I made the mistake of watching the Beat by Beat DVD not long before going to see them, which was probably a bit of a mistake. It's not that they're not as good as they were in the mid 90's, it's just they always appear in my mind's eye as the "classic" lineup, even though I know it has since changed.

So I spent the first few songs in a "when will En Esch appear?" state of denial, during which the songs were mostly off of WWIII (which I didn't know), followed by a few from Attak (which I knew, but the rest of the crowd didn't seem to). The newer stuff is arguably more guitar oriented, so it should have worked really well live, but for some reason it fell a bit flat. The crowd wasn't getting into it, which probably didn't help. I guess most of them stopped listening to anything beyond Adios: I was probably in the lower decile by age, and I'm not exactly young.

The new lineup includes a shouty/singy/dj woman, kind of like the female half of Atari Teenage Riot rolled into one (although obviously not as good as them invidually). She seems to bring quite alot of energy to the performance, and I guess having a pretty face onstage never hurts. I'm not sure if it's her doing the vocals on WWIII and Attak, but she seemed to do a good job of them (even if she tended to get drowned out in the mix sometimes).

After five or six new (well, ish) songs we moved back to the classics the crowd livened up, and the band seemed to perk up a bit as well. I always have problems mapping songs to names with bands like KMFDM, and have almost no hope of remembering the set list, but they played quite a few crowd pleasers. I'm pretty sure they played Stray Bullet and A Drug Against War in amongst them.

Overall, it was a pretty good performance, and in my humble opinion KMFDM are still as good as they ever were; the idea of some kind of golden age around Angst and Nihil is probably just because thats all most people ever bothered listening to. Arranging the set from new to old is nice for the crowd as it leaves them with pleasant drunken memories of all the old and comfortable tunes they know, but I think that as long as the back catalog isn't neglected it's probably better to mix the old with the new. Oh, and the set was a bit short (but not offensively so).

I'd never been to the Islington Academy before and it seems a decent enough venue. It's a bit wierd on the way in as you enter through a shopping centre, and then pass through a very cinema like foyer on the way to the actual performance room (maybe it's a converted cinema?). Once inside it's pretty much standard though: not too big, reasonably arranged, decent view of bar.

My main problem with the place was the heat. Ok, it was the middle of summer, and the day was particularly hot, but even so. Eventually they turned on some kind of wierd rotating ventilation system during Thea Gilmore's performance, which elicited little cheers from the crowd every time it played over them. It's really not acceptable to pack a crowd of people into a smallish room in the middle of summer (particularly a middle class crowd such as us :-), and not to have some kind of working aircon or ventilation. Anyway...

Petra Jean Phillipson

I was really blown away by Petra (as she introduced herself; I had to look up her full name). Her voice is fantastic, and the songs were very good as well (I presume she wrote them). She does a kind of smoky blues but, rather than the usuall sadness or self-pity, it was more about cynicism and a certain amount of anger at the world. A bit of a nirvana thing going on. I was rather annoyed that there were no CDs on sale afterwards. Hopefully she'll get a headline gig at Water Rats or something soon.

Thea Gilmore