Whatever happened to Tomato?

The above images are from a 90 minute ‘Live Tomato Jam’ on the Underworld DVD Everything, Everything. A colleague at work - Scott - lent it to me. At that time - the mid ’90s - I only heard Second Toughest In The Infants and DubNoBassWithMyHead, neither of which clicked with me at the time. I wonder now whether I just wasn’t ready for it or whether I listened to it in the wrong way. The loveliness of the typographic-based treatments on the Tomato Jam segment was really striking. Their collages were my favourite work, I think, which had a real gestural/textural sense to them. From their website, Tomato are clearly still active, but perhaps their time has passed. The Everything, Everything DVD is mostly a record of an Underworld concert in front of a huge crowd. The music is remarkably warm, evocative, binding even - as the best rave was. Scott told me that he’d gone along to an Underworld gig on his own because he knew his partner wasn’t particularly into the group and he didn’t want to feel responsible for her. He said he loved the music, got lost in it unaided, no pills, no alcohol. I’ve never been to any big raves, just smaller clubs and lots of gigs, but for a moment I shared the memory of a sublime enthusiasm. Which is not to say that it’s impossible to feel that now, but it’s mostly that I feel a communion with the performers rather than the crowd that surrounds me.