Or simply enjoy feeling slightly naughty when shouting "just a little bitch!"."Get The Party Started" is a fine if obvious opener, and "There You Go" is a reminder of her fly-girl past The rest, though, is endless middlebrow middle-Americana. Stomping about the stage in skater gear (baggy shorts, keychain, DMs, white vest), she's a talkative so-and-so, giving every song a rambling intro When she says the words "Linda Perry", my heart sinks. I hoped I'd see out my threescore-and-who's-counting without ever needing to hear 4 Non Blondes' revolting "What's Up" again, but I was reckoning without Pink at the Apollo.The slideshow which accompanies some songs hints at an ego out of control. "My Vietnam" combines a near-meaningless montage of images of 'Nam with big, capitalised words like "FREEDOM", "PEACE", "AGEISM", "UNITY" and (weirdly) "GAY". "Family Portrait" takes the literalist approach (tearjerking happy snaps).
A gallery of dead legends – Joplin, Cobain, Biggie, 2Pac, Joplin again, Hendrix, Carpenter, Aaliyah, Joplin again – runs as she sings a medley of Gershwin's jazz standard "Summertime" and Erma Franklin's "Piece Of My Heart". The implication – that this rinky-dink Pink panther is up there with the greats – is as plain as your nose.Even that couplet in "Don't Let Me Get Me" that goes "Tired of being compared to damn Britney Spears/She's so pretty, that just ain't me" reeks of false humility. Of course, she's right to a degree, in that you'd crawl over 100 Pinks to get to one Britney, but let's face it, if you didn't make it all the way, it wouldn't be the worst thing that ever happened.All those young minds, all those psychoactive drugs, and all you're going to give them is music for the body? Dance culture's emphasis, from Acid House onwards, on the physical over the cerebral meant that if Underworld did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent them. Not that they're drily bookish or wordy, nor are they incapable of affecting the body: the waves of euphoria that roll over me when I hear "Two Months Off" have little to do with the lyrics. But Karl Hyde's abstract, punctuation-free prose-poems have more in common with, say, Burroughs or Smith (Mark E) than with Mr bloody C.The Brixton Academy isn't filled with people intent on deconstructing the text.
They're here to drink and dance and get on one and shout "lager lager lager", and Underworld give them what they need. There's a circular paradox which dictates that very hi-tech is very lo-tech: the more experimental you get, the more primitive This apparently applies to Underworld's banks of gear. The shaven-headed, enormo-headphoned Karl Hyde dances like a Harry Enfield parody of old skool rave dancing and spews his streams of consciousness, to visuals, courtesy of their own film company Tomato: the kind of smoke the SAS might use to storm an embassy, retina-boggling assaults of binaries and matrices, Xs and Ys, zeroes and ones on the big screen, and lasers which momentarily make everyone's heads resemble little fishes, like a theatre full of neon tetras. Underworld are a band who can engage your brain, dazzle your eyes, and make you dance like a tropical fish.
You can't ask for much more.s.price independent.co.ukPink: Birmingham Academy (0870 771 2000), Mon; London Brixton Academy (020 7771 3000), Tues Underworld: Bristol Academy (0870 771 2000) Mon and touring. With the exception of centenaries, opportunities to hear the major works of a composer as "difficult" as Alban Berg within a few short months are rare. This year – by which I mean the calendar year rather than music's quasi-academic season – we have been lucky. In May there was Richard Jones's bright, brutal staging of Lulu for English National Opera. Last month saw the all-too-brief run of Keith Warner's nihilistic dissection of Wozzeck at Covent Garden. This week it was Berg's Violin Concerto; performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter and the London Symphony Orchestra on two successive nights at the Barbican as part of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas's Last Works season.