Doll By Doll – Torrington, London

Graham Stevens opens his short live review in the Record Mirror of 9 August 1980 by remarking that when a band with the emotive abilities of Doll by Doll appears on the night of a full moon, one can be assured of an “atmospherically loaded event”. So it was at the Torrington in north London.

The band opened with ‘Hey Sweetheart’, “a soulful giant of a song”, building wave upon wave of emotion until the pressure is almost intolerable before calming down and leaving you drained and moved. Musically the band succeed through the honesty and sheer feeling they put into their playing. They “blunder onward”, flashes of brilliance interspersed with broken strings or suspect timing, but always come out ahead of the “plastic song and precision technique of musical robotics”. The set rarely faltered.

The new material showed all the power and commitment of the first two albums, Remember and Gypsy Blood, represented on this occasion by ‘Binary Fiction’, ‘Lose Myself’ and ‘Stripshow’: powerful, menacing passages complementing Jackie Leven’s “almost manic” style of guitar playing, from which he produces almost frantic runs of deft notes. The closing line reads: “Doll by Doll are essential listening, are emotions essential?” – a phrase that is both verdict and question.