KSCOPE 27 June 2025
So here we have a band with no original members who remain a vital creative force and this release shows why. It has a great selection of old favourites from the seventies, mixed with material from the most recent album but, very importantly, it doesn’t end with a recap of the best known tunes, it ends with three-quarters of an hour of new material, created freshly on the night. I heard the band four days later, in Leeds, and they did the same – improvised new music as a finale. That’s why I welcome the band continuing.
The one steady figure over the years was Edgar Froese, as the band composed countless albums, live shows, film soundtracks and even the music for Grand Theft Auto V. He died in 2015 and left Thorsten Quaeschning to lead the band, having been with them a (mere) ten years. Now the band is Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane on violin and Paul Frick. The sound is, as ever, mostly electronic, packed with sequencers, drum patterns, synthesised melodies but so organic that the violin sits naturally, as does tonight’s guest guitar from Marillion’s Steve Rothery. The music is the same tunes but changed over the years so some beats are more House than they were – for example in ‘Cloudburst Flight’, perhaps the closest the band ever got to a hit as Virgin Records pushed their PR. Elsewhere you’ll hear the arrangements updated, moods shifted, played live and reacting to the mood and atmosphere.
Coventry Cathedral was a specially resonant place for the band. Having been bombed flat only thirty years before the 1974 concert, it was symbolic to bring a German band to the rebuilt Cathedral as a sign of the peace to come with cooperation across Europe (oh, those hopeful days…). Even more symbolic that the Catholic Church had just banned Tangerine Dream from all their buildings after hearing that audiences had turned up in droves for a concert in Reims Cathedral and behaved like 6,000 hippies in a space for 2,000 with 3 toilets, so Coventry invited them, almost to tweak the noses of the squares. This concert, from 11th March 2022 felt very significant for the band, nearly fifty years after the first time round and just coming out of COVID lockdowns.
The music celebrates Virgin’s reissues of recent years of seventies material but doesn’t dwell on it, melding it with music on the Quantum label and an emphasis on ‘Raum’ – the most recent, intense, COVID period album – leaving a sense of a deep continuity, especially expressed by the way the band rarely pauses more than seconds between compositions. Over nigh-on three hours, a flow of sound passes like a river, interrupted only by applause. It serves as an introduction to the band, having so many famous pieces, but also a celebration, where long-time fans can enjoy the developments and changes – as well as the new composition that fills the latter third of the show.
As a celebration of history it works; as a celebration of the present it works – Tangerine Dream has become a tradition, a spirit bodied in whoever is channelling the sound and whoever is listening to it.