Sometime in the early ‘60s on Venice Beach, California, a young UCLA graduate turned to a friend and said, “Let’s make a million bucks and revolutionise rock ‘n’ roll.” Well, if you believe the Oliver Stone version of events, at any rate. In any case, that same young economics student, now in his fifties, is here tonight in the Point, stationed stage-right behind his trusty keyboards, the lofty ambitions of his younger self long since having been realised behind his wildest dreams.
And he’s doing what all young artists with a desire to set the world ablaze swear they’ll never do, would happily spend a lifetime plugging away in obscurity in order to avoid - namely performing the stadium-sized, cabaret version of the setlist that once upon a time had its finger locked onto the pulse of the youth culture zeitgeist. And for sure, on first viewing, tonight the stage set-up seems naff beyond belief - those menopausal firebrands Manzarek and Robbie Krieger out front, throwing shapes, desperately attempting to summon the seditious spirit of a bygone era.
And get this - the giant video screen at the back of the stage is displaying footage from that self-same period of tumultuous historical upheaval. That’s right, the full anti-Vietnam, protest riot, let’s-string-Nixon-up-by-the-balls nine-yards. And when it’s not vintage newsreel footage, it’s - wait for it - psychedelic lava-lamp visuals. It’s eminently possible that Jim Morrison is turning in his grave. It’s conceivable that Kurt Cobain experienced apocalyptic visions of his own middle-age self alarmingly similar to what we see in front of us here tonight before he shuffled off this mortal coil.
By all known rationale, this gig should be a disaster, a car-crash, Burroughs-in-a-GAP-advert awful. And yet, incredibly, miraculously, it’s not. It is fucking brilliant, a revelation, the best gig I have seen in this horrendous cattle-mart by some distance. Maybe it’s down to the fact that when you’re closer to the grave than the cradle, the need to make every gig count is that bit much more urgent. Or maybe it’s the classic Shakespearean motif of the poignancy of middle-age grief (Manzarek is currently going through a messy divorce).
Whatever the spur, the group tear through such copper-fastened classics as ‘Five To One’, Touch Me’ and ‘LA Woman’ like they wrote them yesterday. The Cult’s Ian Astbury, handed the unenviable task of filling in for Jim Morrison, gives a magnificent performance, replicating the great man’s soaring vocals and