Radio One's Mary Anne Hobbs had already forewarned on her show this week that Orbital are "the best live act in the country", so my hopes were already well built up.  They were amazing.  For an electronic act, they could have been very two dimensional and boring to watch.  To quote Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant, for example:

I always think the best thing about a rock concert is when the people come on and the first five or ten minutes; I tend to lose interest after that.  I think the concert that had the biggest impact on me in my life was when I saw David Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour in 1972.  It wasn't just his costume changes, it was simply thrilling to watch.  Nowadays so many rock concerts use the same format.  We wanted our concert to have lots of peaks in it, so that you haven't seen it all in the first ten minutes.

I know exactly what Neil Tennant is on about, after some 79 gigs under my belt, and he should have been here tonight.  This gig was the best mixed live performance I've ever heard, yet the music was very nearly secondary to the visual spectacle the packed-out Guildhall was subjected to.  The stage was decked out like the set of a 'Dr. Who' episode, with sheets of circular indented plastic spinning frantically around behind Paul and Phil Hartnoll as they twiddled with their knobs (ooh er!) and did their stuff.

Throughout the hour and three quarter set, a video screen was lowered and raised (revealing a kitsch glitter ball behind it) and had striking images projected onto it.  We saw Pac Men surrounded by armies of mobile phones, hairdryers and televisions; spectrographs of the sounds being played; amazing computer graphics synchronized with the tunes; and (most aptly, given the current world circumstances) images of dictators, bombs and guns accompanying 'Satan'. This was the sort of stage set up I'd be impressed with at Wembley Arena.  To see it in such a comparatively modest venue, along with a first class light show precisely in time with every last sixteenth note - was almost unbelievable.

Enough of the sights, what about the sounds?  For a band whom the music press have written off (even I didn't get around to buying the latest album, 'The Altogether') they sound fresh, current and commercial.  They begin with 'The Girl With The Sun In Her Head', and rapidly blast through their back catalogue - from the atmospheric 'Belfast' to the inevitable 'Chime' encore.  Also worthy of note was their version of the Radiophonic Workshop's 'Dr. Who Theme' , complete with breakbeats and authentic sound effects - surely a single-in-waiting.

The gig was captivating, dynamic, clear and as bass-heavy as The Prodigy set I saw way back in '96 (up until tonight, my favourite Guildhall gig), but it was the balance between the modern beats and the postmodern, socially aware images being flashed up on the screen which made the night complete.  I have no idea who was behind the content of the projections, but if it was the Hartnoll brothers themselves, they must have very socialist and left-wing opinions: images of suppressed workers and clocks ticking away above captions of "No Time", amongst others - which is to be applauded.  The work that must have gone into the images is hard to comprehend. Perhaps it was just me trying to find the meanings behind the pictures, but I'd imagine many people in the audience were left with a memory of the band as political commentators, as well as musicians.

The crowd was up dancing all night long, but the only complaint I have about the night, was the lack of 'The Box' - surely the band's finest, Ennio Moricone influenced moment.  But that's nit picking after the best gig I've been to in Portsmouth this year.

Review: Andrew Morrison
(An edited version of this review appeared in the December 2001 edition of the University Of Portsmouth's Student Union Magazine Pugwash.)