NEW YORK DOLLS REVIEW IN THE GUARDIAN...

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Fast and louche

Morrissey persuaded what's left of the New York Dolls, original godfathers of glam, to reform for two sell-out Meltdown shows. They still rock, but only nostalgia junkies would want them to make a habit of it

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday June 20, 2004
The Observer

The New York Dolls Royal Festival Hall, London SE1
The first time the New York Dolls played London in 1972, the British charts featured T Rex, Slade and a bunch of Brummie navvies in lipstick and stack heels called Sweet. Glam rock had made androgyny and high camp fashionable but the Dolls had already been teetering around on stage in stilettoes, Spandex body suits and feather boas for nearly two years, thrilling the jaded downtown New York demi-monde at the Mercer Arts' Lab and Max's Kansas City with their revved-up, ramshackle rock'n'roll. The Dolls in all their drug-fuelled, transvestite trashiness, made the British glam scene look positively restrained.

Though worshipped by Morrissey, the curator of this year's Meltdown, for their exoticism, the Dolls were also old school rock 'n' roll. They came out of a time when all you needed to know about rock'n'roll was contained in the latest single by the Rolling Stones. Their sound merged the swagger of Sticky Fingers era Stones with the street harmonies of the toughest of all the Sixties girl groups, the Shangri Las, and revved the whole thing up to breakneck speed, laying down a template for what would later become punk. They were poseurs, and peacocks, and musical magpies and one or two of them were junkies, but - and this often gets lost, or overlooked in the mythology of the New York Dolls - they were a great rock'n'roll band. They had a swagger and a swing that has all but been lost in rock music since the rise of the indie guitar band in the early Eighties. The Stones had it, the Faces had it and the Dolls had it in abundance.

At Morrissey's request, the New York Dolls have reformed for two sold-out shows at this year's Meltdown. 'I have magnified the importance of the Dolls since I was a small, fat, dull child,' he said recently, which makes me wonder if it was his idea to have them perform tonight beneath a backdrop bearing a quote from TS Eliot. 'We shall not cease from exploration,' it reads, 'and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time.'

While I'm still working that one out, the Dolls, or what's left of them - both guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan, died of drug-related illnesses in the early Nineties - saunter on stage to a heroes' welcome from an audience composed of youngsters and grizzled rockers and all points in between.

Surreally, lead singer David Johansen, who once did the best imitation of the young Mick Jagger, now looks uncannily like today's Sir Mick. His still skinny torso, which will be bared in all its is gnarly glory by the third song, is draped in a swathe of green velvet, more BHS than Biba, which falls over stick-thin legs encased in too-tight trousers. To his right, Sylvain Sylvain looks like an ageing Bowery rent boy in jeans, sheer black top and sailor hat, while the tall, looming figure of Arthur Kane has opted for dandy highwayman chic in frilly shirt and tall leather boots. Thankfully, there are not even the slightest traces of lipstick, rouge or eye liner. Survivors all, the three remaining Dolls look grizzled and gauche, but beautifully unbowed. When they tear into 'Looking For a Kiss', the wave of goodwill from the audience all but drowns out the shakiness of the proceedings. That shakiness is visible as well as aural, but what is clear from the off is that the Dolls can still rock, even if they don't roll like they used to.

Ominously, a Johnny Thunders lookalike has been drafted in to stand where the late great guitarist once stood but he is on a hiding to nothing tonight with his Johnny Ramone stance and exaggerated posturings. Put simply, the Dolls without Johnny is like the Stones without Keef, but, troupers to the last, they charge through 'Subway Train' as best they can, Sylvain's Chuck Berry riffs firing Johansen's already ragged vocals. Behind them, on drums, Gary Powell, drafted in from the Libertines, sounds as if he is playing in a different room, his solid rock approach suggesting someone familiar with this music but with no real understanding of the chemistry - no pun intended - that produced it.

The original Dolls were undoubtedly a product of their time and place, but, growing up street-tough in Brooklyn, they were also of a generation that absorbed the primal rock'n'roll of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. That rootsy riff-fuelled swagger is missing tonight, even if, ironically, this line-up probably sounds tighter than the Dolls ever did.

'Hey, he tunes now,' mocks Johansen when Sylvain calls a halt to proceedings to do just that. The idea that the original Dolls would have stopped to do something as trivial as tuning up is so unlikely as to be ridiculous. They were so out of it, and so ragged sounding, that playing in tune would barely have made a difference.

Tonight, they stay in tune throughout, though Kane's monolithic bass lines are perhaps the most minimal I have ever encountered. It hardly matters. By the time they have stamped all over 'Take Another Little Piece of My Heart', paid their dues to Memphis Minnie, the aforementioned Shangri Las, and, indeed, Bo Diddley, the crowd are behind them all the way, and the joint, much to Johansen's delight, is jumping. 'Frankenstein' follows, clattering and clumpy in the best possible way, then a gloriously ragged 'Personality Crisis', which makes you wish you had seen them in all their dissolute glory.

They take their bows like exhausted pantomime dames, and, even amid the ovation that accompanies them as they stumble off stage, you hope, for their sakes, that they don't turn this moment of nostalgia into a nostalgia-driven touring industry. A good time was undoubtedly had by all tonight, but, as I left, I kept hearing the ghost of Johnny Thunders whispering in my ear. 'You can't put your arms round a memory,' he sang, 'so, don't try...' I hope his mates are listening and take heed.




http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/reviews/observer/story/0,14467,1242914,00.html
 
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