Last Wednesday I took the train to Haarlem to watch a performance by Moke with a friend of mine.
To be honest, it was her idea to go. Although I had heard about Moke before, I had no idea about who they were and what kind of music they played. Of course I did a little bit of research beforehand and I found out that Moke is an Amsterdam-based rock band. Maginn, the front-man and vocalist/guitarist of the group comes from Northern-Ireland and you can quite easily pick this up from his singing. When he started reading poetry (I’m trying to discover which poem it was, but until now without success) somewhere in the middle of the performance his background became abundantly obvious. Somehow this also means that the band is “Catholic”, there were a few mentions of Jesus Christ, God and Heaven, but it didn’t really bother me.
The show started with an ear-drum splitting, extremely irritating high-pitched sound that continued for way too long and the guy who was sitting a few rows to the front wearing earplugs suddenly made sense. Then Maginn swung a low-hanging lamp across the stage flashing the light in your face at the most random and unexpected moments. I wondered briefly if Moke was getting a kick out of annoying their crowd.
The band just started playing and Maginn started singing. Eventually the curtain was pulled up and an enormous screen was revealed on which several artsy images were shown during their performance. Within just two songs I managed to float along on the stream of their music and found my mind wandering to all kinds of different places while I felt almost hypnotised by the images they presented.
I don’t know any of the band’s original music, but I could discern some covers like “Philadelphia” originally sung by Neil Young and “One of Us” originally sung by Joan Osborne.
It feels kind of strange listening to a rock band play while sitting in a theatre, but it fit their show appropriately titled “Till Death Do Us Part”.
