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Grunge may have gone but Dude has last laugh; Pop
Stephen Dalton
13 August 2009
The Times
T
2
28
Pearl Jam Shepherds Bush Empire, W12 ****
One of the last surviving bands from the Seattle grunge gold rush that revitalised American rock two decades ago, Pearl Jam played a rare London club date as a taster for next week's arena concerts and their forthcoming album, Backspacer. Tickets priced at £45 for this sold-out show were changing hands for three times that outside the venue, and more than ten times online. Inside, the mood was sweltering and highly charged.
Once notoriously glum and humourless, the singer Eddie Vedder appeared in buoyant mood, swapping jokes and bemused questions about Big Brother with the crowd. Now 44, with a fuzzy beard and sloppy clothes, this former brooding depressive has become a dead ringer for The Dude, the laidback stoner played by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowksi. Vedder spent much of Pearl Jam's first decade struggling to prove his credibility in the face of derisive critics and contemporaries who cast him as Salieri to Kurt Cobain's Mozart. Today, 60 million albums later, it seems that he is having the last laugh.
As Vedder wrapped his grainy baritone growl around Pearl Jam classics including Sometimes, Even Flow and Alive, he barely had to sing a note as the audience boomed along to every word. The smattering of tracks from Backspacer inevitably received a more mixed reception, but more due to unfamiliarity than any discernible dip in quality. Most of the crowd already knew the imminent new single The Fixer, a concise blast of upbeat, pleasingly melodic punk-pop. The staccato guitar shudders of Got Some also sounded like a New Wave throwback, faintly echoing My Sharona, by the Knack, while Vedder's plaintive acoustic ballad The End felt like a potential showstopper.
Pearl Jam always had more in common with classic 1960s and 1970s rock than the punky nihilism of grunge. Once seen as a criticism, this wider perspective has increasingly proved to be an asset as the last decade's fickle pop fashions recede. They were certainly shameless in their ancestor worship on Tuesday, enlisting a cadaverous Ronnie Wood, of the Rolling Stones, for a fiery gallop through Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower. Simon Townshend, younger brother of Pete, also joined them on a ragged cover of The Who's The Real Me.
This show, sprawling well over two hours, began at an explosively exciting pitch that dissipated as the evening progressed. There were a few trudging, workmanlike numbers, but Vedder's essentially likeable nature won through. The grunge bubble may have burst 15 years ago, but The Dude abides. Manchester MEN arena, August 17; London O2 arena, August 18
No more the depressive: Eddie Vedder was effervescent on stage
Grunge may have gone but Dude has last laugh; Pop
Stephen Dalton
13 August 2009
The Times
T
2
28
Pearl Jam Shepherds Bush Empire, W12 ****
One of the last surviving bands from the Seattle grunge gold rush that revitalised American rock two decades ago, Pearl Jam played a rare London club date as a taster for next week's arena concerts and their forthcoming album, Backspacer. Tickets priced at £45 for this sold-out show were changing hands for three times that outside the venue, and more than ten times online. Inside, the mood was sweltering and highly charged.
Once notoriously glum and humourless, the singer Eddie Vedder appeared in buoyant mood, swapping jokes and bemused questions about Big Brother with the crowd. Now 44, with a fuzzy beard and sloppy clothes, this former brooding depressive has become a dead ringer for The Dude, the laidback stoner played by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowksi. Vedder spent much of Pearl Jam's first decade struggling to prove his credibility in the face of derisive critics and contemporaries who cast him as Salieri to Kurt Cobain's Mozart. Today, 60 million albums later, it seems that he is having the last laugh.
As Vedder wrapped his grainy baritone growl around Pearl Jam classics including Sometimes, Even Flow and Alive, he barely had to sing a note as the audience boomed along to every word. The smattering of tracks from Backspacer inevitably received a more mixed reception, but more due to unfamiliarity than any discernible dip in quality. Most of the crowd already knew the imminent new single The Fixer, a concise blast of upbeat, pleasingly melodic punk-pop. The staccato guitar shudders of Got Some also sounded like a New Wave throwback, faintly echoing My Sharona, by the Knack, while Vedder's plaintive acoustic ballad The End felt like a potential showstopper.
