Madonna, O2, London, October 15, 2023

Getty
Image: Getty

“Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free”


“I think when you start off in your life with a very big slap in the face you have a different view of the world. You just do… There’s a line in my [Madame X] script, when my mother dies, I get back up and I keep going. And [when] all my friends died of Aids, I get back up and I keep going. Basquiat dies, and I get back up and I keep going. This stranger rapes me with a knife to my throat, I get back up and I keep going. My ex-husband betrays me, I get back up and I keep going. My brother betrays me, I get back up and I keep going. Either you have that mentality that you get back up and keep going, or you sit around, thinking about what people are thinking about you all the time. The challenges I’ve had, since I was a child, are the things that make me realise how precious life is, and leaning over and kissing my mother’s lips in a coffin made me think… in the blink of an eye, everything could change. I’m not wasting one second of it, and fuck anybody who tries to get in my way.”

Madonna, interviewed by playwright Jeremy O. Harris, 2021, V magazine


It feels like there are artists who have always been around, present in your life, in your DNA, in culture, and you can’t remember a time before them. Some are no longer here (Beatles, Bowie), some are here but are well into their twilight (Dylan, Elton, Stones, McCartney), but the list of pop stars who are still interesting, still making songs worth hearing, still pissing everyone off, still completely themselves, still breathing… it’s a short one.
 
Madonna has outlived, outwitted and outlasted every motherfucker who ever went up against her. Obviously, Beyoncé has come the closest to a dethroning. Sure, people adore Taylor Swift. I find her a nice girl, and some of her songs are good, though she is undeniably rather dull. Gaga has done a few good songs and she’s trying her best (like Madonna, she is a Bowie obsessive). But the copyist is the copyist, even if Gaga is a better actress. Adele’s great as both songwriter and singer but her ‘local girl done good’ shtick is as fake as her nails. George Michael had prime years where he was on her level but could never last or listen. Prince (born two months before Madonna) and Michael Jackson (born 13 days after), both of whom she adores, shone brightly and burnt out, like many others.
 
Nobody else comes to mind. No other man or woman has come close, kept up or worked harder. For 40 of my 46 years on earth, there has been one dominant pop star who remains standing. No artist has done a better run of singles, none. Sixty-five-year-old Madonna lives exactly how she wants and it’s tough shit if you don’t like it.
 
I had never seen her live, for two reasons. Firstly, the best tickets have always been eyewateringly expensive and I couldn’t justify it. Secondly, she doesn’t play many of her hits. While I admire that on an artistic level, I didn’t want to pay £300 to listen to half of a new album, no offence. Then she announced the Celebration Tour, which began its 78 shows in 15 countries with four nights at the O2, starting on October 14, the night before I went. It was different: her first not in support of a new album, with a decent price range and big songs promised. I failed to get a ticket. The cheapest ones – a still not-cheap £90-£150 – went, fast. I hadn’t given up hope of going but it felt unlikely. Then last week I was at one of my offices (Time Out, as it happens) and someone said a few tickets had dropped back on. I immediately saw a bad seat (Block 406, at the vertigo-inducing top of the arena) on sale for £135. Sold! I was thrilled and walked around smiling for the rest of the week.
 
On Sunday, a stressful travel situation had me arriving after 8pm. I bumped into a journalist I know in the lobby and said, half-joking, maybe I’ll ask if they’ll move me out of the nosebleed seats? I’ve seen plenty of gigs up there, I’ve done my time in the 400s, I convinced myself. Nothing to lose. I went to customer services and said, extremely politely, genially, “Can I be honest with you? I’ve got a shit seat. It’s so steep and the narrow stairs are anxiety-causing, would you by any chance be able to move me? I know it’s a long shot but I’d be extremely grateful for anything you can do.” The young guy behind the desk took this in and said, “let me look, it might be possible”. There are always spares dotted around for any ‘sold out’ gig at a place this size. Swiftly, he returned with a Block 111 ticket. My mouth fell open. I’d had a bad week and decided I deserved it. I thanked him profusely, realised it was bashert (Yiddish for ‘destiny’) and virtually skipped away to my amazing new seat.
 
Time-travelling for a second, it was 1986 when I found her. My mum, not honestly a huge fan of music made after about 1980, bought True Blue on vinyl. I had never heard anything like it. And the cover! This perfect, androgynous, spiky-haired girl, head back, eyes closed, in ecstasy. It makes me laugh to think mum was only 35 at the time! I saw the video for Open Your Heart soon after on Top of the Pops; in a vibrant Cabaret-inspired performance she plays a dancer at a peep show being ogled by multiple men (talk about the male gaze, this was only 11 years after Laura Mulvey coined the term) and one short-haired woman. She was 28, I was nine (and soon to see Labyrinth at the cinema, a life-changing event). You can track your life by her songs, everyone who loves pop music can.
 
So many beats of her career are my music memories. 1989: the cross-burning/Black Jesus Like a Prayer video? The furore was so significant, it made the news; Express Yourself, that choreography, that gorgeous suit; Vogue, a video for the ages; 1990: the best greatest hits album of all time, The Immaculate Collection; staying up late to watch Justify My Love premiere on Channel 4 after its MTV ban; I rewatched it yesterday and it is still a stunning piece of erotic art; 1991: I was a scandalised 14-year-old when In Bed with Madonna, still a masterpiece, came out; 1992: SEX, a book of her fantasies, still subversive and controversial 31 years later, was published. I’ve never seen a physical copy, but its extremely explicit contents, much of which are BDSM-themed, still have power to shock the easily shocked (the only thing that makes you cringe is the presence of Vanilla Ice). The pop video as a piece of cultural record and remembrance is nearly dead, but I have images from her 90s videos, like Erotica, Human Nature, Secret, Frozen and Ray of Light, burned into my brain.

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Even if I only got half of her hits, it would still be 25 songs or thereabouts. In my excellent seat, I waited patiently for my audience with pop history alongside a multi-generational crowd, many vibrantly kitted out in her most famous outfits, though the group wearing her simple, black Papa Don’t Preach shirt saying ‘Italians Do It Better’ made me chuckle. Madonna is a distinct, demanding perfectionist who won’t give you everything you want (you don’t want her to) so, inevitably, the show started half an hour late, went over curfew and had to drop its encore. It begins with MC Bob the Drag Queen dressed-as-Madonna-dressed-as-Marie-Antoinette (Vogue VMAs) letting us know that mother is about to arrive. You can immediately see that the show is technologically complex, typifying her relentless reinvention and mastery of how to create an arena spectacular. A gargantuan amount of work, it must have cost millions. Many think she looks weird now, because of her unlined, plumped-up face. People judge her for these changes and I do not exempt myself from that. On my immature, uncharitable days, going with the cruel crowd for a cheap laugh, I’ve judged her too. Would you like to have seen her natural, wrinkled face? What does it have to do with you? You’re fine with her body hurting to dance for you but not for vanity? You don’t get to choose which Madonna you get. As it turned out, at this show you get them all, though it ended up being far more complicated than a routine ‘greatest hits’ parade.
 
Ghosts roam the stage as she takes you on a journey, starting with her 1978 arrival in New York from the suburbs of Detroit with $35 in her pocket, a much-repeated but true story. She has no money, nowhere to live, no job and no way to survive. We get a tour of NYC’s filthiest nightlife, where she is (fictitiously) refused entry with Jean-Michel Basquiat, her then-boyfriend, to queer club Paradise Garage. We see big-screen clips of CBGBs and Danceteria, as she performs her first two singles, Everybody and Burning Up. A run-through of a young life in a city where she posed nude for cash, lived in a rehearsal studio without a bathroom and dated men so she could wash (“yes, blow jobs for showers!” she said, matter-of-factly, on opening night). It was NYC where she was assaulted at knifepoint aged 19. It was where her friends were soon to become ill. This New York was not like it is now, corporate and unaffordable. It was dirty and dangerous. Her 1980s life was about survival, then, and is about survivor’s guilt, now.
 
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Straight after a wonderful pairing of Open Your Heart with Holiday, that joy of being on the dance floor falls away into her pain on Live to Tell, where she rises in a small, oblong, glass box that moves out over the audience at great height as multiple retracting screens unfold to show photos of dead, gay men (and some women, including the mother of Trinity the Tuck, Bob the Drag Queen’s Drag Race compatriot). First, we see her best friend, English designer Martin Burgoyne, dead at only 23, then close friend Keith Haring, 31. We see her first dance teacher Christopher Flynn, 58, and Howard Brookner, 34, who directed her in 1989’s Bloodhounds of Broadway. Then the photos widen to people she was acquainted with or inspired by: Arthur Russell, 40, Robert Mapplethorpe, 42, Sylvester, 41, Cookie Mueller (star of John Waters’ films), 40, Herb Ritts, 50, Freddie Mercury, 45. Then each screen splits, as she sings surrounded by these spectres, into space for 10 photos, then 50, then 100. This latter section was curated with the help of The Aids Memorial, which shares stories of those lost. We see hundreds of faces and it is overwhelming, unbearable. She’s the one doing it every night, carrying this young, grieving version of herself around, and she has been doing it since day one. There’s a reason Madonna is never accused of queerbaiting. Her whole life has been spent worshipping gay culture, as well as stealing from it, and embracing her girlfriends as well as her boyfriends. Multiple new posts this week show bereaved husbands thanking her for honouring their lost partners. This one says he was a superfan and is now “touring with Madonna!” She has taken all these lost boys on the road with her…
 
Not everything completely works. Some of the songs have different backing tracks to the originals, which works sometimes (fantastic remix of Ray of Light) and not in others. This despite her English musical director Stuart Price, who has done a magnificent job with the music, saying, “what we realised is that the original recordings are our stars”. Would a live band have been better? I don’t think it would have made any difference to my enjoyment. I’ve also heard some claim the vocals are on tape: not true. Her voice sounds brilliant. The narrative falters in the next section, with its vague stab at the usual let’s-wind-up-the-Catholic-Church stuff (big crosses, a little tired), before the revived Blond Ambition Tour velvet bed has M getting into a bit of groping with a female dancer in the Gaultier conical bra with a rubber hood on (quite fun). There was also a slightly strange tribute to Prince, with his unreleased solo placed back into Like a Prayer; a dancer mimes to it on his ‘symbol’ guitar, while wearing the My Name Is Prince cap with chainmail. (Later, a parade of other heroes appears on screen: Nina Simone, Angela Davis, Brando, Bowie. Then Sinead, which I’m taking as penance for how uncharitable Madonna was at the time of the SNL incident.) It’s unfocused compared to the brilliant first half, though it does all get back on track with the deathless semi-Abba hit Hung Up, which she performs flawlessly, at first blindfolded, with topless dancers gliding around her, an homage to her movement heroine Martha Graham, before stopping for a quick snog with a female dancer. The usual.
 
The sharp, hugely fun Bob the Drag Queen reappears up to tell us exactly who we’re watching before Vogue, which turns into a fantastic Paris Is Burning ball, with each dancer walking while M holds a ‘10’ sign, sitting alongside none other than FKA twigs, as good a dance judge as anyone (this was Madonna’s oldest, 27-year-old Lola, on the first night). Bob reads the ball using the lyrics of Beyoncé’s Break My Soul, nice touch. Her twins, Estere and Stella, only 11, DJ and walk, respectively. Another of her children, Mercy James, 17, plays piano, exquisitely, on Bad Girl. Before a brilliant La Isla Bonita, her son David Banda, 18, plays acoustic guitar on deep cut Mother and Father, as she honours his mother, who also died of Aids (only the presumably non-musical Rocco, 23, is missing). All the figures of her life, those lost forever and remembered, those who keep her going, are present in some form. This night is about what she has lost – her mother when she was five, her friends and mentors and heroes – and the family gained: the one you choose, the one that chooses you. Beauty’s where you find it.
 
After that high point, there’s some filler – Bad Girl, Die Another Day, Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, Bedtime Story – that would be better replaced by missing hits. There are also understandable musical interludes without her on stage, there to allow costume changes and the taking of some breaths backstage, and they are not very interesting. But that’s just because you crave her being there. It’s almost intolerable when she’s offstage because you know each second gone is one closer to the end of the show.
 
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I wasn’t surprised by how well she moves, despite the occasional application of a blue knee covering, shoring up an old injury. She has always been a serious dancer, the woman can move and remains super-fit. Of course, after decades of relentless touring, with Celebration taking her over the 700-show mark, she isn’t going to do all the routines she used to (which most people could never have done), but at times, she keeps up with the dancers, 40 years her junior, after enduring no doubt all-night rehearsals. The songs not performed make a decent playlist: Express Yourself, Beautiful Stranger, Cherish, Lucky Star, Borderline, Material Girl, Papa Don’t Preach, Rescue Me, Deeper and Deeper, Secret, Music. On occasion, she’ll have a chat with the audience; less interesting when it’s boilerplate ‘be yourself’ inspo, more interesting when she talks about her life.
 
Because of that broken curfew – she’s always late – the encore was absent, but honestly I don’t think I missed much: it starts with a taped version of Like a Virgin, accompanied for no real reason by a tribute to her relationship with Michael Jackson and a mashup of her hits into his. Of course, he would have performed This Is It here and died trying to do so. They’re on the main screen together in some sort of AI silhouette dance, which looks cheap. And let’s take an eyebrow-raising moment to ponder the wisdom of it. Is Like a Virgin (!) the best song to use for an MJ tribute, girl? Awkward. The show ends with a couple of later cuts, 2015’s great Bitch I’m Madonna and 2009’s Celebration, which includes a dash of Music, as dancers appear as incarnations of Madonna in her most famous costumes. Not the most banging encore, you have to say. Maybe I can quibble about the songs not played but what’s the point? I wish I had spent the last 30 years of my life seeing her live, frankly.
 
