Heart of a Punk Soul of a Rasta

Howard Devoto - The Shadowy Years
Part 1 (Episode 2a)

The Bernard & Howard Show (Partie deux)

The Lyric Theatre Hammersmith
15th May 1983

Hammersmith in 2011 is not the Hammersmith of 1983. In 1983 The Broadway Centre hadn't yet been excreted on the middle of Hammersmith like massive turd dwarfing everything around it and stealing the sky from Joe Public. "The Broadway Centre" is the epitome of duplicitous architecture it pretends to be office space, the entrance of a Tube station and a shopping centre all rolled into one, when in truth its a dehumanising monstrosity and the shittiest roundabout known to Western Civilisation.

Yep in 1983 Hammersmith was a much different place. Island Records still had their office just around the corner from the centre in St Peter's Square. The Hammersmith Apollo was still being correctly called The Hammersmith Odeon. The Hammersmith Palais was open for business and hadn't yet undergone its catastrophic internal revamp - a revamp that for me was a bigger crime than its final demise in 2007. And in 1983 the tiny yet perfectly formed Lyric Theatre was outwardly totally unlike it is today. There was no bright open piazza and fountains to greet you into its front doors back in '83. Yep things have changed mightily in the last 28 years in Hammersmith - the whirligig of time has spun - some changes have been bad - others have been worse.

But the inside of Lyric Theatre has remained pretty much the same over the last 30 years. It is a tiny red and gold gleaming piece of Victoriana cemented inside a collection of oversized breeze blocks. This "enclosing" happened during its reconstruction in the 70's. Outwardly it looks like a cross between Lenin's Tomb & the National Theatre, inside its all Music Hall and "The Good Old Days". The Lyric has always concealed its light under a bushel, so much so that when the gig was announced in the NME, even though I'd been to the Palais & the Odeon and stayed in Hammersmith several times, I'd no idea what the Lyric was like, or even where it was. I found out.

Bernard Szajner took to the stage for his only UK performance with a very much live and loud acoustic drummer and full band. If you thought you'd come to see a light bit of sterile ambient frippery from your pew in the circle you were about to be proved wrong. I did. I was. The opener "Brute Reason" was given one hell of a "in your face" outing. Cranked up to eleven it was more prog rock than limp wristed plinky synth stuff. Szajner worked the new material alternating between The Laser Harp and the more conventional bank of keyboards. Then finally the trilby wearing Howard entered stage right, slightly embarrassed by the depth and warmth of the reception, but then it had been a while, 3 years and 9 days since I'd last seen Howard onstage.

The Berni and Howie Show commenced, Devoto dispatched his work confidently, coming and going throughout the set, doing his pieces, neatly punctuating proceedings, whilst Szajner kept both hands tightly on the tiller. The evening was capped and concluded by Howard singing Snowprints (a role which he didn't fulfil on the LP). A glitter ball was lowered from the rafters and gently began to turn. As Devoto narrated diamond shards of light danced around the walls of the Lyric and tiny synthetic snowflakes began to shower down upon him. The music faded and Howard removed his trilby to allow the final flakes to come to rest upon his venerable dome - it was a perfect end.

And it was The End. There was no further collaboration between Devoto & Szajner. It had simply been an deeply interesting and uncanny interlude in the Shadowy Years of Howard Devoto.

NB: Jim Shelley from NME didn't quite see the gig through the same eyes as me. But then it sounds like he was in the "God's" and well away from the action. Tush tush, the NME, it never changes, always well away from the action.