Pearl Jam always had more in common with classic 1960s and 1970s rock than the punky nihilism of grunge. Once seen as a criticism, this wider perspective has increasingly proved to be an asset as the last decade's fickle pop fashions recede. They were certainly shameless in their ancestor worship on Tuesday, enlisting a cadaverous Ronnie Wood, of the Rolling Stones, for a fiery gallop through Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower. Simon Townshend, younger brother of Pete, also joined them on a ragged cover of The Who's The Real Me.
This show, sprawling well over two hours, began at an explosively exciting pitch that dissipated as the evening progressed. There were a few trudging, workmanlike numbers, but Vedder's essentially likeable nature won through. The grunge bubble may have burst 15 years ago, but The Dude abides. Manchester MEN arena, August 17; London O2 arena, August 18
No more the depressive: Eddie Vedder was effervescent on stage
Up here so high I start to shake, Up here so high the sky I scrape, I've no fear but for falling down, So look out below I am falling now, Falling down,...not staying down, Could’ve held me up, rather tear me down, Drown in the river
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Jamming with golden oldies; IN TOWN LAST NIGHT...
ALISTAIR FOSTER
12 August 2009
London Lite
1
26
ROCK
Pearl Jam Shepherd's Bush Empire
*****
ALISTAIR FOSTER
PERENNIAL grunge gods Pearl Jam pulled off a masterstroke last night. The band, in their midforties, made themselves look young again by bringing an elderly local on stage, in the form of 62-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. He joined them for only the third song of a two and a half-hour set, a gloriously under-rehearsed rendition of Bob Dylan's All Along The Watchtower. The other way to turn back time, of course, was to rock the set like it was 1990. They played to a feverishly loyal crowd at Shepherd's Bush Empire as a warm-up to their short stadium tour of Europe, which starts next week. Frontman Eddie Vedder was positively chatty by his standards, and clearly relished this rare opportunity to play such an intimate venue. New tracks from their forthcoming album Backspacer went down well, along with classics Alive, Even Flow and Given To Fly.
In chatty mood: Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder last night
In chatty mood: Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder last night
Pop: Pearl Jam Shepherd's Bush Empire, London ∂∂∂∂∂
14 August 2009
The Guardian
36
If there's anything guaranteed to warm the heart of a veteran rock band, it was the scene outside the Shepherd's Bush Empire, where Pearl Jam were warming up for an arena tour that starts next week. Alongside the touts were a cluster of people, average age 20, holding up homemade signs pleading for spare tickets. "Genuine fan desperately needs a ticket," read one brandished by a girl who couldn't have been born when the group first created their brew of grunge chords and despondence.
It's no great surprise that, years after their commercial peak, Pearl Jam's music still matters. Even with their ninth album, Backspacer, about to appear, they remain relentless foes of "the man", while producing music that envelops listeners in a warm sense of shared despair. Singer Eddie Vedder seems a much chirpier chap these days: tonight, he even cracked jokes about Big Brother. But he still sings with righteous rage. Glowering at the unfairness of everything, he invested nearly all 26 songs of the set - most of them great slabs of riff-based rock - with an adolescent moroseness that explained his appeal to the mainly young audience.
The signature hits Even Flow ("written in 1793", quipped Vedder) and Alive inspired singalongs, while old non-hits such as Why Go and Do the Evolution were greeted with pleasure. Even new ones Got Some and The Fixer - punchier and poppier than the rest - were respectfully received.
The highlights, however, were two cover versions and two guests. All Along the Watchtower featured a stalk-like Ronnie Wood on guitar, and Pete Townshend's guitarist brother, Simon, turned up to play on the Who's The Real Me. For those few minutes, Pearl Jam forgot the angst and yielded to something that looked suspiciously like joy.
Caroline Sullivan