You can’t be cynical in the presence of the greatest pop star who has ever lived, an Italian-American Catholic who has been excommunicated three times by the Vatican, who only four months ago spent five days lying unconscious in the ICU. Her life is a triumph of spirit and work over obstacles and she is ready to stop treating her hits as a chore. You want pop stars to be like this: eccentric, unrelatable, thrilling, stubborn – never ordinary company, only extraordinary. Is it preferable to think you could have a pint with your fave, like a Bruce or a Liam? That’s not what I want.
 
I’m forever removing the word ‘icon’ when I’m at work, because it is ubiquitous in copy. You can use it literally, to talk about religious works of art. But you aren’t permitted to use it to describe every pop star/actor/public figure who does something well. On vanishingly rare occasions, when hyperbole takes your mood, it can be used to describe actors (she’s told you who: Garbo and Monroe, Dietrich, Brando, Jimmy Dean, Grace Kelly, Harlow (Jean), Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, Lauren [Bacall], Katherine [Hepburn], Lana [Turner], too, Bette Davis… ladies with an attitude, fellas who were in the mood) or musicians (Bowie, M’s muse, Elvis, MJ, Aretha, Prince).
 
I’m going to say it, though, because she is a religious work of art: Madonna is an icon. To be in a room with her even for a short time is to experience the 20th and now the 21st century of popular culture. She makes you feel as powerful as she is. In a remarkable speech in 2016 at a Billboard event where she was honoured as Woman of the Year, she said the “most controversial thing I’ve ever done is to stick around”. In the same speech, she said “to age is to sin” and there is no doubt that Madonna is powered by the misogyny and bullying she faces (and much of it comes from women). Every person who calls her an old bitch, who says don’t wear that short skirt or those fishnets, who says take off that make-up or stop putting that filler in, or filter on, your face, cover your tits up and stop showing your 65-year-old ass to the world… all are reduced to rubble. She discards every person who has tried to harm or shame her, from clerics to critics to cops. She burns them all on a fire until they are ash, then smokes their remains. I saw a few fans online whining about her being late or not getting 100 per cent of her hits.
 
To them I say: be quiet. You’re lucky to be alive at the same time as Madonna. This isn’t your show, it’s hers, and the ticket price grants you an audience. You get two hours of near-perfection. Show up, do as you’re told and kneel.

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Image: Getty
 
 
            .           ‘It’s Not a Party... It’s a Celebration!’ (opening by Bob the Drag Queen)
            .           Nothing Really Matters
            .           Everybody
            .           Into the Groove
            .           Burning Up
            .           Open Your Heart
            .           Holiday (with Chic’s I Want Your Love)
            .           Live to Tell
            .           Like a Prayer
            .           Erotica
            .           Justify My Love/Fever
            .           Hung Up
            .           Bad Girl
            .           Vogue
            .           Human Nature
            .           Die Another Day
            .           Don’t Tell Me
            .           Mother and Father
            .           I Will Survive (cover)
            .           La Isla Bonita
            .           Don't Cry for Me Argentina
            .           Bedtime Story
            .           Ray of Light
            .           Rain

Abba Voyage, London



This review contains spoilers

“To be, or not to be? That is no longer the question,” said Benny Andersson from Abba, last week, at one of the weirdest and most astonishing nights I’ve ever had watching a concert. God, it’s hard to know where to start. Well, it started with a long, dark walk through one of the most grim areas of London. Stratford has been regenerated, incoherently, over the last couple of decades, with much of the new-build ugliness coming in the post-Olympics ‘legacy’ period of the last ten years with billions more in investment on the way. As it stands, what is there has no architectural consistency, style or substance. This part of E15 seems to contain only unsightly boxes in which to live. There is little sign of people, shops, restaurants, bars, cafés, community centres: life. If an alien landed there, they’d think, “Blimey, isn’t London shit?” And perhaps part of the joy which followed that long, dark walk around the unlit bypasses (where I accidentally walked into a protruding metal bar, giving me a magnificently large and painful bruise on my arm) and bleak, community-free streets lived in contrast to this lifelessness because of it, not despite it. If the venue was in the middle of Leicester Square or a buzzing neighbourhood, it’d have already taken the edge off the technicolour shock that hits when you reach the 3,000-capacity, sustainably designed venue, as collapsible as an Ikea flatpack cupboard: boom, you are in a hen night. People are simply… happy. It feels like quite a few are not here for the first time. Some are in Abba cosplay, from glittered catsuits and feather boas to electric blue satin flares. The crowd spans generations. There are daughters with their mums; there are entire families out on a birthday trip; there are gay couples in matching outfits. It is adorable, a delight even before you go into the arena.

Abba, like many other artists who were successful in the 1960s or 1970s, endured a disrespected decade, in the UK at least, in the 1980s. From Dylan (the maligned Christian period; badly produced, average albums) and Bowie (Tin Machine; critical hatred which lasted until Glasto in 2000) to Neil Young (sued for not sounding enough like himself), McCartney (Frog Chorus; derision for his wife; the thumbs-up cringe, started by Smash Hits) and more, their legacies were not burnished by being in their thirties or forties; they were sneered at and called ‘old’. Boomers’ reps began their restoration in the 90s and the same happened to Abba, who were already into their mid-late twenties and on their second marriages when 1974’s Eurovision breakthrough came. A fan’s Google review of their 2021 album, Voyage, their first in 40 years, has as its first line: “I have been an Abba fan since way back when it was so uncool to love them.” Björn Ulvaeus (the one who plays guitar; Benny is on keyboards) spoke to that, too, in a Guardian interview last year: “In the beginning of the 80s, when we stopped recording, it felt as though Abba was completely done, and there would be no more talk about it. It was actually dead. It was so uncool to like Abba.”

The newfound appreciation back then usually came from a younger band who grew up with your music talking you up in interviews or covering your songs (in Bowie’s case, Nirvana and NIN did the trick). In Abba’s case, the beginning of their reappraisal was brought forth by the great British duo Erasure, who made similarly perfect pop music. Their four-track Abba-esque EP, released in June 1992, was a sensation in the UK, giving them their only number 1 record. It was the sound of that summer, a wonderfully queer package filled with glitter that was dropped right into your living room via Top of the Pops for weeks on end. Five months later, Abba Gold transformed the band back into what they always were: beloved creators of some of the best pop songs ever recorded. Erasure’s covers and that album, which has sold 30 million copies and is on a par with Queen’s Greatest Hits as the best singles collection ever released, hit people my age like the freshest songs we’d ever heard. Even my parents, no more the right age to be into Abba than I am, being the same age as the youngest member, Agnetha Fältskog, bought it.

Two years later, I fell in love with a wonderful Australian film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which had Abba as a guiding light for the characters and was the second time I’d seen drag versions of Frida and Agnetha (the first being Erasure). The performance, by Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving, of Mamma Mia, in the film’s finale, knocked me off my feet like a lightning bolt. I didn’t see Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths doing the same in Muriel’s Wedding until years later, but I know it had a similar effect at the time (the band have always had vast popularity in Australia). The final piece of the puzzle, Mamma Mia!, arrived in 1999 and has become one of the most successful musicals of all time. The two film versions of the story – a girl searches for her dad on a Greek island, set to their music – have between them made a billion dollars at the box office. There are also two other Abba-related events on in London right now – the long-running West End musical, of course, but also a restaurant, themed around the films, at The O2. While I have no interest in buying a ticket to either, I take great pleasure in how their music has become a soundtrack to pure joy, played endlessly at parties and weddings, fuelling warm nights out among friends. There is a Swedish concept, lagom, which has no direct translation, but roughly means “everything in moderation”. Abba are wonderfully, vibrantly… anti-lagom. To attempt a technological transformation of their music and person, who else could do it first?

Abba Voyage began with the chilly, electronic brilliance of the title track from 1981’s The Visitors, a gutsy choice, given that it was the last album released before they split. And then… there they were. Sort of. Yes but no. My eyes blinked, my mouth dropped open. My ears were fine with the music of course, which sounds as punchy live as you’d hope: a ten-piece band, including three backing singers, work behind vocal stems from their live shows and original recordings (the band was put together by Klaxons’ keyboardist James Righton). But what the actual fuck is going on here? Seriously. Your eyes can see these four figures near the back of the stage… and they look real. Staggeringly, confusingly real. That is, they look like mid-70s Abba, still young. The adjusting to the concept comes when you see them on the 65-million-pixel LED screens, which are raised and dropped as required, and wrap around half the arena in a half-moon shape, looking uncanny valley, video-game waxy. Okay, I get it. I adjusted my senses. And then it didn’t matter, I fell into the video game, becoming immersed in the whole thing. It felt like forgetting the difference between 2D and 3D. Later on, some of the band and the three singers came out of their position stage-right to the front (where of course Abba cannot move to). I turned to Leah and said, only half-joking, “How do I know they’re real?” This was a leap into retro-futurism that, even though I had been told plenty about the show by multiple people, I wasn’t ready for.

Few bands have crafted pop songs as good as this. SOS, Knowing Me, Knowing You (reclaimed from its cheesy Partridge home), Does Your Mother Know, Lay All Your Love on Me, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!, Voulez-vous… they kept coming. And the show could afford to leave bangers out, too. There was no Super Trouper, Take a Chance On Me, Money Money Money, The Name of the Game. It very much had a gig feel, rather than that of a theatre performance, a museum piece or a screening. Each member makes between-song speeches, which only hammers home the weirdness of this whole enterprise: it’s young faces talking with old voices, because the sentiments are coming from the band as they are now, aged between 72 and 77. Before Fernando, Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad talks about her grandmother. This makes me well up and I start thinking about my friend Ann-Charlotte, who is extremely dear to me. She is also a Swedish woman, born in Stockholm, and is around the same age as the band, with a sister called Neta (Agnetha). I thought of her, sitting at home in Gothenburg in her flat, of how much I miss her, of the Bowie shows we saw together. For decades, she worked as a ship’s bursar on cruises: a real sailor. We have talked often of her parents and grandparents, of Sweden in the twentieth century. We talk about food and family. I’m lucky to be her friend.

After this relentless bombardment of pop perfection and incredible visuals, about half way through there was a smart moment that was very gig-like in its pacing. The band vanished as the screens fell for a couple of songs, set to a Studio Ghibli-style animation that had me gripped (and no doubt sent others to the bar). Near the end, another moment took me wonderfully out of the augmented reality computer game. The intro to Waterloo was a funny speech about how the UK gave their Eurovision-winning song nul points (how embarrassing), but was then surprisingly followed by the faded, low-resolution, ESC performance on the screens. In an instant, you saw how imperfect humans are. A bump on the nose here, a hair out of place there. The Abbatars (lol) are not like that, they are blemish-free, glassy beings, made better-looking than their subjects were, with more perfect teeth and skin and hair and bodies. This is how we all wish we looked, or how we thought we looked in our twenties. But we were not that flawless, we were just as real as that Waterloo clip. Abba Voyage, being watched in the present day with our young lives in the past, replaced by that adulthood-bill-paying-body-aching-losing-a-parent-reality, makes you feel that you can remain young forever. Everyone there felt it, even if you weren’t old or young enough to be an Abba fan first time around, as I wasn’t. It’s not even really about the band. It’s about you, about applying what you’re seeing to yourself. It became about what you’ve lost, how innocent you were back then, your self-vision being yours to remake and be wistful, and perhaps a little inaccurate, about. The real imperfections of your human face and body, ironed away just for one night.

The last song is the heartbreak of all heartbreaks, The Winner Takes it All, the pinnacle of the band’s emotional core. That song is a lot. Björn wrote it about his divorce from Agnetha and she sings it. What it must have taken to do that, can you imagine? “Building me a home / Thinking I’d be strong there / But I was a fool / Playing by the rules… Somewhere deep inside / You must know I miss you / But what can I say? / Rules must be obeyed”. That song is too much. Too many people think Abba are superficial, the embodiment of music that electric blue satin flares and silver-glittered platform heels are worn to, but these are serious musicians. There is magic in the marriage of Benny and Björn’s songwriting and out-of-this-world production, and their ex-wives’ incredible, dovetailing voices. In the post-split years, another thing that happened was the withdrawal from the public eye of Agnetha and Frida, leaving the men to sell everything from their majestic score to Chess to Mamma Mia!. The stage has been half-empty for a long time. Abba Voyage returns half of that credit where it belongs, to the women who sell those deathless songs. We now recognise how often women are denied their due in music, so it is a particular joy that the show makes clear the stars are Frida and Agnetha; it’s about their reclamation of self, their reclamation of the stage, their stunning chemistry, their return to the public’s mind after four decades of their ex-husbands doing all that talking and leading (to this day: they did not wish to do any promo duties for the album last year).

At the end of the show, as the wooden venue still bounces with the party, the young Abba take their bow. And then… the band as they look now appear and basically everyone lost it. A wave of irresistibly manipulative emotion swept across me. On press night, a third version came out on stage, the actual real-life flesh-and-blood Abba. That would definitely be too much! But this appearance of the virtual four in their seventies brings home that Abba Voyage is about the passing of time and the beauty and immortality of music. This show could play in a thousand years just the same. The difference now, and it is crucial, is that it has been created while the members are still alive. It is not ghoulish to watch, like those appalling hologram gigs, which Abba Voyage is miles away from because this tech is universes ahead. But it’s not about tech. They are in control of their legacy and that is their privilege. It simply could not have worked without the artists being available to put on motion-capture suits, surrounded by 160 cameras, perform the show in entirety and use that as the base to create this spectacle on top of.

