The DEVO Pledge
1) Be like your ancestors or be different. It doesn’t matter.
2) Lay a million eggs or give birth to one.
3) Wear gaudy colours or avoid display. It’s all the same.
4) The fittest shall survive yet the unfit may live.
5) We Must Repeat

Supremely influential, vengefully nerdy, so completely ironic that it hurt, DEVO rolled into town on a splendour bender and entertained a mob of forty-somethings broken up by a thin smattering of younger rubberneckers come to see what all the fuss was about. If The Wiggles were committed to an asylum, DEVO is what they would look like. If Disney ever make a Lego movie, DEVO will be the choreographers. If anyone ever deserved to get rich off the very paradigms they mock, it is DEVO. Considering it was a school night, packing the bottom floor of Metro City was an impressive feat, and it is likely that there were some devolved heads and livers on Thursday.

Poor Regurgitator performed to an audience who arrived late after their nana naps, and who, though appreciative and attentive, were too aware of the need for knee kindness to truly bounce like a – œgurge crowd should. Shortly after offering the mic to the twelve people in the audience who knew the words, and were actually jumping, Quan Yeomans must have realised what he was doing, because his face split into the wickedest grin you have ever seen. Please imagine, just for a moment, not a room full of fans, but a room full of your Mum nodding in time and smiling during I will lick your arsehole DEVO would have been impressed. For their part, Regurgitator were just stoked to be performing with their heroes, but considering the crowd reaction they have grown used to, the band must have been a little disappointed with this one. Still, it gave them the freedom to come out into the audience after their set and dance with wild abandon without being hounded by fan boys asking for autographs.

After a brief introductory film about what to expect and the theory of devolution; (That mankind has de-evolved, becoming less intelligent and more herd-like with the passing of time.) DEVO appeared on stage in their yellow jumpsuits and red energy domes looking exactly like five granddads that’ve been on the piss together and have ransacked the music shop to put on a show for their embarrassed families. Their salvation was that everyone knew their songs, and they performed them as well as we have ever heard them played.

DEVO’s utter lack of seriousness seems to fold back upon itself until you realise that all the things they make fun of, from their robotic movements and manufactured electro to their uniforms and religious affiliation (Church of the SubGenius) are actually rasing consciousness about issues that are very serious indeed, whilst acknowledging that de-evolution is not likely to cease any time soon.

For a rundown of the songs, read one of the other fine reviews posted on the site since they played the same set list at each show, and even tore off each other’s yellow jumpsuits at each show. You can bet that the crowd’s answer to “Are we not men?” was “we are DEVO” at every show, and the eyes of every devotee old enough to have bought one or more of the albums as a new release were firmly fixed on the stage and nowhere else for the entire set. You can also bet that at least half of them performed some small act of defiance or disobedience the following day, inspired by the DEVO pledge, and the band’s evident contempt for complacency. They even provided a movie to entertain the masses between the end of the set and the encore so that they didn’t succumb to complacency and go home before the grand finale in which they had Regurgitator return to the stage along with Booji Boy to perform a super extended version of Beautiful World to ram the point home.

See all the pitures of the night in Stu907’s gallery