Wave Gotik Treffen

Day 4 - Bands in order of appearance:

Temple Of Twilight
Ulterior
Nosferatu
Megaherz
Killing Joke
Fields Of The Nephilim
Recoil

Agra, Leipzig
Sunday June 12 2011

Back to the Agra today, the grubby grey warehouse that is transformed into an unlikely rock venue for each WGT. It's the Treffen's biggest venue, and a certain amount of kudos is attached to playing here - even if you're the first band on, as Temple Of Twilight are today.

It's rather ironic that a band called Temple Of Twilight are playing in a mid-afternoon slot, with sunlight streaming through the windows. Maybe they should've renamed themselves Temple Of Teatime for the occasion.

They're an amiable bunch of straight-down-the-line metallers, with a set of songs that aren't actually offensive to the ear - and it's not often you hear me say that about any band of the metallic persuasion. They also have a cover of New Order's 'True Faith' which is actually rather good, although its insistent catchiness throws an uncomfortably harsh light on the band's own songwriting.

I don't think I'd go out of my way to see Temple Of Twilight again, but as a low-stress opening band at a festival, they do the job.

I've harrangued the WGT before for its apparent indifference to the darker strand of contemporary British music: those bands now emerging, blinking in the daylight, from east London cellars, trailing post-punk influences behind them. Such bands would fit in very neatly with the 'Wave' part of the WGT, but trying to get anyone in Leipzig to sit up and take notice is absurdly difficult.

Too often the UK is represented at the WGT by old-school heroes from a decade or two ago, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing (see the March Violets as a prime example) it makes no sense that so much new British blood is blipped over. Well, here comes one band that has made it, and while that might be more due to the fact that they've now got a German booking agent than any sudden dawning of enlightenment at WGT HQ, it's nevertheless good to see 'em here: Ulterior.

We know what we're in for. The WGT crowd is perhaps less prepared. Radiating insouciant confidence, as if they'd just bought the venue for cash, Ulterior come on like a headline band, all rock 'n' roll swagger, drum machinery crashing and bashing like computers being thrown down the stairs, guitar skidding over the racket.

The four Ulteriors command the stage with their best 'Here we stand, we can do no other' demeanour - and we expect nothing less from Ulterior, of course: this band doesn't do deferential. They might be in the second-band-on slot, but they act like they've already won first prize.

It's an approach that would seem merely arrogant if any other band tried it, but Ulterior have the chutzpah and the barrelling techno-rock songs to get away with it. They've even got enough chutzpah left over for vocalist Honey to get away with his baggy and well-ventilated tracksuit trousers, a bold choice of outfit for a festival where most people dress up to the max.

Guitarist Paul Simmons grabs his guitar by the neck and whirls it around, conjuring noise out of thin air, but it's the audience that have been grabbed by the neck, here, too. Ulterior's machine-beat onslaught, delivered with gimlet-eyed assurance, sinks its claws into everyone.

From a band that represents the contemporary British underground to a band that represents the 90s British goth scene - a milieu that seems to exert an uncanny fascination over the German goth scene of today. Perhaps, if we wait a decade, the current goings-on in British music will finally be acknowledged in Germany. But the present-day interest in 90s vintage UK goth can only be good for Nosferatu, who enjoyed something of a heyday in the early 90s.

Nosferatu's current incarnation, with original vocalist Louis deWray back up front, is a lot more convincing than some of the interim line-ups. The WGT has certainly kept the faith - Nosferatu have been able to count on a booking every couple of years or so. With a new album in the can, and an audience there for the taking, the band should be able to walk it at the Agra today.

Well, if you haven't yet had your fill of sepulchral gothic rock melodarmatics, they ain't bad. Nosferatu, twenty-first century style, have rowed back on the frills and flounces that characterised the band's early days, and now present themselves as a far more straightforward rock outfit.

Only Louis deWray himself, all hair, shades and black velvet suit jacket, like a cross between Lord Byron and John Cooper Clarke, rocks the old-school maximum-goth image.

The rest of the band keep it downbeat, workmanlike, and keep the riffs a-comin'. Nosferatu's music is all chunky guitar, whumping rock drumbeats and sampled choirs keening out of nowhere - except when they take it down a bit and essay a ballad, at which point it does rather get a bit bedroom-goth. It takes a special genius to evoke the woeful teenager moping in a bedroom when you're on a big festival stage in front of an enthusiastic four-figure crowd, but Nosferatu manage it.

Nosferatu don't do anything radical. Boundaries remain unpushed. They're good at what they do - this straightforward gothic rock thing - but, this year at the WGT in particular, there are umpteen bands who are good at the straightforward gothic rock thing.

If Nosferatu were not able to play the 'classic British band of the 90s' card, I wonder how much impact they would really have. Still, I suppose nobody ever lost out by playing straightforward gothic rock to an audience of straightforward gothic rockers. The band's set amounts to a no-surprises stroll in the gothic rock park - just what this audience wants. But personally, I'd much rather be in the adventure playground.

I'm always keen on a spot of wordplay, and Megaherz pull off a neat bilingual pun in their name. Literally translated from German, the  name means 'Mega Heart'. But it's also a reference to hertz, the unit of measurment for frequency - a megahertz is 1,000 cycles per second. Nice one, lads. Science, emotion, and an impression of bigness all wrapped up in three syllables. But none of this tells us what the music is like. Here comes the band to demonstrate that.

That impression of bigness certainly wasn't misleading. Megaherz make a thunderous Rammstein-esque racket: a deafening industrio-metal apocalypse of guitars, drums and - incongruously - little bits of electronic bleep-and-tinkle that seem to have sneaked into the thermonuclear war zone of Megaherz music from a quite different band.