The estates of dead rock stars are checking their bank accounts as we speak, trying to figure out if they can do this. Not everyone has Abba’s eye for detail or creative control, or their deep pockets, as the show has to make £140 million to break even, and it will make a lot more than that in the end. Certainly, the rich estates of dead artists – MJ or Elvis or Freddie Mercury – would happily hire an impersonator of approximately the right size, choreographed to get the moves right. But that does not solve the problem of the face. A face-cast mask, think Bowie’s in Cracked Actor, won’t do it. An impersonator can’t do it. You cannot de-age a face if you have no access to… well, not to be morbid, but… their skull. Can’t do it. “Capturing every mannerism, every emotion, that becomes the great magic of this endeavour. It is not a version of, or a copy of, or four people pretending to be Abba. It is actually them,” said Ludvig Andersson, one of the show’s three main producers (the others being Svana Gisla and music video director Baillie Walsh, with the tech wizards at George Lucas’s ILM doing the thousands of hours of work to bring it all together). The creative director of the project, incidentally, is none other than fellow Swede Johan Renck, who directed the videos for Blackstar and Lazarus. But if it’ll be difficult for late singers to go on their own voyage, there is no doubt that living artists like the Stones or Elton or McCartney, who definitely can afford it, will be hiring those suits any day now. I thought about Bowie, because his estate has money and no soul, and I bet they’ll find a way to have a go. It’d be Ziggy, because people are basic, but I did allow myself a moment to imagine going again to my show, 2003-04’s Reality Tour. What would it feel like? Like time-travelling, I suppose, something acknowledged by Benny at the start when he made reference to the show being like having their own Tardis. You wonder if one day there’ll be tech that lets the projection, or whatever it is, move around more. That would be wild.

Surreal is an overused word. But I couldn’t get over the details. You can see their pores, the swishing of their lavish costumes (made by Dolce and Gabbana, among others, in a more tailored and modern imitation of their 70s style), the hair on Benny’s chest. It’s all perfect by design. Abba Voyage is the coolest thing, by some distance, a pop group has ever done. The band will never get tired, or any older, or split up (again). It’s a bizarre combo of something that is glassily perfect, but somehow has mountains of soul and chemistry, being smashed together with timeless music. And they’ve managed to do all this without ads, corporate sponsors and branding, which is hugely refreshing. The show can travel on its own, sustainably, with its only partner, a shipping company called Oceanbird. But I hope it stays in London for as long as possible, because seeing it again is in my future.

The naïve part of me hopes Abba Voyage does not lead to a Black Mirror-ish dystopia and become the sole future of live music, for heritage acts or otherwise, that its tech is used carefully, with integrity, but we know this won’t happen. It doesn’t matter. Abba did it first and I can’t see anyone else doing it better. This exciting, ridiculous, innovative, psychedelic show will never be equalled. It took my breath away.



Moonage Daydream



In early September, I saw Moonage Daydream at its premiere at the BFI Imax in Waterloo (followed by an amazing after-party at the Blavatnik Building, part of Tate Modern, where we danced to Bowie with Eddie Izzard: life level unlocked). Hearing too much about a film can be trouble. Trailers and reviews give you inklings while you try to avoid spoilers. But this film, which has been called an immersive (boy, is that an overused word) documentary, I’d already seen most of, so it felt organically like I had to prepare my thoughts and expectations in advance. I’d decided that the absence of much new footage, which friends rather than reviewers told me about, wasn’t going to bother me, but that turned out to be easier thought than done and not even the biggest problem with the film, ironically.

Its creator, Brett Morgen, had been courting hardcore fans for months. The early discussion last year about the film in the press continually said that it was based on ‘thousands of hours of unseen footage’. You might, then, expect quite a bit of it to be in there. Before
Moonage even had a release date, much of the narrative said stuff like: ‘While exact details about the new Bowie film are scarce, unseen concert footage is supposedly a central element to the documentary’.

Perhaps this mixes up the difference between ‘unseen’ and ‘rare’ (pretty basic for a director to know the difference you might think) because at no point was this big fat selling point disavowed by anyone to do with the film. Wait for it, surprise coming up, it turned out to be a complete lie and there is very little new stuff; I’d estimate about 5 per cent. The film’s major find is some footage from the Isolar II Tour, shot at Earl’s Court in 1978. We get all of
“Heroes” (though the first half is audio only, as we’re stuck with seeing fans coming in, for some reason) and a bit of Warszawa. There’s a little bit of Diamond Dogs Tour footage, too. But that is it. In a recent interview with the Guardian Morgen said ‘if you’re a hardcore aficionado, there’s enough new material to satiate you’. *turns to camera* *eye-roll*

He also said
Ricochet was his ‘holy grail’ when giving a story to Indiewire of finding it like he was Indiana Jones. It’s one of the extras on the Serious Moonlight DVD and is not hard to find. It’s not a big treasure. It’s some ‘stranger in a strange land’ footage of Bowie going around looking vaguely like a colonial ruler, bowing his head to foreigners. As always with him, it is well-meaning but it shouldn’t have been excavated here as the heart of the film. It’s nowhere near that interesting. But Morgen loves Ricochet so much he repeats the same footage of Bowie going up and down an escalator three times to hammer home his point (it’s not the only reused, repetitive footage). One assumes the point was Bowie at his best making music when he was searching for something. Then when he found it (the wife) he became so contented that his music went bad. Good grief.

Morgen had discovered all this material after spending five years sifting through the vast Bowie archive (made up of some
5 million ‘assets’). He was only the second party allowed in there, after the V&A curators. Francis Whately did the BBC’s great Five Years docs, but going by this interview I don’t think he had access officially, though the estate were helpful (and Bowie was alive when he started, so it was different). I don’t doubt Morgen’s love for the music and his intention – to show the world why we’re all so devoted to Bowie – is pure. He obviously loves David very much.

But despite what he says,
Moonage is not for fans; it’s for everyone else. It’s a Bowie gateway for people who are coming to him relatively fresh and, at a basic level, it does fulfil its aim. What is better than seeing a massive amount of Bowie footage on a gigantic screen? That’s always a good time. There were things I liked about it, such as the voiceover narration, which uses Bowie interviews spanning decades; that worked very well. Particularly insightful were clips from the superb Mavis Nicholson interview), recorded in 1979. It set the context well of where his life was at age 32. If he came off a bit cold or distant emotionally in those 70s interviews, that’s because he was. And therein lies the problem. So much of the film’s narration is based on early interviews, when he was just as stupid as any of us are at 26. Morgen tries to balance the interviews out by using more recent ones, when Bowie’s older, wiser, more aware of his place, and has a deepened understanding of his creativity and process. But it’s not enough. And worse, all the interviews were utterly humourless. What? David Bowie was a funny man, with a super-dry sense of humour. Using all these interviews to make him sound incredibly pretentious achieved what? Sometimes he was pretentious, nothing wrong with that. But you’re cutting off half a personality by making your film so po-faced, by believing the audience doesn’t deserve even one laugh as it’d break the mood?

Having said that, I am grateful that the film has a short section on his paintings, as it’s overdue for that aspect of his artistry to be taken seriously. Another part on Bowie’s half-brother and his illness, and his mum keeping her own emotional distance, was well-handled. The Russell Harty interview is a hoot, because he is just so incredibly weird compared to what English culture was serving people in 1973. The best-selling single of the year was the jaunty kitsch pop of Tony Orlando and Dawn’s
Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree. On TV it was the era of The Benny Hill Show. The most-watched TV broadcasts of the year were Princess Anne’s wedding, then Eurovision. It is impossible to overstate how the nation would have dropped its dinner when they saw this guy who looked like he’d just got off a spaceship from fucking Mars. Harty, who was deeply closeted, sneers and goads him over his bisexuality for the audience’s amusement yet Bowie’s relative innocence and charm survives the assault. Kids who loved him back then were beaten up at school and called homophobic slurs. Being a Bowie fan was dangerous and these clips are important to show you just why. The film doesn’t pretend any of this didn’t happen and handles his sexuality well, which I appreciated.

Moonage’s aim is to give a mainstream audience all the information so they can fall in love with him just like we did. That’s a highly valid idea for a film! But, how dull, nearly all of the material is derived from the 70s and early 80s. There is a bit of him looking hot and inspired while covered in paint on the 1995 set of Hearts Filthy Lesson (which we don’t hear), but it’s in the film three times. There’s some collaged, thunderously loud versions of Hallo Spaceboy live in 1996/7, which I enjoyed. There is a nice juxtaposed Space Oddity of old with the 1997 NYC birthday concert. There are also some great bits of the Louise Lecavalier dance footage shot for 1990’s Sound + Vision Tour (but without any context, because it doesn’t fit the narrative, more of which later). We get about a minute of the ritual footage from the video, without Bowie in it, which doesn’t make sense without context either, then we see about five seconds of him. There’s a little bit of soundless footage from a Reality promo to, I assume, compare young with old (if 56 is old). But that is it for anything after 1987. All this might take up perhaps ten or 15 minutes of the 2 hours and 15 minutes running time. Slim pickings.

It all means that we are subjected to the deeply boring reiteration of the late-work cliché. What I mean by that is the untrue and insulting idea that Bowie’s great music was over after 1983 (if not 1980). The other week in the Sunday Times, Morgen gave an interview in which he said that when Bowie met Iman in 1990 his work ‘plateaued’ [‘reached a state of little or no change after a period of activity or progress’]. How can he think that? The same paper printed a ‘ranked from worst to best album list’ that has , elevated because it’s ‘rich in symbolism’ (i.e. they consider it tragic), as the only album in the top ten made after 1980. 1. Outside is placed at 20 out of 26 (the Tin Machine albums are excised but the band is called ‘excruciating’). Look, I can understand why Morgen believes the general public wouldn’t want to watch a film that includes more than a small amount of the later work of the 1990s and the late work of Heathen onwards. The media has been ripping Bowie’s mid-career work (1984-99) to shreds for nearly four decades. Wasn’t this an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, the media has told you his 1990s output was shit, but it’s not!’? Morgen has repeatedly, openly disrespected that work in interviews. Then he backtracks on Twitter and says he loves ‘Heathens’ [sic] and Outside’? Not convincing. There is nothing in the film from Heathen by the way, a significant work that doesn’t fit his Bowie-got-boring-when-he-got-married narrative. And nothing of another important album, The Next Day, which is bonkers. Even back in his beloved 70s, there’s nothing from Young Americans and, from Station to Station, we get a minute of Word on a Wing accompanying a cringe photo gallery of Bowie and Iman, then ten seconds of the title’s track’s train sound! Very bizarre. Why not do a classic final ‘comeback’ section? Tell me a third act where he returns in his sixties and then dies a couple of days after his masterpiece comes out wouldn’t be a perfect ending to the film?

T
moonage2
his was a chance to expose a wide audience to some of the music he made as an older person, when he deepened his thinking about life, creativity and existence. Instead, Morgen repeats the false narrative about Bowie’s later work by excising much of it, reinforcing the idea that nothing after Let’s Dance is worth anything. If you don’t want to rehab Bowie’s 1990s, okay, sure. It’s a big task, people won’t want to hear it. But the late work (2002-16) is not a hard sell. That period encompasses some of the most exciting, nuanced, intelligent and, yes, demanding and complex work of Bowie’s entire career. I don’t expect a five-hour film. And in a way it’s not even really about something being missing, it’s about a thought process that labels 1. Outside as ‘not on anyone’s bingo card’, as he did in the new issue of Sight and Sound. He sucks up to fans but fails to notice that album is one of our favourites? It’s a commercial decision to not challenge the audience by making most of the film out of footage he thinks they want. No company is going to give you millions of dollars to show a world audience the best bits from a period openly derided by so many (though the NYT recently said the production ran out of money). But if you think his work ‘plateaued’ when it got deeper and more challenging, do you understand your subject?

Thank god at least that the format isn’t one of those boring talking-heads documentaries. I don’t want to watch people who interviewed him a couple of times, or never met him at all, or ‘famous fans’ making their money out of speaking his name. I’m bored of that, aren’t you? In the last decade of his career he let others speak in his place and it worked, it was smart. But now he is gone. So those who chase that ambulance… I don’t want to see anyone churn out the same old anecdotes or stale cultural opinions for the hundredth time. I don’t dig it. I want
him. I want him to speak and sing and be heard and seen. I want more analysis of his music and fewer people talking about his ‘influence’.

Moonage is about getting a new audience to understand the essence of who he was. It’s about young people going to see it and being blown away because it’s all new to them. Bowie is the music not even of their parents, but their grandparents, now. The music of my grandparents was Mario Lanza and Frank Sinatra. Falling generationally in between crooners and The Beatles was Elvis, a grand hero of Bowie’s. When I was young, in the early 1990s, Elvis was long gone, from 30 years before, full generations ago. Not even my parents were old enough to be his fans. Another 30 years has passed and now Bowie is to teenagers what Elvis was to me. I knew the real, beautiful, non-tragic Elvis because my mum and her best friend showed me all the 50s footage and some of the better movies. I didn’t know what happened to him when I was young. But most people did and made jokes about him. It was unfair, Elvis deserved better than to be remembered as a fat Vegas act who made dozens of bad movies. And so as Baz Lurhmann’s eccentric, flawed and brilliant Elvis biopic starts to leave cinemas, having completely captured how he filled the world with electricity, so arrives this film that should fill new people with the same wonder. It probably will, if you don’t know very much about Bowie. That Elvis film injects you with a thousand volts of power and energy and magic; it makes you see why, as Lennon said, before Elvis there was nothing. It manages to be kind of a bad film and a work of art at the same time. I craved for Moonage to do the same. But Morgen is not Luhrmann, he doesn’t have his talent.

