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O woe! Words cannot express the despair of arriving at Charing Cross, twenty minutes from where the opening bands at Cathedral’s last ever show will already be taking to the stage, only to remember that your ticket sits on your coffee table at home, an hour-long round trip behind you. This is the worst kind of wrath: not directed righteously outwards at world hunger, or global power elites, or Zad, but instead inwardly directed, impotent self-loathing of the kind that reliably produces piss-weak depressive-suicidal black metal. Still, after sprinting back and forth across the nocturnal grass of Blackheath, risking my ankles in its moonlit divots, I arrived in time to catch the whole of final warm-up act Grand Magus’s set. Great performance if you like songs about snow and hammers and the overuse of the word “mighty”. Sadly, though, I missed ancient prog band Cressida (replacing the almost-as-ancient Comus due to illness) who would have doubtless been great fun.
Saturday night though, was a major occasion for none of the above reasons. It was Cathedral’s last ever show, but it is hard to feel too sad, because we know that the band still has a last hurrah planned on record, at least. Indeed, this was less about mourning and more about marvelling at what a great project we have been fortunate enough to share our world with over the last twenty years. This is (was) a band that long ago perfected killer doom riffing, and, instead of resting easy, moved on to drench their later music in colourful and eccentric psychedelia. Not only this, but their unique sound exploded with all the colourful fun of their varied obsessions: classic Euro-horror (see their many songs about De Ossorio’s Blind Dead films), medieval insanity, and increasingly anarchistic politics (more on that in a moment). As a show this could hardly go wrong- both band and audience were pumped and dedicated for obvious reasons. Dorrian’s stage talk steered well clear of mawkishness, instead allowing the sentiment to seep through only via the music itself- pretty much a greatest hits set with nothing from upcoming releases (including the new EP Dawn of a New Ice Age) and only one song (Funeral of Dreams) from The Guessing Game- a record to which I suspect much of the crowd would have been somewhat ambivalent. And so Cathedral opened with Vampire Sun and Stained Glass Horizons, and finished with Utopian Blaster and Hopkins. All the while the stage was bathed in blobby retro lighting and flanked by screens displaying a montage of classic (and usually kitsch) horror and sci-fi scenes. It was great fun. That’s all I really need say, but I’m going to go on anyway, and if you don’t like it fuck off and cry over Top Gear. Please be aware, dear reader, that the preceding sentence is intended to carry an implicit semicolon-hyphen-close brackets at its end. What surprised me personally about the show was the fact that my favourite two songs of the night were not the abovementioned classics which bookended the setlist, but a more recent brace which turned up in the middle- the first of these being North Berwick Witch Trials (from 2005’s Garden of Unearthly Delights). It revealed something to me that hadn’t fully occurred before. For all their lyrics about witchburning and medieval curses, Cathedral are not an escapist band. They live in a country in which a day off work is enforced by the government so we can all watch in humble deference as two royals tie the knot in an arcane multimillion pound ceremony, but when ordinary people choose to do the same in defence of their quality of life in retirement, they are heaped with contempt and ridicule. With these injustices fresh in the mind, there is something uplifting, even profound, about Cathedral’s stomping, riff-laden tribute to sixteenth century conspirators against the British monarchy. It is transmogrified from medieval yarn to rebellious allegory. If you think that’s overanalysis, fine; but remember that this was followed immediately by the band’s most explicitly political and radical song, Funeral of Dreams: “Then a priest with fire in his eyes … Black towers over you and me- authority I talked above about wrath- but that isn’t really this band’s style. Instead, they engage with the day’s injustices with a sort of sad, perplexed eccentricity. From Stuart-era superstition in worship of “God” to 21st century masochism in worship of “the markets”; Cathedral's music encourages us to heap whimsical derision upon it all. More to the point, they did all this via the medium of some of heavy metal’s greatest ever riffing, many of its coolest album covers, and lyrics about sightless, cannibalistic Knights Templar. That is their genius. Now, humanity, weep, for they are (almost) gone! |
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Killing Songs : Vampire Sun, Cosmic Funeral, Funeral of Dreams, North Berwick Witch Trials, Hopkins (The Witchfinder General) |
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