Fischerspooner

If electroclash truly has passed on then the Fischerspooner touring live show is surely the movement's funeral dirge. When Warren Fischer (the "musician") and Casey Spooner (the "singer") stage their live shows in New York, they are reported to cost in the tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of dollars in sets, costumes and performers (imagine Moulin Rouge with Kraftwerk as the house band). But the version that marked the duo's Canadian debut barely resembled the spectacle of sight and sound they are known for. If the New York Fischerspooner shows are the Broadway theatre of electroclash, this was a bad high school production. By their own admission, the duo is hell-bent on taking the piss out of the music industry (apparently by destroying it one label at a time) and their stripped-down live show is proof that they would love dearly to be the next Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Appearing on stage surrounded by a quintet of Robert Palmer video rejects and two female back-up singers, Casey Spooner lip-synced (very badly) to most of the songs off their lone #1 disc. Warren Fischer also made the odd appearance, as either a verbal abuse whipping boy for Spooner's displeasure with the sequencing of the songs or to spastically jerk about and spew fake blood, à la Gene Simmons. Between tracks, Spooner openly showed that he was either a complete idiot for forgetting where he should be standing (assuming he was really high and couldn't get his stage cues straight) or a mastermind of ironic audience manipulation (assuming the fuck-ups were all part of the act). Either way, it was neither amusing nor entertaining. Then again, maybe that was the point. As a demonstration of how desperate they were for audience approval, they closed the 50-minute set with the single "Emerge" and proceeded to offer it up again five minutes later as an encore. Strictly amateur.