A moment on the crime of using blurry footage. Morgen’s insistence on it being in Imax is a nice idea in its ambition. And some footage – D.A. Pennebaker’s
Ziggy; the 1978 clip of “Heroes”, the highlight of the film; a bit of the Jump They Say video (no audio, too 1990s), the b/w S+V footage, the 1. Outside painting – works blown up to that scale. But a lot of it doesn’t. There are significant sections that are impossible to see properly because it’s all so grainy and of poor quality. It is unforgivable to put newly discovered Diamond Dogs Tour footage on screen that is virtually unwatchable. There’s a bit from the Station to Station Tour that is significantly worse than the cheap bootleg I have of it – and worse than was seen in the end credits of the first part of the BBC’s Five Years documentary (which trumpeted its ‘wealth of previously unseen archive’ and delivered on it). I’m embarrassed for Morgen. Even Cracked Actor was a mediocre transfer, so was the Serious Moonight Tour footage, so was Glass Spider. Just put the film on Netflix, it’ll look better. This was discussed after my second viewing with an expert (hi Andrew!) and he told us it was because of the differences between what is shot on film (transfers perfectly) and what is shot on video (transfers terribly, cannot be improved). In that case, why use bad, grainy footage at all? It just makes your film look amateurish. Just be honest and say it’s not good enough to be blown up to cinema size.

The first half hour was quite dull, because Ziggy is not my favourite period, but it felt like simply sticking Pennebaker’s great movie on a big screen. That is okay I guess, I’m happy to see Bowie footage again, big and loud. But song after song? By the time we got to the video of
Ashes to Ashes looking worse than any bootleg I’ve seen, I had given up. Use my Best of Bowie DVD, mate, it’s better than whatever source you found. In the mid-80s, yes, I get it, he was unhappy. But to set up the high camp of the Glass Spider Tour as the lowest point? Playing only video from it, no audio, no context, was low. Play his entrance in Labyrinth to, what, sneer at a film that created a massive new generation of Bowie fans? Ignore Tin Machine like it never happened, despite its great importance to him as an artist, because it doesn’t fit your narrative? There can’t have been rights issues over all of it. And putting in the Pepsi ad proved what? It’s a bit of fun. This film is so painfully serious, it shouldn’t have been. It all continues to pour fuel on the idea that Bowie had ‘bad years’ without taking a second to look again and see if there is much of value. He just keeps refusing to expose the audience to anything from after 1983. We hear Spaceboy and a bit of . That is it. Not one more second from the last 33 years of his career.

I’m not a fool, I know this is a fan’s review. You can’t assess movies properly that way. It’s too personal. But when the director goes out of his way to appeal to fans, going so far as to make a trip to the Liverpool Bowie convention (I met him there, he was very nice), you’re saying that this is a movie as much for us as anyone else when it’s not. New people, and those who always liked him a bit and wanted to know more, should go on their Bowie journey and
Moonage Daydream will help them do it. It’s why the film reviewers, who might like him just fine but aren’t mad fans, all gave it five stars (the music reviewers like it less). It’s why the audiences I saw it with adored it. But setting out that being with Iman made him boring/out of ideas in his artistic life jarred (feels like the estate insisted on her being dropped in). Never mind that he put out his weirdest fucking work, 1. Outside, three years after they got married. The estate are going to manage his legacy however they want following the end of the first five years of what I can only assume were his wishes (when great stuff like Glasto and Visconti’s Lodger remix came out, which he consented to). We have walked through that looking glass now. They’ve sold the songs to Warners for £125 million and now you are going to be told what to think about him. One recent ad campaign was a remix by the DJ Honey Dijon for the home exercise bike company Peloton, about which she said: “I chose Let’s Dance because it’s a celebration of music and movement – just like Peloton!”

I don’t think one person is going to realise Bowie is amazing because they’ve heard a piano-led, slowed-down version of
Sound and Vision advertising the refurbishment of your spare room by B&Q (yes, this is a real example). I don’t think one person is going to buy some tat (socks, Barbies, cheap T-shirts, a Low tankard: another real example) and go, wow, I’ve just discovered Baal because of it! I want no part of this.

The film does have a purity of reach, because it takes his artistry and creativity seriously, rather than talking about his clothes or sex life, which is great. I just wish I could see the footage properly and there was some understanding of how he got better as he aged, rather than reinforcing a media-driven cliché of everything going downhill after the 1970s. Worse, setting up that the ‘peak’ we keep going back to is 1972. Are you kidding? His least musically adventurous stuff is the artistic pinnacle because of his impact? This legacy management is out of our hands, but we don’t need to buy into it. I’m disheartened that
Moonage is such a disappointment. Not even just that, it’s a fucking mess. Of course, many fans will adore it uncritically because they don’t want to find fault, as this might be seen as a ‘betrayal’ of David. This film will bring about revelations for many and that’s fantastic. But that was not my experience.

I was hoping it’d become one of those documents that we would end up watching, a bit drunkenly, in excitement at its treasures, for years. I couldn’t even say I was looking forward to seeing it a second time. But I did go, because it had to be done. The first 45 mins of Ziggy is still boring. The middle section when we get to Berlin is a little better on second viewing. The incidental music choices are, repeatedly,
Ian Fish U.K. Heir and The Mysteries (I guess he did get into my Best of Bowie DVD after all; that’s the menu music). And the last half hour is a dirty, offensive setup, lining up a bunch of great footage – Glass Spider, Labyrinth et al. – to tell the audience that he was shit in the 1980s. All set to a very on-the-nose Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide. We get it, he was great in the 70s, then he committed artistic suicide, then he got married and then he died. What a waste.

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Stardust – 2 stars



Prologue

Between lockdowns, on a rare day in the office, I watched the trailer for the Bowie biopic, Stardust, drop on Twitter. Reaction was… uh… mixed. And that was just the trailer. A few reviews already existed, as it had been shown at American film festivals in the spring, so I read them: all the young dudes carried the news, and the news was not good. I knew then that I didn’t want to see it: I wanted to review it. In a display of entirely unearned confidence, I jumped up from my desk and followed the floor sticker arrows around to the desk of Phil de Semlyen, my colleague, the Global Head of Film at Time Out. I said, “Lovely Phil, how do you fancy letting me review the Bowie movie? Okay, I’ve never reviewed a film ever for any publication but I can do it, I think. And someone who knows the subject should do it anyway, so go on, let me! How hard can it be?” He said, “Sure, no problem. If I can do it anyone can!” Such a nice man.

Well, then. Slight panic. I did some research, made notes about technical things, then watched it on the Raindance website. Surely, surely, it was going to be better than early reviews said? Or, best-case scenario, those reviewers weren’t Bowie people and didn’t get it, and it would be filled with Easter eggs for the nerds. Why not? I’m an optimist by nature. Then I pressed play.

It became clear quite quickly that Stardust was, in fact, going to be even worse than the reviewers said. After about 15 minutes, hysteria set in; I couldn’t stop laughing at how bad the dialogue was. Then another 15 minutes passed, the laughing ceased and I started to get annoyed, because it wasn’t even bad in a good way. It was just terrible and humourless. And long. 109 minutes of my short life on this spinning rock I am never getting back.

But even if a film is profoundly bad, a review must be fair to the hundreds of people who worked hard on it. There is usually something to recommend it, to stop it from being a one-star. Stardust is not poorly made; the cinematography and other technical aspects are well rendered. But they alone can’t make for an enjoyable watch.

Also, what I didn’t entirely take in during that interminable viewing was the baffling decision to cast actors decades older than the people they’re playing. Obviously I knew that Flynn was a dozen years too old (when filming took place, last year). But Jena Malone (35 playing 22) looks young. I hadn’t given a thought to how old Ron Oberman must have been back then: he was 28, Marc Maron was 56. There was one scene with Bowie’s manager, in which the character was so primly English I thought it was Ken Pitt (49 in 1971). It was not. That was supposed to be the charismatic, cigar-chewing Tony DeFries, who was 28 in 1971: the actor, Julian Richings, who looks like Pitt and looks nothing at all like DeFries, was 64. That was so unclear I thought it was a totally different person! And on it went with the Spiders: Ronson’s actor was 42; Mick was 25. The guy playing Woody was 38; the drummer was 21. (Trev Bolder doesn’t even get an IMDB listing)

Why on earth would casting directors take out the young, vigorous heart of a biopic and fill each role with actors all far too old? I had only noticed Flynn at the time – the rest made so little impression that their various levels of decrepitude must have passed me by. I don’t believe the filmmakers didn’t know how old these real people were: they chose not to care. That’s the level of detail and commitment to reality we’re talking about here.

Anyway, my review was well-received. People told me it made them not want to see the film.

The version below is 95% the same as the original. I have reinstated a couple of bits I felt were important and dropped back in a few extra details for colour. I’ve also added links to provide backstory, which isn’t the style of TO’s Film section but no harm in adding here.

I’m very proud that I was allowed to write this review and grateful that I am Time Out’s person of record who gets to stand up to show and tell people what I know and think. This film won’t affect Bowie’s legacy or anyone’s feelings towards him. The gifted people who understand, who love him, who have something to say that’s carefully well-researched and cited, will continue to produce work about him that is credible and worth reading, watching and listening to.

_____________________________________________________________



Rock biopics that don’t have rights to the artist’s songs can work, as seen in England Is Mine (Morrissey) and Nowhere Boy (John Lennon) – but both were set in their subjects’ late teens. In Stardust, we meet 24-year-old David Bowie (played by 36-year-old Johnny Flynn) in 1971. He’s on his first US trip, promoting his Led Zeppelin-esque third album The Man Who Sold The World, presented here as a hard sell because he wore a dress on its cover (though Americans wouldn’t have known this, as the US cover was an odd cowboy cartoon). You need to believe this young man becomes one of the greatest rock stars of all time. You won’t.

The disastrous Bohemian Rhapsody was, by a (moustache) hair, saved by the music; no such luck here. Bowie’s estate, it turns out wisely, denied use of his songs. Then a one-hit-wonder with Space Oddity, Bowie tries to behave like a star before he is one, but is written as a boring, pathetic, hippy rube who misses every opportunity his publicist (Marc Maron, always watchable) finds. How about a modicum of research? David Bowie was ruthless, camera-ready, bright and funny, with megawatt charisma and unshakeable self-belief. Here he’s an unengaging wet failure, tortured by fear of succumbing to ‘madness in the family’. The severe mental-health problems of his half-brother Terry, seen in flashbacks, are treated crassly. While his wife Angie (Jena Malone) is a hectoring presence that doesn’t credit the significant contribution she made.
 
Flynn, who does a decent job singing songs that Bowie covered by Jacques Brel and The Yardbirds, works hard with a weak script. And Stardust does try to call some truthful Bowie bingo numbers: a song by one of his early heroes, ’60s singer Anthony Newley, plays on the radio; there’s a nice touch showing a recreation of his screen test at Warhol’s Factory; we briefly experience the bizarre tale of Bowie spending an evening talking to Lou Reed only to find out later he’d met his replacement, Doug Yule (according to Bowie’s version of events he never knew but Yule says he explained Reed had left the Velvets months before); and he wears that dress for a hopeless Rolling Stone interview – though the film erases his bisexuality, which is poor stuff. But this biopic can’t sell the idea of his progression as a songwriter because it can’t show us that he wrote Life on Mars and Changes around this time.
 
Ultimately, Stardust doesn’t work on any level. Not having his original music means it can’t truly let go, which makes this Bowie nothing close to the magnetic performer he was, despite a reasonable finale (with a Ziggy hairpiece that’s the wrong colour and inaccurate make-up). Because the songs aren’t here, his music is forced into becoming entirely unimportant, which is criminal. This film adds nothing interesting to his story. You’d be a great deal better off seeking out Todd Haynes’s gorgeously camp, self-aware, fairytale Bowie biopic Velvet Goldmine – it’s much more fun than this. 
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Hartsfield’s Landing: a West Wing story about how much your vote matters



This was written just before the American presidential election.

It’s been a hard year. People are reaching out for comfort. You might have remodelled a room, bought new art, a rug, plants; got new clothes, even though you have nowhere to go; hunkered down to watch TV, as we face whatever the fuck this is and is going to continue to be.

How can money be sucked out of you? Pay-per-view football, a live-streamed gig (remember gigs?!), benefit for a struggling theatre, donation to a food bank or community food project? Are you bereaved? Working, furloughed, made redundant or on the dole? Getting government money, barely enough to survive on? (which you – not the rich – will be repaying via higher taxes for the next two decades) Or have you fallen through the social support cracks into anxiety-induced near-penury?

The roulette wheel spins, we pick and yet… sameness. A tiny event like a distanced visit with a loved one marks out a day. You pounce on any work offered, as who knows when the next will come. Talking a walk in a wood or park near home, if you don’t have a garden, has become important, and yet it takes a gargantuan effort to muster any energy to go out. Out in shops or on public transport, on overloaded buses, half-full tubes or empty commuter trains, you weave around the chin and nose cunts, too self-absorbed, too selfish, to notice or care about fallen masks. Recipes distract, it’s a surprising interest in cooking a passable version of food you can no longer order in restaurants. An acceptance that there will likely be another year of this shit. Who knew the end of the world as we knew it would be so… slow.

In reaching out, maybe you (re)discovered something that doesn’t remind you of all this. John sang, ‘whatever gets you through the night, it’s alright’. Me? Buffy again. The warm, delightful Schitt’s Creek. The viciously good Better Things. And partly because of all this and partly because of White House occupancy, a walk back to the warm hug of how American politics can be of The West Wing.



I’m not sure any other show inspires such devotion and blame. American journalists are obsessed with ripping it up, as if it actively harmed their country. It’s dated, smug, preachy, a liberal fantasy, or an act of self-harm so egregious you’d think people voted for the White House’s occupant because Toby Ziegler chewed a cigar and expressed a progressive opinion that social security could be saved for generations, healthcare should be available to all and university tuition should be tax-deductible (an idea so left-wing it was backed by Rand Paul, one of the most viciously right-wing/libertarian politicians). TWW has a huge amount in common with the sweeter small-government politics of Parks and Recreation, a show that never got called a liberal fantasy, despite being exactly that (with showrunner Mike Schur massively influenced by The West Wing). It might come down to creator/head writer (for the first four of its seven seasons) Aaron Sorkin, the Bono of screenwriting. Journalists hate that guy. Yes, The Newsroom was bad; yes, Studio 60 was flawed but watchable; but The Social Network, Molly’s Game, Sports Night, Moneyball, Charlie Wilson’s War, A Few Good Men, The American President and The Trial of the Chicago 7 are all very good indeed.

