22-05-2025
Stereolab: Instant Holograms on Metal Film review — delightful and original
Back in 1996 Stereolab were on the bill at the now defunct Phoenix festival, an unpleasant rock/dance/rap affair that took place on an airstrip near Stratford-upon-Avon. The sound and perhaps sight of three women and two men in Sixties modernist clothing playing polite electronic pop influenced by European arthouse cinema, brutalist architecture and Marxist politics appeared to offend the beery, thuggish crowd. They were there chiefly to wait for members of the hip-hop collective the Wu-Tang Clan to take to the stage. Stereolab managed to get through three songs, including their peerless classic French Disko, before giving in to the shower of bottles, cans and sexually loaded insults coming their way.
It must be a sign of progress that since then, Stereolab have become one
