NEEB @ the Maze, Nottingham 16.11.01 (review © Jon Horne 2001) from Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide) This was one of those nights when things didn't quite happen. No one's fault: the music was fine, a few people danced (eventually), and no one was beaten up, glassed, or otherwise mutilated. It's just that sometimes the music and the crowd don't mix. NEEB at the Maze was a mismatch of group and venue. The Maze's natural clientele is older than NEEB's natural audience, and more inclined towards vodka and Red Bull than to more concentrated stimulants. NEEB's electronic set was designed for a festival, or as part of an all-nighter. There was a real flow to it; a build-up of intensity as things progressed from a fairly turgid beginning, through fast, trance-y techno ('One'), and finally exploding into the big-beat pop of 'Walkthaway' and 'Luminous'. As befits a group named after an Electricity Board, NEEB owe a pretty huge debt to Kraftwerk, particularly in the creation of atmosphere through dynamics, and the use of background noise to produce bowel-emptying blasts of raw sound in order to awaken a flagging dancefloor. For a bunch of speccy white boys, there's a fair bit of Funkadelic too, in the visceral Bernie Worrell-ish bleeps and burps which they use as punctuation during the more conventional four-on-the-floor tunes. As the background to a Friday night, where most of the people there were only interested in dancing and pulling, it didn't work. When the nice pop tunes came along, everyone danced, mostly in couples. Before that, they didn't. To get the most out of this sort of stuff, you have to lose yourself in it, either by cranking yourself up artificially, or by being prepared to dance on your own. Alternatively, you can sit there and watch the proceedings with an amateur anthropologist's eye. There were clearly people there who wanted to hear some Proper Bloody Music, and were not pleased to see a stage full of synthesisers. Equally there were one or two others, standing in the middle of the dance floor looking ostentatiously wasted, who liked what they were hearing, but could have done without the company of a lot of people nearly old enough to be their parents. When I was a lad, a situation like that would have turned very ugly, very quickly. In some ways, these are more enlightened times: the only conflict on the night - and easily the most entertaining part of the evening - was between one spectacularly drunken audience member and NEEB's part-time drummer. First the drunk climbed onstage and started randomly hitting cymbals, for which he was threatened with a drumstick; then after slinking back into the audience to join his embarrassed friends, he attempted to chat up a tall blonde who was standing next to the stage - who turned out to be the drummer's girlfriend. Such moments make life worth living. To sum up: NEEB were pretty good. See them in their natural environment if you can, but otherwise go and see them in an unnatural situation, and try to enjoy any weirdness that ensues. If that seems like hard work, they've got a record out, called Northern Electric, so give that a listen instead. I hope the Maze carries on taking a chance with groups like this. As a venue, it is always hovering just above chicken-in-a-basket status, with its tribute bands and covers-only bands - whilst always keeping some credibility by hosting the Cosmic American thing, theatrical and poetry events, and putting on groups such as NEEB, whom few of us have heard of. Keep at it, I say. - - - read more rants and raves