From the stage of the Concorde 2, Fee Waybill expresses surprise that he’s still the frontman of a band at the age of 64. You can see why he might have thought the Tubes’ career would have been substantially shorter than it’s turned out to be.
West Coast pomp-rockers given to concept albums and elaborate stage shows, they should have been precisely the kind of thing that punk swept away. Instead, thanks to a snarky sense of humour and the prescient name of their 1975 album track White Punks on Dope – a UK hit single two years later, its title now loaded with new significance – they ended up unexpectedly thriving in its aftermath.
Their big selling point used to be live performances so rococo and over-staffed they proved financially unviable even at the height of their success. Tonight, the theatrics are unsurprisingly scaled down. This still means that Waybill dons a succession of costumes, including a straitjacket, a leather mask, chaps and a thong for Mondo Bondage.
At one point, he puts a cardboard box on his head that looks like a TV with prison bars across the screen and performs No Way Out, the song’s message about the deleterious effects of television updated with an expletive-laden introductory complaint about Game of Thrones.
There is, alas, no appearance from his sidesplittingly-named punk alter ego Johnny Bugger, but Waybill still complicates White Punks on Dope’s great splurge of New York Dolls-style trash by singing it in character as the drugged-out, platform-booted Quay Lewd, who gave every impression of being a parody of the Dolls’ sartorial and chemical excesses. Nevertheless, it’s the epitome of modest understatement compared to the days when their performances involved fire-eaters and chainsaws.
Attention is thus focused more on their music, which is bizarre enough in its own right: it heaves from glossy early-80s AOR to parodies of loungey jazz, to a cover of Gene Pitney’s 1961 hit Town Without Pity to their debut album’s Up from the Deep, prog rock so grandiloquent and tricksy you wonder how on earth anybody got them mixed up with punk. It’s alternately entertainingly preposterous and self-indulgent beyond belief: either way, 40 years into their career, the Tubes still seem unique.
