Mancbeth is the story of a haunting - but not the haunting you’re thinking of. The famous Scottish play is all about a hunger for a future foretold, and the scrabble to scourge the mind of the stubborn memories of the past misdeeds it took to win that prize. In setting out to retell this tale, David Lemberg and Martin Andrews recognized the aptness of the 90s Madchester scene for a tale of violence, madness, and aspiration, but did not see the dissonance that would be created by their nostalgic perspective. Macbeth is tortured by his heinous crime. These lot are longing for their lost youth of being able to name-check the local badman. What’s worse is that in attempting to service the undeniably attractive pun in the name, the concept of an album, and 2006 live studio TV special to launch it, they defang both Shakespeare and the scene they’re paying homage to.
The bulk of the show is a 2-hander. Andrews is Octavia Freud, his DJ/Producer alter ego, who in this is essentially Shaun Ryder from the Happy Mondays - namechecked early doors for ‘dealing in the Hac’.Brian Gorman plays ‘Mr Manchester’, Tony Wilson, who is interviewing Freud at the launch of this ‘Mancbeth’ album. It’s kind of a cool conceit but became relatively one-note, the two middle-aged Lancastrians reminiscing about Macbeth’s rise to the top of the club scene. They make poor use of the talent around them — strong opening track ‘Fair is Foul’ makes you think that the billed ‘Octavia Freud and the Weird Sisters’ are going to be a trio that walks us through the torrid tale. And then the women whose harmonies carry a lot of the tunes are left standing at the back to sway and smile while the blokes whitter on in front of them. ‘Lady M’, usually one of the
meatiest female roles in the canon, doesn’t get much characterisation early on, other than she’s ambitious for Macbeth, fairly standard. Guest vocalist *MaARAIA?* shows great pipes in the baroque banger ‘Invincible’, but could have been a much more prominent feature. The genre they were going for — Noel’s House Party, SMTV, Big Breakfast style live shows are characterised by guest stars and zany antics. The women were right there, and they barely used them.
The visuals that went with each track were individually cool, as previously mentioned, ‘Fair is Foul’ stood out — but there wasn’t enough of a through-line going forward. The music itself wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good enough to carry the other, weaker parts of the show. Some were grittier, some more Bowie-esque or evocative of Pulp, but the writers’ idea seems to have been to pick a Manchester-linked theme for the scene, make that into a beat, then repeat a few key lines from that scene over the top of the beat, ad infinitum. I don’t know if the visuals were really cut together from stock footage, but that’s the conclusion I came to due to the disjointed nature of it. I wouldn’t watch those visual tracks in a row and think they were one cohesive story.
The idea of Mancbeth is a strong one, and maybe some blown-out speakers in Modern Art Oxford’s basement ruined it for me. If you love the idea and the music of that time, perhaps there’s something there for you. It just wasn’t for me.