TANGERINE DREAM
VENUE THE LONDON PALLADIUM, LONDON
DATE 08/11/2023
The godfathers of kosmische playing at London’s mecca of light entertainment might seem like a mismatch on paper, but once Tangerine Dream are in full flow it all begins to make sense. Light entertainer Bruce Forsyth’s ashes are buried under the boards of the Palladium’s stage, and everyone from Arthur Askey to Zsa Zsa Gabor look down from the walls of its Edwardian corridors. The Tangs, too, carry ghosts with them, not least of all Edgar Froese, who led the good (space)ship TD for 48 years until his death in 2015.
Any concerns about the current trio fitting in are soon allayed when Thorsten Quaeschning takes to the stage. The custodian of the group in Froese’s absence has the aura of an old-school magician, genteel in his style of presentation and dressed in a suit that wouldn’t look out of place at The Magic Circle, and he bows respectfully and addresses the audience as if one of the Saxe-Coburgs is in the Royal Circle: “We’ll be playing some old tracks, some new tracks and some very old tracks,” he informs us.
Quaeschning is flanked by Japanese violinist Hoshiko Yamane to his right and the newest member of the band, Paul Frick
(also of Brandt Brauer Frick), playing synthesisers to his left. Like the classic trio of Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann, each takes possession of their part of the stage while simultaneously aligning sonically as part of a symbiotic machine. The tour is billed as From Virgin To Quantum Years, and sure enough, they commence with the mighty Phaedra, the title track from the 1974 album. On Phaedra, Franke introduced the sequencer to electronic music for the first time, a gamechanger immeasurable in its influence.
Then comes an array of songs that feel somewhat randomly generated – though when a band has more than 100 albums and each song takes around quarter of an hour to unfurl, there will always be questions as to why, say, the songs from
Force Majeure have been overlooked for
Rare Bird, a hidden track from the live
Poland album. That said, the fact they’re playing so much newer material –
Genesis Of Precious Thoughts from
2017’s Quantum Gate, for instance – demonstrates a band unapologetically confident in moving forwards, as they should be. Most recent studio album, 2022’s Raum, is almost certainly Tangerine Dream’s finest since the mid-80s and, accordingly, new instrumentals Continuum and the title track stand up well against White Eagle
and Love On A Real Train.
Admittedly, come the interval, the mid-paced peregrinations have started to feel a little leaden, though the trio bound back in and return to their quads like office workers coming back from a boozy lunch. The second act is where the real gems are hiding: Betrayal (Sorcerer Theme) ambulates elegantly mid-air before descending like a jet coming into crash-land. The more recent Portico blips pleasingly like a cosmic vital signs monitor, and perhaps best of all is Los Santos City Map, a progressive electronic epic that reinterprets Froese’s cinematic score for the
“IF TANGERINE DREAM BECAME AN IRRELEVANCE DURING THE 1990S, RECENT NODS FROM
STRANGER THINGS AND BLACK MIRROR HAVE PROPELLED THEM BACK TO A KIND OF RELEVANCY THEY’VE NOT ENJOYED SINCE THE VIRGIN YEARS.”
video game Grand Theft
Auto V. If Tangerine
Dream largely became an irrelevance during the
1990s, recent nods from meta pop culture must-sees like Stranger Things and Black Mirror have propelled the Tangs back to a kind of relevancy they’ve not enjoyed since the Virgin years. There’s one final treat in store when Nick Beggs sashays onto the stage dressed in skin-tight black leather for the final session of the night, an improvisational piece in D minor (chosen because it reverberates with the resonance of the room). Quaeschning introduces Beggs as “probably the best bass guitarist in the whole world”. No pressure then. The revered musician brings his anaconda-like Chapman Stick to proceedings, and while some of what he does falls slightly flat, other moments are truly transcendent, which is a bit like the entire career of Tangerine Dream in microcosm. Nice to see them, then… to see them, nice.