http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-16947,00.html
New York's Sonic Youth are seasoned Don't Look Back campaigners, having performed Daydream Nation at All Tomorrow's Parties and at a series of DLB concerts in Europe and the US.
They weren't that keen to begin with, says the band's Lee Ranaldo, but were talked into it by DLB founder Barry Logan.
"We didn't want to do it because we're not a particularly nostalgic band," says Ranaldo. "We felt we'd rather spend our time writing new music than revisiting something from a long time ago."
Eventually, however, "it just seemed that the stars were aligned to the point where we couldn't say no", Ranaldo says. "We were preparing that album for a deluxe edition release, part of a three-album set, something that we started six years before. Then the album got inducted into the US Library of Congress.
"We couldn't have planned the concert any better if we'd tried."
Daydream Nation, released in 1988, represents the pinnacle of Sonic Youth's career to that point. It was a marriage of their earlier white noise sensibility to a newer pop framework and included songs such as Hey Joni and Teen Age Riot that have since become staples of their live performances.
"It's the album that put us on the map for a lot of people," says Ranaldo. "We were so confident in our abilities when we came to do it, which is why it's a double album. That's why Daydream was so peculiar because our general attitude is looking forward. That shows up in the music. It cuts free from a lot of the music of the past and tries to move somewhere else."
All of these nods to significant albums, as far as DLB is concerned, are down to the persistence and musical taste of Englishman Logan. A self-confessed music tragic, he has coaxed many of his favourite bands into performing the albums he loves.
It doesn't hurt, of course, that he has a festival stage to offer them, but it's his role as a fan more than anything that has convinced the acts to say yes and that has taken the concept across the world.
"The way we listen to music now, the album is under threat, so this is one way of preserving that idea of an album as a piece of art," Logan says.
He worried for weeks when he approached Iggy Pop about doing the first Don't Look Back performance with the Stooges. "He said it would depend on what album I wanted. I said Funhouse, and he said that was the right answer." Since then, other bands such as Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney, Cowboy Junkies and our own Dirty Three are among those who have performed one of their albums track by track. The first to do so for Don't Look Back in Australia is Minnesota lo-fi outfit Low, who begin their short tour in Melbourne on January 11. Singer, guitarist and songwriter Alan Sparhawk agrees that the idea of doing an album from start to finish is a good one and gives the artists a chance to approach the work in a way that they may not have considered. They first performed Things We Lost in the Fire in London a year ago. Again, as with many of the other artists, the Fire album was a pivotal one in their career.
"We were at the cusp of being innocent about what we were doing and also opening up the door and going for different arrangements," he says.
Sparhawk recalls wincing at the prospect of doing the whole album live, "but the more I thought about it. it made sense", he says. "We still play half of the songs live. At this point in my life I feel comfortable going back to them. In fact there are a couple of songs that I think we probably have a better perspective on now than we did at the time."
As technology redefines the role of the conventional album, it's uncertain whether the concept of Don't Look Back will survive long term, but for the moment bands such as Died Pretty, who, unlike some of the others, are not a going concern, are happy to be able to revisit the work that made them famous.
"That album changed things a lot for us, in Australia that is," Myers says. "It certainly shows how an album is a powerful entity, but there are a lot more bad albums than there are good ones, plus there are a lot of albums where you only have two or three good songs, so when you get a classic album like, say, (Television's) Marquee Moon, it sticks out. It's not something you regularly do as a band, play your album from beginning to end."
The Don't Look Back concerts begin on January 11 and run until February 23.