Gig Review: From A Galaxie Not So Far Away — Dean & Britta play Galaxie 500

There was a time when every gig was reviewed. Now no gigs are reviewed. So I’m trying to get back to that earlier time, gig by gig…checked out Dean & Britta playing Galaxie 500, sure glad I did!

Dean and Britta Play Galaxie 500

Meow, Wellington

Sunday, December 1

Dean and Britta play Galaxie 500 was a show first conceived just over a decade ago, essentially it’s just an umbrella for sporadic gigs where Dean Wareham revisits the material of his first significant band (Galaxie 500) with his life and musical partner Britta Phillips, who became the bass player in his post-Galaxie band, Luna. As “Dean & Britta”, they have made albums and EPs, and movie soundtracks. They first performed in New Zealand in 2010, touring their show of soundtracks created for a series of Andy Warhol screentests.

What was significant about that, outside of Wareham’s obvious love of The Velvet Underground, was the fact that it was his first time ever performing in Wellington. The city he was born in.

Wareham spent his very early years in Wellington, then moved to Australia, and on to America. In the 1980s, Galaxie 500 was not quite a shoegaze band, not just an indie-pop band, and their mercurial mix of Velvets, and post-punk, and indeed the driving Flying Nun sound of The Bats and The Chills in particular, was a college radio fever dream. One of those bands that sold a finite amount of records at the time, but everyone that bought one took it home and played the absolute shit out of it.

So, some 35 years on, the music still means something to a lot of people — including to the person who wrote it. Indeed, Galaxie 500 is still the template, in a way, for the more recent Dean Wareham songs, or at the very least, the modern material is not at all a, um, Galaxie away…

But things start very lowkey tonight. It is after all a Sunday, something Dean addresses a couple of songs in. It’s a quiet, respectful vibe. The audience is into it, but there’s a little bit of watch-checking and capping the drinks, thoughts of an early Monday start to get the new week going.

If the first couple of songs are great, but low-key, the plaintive strum of Temperature’s Rising beds in the sound, allows Britta to join more fully with harmony vocals, and has Roger Brogan’s steady cymbal pulse really shining in support.

One of the great aspects to Wareham’s songs, and playing, is the way he uses his guitar in a very exploratory fashion, indeed there were one or two moments at the start of this gig where I thought, almost of The Grateful Dead. I’m sure fans would feel agrieved at the idea of something so loose and far from the perfect pop that Dean makes. But he really does let his guitar prowl the stage. I love the way it has both the chug of the Velvet Underground riffs, and also the snarl of their solos.

When Will You Come Home is another VU-derived mini-masterpiece.

I also loved the nearly country Hearing Voices and the subversive shimmer of Tugboat. How could you not.

Wareham’s voice is often on the verge of collapsing in on itself, but at the same time he is in full control of it, and uses the limited range as the perfect colour stroke on his pallete every time. From there he mixes in the guitar shades that will texture the melody, that will move the song forward, that will give a dramatic hue around deceptively simple chord voicings.

You could even say his voice is thin, “Reed-y”, never as spoken-word as Lou, but almost as atypical for such a sustained career as lead singer. In Luna and solo Wareham continues to reinvent old classics, with charming, surprising cover versions — but this was actually something that started back with Galaxie. So it’s a treat to hear Yoko Ono’s Listen, The Snow Is Falling, as recorded on the 1990 Galaxie 500 album, This Is Our Music. And though I really wanted their version of George Harrison’s Isn’t It A Pity from the previous year’s Galaxie record, On Fire, we did at least get Victory Garden from the same album, a slightly more obscure cover, originally from the band Red Krayola, a late 60s psychedelic pop-rock combo that were direct antecedents to the brand of dream-pop Galaxie 500 helped to cook up.

So by mid-way and later stages of the gig things were really humming, the set just built and built, and the band sounded fantastic throughout, and with little Easter Eggs along the way. Cheese and Onions (The Rutles), from the recently released collection of outtakes and rarities and alternate versions, Uncollected, and then a Joy Division cover to close. Ceremony was very appropriate, not just for more of Wareham’s spidery cathedrals of guitar, but for some summing up of the the reverence so many fans still feel towards the music, this band — actually true of both Galaxie and Joy Division.

I’ve been there for all four of Dean & Britta’s Wellington shows across the last decade or so. I’ve seen a different version of the Galaxie 500 show, a full set as Luna, and the aforementioned Warhol Screen Test soundtracks. Every time I’m watching someone as lowkey and brilliant as David Kilgour, as nonchalant and focussed, as singular and deferential.

Not bad for a Sunday night, then.