Gig review: 13 Most Beautiful

Published on Thursday 9 July 2009 18:54

13 MOST BEAUTIFUL **** CARNEGIE HALL, DUNFERMLINE

CONSIDER all the many millions which Coca-Cola has spent on advertising campaigns over the last half century, and then witness less than five minutes which make their brand more indelibly attractive than anything the marketing bods managed to squeeze out. It's one of Andy Warhol's Screen Tests, a series of video portraits, in which a young Lou Reed wearing black shades stares down the lens of Warhol's camera while arrogantly gulping on a bottle of the stuff, as a raw version of the Velvet Underground's Not a Young Man Any More is played live.

As with most of Warhol's work, these Screen Tests – 13 of which are collated in this show, a UK premiere – are only promotional material in the sense that they mythologise the artist and his coterie of Factory-associated artists, models and hangers-on. "Moving portraits" of figures like Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Dennis Hopper, who magnetises the screen with his flickering expressions of pain and rage, they allow us to recognise the individuals by their body language and facial ticks as well as their features. A live soundtrack by Dean and Britta (Wareham and Phillips, respectively; married alumni of classic US shoegazing and alternative outfits Galaxie 500 and Luna) adds beautiful

Wareham tells us about Freddy Herko, who danced to his death through a window in Greenwich Village, and Ingrid Superstar, whose false teeth were all that was left behind when she disappeared from her mother's New Jersey home in the 1980s. And Nico, of course, who is accompanied by Bob Dylan's I'll Keep It With Mine because "he wrote it for her – or maybe Joan Baez". The truth behind these faces, Warhol seemed to agree, was never as important as they legends they would inspire.