Such hatred is based on a shallow understanding of The West Wing. The administration achieved… very little. There is no triumphalism; they don’t remake America. They were blocked by Republicans (portrayed as John McCain types, not venal Mitch McConnell types, at least during the Sorkin years), blocked by themselves and blocked by circumstance, incompetence, arrogance and hubris. Yes, they are sexist. The sexual harassment in the boys’ club workplace is sometimes borderline, sometimes blatant. But the idea that Sorkin painted perfect characters and we should all wring our hands over the damage they did to liberal causes because of their implausible idealism, and that we should stop trying to make America like this, is naïve. It’s not like those who love it are blind to its flaws. The West Wing Weekly podcast calls out those flaws in detail. But it also posits that, especially given the trauma of the last four years, politics can be different. Why not? What’s wrong with a bit of hope?

TWWW, co-presented by podcaster Hrishi Hirway (Song Exploder) and former cast member Josh Malina, started in March 2016 and was a deep dive, with episode breakdowns and interviews featuring ex-cast members, guest stars, technicians, producers, writers, directors, famous fans and a whole bunch of experts – senators, speechwriters, military figures, press secretaries, chiefs of staff and more, most of whom worked in the real White Houses of the last 40 years. These were political operatives from the administrations of Nixon, Carter, Johnson, Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton (whose White House the show is largely based on) and Obama (whose staffers told the cast they went into politics because they grew up watching The West Wing). If you like to know how things are made, if you want to be inside baseball, as they say, it’s a wonderful insight.



The West Wing is a relic, as are other late-90s-early-2000s shows about cops, lawyers, doctors and aliens (and by the way, nobody writes articles saying The X-Files damaged America because it popularised conspiracy theories and pushed them into the mainstream, even though arguably it did).

I don’t doubt that getting the band back together for the podcast is part of the reason that Sorkin, who gave TWWW his full, grateful participation and appeared in many episodes, decided to come back for a one-off reunion episode to benefit When We All Vote (it’s supposed to be a nonpartisan organisation but I don’t see any Republicans in its ranks apart from a few local mayors; nevertheless, the episode raised more than $1m for it). And so, in this era of visors and distances, most of the cast of The West Wing got together in LA in September and filmed a staged reading of season three’s Hartsfield’s Landing. It is, simply, about how important it is to vote, with side plots of a chess game (figurative) with China and Taiwan, and two chess games (literal) between the president, Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen), and two of his staff, Communications Director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) and his deputy Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe).



I got an evening of it going, first watching the 2002 original to play spot the difference. The 2020 version started thus, with Bradley Whitford (Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman), now a multiple Emmy winner, giving a bit of charming side-eye, fully aware of the ridiculousness of the entire enterprise: “We understand that some people don’t fully appreciate the benefit of unsolicited advice from actors. We do know that. And if HBO Max was willing to point a camera at the ten smartest people in America, we’d gladly clear the stage for them. But the camera’s pointed at us. And we feel at a time like this that the risk of appearing obnoxious is too small a reason to stay quiet if we can get even one new voter to vote.”

We were off. All the setups are on the same stage, LA’s Orpheum Theater. The design, deceptively simple, is stunningly directed by the executive producer of the Sorkin years, Thomas Schlamme. He is the ‘walk’ of the famed ‘walk and talk’. It asks whether a TV drama can be broken down, reverse-staged: usually plays become films, not the other way round. The dynamic energy of the 2002 episode is brought about by camera movement and the actors’ physical movement, as they rush from office to office… now, in 2020, nobody goes much of anywhere, and the power of the setting is allowed to come through, which lets the actors, cameras, plot and even the chess pieces settle. That comparable stillness is what makes sure the dialogue sings even more than it did first time around.

On first watch, I found it all so moving. Eighteen years have passed. Some of the women look different but the same, in the way that Hollywood insists women’s faces must look. The men look genuinely older, greyer, more worn (even Rob Lowe). But certainly, the political devastation of the last four years sees the toll written on each face. The lines were delivered with more anger in 2002; this time there’s weariness, a resignation to the mileage taken on. Adding poignancy, one role had to be recast, because of the passing of John Spencer, whose Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, was TWW’s heart. Leo was transformed into a younger version, played very differently by Sterling K Brown (Sorkin said if he ever rebooted TWW – making clear he would never do so – Brown should be the president). Brown did a great job: being nothing like Spencer helped both him and viewers disassociate from the overall sadness of the lost cast member.

On second watch, beyond how lovely it was to see them all together again, I remembered how sharply funny so much of Sorkin’s dialogue is, even in tense moments. To leaven the China plot and the big finish, a heavy chess game between Toby and the President, there was a lighter chess match with Sam, wherein the machinations of the diplomatic dance between China, the US and Taiwan were played out like real-life Battleship. There was a very funny thread, where press secretary CJ (Oscar winner Allison Janney) and Charlie (Dulé Hill, the youngest cast member – now 45 – the president’s ‘body man’, an executive assistant) battle over a missing paper schedule, which escalates into a prank war that puts the life of a goldfish in danger. We also wisely avoid the fairly inappropriate workplace flirtation between Josh and his deputy Donna (Janel Moloney), who get the title card plot. Hartsfield’s Landing – based on two real towns in Bartlet’s home state, New Hampshire: Hart’s Location and the brilliantly named Dixville Notch – is where 42 voters will cast their ballots at midnight: the town has been historically successful in predicting the general election winner, so these 42 votes matter. There is a plot hole big enough to drive a truck through here, wherein we are half a season away from the general election (Bartlet beats Rob Ritchie, played by Barbra Streisand’s husband, James Brolin, to win his second term) so what are they voting for? It can’t be to choose Bartlet as the candidate because he is running unopposed so wouldn’t be on the ballot. But… we gotta let it go.

Josh It is absurd that 42 people have this kind of power.

C.J. I think it’s nice.

Josh Do you?

C.J. I think it’s democracy at its purest. They all gather at once…

Josh At a gas station.

C.J. It’s not a gas station, it’s nice. There’s a registrar of voters, the names are called in alphabetical order, they put a folded piece of paper into a box. See, this is the difference between you and me.

Josh You’re a sap?

C.J. Those 42 people are teaching us something about ourselves: that freedom is the glory of God, that democracy is its birthright, and that our vote matters.

Josh You’re getting the pizza?

C.J. Yeah, I should call ahead.

The show said it best: “Decisions are made by those who show up”. And so, Josh elevates 42 votes to a place of high drama and high importance. Not just because politics is a superstitious game, but because every vote does count. A couple he met on the campaign trail, the Flenders, have called Donna to say that they are thinking about voting for Ritchie. She is sent out into the cold with a mobile (yes, even in 2002!) to try and persuade the Flenders their two votes matter. Back and forth it goes:

Donna They think the President is going to privatise Social Security.

Josh He’s not going to... That’s the other guys! He’s not going to privatise Social Security! He’ll... He’ll privatise New Hampshire before he privatizes Social Security!

A side note for the nerds: this remake takes a deep-dive into the supporting cast from the original. The journalists in the press room, all in multiple episodes, are recognisable to long-term fans. CJ’s aide, Carol, is there – played by Melissa Fitzgerald, she quit acting and founded Justice4Vets, an org which campaigns for veterans’ treatment courts. The China plot brought back the wonderful Anna Deavere Smith, who as well as being a brilliant actress (and professor) is a Pulitzer-nominated playwright: her one-woman show about the prison-for-profit system, Notes from the Field, played off-Broadway and at the Royal Court. She took no part in TWWW, purely, we were told, because of being too busy so it was a real pleasure to see her again.

Reading the scene directions [Cut to: Int. Josh’s bullpen – Night – Donna comes in, wrapped in a long coat] (that sort of thing) was the brilliant Emily Proctor. She joined in season two to play a Republican operative, Ainsley Hayes. President Bartlet’s nature was to be interested in those who disagreed with him, like Lincoln’s ‘team of rivals’ (as described by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin), so he hired her. But there were, as Sorkin put it, ‘too many mouths to feed’; Procter was offered another job (CSI: Miami) and left for a bigger break. He regretted not making space for her, and I’m certain that’s why she appears (rather than any attempt to reach out to Republican voters). Hayes presented a realistic face of conservatism that never sneered, not even when she argued against the Equal Rights Amendment.



The episode’s big storyline, though, is Toby’s chess game with the president. The scene, simmering, comes to a boil with a question about what voters want. A guy they can have a beer with? A rich guy they’ve been conned into thinking isn’t elite? The smartest kid in the class? Watching that scene makes you recoil, knowing what we do about who sits in the Oval. While Bartlet has had enough of Toby, Toby has had enough of tiptoeing around the idea of whether a candidate should be ashamed about being smart and capable.

Toby Abbey [the First Lady] told me this story once. She said you were at a party once where you were bending the guy’s ear. You were telling him that Ellie [his middle daughter] had mastered her multiplication tables and she was in third grade reading at a fifth-grade level and she loved books and she scored two goals for her soccer team the week before, you were going on and on... And what made that story remarkable was that the party you were at was in Stockholm and the man you were talking to was King Gustav, who two hours earlier had given you the Nobel Prize in economics. [laughs] I mean, my god, you just won the Nobel Prize and all you wanted to talk about to the King of Sweden was Ellie’s multiplication tables!

Bartlet What’s your point?

Toby You’re a good father, you don’t have to act like it. You’re the President, you don’t have to act like it. You’re a good man, you don’t have to act like it. You’re not just folks, you’re not plain-spoken... Do not, do not, do not act like it!

Bartlet I don’t want to be killed.

Toby Then make this election about smart, and not... Make it about engaged, and not. Qualified, and not. Make it about a heavyweight. You’re a heavyweight. And you’ve been holding me up for too many rounds. [Toby lays down his king on the board. Bartlet stands and turns to walk out.]

Bartlet Pick your king up. We’re not done playing yet.



That scene is incredibly powerful. It was in 2002. And it’s 100 times more so today. Sheen and Schiff are remarkable, two heavyweights slugging it out, a masterclass in tone, emphasis, balance. There is, it’s been said before, real music in the cadences of Sorkin’s words.

We know it should work like that. Because being president is a serious job and these are serious times and elevating an unserious person to its heights is disastrous. Who sits in the White House is always… a mirror. This is a bleak moment in American history and we all know the conservative side suppresses voting because they benefit when fewer people vote. So we must hammer the idea every time even if it never changes turnout: voting is a right and should be widely accessible.

In the end, with the Flenders and their economic anxiety, Josh gives in, saying ‘let ’em vote…’ And the lesson is done. This show is about public service. It’s not a harmful bubble to live in for 42.5 minutes. Between scenes, where ad breaks usually go, are unsubtle messages about voting from Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Samuel L Jackson, Elisabeth Moss (who the show discovered, she played the Bartlets’ youngest daughter), Lin-Manuel Miranda (a serious TWW nerd, he and Hamilton director Thomas Kail did a special TWWW episode and his last Hamilton curtain call was done to TWW theme). There was a return for the iconic Marlee Matlin (who played pollster Joey Lucas), the only deaf actress to win an Oscar, who looked beautiful: and looked her age. Her bit with Whitford was on why voter fraud is nonsensical, how it doesn’t and cannot happen. Some of these sections are serious, some funny, some pointed, especially interjections from Jackson and Black cast members Dulé Hill and Sterling K Brown. In a glowing review of the special, Vanity Fair’s TV critic said the show ‘feels so removed from reality’ but she said that out of sadness, rather than criticism. Buying an idea/myth of politicians acting in good faith isn’t a failure of The West Wing. You should believe that, even if it feels we’ve gone far away from Obama’s optimism into today’s cynicism. We should all know that – and this goes for politics and pandemics – it won’t always be like this.

To end, this clip (from earlier in the third season) is on the nose. It’s the worst of Sorkin if you can’t bear him, the best of Sorkin if you get him. And call me a sentimental old fool if you want, but I love it. In it, a leak has embarrassed the President and Toby assembles the junior staff. The audience expects him to be angry, take the roof off, with a lesson about loyalty. He does the opposite, and even out of context it’s… what the show is all about.



The West Wing.

It’s just a TV show: lighten up, don’t take it seriously.

It’s not just a TV show: it matters, and it has changed lives.

It’s okay for both of those things to be true at the same time.



Final note: The West Wing Weekly’s special episode on The West Wing’s reunion special

Bohemian Rhapsody – 2 stars



Biopics are not easy to get right. Squeezing an entire life into two hours, with commercial considerations banging on the door… meaning, it usually has to be a PG13/12A rating, and you have a big story to tell, often of sex and drugs and rock and roll. Nine years in the making, with three leads, three screenwriters, two directors: these are not the ingredients that result in a gratifying portrayal of a human life. And with Freddie Mercury, lightning in a bottle personified, it was always going to be a fool’s errand. It’s a two-star film, at best, with a four-star performance. Rami Malek’s virtual channelling of Mercury just barely saves the film from total disaster. 