Naturally, the vocals are an angry sergeant major shout: an irate oberleutnant giving his troops a good rollicking, delivered with OTT irascibility by the band's frontman as he strides manfully back and forth in a state of theatrical fury.

From time to time he leaps up on a couple of coffee tables - they're made of alloy and black-painted plywood and probably have a much more macho technical name, but to me they look like coffee tables - the better to holler at us from on high.

Doubtless all this jumping on the funiture is supposed to enhance the scary dramatics of the Megaherz megashow, but frankly it all looks a bit camp and silly to me. It's all a bit Carry On Rammstein - a movie somebody really needs to make, because there's a lot of comedic self-aggrandisement going on here that really needs to be debunked. I see Kenneth Williams in the lead singer's role, don't you?

Megaherz may have a winning way with wordplay, but their sense of humour stops short of clueing them in to their own camp ridiculousness. Someone should tell 'em. Maybe I just did.

Now there's an unplanned interrnission. Killing Joke are scheduled to take the stage, but Youth, the band's bassist, has vanished. The show can't go on without him.

An announcement booms over the PA: "Would Martin Glover please come to the stage, where his parents are waiting for him."

A gust of laughter erupts in the Agra, but the ploy works. Youth appears, and, shortly afterewards, so do Killing Joke, hammering through 'Requiem' as if half a dozen devils are at their back. Keyboard stabs and implacable punk-funk basslines fight it out in the hot Agra air.

Jaz Coleman, Killing Joke's vocalist, a man almost impossible to mention without adding the words 'shouty crackers', is on fine form, gurning through red facepaint and gesticulating mightily as if calling down the forces of chaos. Jaz always did like a good apocalypse, and the ever-more parlous state of the world must surely be grist to his mill. Tonight he's mesmeric and roaring, a bonkers shaman in his romper stomper suit, always the eye of the band's rolling, thunderous, sonic storm. 

'Love Like Blood' gets a rinse-out second song in, and from that point the band go marching all over their repertoire. 'Wardance' is introduced by Jaz with the cheery prediction that "80% of the world's population is going to die. It's gonna be hell." He sounds rermarkably matter-of-fact about it, but the song itself still burns with righteous fire. 'Psyche' (with Youth comandeering the first verse) is all mania and tension, 'European Super State' is as grandiose as the palace of Versailles, while 'Pandemonium' - one of the band's mid-period songs, recorded with a previously-absent Youth back in the line-up - is adroit and fluid tonight.

But everything is powered by the roar of the big Killing Joke machine, an effortless demostration by the old masters that mere Rammstein-esque bludgeon riffola can't beat a sure touch in the rhythm department. And you'll notice Jaz didn't need any coffee tables, either.

Talking of old masters (as we were), and talking of gothic rock (as we have been, it seems, throughout), here comes an old-school gothic groaner who seems to be enjoying quite a renaissance of late.

Carl McCoy, who these days is the sole proprietor of the Fields Of The Nephilim brand, is steadily re-establishing himself after the band's initial run of success around the late 80s was followed by several rather underwhelming years of sporadic releases, squabbles with record labels, and general not-doing-much.

Not that the Neph are grafting all that hard now. The band's last album came out in 2005, so McCoy isn't exactly in line for a Hardest Working Man In Showbiz award. But he's kept the pot boiling with fairly regular live appearances, and I suppose that's what the fans want. The greatest hits, played by a band which, if it isn't the original, at least looks somewhat like the legendary 1980s incarnation.

That's what we get tonight, at any rate. McCoy himself looks just the same as ever - the suburban cowboy from Stevenage, a shadowy figure beneath his hat, toting his mic stand like a canoe paddle while his band of Nephalikes crank it up into the max heaviosity zone. They're assisted by a soundmix which ramps everything up painfully loud. The bass speakers down in the photo pit are shifting so much air it's like trying to take photos in the teeth of a howling gale.

I snap off a few shots - not that it's difficult to photograph the Neph: once you've got the hat shot, and the mic-stand-as-canoe-paddle shot, you've more or less captured McCoy's full visual range. Then I retreat hastily - and gratefully - to the back of the hall, where the band's heavy metal thunder is reduced to tolerable levels.

It's all a bit ho-hum for me, and always has been. But Carl McCoy has many loyal acolytes, and a good few thousand of them are in the Agra tonight, being ritually deafened in the name of Gothic Rock. The master demands sacrifices, it seems. But he's not getting one from me. I've got earplugs, and I'm going to the bar.

Final act of the night - in the WGT's euphemistic 'Mittnacht Spezial' slot, which in practice usually means the early hours of the morning - is ex-Depeche Mode man Alan Wilder, with his electronic project Recoil.

Alan Wilder himself turns out to be a besuited and entirely unassuming figure behind a sit-up-and-beg Korg keyboard. But then, Recoil isn't a band, and this isn't really a performance.

Rather, it's an audio-visual installation, with a soundtrack that samples bits and pieces of Alan Wilder's past projects, adds bespoke sounds and effects, and weaves the whole into a quasi-ambient accompaniment for impressionistic images that flicker on a big screen.

It's a counter-intuitively un-rock 'n' roll wind-down to a long day in the Agra, but after the Neph's heavy metal onslaught, it's quite a relief to have something a little cerebral to send us to bed.

Final verdict? Recoil are intriguing and actually rather good. But it was Killing Joke and Ulterior that made the day, I think. Here's an idea: get 'em out on tour together. I'd pay to see that.

On to Day 5 of the WGT here.

Back to Day 3 of the WGT here.

Recoil: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Fields Of The Nephilim: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Killing Joke: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Meghaherz: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Nosferatu: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Ulterior: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Temple Of twilight: Website | MySpace

Wave Gotik Treffen: Website | MySpace | Facebook

For more photos from the WGT, find the bands by name here.