Shows/1987-12-03

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Setlist: (incomplete and out of order)

• Purple Toupee
• Lie Still, Little Bottle
• Why Does The Sun Shine?
• 32 Footsteps
• Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head
• Kiss Me, Son Of God
• Hide Away Folk Family
• The World's Address
• Shoehorn With Teeth
• Number Three

They Might Be Giants
Musikcafeen in Copenhagen, Denmark
December 3, 1987 at 9:00 PM

Fan Recaps and Comments:

"Rock as Ironic Puppetry" by Lars Villemoes,
Dabladet Information, December 5, 1987
(Translated from Danish)

Sped up, cool and curly humorists from New York

If you imagine a cross between Buddy Holly, Clark Kent and Elvis Costello, equipped with a sharp-tongued New Yorker nervousness and a diploma in advanced rock rhetoric, then you roughly have the image of singer and ironist John Flansburgh from the duo They Might Be Giants. He and his harmony-playing partner John Linnell are, both live and on record, a particularly endearing and well-articulated expression of a kind of minimalist cabaret rock, created with a great overview of 30-40 years of American pop, rock and folk traditions and delivered with all the presence and all the self-irony that it is rarely (never?) possible to adapt from a club to, for example, a stadium stage. What these two middle-class laughers are doing is about conversation and interaction, not about any kind of monumentalism or creed.

They Might Be Giants sing effortlessly and thoroughly playfully about topics as diverse as purple toupees, housewife pill abuse and nuclear space physics. They also make fun of the musical roots, which are cultivated simply because they are roots. Flansburgh presents the roots-instrument the stick; a thick, bark-less branch, and tells indignantly how this excellent instrument has been abused by all the mega-stars from Sting to Phil Collins. But now, friends, you are going to hear how the rumble stick really needs to be played, he says before "Lie Still, Little Bottle", with its puzzlingly catchy mix of hallucinatory nervous lyrics, naive folkism and old-fashioned jerky rock'n'roll with farting baritone sax. The stick is hammered into the floor with every beat and occasionally directed threateningly at the audience. This is roots music, believe it or get lost...

With electric guitar, harmonica, and a few smaller percussion and wind ensembles brought on tape, They Might Be Giants manages to be the embodiment of distanced stylistic pluralism; a group that constantly hovers on the thin line between love for pop and deep distance from it. They can sound like true connoisseurs of the Texan polka tradition for up to several minutes at a time, but they also write songs that could be replicas of the English new rock of the '70s, from The Clash to Elvis Costello. Put your hand inside the puppet head, they sing as a call to counter-movement against the eyes of the world, and it is precisely like a kind of trembling rock musical puppeteers that they puncture all attempts to make "authentic" music. They Might Be Giants comments on how many others are mere imitations.

When Tom Lehrer meets The Andrew Sisters in their blaring Christ parody song "Kiss Me, Son Of God", when they make people in Musikcafeen scream for 16 bars as if we had been transported to a teenybop concert at Gentofte Stadium, when Kid Creole's streamlined salsa-disco gets a couple over the neck in "Where's The Jazz" [ed. note: "The World's Address"] and when military music and rococo oboes merge into a surreal jingle like "Shoehorn With Teeth", you experience a pair of formidably confident, well-thought-out and instinctively funny musical hyenas and vultures who romp around the playground of pop history and want us to have an opinion about it and what it all means.

They Might Be Giants can imitate the Beatles, Phil Spector and The Velvet Underground (sometimes in the same song), they can sing like a sheepish Willie Nelson, a retarded Willy DeVille, and like John Doe, who is forever stranded out on the beach in Gastown. Yes, even the lack of inspiration can give them inspiration for a song: "There's only two songs in me and I just wrote the third / Don't know where I got the inspiration or how I wrote the words / Spent my whole life just digging up my music's shallow grave / For the two songs in me and the third one I just made" (Number Three).

And if this sprawling, witty combo is most confident on stage, it certainly doesn't mean that their record is a shoddy imitation of their concerts. On the contrary — the raw, the watered-down, the crazy, the refined, and the hellishly cut-together alternate with the almost always beautifully melodic coherence on their variegated and intelligent LP, which is recommended to everyone who thinks Simple Minds, Sebastian and Sisters Of Mercy are the most important rock preachers of our time. Take a grain of salt or two with John and John, the most friendly giants in a rock world that gets so much respect and artificial fertilizer that it goes to their heads...