First off, there’s a problem with what they’ve chosen to include: half the film is set in the 70s, and there are lengthy sequences of recordings, including of the nonsense masterpiece the film is named after. There are some people – myself included – who find the inner workings of recording studios grippingly fascinating. But I imagine the majority of an audience wants to see something else, even though I found those scenes fun, mostly because I was listening out for different vocal takes and such like. No doubt putting that much music in is a done deal when you have band members producing a film, but it doesn’t make for terribly interesting scenes. A great many exciting events happened to Queen, from their formation in 1970 to their sad, enforced end in 1991. With their first album out in 1973, the band recorded music for only 18 years, and Mercury has been gone for very nearly 27. So it seems cynical to attempt a biopic now, after all these years (original Queen fans + their offspring = double the audience), and the controversy, and firings, around it have hardly helped to cement a consistency of storytelling. Bryan Singer (who will shortly have an Esquire article expose him as a predator) has tried to do a good job, with help from the underrated Dexter Fletcher. And it is nearly impossible to cohere multiple satisfying narratives into two hours, especially with the subject gone. But there is no reason for the script to be this terribly poor. It shouldn’t be, with The Queen showrunner Peter Morgan’s original bolstered by The Theory of Everything’s Anthony McCarten. Why is it so bad? Freddie Mercury was passionate, generous, gifted, very funny, sometimes difficult and, yes, sex-driven, with a side of shy and vulnerable, and this is a meek, painfully sanitised exploration of his private life. I’m not saying I wanted the bathhouse-based director’s cut, but a bit more bite would have been great. His seven-year romance with his lifelong muse, and the woman to whom he left his grand home and half his wealth and royalties, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton, doing well with bad writing) is covered in endless detail. Austin has not played any part in this film, understandably; indeed, since he died she has given only a handful of interviews, and her relations with the rest of the band, his friends and family are said to be tense. With one person gone, and the other unwilling to discuss the reality of a private relationship, the scenes between Malek and Boynton feel like basic coming-out-story melodrama, when the reality must have been much more complex. It is important to note that Mercury’s bisexuality is not washed over, at least. And nor is the gay side of his life, later on. It’s also correct that Austin should be given the credit and legitimacy in his life that she deserves, but it’s all rather bloodless. It also means that, unfairly, less importance is given to his relationship with the late Jim Hutton, the Irish barber (here a waiter, why?) who he also shared his life with for seven years, until the end. You can’t get private moments right without input from those who were there, of course, but they don’t even get close to making a decent job of it. The Hutton storyline is undercooked in the extreme, little more than a footnote, which is insulting to his memory, too (he died of cancer in 2010, aged 61; when Freddie died Mary had him evicted abruptly from the home they shared for years).

The band, even today, seem uncomfortable with his sexuality, with a recent interview with May discussing his ‘men friends’ alongside Austin. Understandably, if you lose both your friend and your career overnight it’s not something you ever get over. I’m just not sure that that discomfort should be shared beyond boilerplate rock-star autobiographies: such coyness has no place influencing the content of a film that’s should have largely not been about you. Brian May (Gwilym Lee) is hardly a ripe character for a biopic. He may be a musical god, but he’s a gentle, quite dull man who cares more about badgers, physics and stereoscopic photography than any person should – Lee manages to do miracles with the character, frankly. His dry humour comes across nicely. While bassist John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello; the little lad from Jurassic Park, trivia fans) is imbued with a rather surprising amount of subtle personality by an actor who’s been doing his homework. But drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) should have been made much more of; he’s a spiky, no-bullshit, Tigger-like presence in real life, and his closeness with fellow hedonist Mercury doesn’t come across at all. The character is dull, and the actor is too, and it does Taylor a disservice. Let’s not talk about Mike Myers, in his Jeff Lynne costume. He was amusing as a composite character of a snooty record exec and their first manager Norman Sheffield. But he just seemed to be there so the band could say, ‘thanks for making the song big again in America via Wayne’s World.’

As for the ‘straightwashing’ the trailer was accused of: I didn’t find that to be true. I wasn’t expecting a Caligula-esque series of scenes set in London’s iconic 80s gay club Heaven, or any one of the myriad Munich bars that he spent most of his nights in starting from 1979 or so. A big studio picture is never going to allow that level of exploration of gay life, especially with the spectre of Aids hanging over the film like a black cloud. It did feel like a series of missed opportunities, however, to rip open the virulent media-led homophobia that he faced his whole life, and his fear of being outed. 

Also a missed opportunity was a more rounded storyline for the villain of the piece, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech). One can’t libel the dead, and this snake should have been written with much more narcissism. He drew Mercury away from the band and into drugs and long nights in dark rooms that ultimately proved his undoing. Glossed over, too, was his heartbreaking betrayal of Mercury, which he never recovered from. He sold his story to The Sun for £30,000 in 1987, outing the singer in the process (in the film this was a fictitious TV interview where he slings a racial slur at Mercury: never happened). Prenter may as well have a neon sign saying ‘danger: I can’t be trusted’ hanging above his head, but this terrific actor is wasted in an underwritten part. Two more great actors do wonders with average parts: Aiden Gillen does the best he can as the band’s 1970s manager John Reid, while Tom Hollander as Jim Beach, who guided the band at their imperial 1980s peak, does sardonic well. But everything should be sharper: the drama, writing, plotting. 

One faultless aspect of this flawed film is the musical sequences. In this, we get perfection. The swirling, thrilled, sweaty crowds; the peerless music, sometimes overblown to the point of laughter, sometimes achingly beautiful, always decadent, works a treat. The live concert scenes are handled with great skill by Singer. These details, speaking from a fan’s perspective, are spot on. From the costumes to the settings, the performances are finely tuned. And Rami Malek comes close to saving the whole movie, somehow. The depth of understanding from this fine actor of his subject is critical. Immersion in such a life only works if your subject was layered, thrilling company, and it helps if there’s a creditable, exciting, possibly tragic, story to build on. Malek is given all that raw material to work with, and he runs away with it. There is no shortage of drama and dynamism and power on show. Embodying a beloved person is an impossible job, one that can go wrong without the right focus, or can veer too much in a Stars in Their Eyes direction. To inhabit a rounded portrayal of a real man, with very little offstage material to go on (Mercury did precious few interviews), is not an easy task, but Malek pulls it off and then some. He captures a perfect mix of bravado and vulnerability. The script makes a cheap shot about ‘having not enough time left’, sold to us as prescient but it made my eyes roll, yet he still manages to imbue these moments with the ending we know is coming, of a life over at 45. He beats the thin script into a pulp with sheer force of will. In particular, the big finish of the film, a full-length recreation of the band’s Live Aid performance, is breathtaking. I have no issue with the lack of descent depicted, that the film ends in 1985 rather than going toward deathbed drama. There are plenty of films, and documentaries, that show the cost of Aids in grisly extreme detail; it’s not needed here. And for those of us who lived through it well enough at the time, traumatised by seeing this extraordinary man turned into bones in front of our eyes, there is no need to portray it here for prurient interest. If you want to see what happened to Mercury, his devastating end, the video footage is available. It was a smart choice (badly handled, as I’ll get to later) to end the film at his life’s professional peak. 

Much like the tedious Queen musical, We Will Rock You, here the music works and not much else does. And for Malek, it’s the star-making performance of a lifetime. But if you let a band produce a film about themselves it will have music-making, and their version of events, as its centre, rather than a truthful core about the person who has no ability to reply. Worst of all, the falsities on show here mostly in the final third are wild and reckless. And there is no need for them: his life was a thrill-ride without the need for embellishment. If you’ve gone to that much trouble to get a piece of recording studio equipment right, or the correct Japanese light in a recreation of his house, then why on earth would you allow complete lies to be in the film? I don’t mean something like a gig showing him crowd-surfing: that’s in the film, it was apparently not in the script; Malek just did it. Mercury never did that in his life. There are tons of small things like that which are wrong. That’s fine, a bit of exaggeration, who cares? It’s not a documentary. But the big stuff, you have to get it right.  

The remaining band members’ judgement looms large: we’re normal Freddie, we have families, you have to slow down. Never mind that May cheated on his wife with groupies multiple times and just after Live Aid left his family. Never mind that Taylor shagged everything on the road that moved, unable to create any sort of stable relationship for decades. Oh, it’s Freddie and his ‘appetites’ that are destroying the band. They’re having normal heterosexual sex: the kind of sex Freddie has is the wrong kind. Their resentment of him beams through. I always thought it was grief. That the loss of their friend was something they never recovered from. It’s not. It’s anger, at his gayness destroying their careers. And it culminates in changing the truth for their own ends. And incidentally, if Brian and Roger are going to make a big deal about how Freddie’s solo career put the band in jeopardy, they might mention that they had already made three solo albums between them by that point. His solo record came out after Live Aid, not before. It’s one thing to put in a stupid press conference where Freddie is pressed on his sexuality while high (never happened). It’s a badly written scene but changes nothing that’s materially important. It’s another to indulge in a parallel universe fantasy.

And that leads me to the biggest, and most insidious, lie in the film. He is given his HIV diagnosis, for dramatic effect, just before Live Aid – as fuel for that career-defining performance. The real diagnosis happened two years after. This is sick, distasteful stuff, as is the fictitious meeting with an Aids patient covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions outside the doctor’s office. What were they thinking? Everyone involved in this film should hang their heads in shame for making it happen. The band has thrown their friend under the bus to make themselves look good and benevolent for letting him back in the band (never happened).

He put on that 20-minute performance of his life at Wembley Stadium because he was fucking remarkable. Not because he had been told he was going to die. This messianic trash, this ‘I’m going to die for you, audience’, cheapens the power of the scene, the film, and worst of all it cheapens his life and death. Malek plays it, despite it being nearly shot-for-shot, with a determined face: I’ll make this the show of my life because I have limited time left. Watch the real thing.

It’s not determination. It’s joy. It’s conviction. This guy knows he is doing the 20 minutes of a lifetime. A year later he is said to have started to feel unwell, telling everyone the tour they undertook was to be his last. He avoided tests, in fact, for another year, out of fear. Then he was calm about it, wanted no sympathy. Just wanted to get on with it, make music until he dropped. This is an era of ‘my feelings matter over your facts’. Well, no. Facts matter. 

This Live Aid fantasy was the filmmakers’ insulting solution to dealing with his illness? They made the correct, quite brave, decision to not do his death onscreen. But the fix for this problem was not to openly lie. It was not to create an alternative timeline that ruined a good idea with a bad one. 

It could just have been a post-script: you don’t change history and a person’s literal HIV status for show. It could also have had a braver end: Hutton was backstage at a Queen show for the first time, and Freddie was in love, after being lonely, and taken advantage of by hangers-on, for so long. Finally, he’d found someone to whom he could come home to, who nursed him to the end. But I guess a gay love story isn’t going to sell the way the fake inspiration of illness does. It makes me so angry that people will watch this and think it’s true. I hope they seek out what really happened, I hope they seek out the real thing and consign this version of events to the bin. Freddie Mercury deserved better than this film. 

Girl from the North Country – Written and directed by Conor McPherson. Music and lyrics by Bob Dylan.

This review, which contains spoilers, ran in Issue 194 of Isis, the Bob Dylan magazine.

Artists who diversify have sometimes been viewed with suspicion. An actor makes music? Bruce Willis crooning Under the Boardwalk springs to mind (don’t bother). A rock star makes a movie? Mick Jagger played a mercenary in Freejack (really, don’t bother). David Bowie’s last work, Lazarus, was a sprawling, experimental piece of theatre which used his songs in a dynamic, thrilling way. But would the play have worked without the music? I don’t think so, and I saw it workshopped in New York and then tightened up in London. In fact, after seeing Girl from the North Country, I wished that Conor McPherson was the Irish playwright that Bowie had engaged, rather than Enda Walsh, the one he did. Because while Lazarus could not stand easily on its feet as a play, Girl from the North Country certainly can. There were a couple of ill-judged parts, more of which later, but on the whole this was a dazzling night at the theatre. 




It’s 1934 in Duluth, our man’s birthplace. The Great Depression has taken hold and casts a chill over proceedings like the local cold. The parallels between Dust Bowl America and our own recession, turned into cutting, cruel austerity, are marked. The narrator (Ron Cook), a doctor, introduces us to the scene, and provides grounding throughout. We are in a guesthouse, leaking money and about to be put into foreclosure, run by Nick (Ciarán Hinds), a gruff man with a complex life: a wife with dementia (Shirley Henderson); an adopted African American daughter (Sheila Atim) who is seemingly pregnant at 19 by someone long gone and also being pursued by a predatory, creepy old man (Jim Norton); and a layabout son (Sam Reid) with his head in a whisky bottle most of the time. He has a mistress (Kirsty Malpass, stepping in from the ensemble, superbly), who asks for little, and can’t stick around much longer in this desperate economic climate. We meet a variety of dishonest lodgers, tempers fraying, trying to eke out a living in impossible times. 

The dialogue races by, each strand woven together masterfully. I was gripped by the intensity of the storytelling. And then, there’s the music. I thought, how on earth could this work? Will dropping a bunch of Dylan songs into an autonomous play distract? Will Americana arrangements suit? Will the choices make sense given that they can’t further the story? After all, he didn’t write these for the play. And then the first song, Sign on the Window, drifts in and wow, just wow, it all coalesces better than I could have dreamed. A hipster-looking (1930s beards/attire is twenty-first century hipster chic) house band (double bass, piano, fiddle) accompanies the actors, who take turns on percussive instruments. Twenty songs are used to soundtrack lives of anger and passion, sadness and regret, worry and loss. I was sometimes taken out of the moment, if briefly, to reflect: this song is part of me, part of the fabric of who I am. But then a second later I was locked back in to 1934 Minnesota. It’s a tightrope walk and McPherson, previously known for his supernatural works, has aced it. There are no easy choices here: you try and pick 20 Dylan songs out of them all to accompany a plot organically and soundtrack this highly strung chaos.




The performances are remarkable, particularly Henderson as Elizabeth, Nick’s wife. She gives an untethered lightness to the role that is sure to win her buckets of awards; I predict the Olivier for Best Actress. Physically slight, and 51 but looking two decades younger, she is a mismatch for a big man of 64 like Hinds. They don’t convince as a couple in that sense but there is genuine chemistry between them as he tries to cope with her disinhibited behaviour towards the guests. There are no weak links in the company, with Sheila Atim in particular owning the stage during both dramatic and musical moments as a woman who everyone wants to control. Her version of Tight Connection To My Hearttook my breath away; nearly unrecognisable, it is all the better for it. As the stories interlink, and there is much to weave in, we come to a couple of troublesome moments. 



