The Chameleons | Albert Hall, Manchester | 21st November 2025
Reviewed by Peter Wild
It’s been a bumpy road for The Chameleons. They started out all the way back in 1983, released a clutch of anthemic, Goth-leaning albums in the vein of early U2 (see Script of the Bridge, What Does Anything Mean? Basically and major label debut Strange Times) before splitting acrimoniously four years later (each half of the band forming another short-lived band in turn – frontman Mark Burgess and drummer John Lever The Son and the Moon, guitarists Reg Smithies and Dave Fielding The Reegs). Fast forward a dozen or so years (during which time Burgess released a brace of solo and collaborative albums – of which 1995’s Paradyning remains a high point) to 2000 and they all decided to give it another go (releasing their fourth album, Why Call It Anything, and a couple of curios) before – doh! – splitting acrimoniously again following the fatal cardiac arrest of guitarist Dave Fielding.
Although frontman Mark Burgess and drummer Mark Lever continued to ply the Chameleons trade (as Chameleons Vox) for several years (and Lever and Smithies went on to record an album as the Red-Sided Garter Snakes too), it wasn’t until 2021 (some years after Lever’s death at the age of 55) that Burgess and Smithies, the only surviving Chameleons by this point, reformed under the original moniker to see if some of the critical glory they’d accrued over the years could be translated into either lucre or hard-earned (low level) fame.
Appearing on stage with three new members, these days it’s hard to spot any of the old acrimony between Burgess and Smithies. Whilst admittedly there isn’t much in the way of bonhomie either (we don’t see any of the arms around each other that even Liam and Noel managed earlier in the summer), the focus is very much on pulling out all the stops to deliver a great show for the fans in the room – and the warmth with which they are greeted by a crowded Albert Hall is palpable throughout. This is a band, and a clutch of songs, that people in Manchester love, even after all these years.
As a live experience, recent outings from The Chameleons have tended to plough the old “here’s one (or two) of our classic albums” bookended by The Chameleons equivalent of ‘the hits’. The faithful would gather and much pleasure was had hearing Script of the Bridge or Strange Times in full. They were solid, they were reliable, they gave a lot of people who may never had the chance to hear ‘Swamp Thing’ or ‘Don’t Fall’ or ‘Up the Down Escalator’ the chance to hear them performed by a band with some serious guitar chops.
This year though, The Chameleons live is a different experience because, for the first time in over two decades, they are touring a new album, Arctic Tears. Now, whilst Arctic Tears is unlikely to trouble the old hit parade or even unseat the classic Chameleons’ albums from their place in the heart of their fans, what it does mean is that, for the first time in a long while, The Chameleons play a set the way any common or garden band would play a set – mixing up the new songs alongside the old songs.
And so we get tracks from the new album like ‘Where Are You?’, ‘Lady Strange’ and most recent single (not a phrase any Chameleons’ fan expected to hear in 2025), ‘Saviours Are A Dangerous Thing’, interspersed with the likes of ‘Perfume Garden’, ‘Soul in Isolation’ and ‘Paradiso’ – and if the test of the new material asks if it stands out amongst the older material, here the answer is no (although the cheers that greet the classics are understandable, all the same).
Burgess took a moment before ‘View from the Hill’ to commemorate the death of Stone Roses’ bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield the previous day, nodding to the passing of Chameleons’ drummer, Lever, by commenting if Mani fancied creating a band up in Heaven, he knew a good drummer. (We did wonder if The Chameleons were going to try their hand at a cover of one of the Roses’ early goth singles – surely ‘Tell Me’ has been crying out for the Chameleons’ treatment? – but sadly not.)
You might think that a new album would inform a new lease of life but “this might be the last time you see us for a while,” Burgess says. They don’t let the pall cast by this news call a halt, though, blasting through a furious encore (playing the mighty ‘In Shreds’, their debut single from all the way back in March 1982 and every bit as blistering now as it was then, plus ‘Monkeyland’, ‘Second Skin’ and ‘Don’t Fall’ from their debut album Script of the Bridge) that ensures the cheering punters are halfway home before they start to wonder what Mark meant and what are they going to do if they are not entertaining us as The Chameleons?
Reviewed by Peter Wild