For the final night of the RFH Mojo season, it was back to the 1980s and the somewhat quaint sound of ska. Not that the Beat have been entirely frozen in time, since they'd managed to update their ode to Thatcher, Stand Down Margaret, so that it went "Stand down Georgie, stand down Tony", the better to accompany guitarist/vocalist Dave Wakeling's acid remarks about armageddon in Iraq.
Still, now that ska's novelty value has long worn off, the contrast between the narrow musical compass of the Beat's twitchy 2-Tone rhythms and their evident all-round musical expertise was striking.
They're probably capable of playing almost anything, so it seems perverse to limit themselves to such nondescript fillers as Big Shot or Get A Job, more like slogans with rhythmic accompaniment than fully-fledged songs. Indeed, neither the nonchalance with which they whizzed through their set, nor even the berserk energy with which toastmaster-in-chief Ranking Roger kept bouncing and spinning around the stage, were quite enough to dispel the sensation than an injection of new material was two decades overdue. The audience seemed to consist mostly of middle-aged Brummies on a nostalgic night out.
The nervy, menacing Mirror in the Bathroom appeared early then, inexplicably, popped up again not much later, sounding equally nervy and no less menacing. They saved Save It for Later for the encores, and the song's rolling momentum and contagious chorus offered a glimpse of the kind of avenues the band might have pursued if metal fatigue hadn't overwhelmed them.
But the Beat always had a knack for refurbishing pop classics from yesteryear. The speed-walking treatment of Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown still packs a radio-friendly frisson, while their revival of the Andy Williams warhorse Can't Get Used to Losing You neatly exploits the song's unusual zigzagging chord sequence. Their veteran saxophonist Saxa, still sound in wind if a trifle fragile in limb, may have found the key to reactivating the band's chart career. His mellifluous rendition of Stranger on the Shore had Radio 2 playlist written all over it.