A young African American man arrives (played flawlessly by ensemble player Karl Queensborough) and reveals himself to be a boxer just out of prison, so he says. This is a pretty clumsy way to shoehorn Hurricane in later on; it didn’t fit, at all. In fact, after a tight first half, it came off the rails, briefly, shortly into the second. It almost felt like McPherson had lost his own threads and, while he tried to find them, shovelled in a couple of songs that didn’t fit. He pulled it all back together but then took the only major misstep in the play, a storyline of parents and their adult disabled son.

 



Portraying disability is not easy, and unless it’s central (like in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) it’ll come across as throwaway or played for effect. The actors in this plotline were fine enough, with the mother in particular (Bronagh Gallagher) compelling. But a confusing blackmail scenario with a menacing Bible salesman (Michael Shaeffer) led to exposure of their ‘secret’: the son had sexually assaulted a woman and the family had to flee. Their section ends with the father, at the end of his tether, letting his son drown. Then, appearing as a ghost in white clothing, the son (Jack Shalloo) returns to render a gospel-tinged rendition of Duquesne Whistle. None of it worked and such a portrayal of disability was inappropriate and veered to the offensive given that the ghost was miraculously cured of his learning difficulties. This inherent condescension was compounded by a regressive decision to cast this character as dangerous in the first place. I tried my best to forget it, because it should not sully the rest of the play. 



I’d decided not to spoil any musical surprises by finding out the ‘setlist’. My dad bought a programme and scanned carefully to see which were to be featured. I turned away, much as I had done for Lazarus: I wanted to gasp with surprise when Jokerman appeared (it was the first Bob song I loved; Infidels came out on my seventh birthday). Or grin and feel an inner thrill at the storming, foot-tapping, tambourine-bashing version of Slow Train, making it sound better than it ever has. I’m not going to drone on about voices, and how these singers give new life to the material. But they do. I don’t need to tell you anything about Bob’s voice, its tenderness in these later years mixing with a road-worn timbre (she said politely). Watching excellent actors embody these songs sets light to them, shooting jolts of electricity through their hearts. And quite frankly, it is no bad thing to have an audience become agog at these lyrics because they can actually hear the deathless words perfectly. It all reinforced my great love for this material; you won’t believe how delightful it is to hear Like a Rolling Stone with a snippet of Make You Feel My Love in the middle. A pleasure to hear tracks from each decade too; it would have been easy to make it all 1960s stuff, given its relative proximity to the 1930s – acoustic renditions would have fitted seamlessly. Instead, there are just three songs from that decade, a welcome, gutsy, non-obvious choice. 





McPherson has set himself a challenge and pulled it off. He manages to evoke Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town as well as the work of Eugene O’Neill. He also makes you want to drag Street-Legal and Infidels out of storage. The songs run between 1963-2012, and each one is judiciously chosen. What Simon Hale, the orchestrator/arranger, has done with them will melt you in your seat; simple but ravishing, these often moving interpretations of music you know inside out will make you hear them anew. 



Girl from the North Country, described by McPherson as a ‘conversation between the songs and the story’, is full of life. It is about trying to find hope through suffering and making the best of it. Dylan’s ‘team’ approached McPherson to write and direct this play, no doubt having heard tell of his acclaimed works The Weir (which ran at the home of new theatre, the Royal Court) and Shining City. And of course we know that hands-off Bob is never quite hands-off; even though he played no part in the writing or arrangements of the dialogue or songs, he did send Jeff Rosen to attend rehearsals. The last time the canon was offered it was a flop, a Broadway show in 2006 that closed after three weeks. But this time, gold has been struck. I hope Bob gets to see it and I feel sure he’ll be very proud of this inspired play bearing his name. 

 

Donny McCaslin :: Rich Mix, London :: 15th November, 2016

Originally published on davidbowie.com in March 2017



Make no mistake, Donny McCaslin, this genial giant sax player from California, has had a distinguished career in jazz. He’s spent nearly three decades carving out a groove in modern jazz playing, starting with filling the huge shoes of Michael Brecker in the legendary fusion group Steps Ahead. With three Grammy nominations to his name, he’s become the trusted right-hand man of bandleader Maria Schneider, herself a multiple Grammy winner. The dreaded term ‘crossover’ has come to be applied in jazz to artists who break out of the somewhat closed jazz world (closed to mainstream rock/pop fans, in that sense) and make a break across the aisle. In the 70s it was Herbie Hancock who did it, and even before then Miles Davis – the greatest jazz artist of all time – had broken the mould, with Kind Of Blue becoming the best-selling, and most famous, jazz album of all time.


 

Historically, plenty of pop musicians (looking at you, Sting) have sought out jazz players on their records to give them a bit of cool. And as a lifelong jazz fan, Bowie was no different, taking on saxophonist David Sanborn and trumpeter Lester Bowie to play on his records, among others. Even Mike Garson, of course, is a jazz player. As we all know, Bowie was one of the great casting directors of our time. But beyond bit parts – musicians popping up – he had never given over an entire record to jazz musicians, until Blackstar. Everyone knows the story now. He wanted to continue his collaboration with Schneider after their magnificent foray with Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) in 2014. But she had already committed to her Grammy-winning Thompson Fields project. So she pressed a copy of McCaslin’s Casting For Gravity into his hand (having sent him this link to a live version of the track Stadium Jazz first) and suggested they visit Greenwich Village’s Bar 55 to see his quartet (with Mark Guiliana, Tim Lefebvre and Jason Lindner). McCaslin says he spotted Bowie sitting at a table with Schneider, tried to keep calm, as you would, and just concentrate on playing. Shortly after, he got an invite to perform on what would turn out to be Bowie’s last album. Since then, one imagines, his feet haven’t touched the ground as, suddenly, this brilliant, powerful quartet have become among the most famous jazz musicians in the world.


During a short European tour, McCaslin’s group (minus Lefebvre, whose regular gig – with the arena-filling Tedeschi Trucks Band – called; replaced by Jonathan Maron) called at Shoreditch’s Rich Mix, packing out the overheated main room and shaking the walls. They’d dropped into London to play some stuff from his new Beyond Now album, a follow-up to 2015’s excellent Fast Future. You could tell the crowd had some Bowie fans at their first jazz gig present; they looked a bit shell-shocked. As I heard someone say, listening to jazz on record is hardly like seeing it live. It’s so much more visceral, muscular, and frankly, louder than you can imagine, especially with a fusion quartet like the one McCaslin leads. The bass thundered. Lindner’s synthesiser textures lent a cosmic vibe reminiscent of the early 70s electric playing of Keith Jarrett when he was with Miles. Guiliana’s complex, intricate drumming evoked the greats; one can feel comfortable comparing him to all-time greats like Elvin Jones and Jack DeJohnette, alongside recent masters like Brian Blade and Kendrick Lamar’s drummer Ron Bruner Jr. That’s how good he is. Get his 2015 album Family First; you won’t regret it.


 

McCaslin leads this band through twisting and turning renditions of songs new and old. You might have expected Warszawa to be on the setlist; the band closed with it. Less expected but incredibly welcome were two more Bowie songs. First, one that caused the room to experience a sharp intake of breath – Lazarus. It sent a chill, until of course the sax came in where the voice should have been and then it took off, with the closing section containing some absolutely remarkable playing from McCaslin, who was on fire all evening. Then, a lovely surprise, the very familiar drum part of Look Back In Anger kicked in and off we went. The room was electrified. If you’d never seen a jazz gig before, or even if you’d seen 100, this was a top class night.


The Rocky Horror Show :: Playhouse London, September 19 and 26, 2015

RHS


The question that Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien has been asked most in his 73 years on this planet concerns what he thinks is the secret of the show’s success. People seem to be hoping for arcane knowledge, that he has a line to the abstract and can divine what exactly it is that has made his odd, subversive 50s-style rock and roll musical the biggest cult theatrical experience and movie of all time. Each time this question is asked he smiles benevolently, and answers very politely, as he is a very well mannered human, that he thinks it’s because the origin story is an eternal fairytale and has existed to intrigue audiences since time began since it is, essentially, a retelling of Adam and Eve (and Babes In The Wood, with a bit of Hansel and Gretel thrown in). There is innocence lured toward corruption by a snake, with human nature making it impossible to resist. For the snake, read: one of the greatest stage and cinematic creations of all time, Dr Frank-N-Furter; and for the apple, well, he’s offering a little bit more than a piece of fruit…

Along the way we have a murder, a touch of incest, transvestism, non-binary gendered characters, the hint of cannibalism, oral sex performed on both genders by the same person, straight sex with a virgin, gay sex with a sex slave, echoes of Frankenstein and King Kong, and the intimation of Americans engaging in Nazi-sheltering, all soundtracked by classic rock and roll. It’s quite a lot to fit into an hour and a half. It was written in 1972, so it was ripe for the times, as rock operas and hippie musicals pervaded. But this show is no Hair or JC Superstar (O’Brien starred in the former and was cast by Jim Sharman, who would later direct both the play and the movie, in the latter). There are no religious parables Godspell-style, anti-war polemics or longhaired hippies. Instead, it’s a science fiction horror tale that sits dead centre on the Kinsey scale and has just about zero gender/sexuality boundaries. Frank is not a woman, nor does he wish to be, nor does he dress as a woman. He is a man in a corset, stockings and suspenders, silk panties and platform heels. He wears manly leather and ladylike lace, delicate fishnet and tough chains. He’s a pansexual alien from, seemingly, a planet of transsexuals in a distant galaxy. He is the hero you swoon over, despite the fact that we see him treat his acolytes like slaves, hack someone to death (off screen) with a chainsaw, then serve the body for dinner. We hang on his every word and mourn when he is sacrificed at the end. If played right, every audience member must want to be seduced by him. That is some anti-hero.

In short, this play and its subsequent film are utterly bonkers with everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them. So tell me, Richard, why do you think it’s all been so successful? You’d forgive him for replying: ‘I really have no fucking idea. If I knew I’d have done it again’.

It wears its 1950s influences on its sleeve without ever being a rip-off; it’s too clever for that. The opening song – sung on stage by an usherette and by a Man Ray-inspired red lipstick covered mouth in the film, Patricia Quinn’s Magenta miming to O’Brien’s voice – Science Fiction Double Feature pays homage to Richard Smith’s childhood, which was spent in the cinema in Cheltenham, where he was born in 1942. He grew up in New Zealand (where he has since returned to ‘retire’), moving there in 1951 and returning in 1964 to become a stuntman and bit-part theatre actor. He chose for a new surname O’Brien, his mother’s maiden name, as inevitably there was already a Richard Smith in Equity. By the time he sat down to write this odd rock musical he was a married man with a baby son. He drew on his love of B-movies for this classic opening song, managing to name check:

The Day the Earth Stood Still, Flash Gordon, The Invisible Man, King Kong, It Came from Outer Space, Doctor X, Forbidden Planet, Tarantula, The Day of the Triffids, Night of the Demon and When Worlds Collide.

Just in one song! It sets out the stall for the rest of the play, which has at its heart a fairly pedestrian premise: an innocent young couple’s car breaks down on a rainy night; they see a house and ask the occupants for help. In both the original stage version and movie they are met by O’Brien’s Riff Raff (looking not unlike a Roxy-era Brian Eno), who lures them in with the promise of getting dry and using the phone. They’ve arrived on a rather special night, for the master’s creature is destined to be born. And we’re off. It’s all a bit Hammer Horror, which fits perfectly as the movie ended up being filmed on the old Hammer lot in Berkshire. With this simple premise comes a fast-moving tale of sex and horror and death, one which must always be driven by the master of the house, Frank, the mad scientist. I can’t say anything new about the remarkable Tim Curry, except that he owns every second of his on-screen performance. There is no moving footage of him on stage in the original 1973 Royal Court Theatre production but fortunately, for posterity, the movie captured in glorious Technicolour every flirtatious wink and facial expression, alongside that rich voice and electric sexual charisma. No actor can outdo that performance: you just have to make it different. Many have tried, and some have been very good indeed (like Jonathon Morris, Anthony Head – Murray’s brother, musical nerd fact – and a few others) but I didn’t think anyone had delivered a performance to rival the original… until I saw the show last week for the first time in 21 years. Step forward David Bedella, a 53-year-old Chicagoan actor best known for his Olivier-winning role as Satan/the Warm-Up Man in Jerry Springer: The Opera and an unlikely turn on Holby City (he’s an experienced West End/Broadway performer, having played Sweeney Todd, Billy Flynn etc.). He has said that he tried to do the English accent and it came out so much like Tim Curry it was abandoned in his first rehearsal in 2006. Using his own American accent, a deep and sonorous baritone for both speaking and singing, it changed the part completely and allowed for a new painting. Since then he has become a fan favourite and the go-to Frank. He played the role for the first time in 2006/7, then again in 2009/10 and was bound to get the call – no doubt over some much more famous actors – for this two-week engagement. I now can’t imagine anyone else playing this part on stage, which is a shame really considering that it’s fairly certain to be the final time both he and O’Brien will appear in it. His Frank is everything it needs to be: flirtatious, filthy, masculine, seductive, rapacious, cruel, funny, empathetic and incredibly, ridiculously, sexy.

