Murder City Devils at Riot Fest

They played hard. Familiar as I am with the Devils' swan song live album and its shambolic roar — the death throes of a great sad beast — I was unprepared for the focused assault of last night's reunion performance. Taking the stage the four boys on guitar and vox made a line with their backs to the audience, as if for a moment of silent invocation. The show ripped open with the challenge-as-creed Get Off The Floor (If you're not going to dance what the fuck did you come here for?) and slammed shut with Murder City Riot. It was professional. Eight years to the month since the Devils folded (at the height of their power at the end of their rope) and the raw anguish of songs written by kids has worn into well-seasoned pain. Clint Eastwood is tougher now than in his poncho days.

Spencer himself is leaner and steadier, even having secured his storm-tossed sea captain beard into a more wolfish projection. He seems to have found a measure of grace. Still he howls I heard or read the only love is lost love, but with a new preface: "I've never been so wrong."

The Devils' ode to Johnny Thunders benefited most from a live interpretation, with its tyrannosaur bass line brought to the fore and Spencer's revealing point of clarification: "It wasn't New Orleans that killed Johnny. Johnny did it to himself. He was a FOOL." The song has become a cornerstone of the Devils' message to the kids (as I see it), along with Bear Away and Bride of the Elephant Man: Struggle and empathize with the struggles of others / Use that empathy to find a way not to destroy yourself but to somehow carry on.

The unequivocal hero of MCD is Iggy Pop of the Stooges. Many people are said to have "saved rock and roll" at one time or another...Spencer told it this way: Iggy found the very lowest form of art and reveled in its utterly indefensible quality; likened to the first caveman artist to paint not a handsome buffalo but an inarticulate scribble in shit. (Relatively sober throughout the night, here the old Spencer fumbled a bit for words. Appropriately enough.) In the same breath Mr Moody identified Kenneth Anger as a parallel figure in American underground film. I'm not yet conversant with Anger's work, but now I think I've put it off long enough. I like the sound of you rolling, rolling in that broken glass.

Part of me wanted to stand back from the pit to take in the full view, to catch every nuance of the Devils' on-stage dynamic and relish the response of the crowd as a whole. I might never get to see them again. But that is the instinct of a tourist, of a person busy fossilizing memories behind a camera. I don't have any photos of the show, and already the sounds are fading away, but I know I was there and I danced.