Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Theatre is not always costumes and players delivering lines of playwrights concoction, but it is always about the moment where an audience feels every single bit of emotion, every damning indication of the present screaming into the hearts and minds of madness, logic, and fierce anger that the system as we know it doesn’t just need change, it requires revolution.
It is not enough to imply mutiny against the great deliverers of harm, politicians who are paid by corporations, owned by business and not ideals and the cause of the common man, it must be an active call for transformation, and one so very few of us can imagine because we have got used to a certain sense of comfortable living driven by the fear of stepping outside the laws of conversation…Revolution is calling, and it’s soundtrack has been heard for years.
The heat of an early summer’s day had once more penetrated the once noisy foundations of industry of the Black Country as a crowd, more of a mass of fans of Geoff Tate weaved their way through silent roads to the new heart of Rock music in Wolverhampton and by night’s end the furnace of one of the truly impressive rock concept albums of all time, as well as assorted songs of majesty and precision, had been stoked to boiling point and attended to with honour by the multitude and the believers.
To perform the entirety of the celebrated recording Operation: Mindcrime is one of absolute theatre, and Geoff Tate and his band perform it to the letter, each note a cue of insurrection, of mounting narrative and insisting that it flows with passion and drama; and the crowd inside K.K.’s Steel Mill didn’t just accept it, they lived it, they breathed it in audibly and without refusal; they punched the air on cue, they dreamed of a period in time when Progressive Metal had come of age and seemed a natural successor to the days of the one act showmanship; and as tracks such as Speak, Spreading The Disease, The Needle Lies, I Don’t Believe In Love, and Suite Sister Mary shot enough power into the system to run the estates of the Midlands city for a year, what was evident was the simple fact that even after almost 40 years Operation: Mindcrime resonates with fury and belief.
The event is the last time the entirety of the album is to be performed by Geoff Tate, and that is the point, a concept album requires more than a stage, it needs the absolution and grit that playing each song in order requires, and as the immense band played alongside the vocals, and as they played a couple of tracks from the new album Operation: Mindcrime 3, as well as the fiercely beautiful and haunting Silent Lucidity, so an era closed its curtains on the world, never forgotten, never to be dismissed, and always there in the background, carried by the thousand fans in attendance as the words were spoken…Revolution Calling.
Ian D. Hall