Music > Live Reviews

Curved Air

The Adrian Flux Waterfront

16/11/18

Last week it was Canterbury prog-rockers Caravan that packed out Norwich Arts Centre on the band's 50th anniversary tour. Exactly seven days later another monster name from the decade that brought you Morris Marinas and Magpie breezed into Norwich in the shape of Curved Air.

Like Caravan, Curved Air retain only one original member within their 2018 line-up, but for many 60-70 year old music fans the temptation to withdraw some of the pension pot and hand over top dollar to see red-headed front-woman Sonja Kristina one more time is difficult to resist. I dosed myself up with glucosamine and cod liver oil, and made my way along King Street, to join their number within the Waterfront Studio.

When Back Street Luv burst onto Top of the Pops in 1971 I was still a relatively normal, if impressionable and highly hormonal, teenager. It was the sight of Kristina, not the electric violin of Darryl Way, or the glorious raspberry-like opening chords from Francis Monkman's synthesiser that everyone was talking about at school the next morning. Here was a ground-breaking first in British rock music – a real-life rock chick vocalist in velvet loons fronting a prog band on prime time television. It could be argued that Sonja Kristina paved the way for the likes of Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Chrissie Hynde, and many others, and demonstrating that this was not just a game for the boys.

Forty eight years later and Way and Monkman, together with bass player Mike Wedgewood and the wonderfully-named drummer Florian Pilkington-Miksa, have all departed for pastures new, and it is a completely different Curved Air that strikes up with Spider, an instrumental track from the relatively new 2014 album North Star. Sonja Kristina joins the band on stage for another three tracks from North Star before picking up an acoustic guitar for the first classic track of the evening, the beautiful Melinda (More or Less) from 1972's Phantasmagoria. Later, we get It Happened Today, Marie Antoinette and a version of Vivaldi with Paul Sax doing a sterling job on replicating Darryl Way's legendary violin solo.

But, and there always is a 'but', the older songs no longer sound quite as good as the original versions. When Caravan played at the Arts Centre last week, tracks like Golf Girl and Nine Feet Underground still sounded like I remembered them – the synth sounds and the vocals still matched my 1970 memories. Kristina's voice, whilst still good, has dropped in range and lost some of the haunting, quivering timbre of old that gave Curved Air their distinctive sound. Robert Norton's keyboard playing is certainly up to the mark, but the Kurzweil K2600 fails to reproduce exactly the right sound-shapes to make the hairs on the back of my neck rise. George Hudson's guitar playing is bang on, Chris Harris' bass is solid, and Andy Tween's drumming is sweet. The newer material, the songs written to suit the current Curved Air, work really well, and anyone hearing the band for the first time would be suitably impressed. But for me, even my beloved Back Street Luv, and the finale rendition of Stretch, failed to cut the mustard for me in Norwich tonight.