May 16, 2000

Manchester University Hop & Grape

...in their own peculiar way, [a]Moloko[/a] make perfect sense. ..

Oblique yet quaint, glamorous yet faintly threatening... but, hey, we did not come to admire the lighting system. Tonight - magnetised by the irresistible lure of The Singles (last year's contagious 'Sing It Back' and recent rump-shaker 'The Time Is Now') - we came to get down.

We wanted to lose ourselves in Moloko's pounding dancefloor sounds: to get mango-ed off our chutney to the ever-quickening pulse of their chart-squashing oeuvre. Yet after an hour or so of Roisin Murphy (tonight sporting a daft Kate Bush-style hippy blouse) and chums' breathlessly energetic neo-funk workouts, Manchester finds its feet are still curiously earthbound. Static. Moribund, even.

So what on earth is going on? The answer, in a nutshell, is that Moloko have pulled off one of the greatest postmodern heists of our time. To wit: they are a dance band who are virtually impossible to dance to.

Moloko, you see, are simply too darn strange to illicit anything more physical than the odd open-mouthed gasp of awe. The beats may pound and thud in all the right places, the keyboards may shimmer like a Mediterranean sunrise, but there's a brilliantly wilful sense of mischief behind even their most mainstream numbers.

Take 'Remain The Same' (from, like most of tonight's set, fantastic current album 'Things To Make And Do'). A lesson in early-'80s shudder-funk, it matches screeching heavy metal guitar 'breaks' with avant-jazz drums to quite terrifying, anti-chart-pop effect. The result, rather excellently, is thus more RATM than ATB. Then there's vocoderised belter 'Indigo' - essentially 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' slowed to a pensioner's pace and pinned to a backdrop of marching ants in Scholl's sandals. It rocks but, even if you were nailed to Lionel Blair during a marathon performance of Starlight Express, you couldn't dance to it.

All of which raises suspicions, naturally, that Moloko are either; a) high-brow arty imposters who've cynically hijacked the populist dance plane or b) new-found dance devotees whose chart successes are laughably unrepresentative of the rest of their distinctly 'difficult' material.

The truth is, however, that Moloko are neither. Though songs such as 'Somebody Somewhere' (a 'Summer Nights'-style duet between Roisin and guitarist Dave Cooke) wobble with a slightly dubious, Fatboy Slim sense of novelty, tonight's performance remains deliciously unselfconscious. You may not be able to dance to it, but it's still fun.

So we get sneakers on speakers. We get lots of spontaneous keyboard twiddling. And, best of all, we get Roisin's hilarious, Pans People-style whirling - a defiantly unchoreographed jig that knocks her Plasticine dance contemporaries for six. Of course, it's a fluke that such a resolutely art-school act have managed to capture the fleeting attentions of the mainstream. Their curious, contradictory brand of bizarro trip-pop may have been assembled from a slew of fairly obvious reference points (a pinch of Grandmaster Flash here, some Gary Numan there). But, like a jigsaw without a box, they've ended up putting the pieces together in their own way. It may be strange. It's not particularly Ibiza. But, in their own peculiar way, Moloko make perfect sense.