one-off thing; as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood blogged after Tuesday’s show in Oxford, the reunited Magazine “were everything you could hope for”.

Ian Harrison

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 5:49 PM GMT 13/02/2009

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