My own Rocky Horror history goes back over 25 years. I’m fairly sure I first saw the movie in 1989, so I would have been 12 or 13. Perhaps it was on TV, as it’s just the kind of thing Channel 4 would put on in those days when they were actually fulfilling their own remit of interesting programming and not just reality guff. I fell in love. One might say the two imposing figures of my puberty were Jareth and Frank-N-Furter, who on the surface are not dissimilar characters. Both a little evil yet dominantly alluring, both make tempting offers to innocent virgins, both are banished at the end but appear to survive, both sing and wear skimpy pants and have expertly applied their eye shadow. It’s no wonder I’ve turned out like this. I think it best not to convey exactly how much I enjoy viewing men wearing fishnets and heels, but suffice to say it has informed my tastes to this day, as a devoted viewer of Drag Race and fan of all things androgynous. In 1990 there was a West End revival but I don’t think that I saw Tim McInnerny (from Blackadder) in the part. Memory can be unreliable but I believe that a very odd thing happened when I went to London to see this version. I was all set to see Tim in the role but, unless memory has let me down, he broke his arm the night before and had to pull out. As Frank has no understudy, a stand-in was used: to the extreme shock of everyone present, when his entrance song kicked in Richard O’Brien himself was playing the part. I don’t think he’s ever done it before or since. I recall that Ade Edmondson, a year before he’d debut Bottom, his masterpiece with the late great Rik Mayall, lent a kind of unhinged quality to Brad that had been previously unexplored. Connections abound: Tenpole Tudor played O’Brien’s Riff Raff, and would later take over for him again and deflate The Crystal Maze (about which I could write another article). Jonathan Adams played the Narrator, the part he originated in 1973; for the movie he was moved over to play Dr Scott so a famous name (Charles Gray, Blofeld from Diamonds Are Forever) could take over. What I am sure of is that I saw the next iteration with Anthony Head playing Frank the year after and also twice more in 1994, with Jonathon Morris, who was a revelation. I was also lucky enough to see the 21st anniversary show and witnessed Patricia Quinn reprising her stage and movie role as Magenta, with O’Brien as the doomed biker Eddie.

For the actors, it’s a bit of a strange ‘adult panto but worse’ vibe. There are, effectively, two scripts: that of the play, that of the audience. Heckles are established and well practiced. An actor can barely reach the end of a single line without having something shouted at them that has wildly varying levels of cleverness and wit. Creating space for pauses, getting a song to yourself, allowing comic timing and interaction with other performers are all on shaky, often absent, ground. It must be a weird show to be in, where the audience are such a part of the experience, though you do get to be a rock star for the night. It’s the kind of thing you need a break from, and perhaps that’s why I’ve not seen it live in so long. I love the movie and its exquisite timing, so being surrounded by people screaming out every 10 seconds can be intensely irritating. But, as the song goes, once in a while…

There have been tours in the last decade but they never quite registered with me. However, when I heard that Richard O’Brien was returning to the role of the Narrator, surely for the last time, I was drawn out of my Rocky hibernation and grabbed a ticket for the Saturday night, which I thought would be the last performance but the week-long run got extended to two (good job it wasn’t more, my debit card would have been begging for mercy). What a rush, what a beautiful teenage nostalgic rush it was. By the interval I knew I had to get a ticket to see it a second time. The crowd created a deafening noise and gave O’Brien a standing ovation before he’d said a word. He raised an eyebrow, always the commanding performer, and took all hecklers on with panache. David Bedella, however, is not one to be outshone. I’d heard that he was a fan favourite and now I understand why. The man owned that theatre, right to the back row. By miles, the best stage Frank I have seen, and probably that has ever played it. Interestingly, he’s the first gay actor to take on the part. I can’t figure out why it’s always straight men who play Frank but there we go, an odd fact. No particular reason I’m sure, in the same way as Hedwig (another character that owes a fair bit to Rocky Horror) is fairly often played by straight actors. Everyone played their parts with aplomb and the show was as tight as a drum, as you’d expect and as it has to be given the nature and timing of the audience participation aspects. It rattled along at a breathless pace and the songs seemed closer together than I remember; for that reason, I was struck by their sheer quality. From the iconic There’s A Light… to the blustering Hot Patootie (Eddie’s cameo, Meat Loaf in the film of course) to the classics (Time Warp, Sweet Transvestite, which were reversed in order in the play, changed for the film then kept that way), and my personal favourite, the suite of ‘floorshow’ songs at the end: Rose Tint My World/Don’t Dream It, Be It/Wild and Untamed Thing.

During that run of songs comes a delicate invocation, almost a limerick, of Frank’s origins, which I’ve always found rather sweetly poetic:

Whatever happened to Fay Wray
That delicate satin-draped frame
As it clung to her thigh
How I started to cry
For I wanted to be dressed just the same.


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Only now do we know how autobiographical that song is, as so late in life O’Brien, a three times married father and grandfather, came to terms with his status as transgendered (his word to describe himself, male pronouns are fine). He tells the story of his own struggle with his femininity: “I was six-and-a-half and I said to my big brother that I wanted to be the fairy princess when I grew up. The look of disdain on his face made me pull down the shutters. I knew that I should never ever say that out loud again.” It took him another 60 years and a long time in therapy and on the edge of breakdowns to speak out about feeling that he was, as he puts it, 70% male and 30% female (or third sex, a term he prefers). He has waited a long time to be himself; it’s ironic that the very person who started the conversation about types of trans-sexualities in the 70s should himself be out of that particular closet at such an important time for the trans movement.

The Rocky Horror Show, an unlikely phenomenon, continues to tour worldwide and play to packed houses. Now that this two-week London run is over it’s off on another national tour (albeit without Bedella and, of course, O’Brien), starting in Brighton at Xmas. Not bad for something that came to be performed by chance as part of a deal: its Australian director Jim Sharman had been engaged to direct at the Royal Court but only agreed on the proviso that they let the little room upstairs be used for this weird sci-fi B-movie musical he had fallen in love with and wanted to direct. Sixty-three people came night after night (including Bowie, allegedly) and it became so successful it transferred to Los Angeles, Broadway and then returned for a year in 1979 to the West End: it ran for nearly 3,000 performances. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) is in its 40th year the longest running movie of all time, but don’t forget it was a flop when it came out until the Waverly Theatre in Greenwich Village started showing it at midnight a year after its release (it still plays weekly there). The rest is history. Somewhere on earth, from Sao Paolo to Sydney, from Cologne to Colorado, it is always playing. As Roger Ebert once wrote, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not so much a movie as more of a long-running social phenomenon.” I was knocked out to see the audience at the Playhouse as engaged and excited as ever; half were dressed like they were going to an amateur fetish night, with plenty of kids half my age seeing the show live for the first time. Of course, every time I enjoy a show and have the chance to see it again I never pass up that chance. So the day after the show – I had been seated in the dress circle, not a bad view at all, if a little obstructed – I got another ticket for the penultimate performance, the matinee. This time on Row C, which was the fifth row, somehow. Proximity is everything.

The events of Saturday 26th were so surreal it would be, as you’ll see, ridiculous to not report them. I was all set to have a long day: a football match at White Hart Lane and then the matinee (oddly, at 5.30; they’re usually at 2.30) before the final show played at 8.30. On Friday, after a glass of wine, my aunt said she’d love to come with. She’d taken me to see it when I was a teenager. Don’t ask how, but she accidentally bought two tickets – K20 and B1 (the seat in front of me!) – and so the spare went to her best friend. Then my cousin came home and we tried to get a ticket for her as well, in D3 this time. So now we were all going, a little comically in four separate seats, three of which were by coincidence very close together. The seat next to me turned out to be free so for the second half we were all pretty much seated together. So, I went to the football (a 12.45 kick off) and it went… poorly. I walked out with 10 minutes to go, which I have not done for many years. In a dark mood, I headed into town and was regaining my composure on the South Bank at about 4.30pm when I got a text from my aunt: “Richard O’Brien, at the stage door, now!”

I jumped up and headed across Embankment Bridge. He was long gone by the time I arrived: everyone met one of my childhood heroes but me. Of course. That was how the day was going. Nevertheless, I was excited to see the show again, and so close to the front. It was again superb, though the crowd were a little dull. Some I suspect had just fancied going to the theatre and weren’t particular fans. They were won over by the remarkable lead, but it put into sharp relief how superb the audience had been the week before. During the first half a slightly bonkers thought occurred to me: I wonder if there are any spares for the very last show? No, I’m being ridiculous. I can’t go for a third time. But my companions egged me on and, at the interval, I went to the box office to check. There was one seat left, H20. Tempting. I went back in and resolved to let fate decide: if it was still there at show’s end I would get it. When I went back I asked if it was, “No, that one sold but one more came in, a return, in K21.” Meant to be. I bought it, had a quick dinner and came back to the theatre, like a crazy person. In my seat by 8.20, I got chatting to the gentleman seated to my right, a wardrobe dresser from Toronto. Then the seat on my left was filled by a lady; we smiled at each other and exchanged pleasantries. She was about my age, dressed in black, leather boots, very slim, long black hair, with some old tattoos (I got an old goth vibe). A short while after, her companions arrived, three men. One of whom I recognised immediately, I was certain I knew him. The show began, again, and was just marvellous. You’d never think they’d only finished the matinee an hour earlier. Tremendously enjoyable. I was resolved to ask her at the interval if the gentleman two seats over was who I thought he was. The conversation was so surreal I have to report it as it happened:

Me: [quietly] Excuse me, but can I ask you, that gentleman seated to your left, I think I recognise him; is it Peter Straker?

Lady: Yes, that is Peter, where do you know him from?

Me: I’m a big fan of Freddie Mercury; they were lifelong friends. For a Queen nerd like me he’s a legend. He even appeared in one of his videos (he’s the one in drag who isn’t Freddie or Roger).

We then made small talk for a few minutes, I asked her where she was from, she said Munich, we chatted about the show and then, the immortal question came:

Me: Have you seen the show before?

Lady: [smiling] Oh yes, many times, I’m Richard’s wife.

- blink -

- pause -

Me: Hm?

Lady: I’m Richard’s wife, Sabrina.

To say this was an unexpected turn of events would be an understatement. As I tried to remain cool and calm, we then chatted about him and his agelessness, the show (she stopped counting how many times she’d seen it at 200, she was a fan before she met him; they were friends for a decade before they married in 2013), New Zealand, where they live, how tough the flight is, how far removed their rural life is from London, his children and two grandchildren, how wonderful David is as Frank, etc. I told her how much I loved The Crystal Maze and that once I had written to the show asking to be on. The age limit was 16 and I was younger so I got a polite letter back from the producers and a personalised signed postcard from Richard, in silver pen (I have to find it, must be in Manchester in my bedroom somewhere), which I was thrilled about.

She was absolutely charming, very warm. It was all a bit distracting but the second half started and off we went, probably the last time I’d see the show for however many more years. We got up and danced the Time Warp. We cheered until we were hoarse. The show ended, as it has done each time I’ve seen it on this run, with a kiss between Bedella and O’Brien, who leave the stage arm in arm. I felt elated and grateful I’d taken this chance (I’ve never regretted seeing any show more than once). At the end, without being asked, she retrieved my jacket from the floor, and told me what a pleasure it was to meet me. I told her to tell her husband how loved he is in England and she said she would. This is the kind of thing that could only happen to me. The afternoon started badly and ended up being one of my more memorable days. Here’s to 40 more years of Rocky.




Morrissey :: Hammersmith Apollo, 21st September, 2015

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I hadn’t intended to write a word about this gig, my 16th time seeing Morrissey, but a few days ago he threw a tantrum and started saying it was the last UK show he’d ever do (on the site of the last Ziggy show, no less… stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before). The evening then took on a rather charged hue so here I am, writing yet again about this man who has become talismanic to me. The last time I saw him was November at the O2, nearly a year ago, but it feels longer. I’d done my back in the week before the gig and was not able to take my usual place in the pit (ok, just to the right of the pit, to avoid flying shirts and fights). Instead we had to perch halfway back, by the mixing desk because I couldn’t stand properly; nevertheless, it was a good show, with a great atmosphere, but I knew it could be better. He could be better; I could be better. He’s got a bit of a setlist problem sometimes, in that I don’t think he’s very good at balancing them out. Song choice isn’t particularly the issue, though even I was tested by ten songs from the new album at the O2 (out of 19 played). Looking back, it’s a bad setlist aside from the first two and last three songs, with the only break for a classic being the gorgeous Trouble Loves Me in the middle. For this section of his never-ending tour he’s reduced the number of new songs to five or six but rather than spread them out across the night he’ll do them in audience-energy-sapping batches. A bit unwise but like I said, he’s not very good at setlist design. It’s symptomatic of course of his general approach: he does it his way. He manipulates you in a hundred ways emotionally, and you prostrate yourself at his feet and beg for it. It’s an utterly unique artist-audience relationship. Do I believe that this really was his last UK show? I do not. I don’t believe he can walk away from this kind of love.

He does test you though. Having ditched Kristeen Young (for the second time) as a support act, he’s extended the video that has been playing before his stage entrance for some years. In my recollection, it used to be about 10 minutes long and took place when the house lights were off. Most people thought it was a short intro film and when they realised it wasn’t boredom and fidgeting set in. At least now he keeps the lights up, so everyone realises they’re going to have to sit/stand through 30 minutes of what goes on inside his mind. And quite the eye-opener it is too. Some of it’s pretty normal, unsurprising: The Ramones, the New York Dolls, Ike and Tina, and, in the past, The Small Faces, Jobriath, Eno, Nico, Francoise Hardy, even Tim Buckley. But interspersed between these music clips you get some outright weird shit. From poetry – Anne Sexton reciting Wanting To Die (cheerful) and an interview with Edith Sitwell – to a grainy 70s clip of Charles Aznavour, a brief interview with novelist James Baldwin, and a bit of prog-metal from System of a Down-adjacent band Mt. Helium (highly uncharacteristic of his taste), immediately followed by a movie clip of flamenco dance pioneer José Greco. Then, just when you think it can’t get weirder, on comes 60s comic Rex Jameson, as his cross-dressing alter ego Mrs Shufflewick. And just before the brief final clip, which is always drag performer Lypsinka, we get an indescribably weird song with Leo Sayer-as-a-clown. It’s all very Morrissey. It’s all very odd. Who else could get away with this? The things you’ll endure for love.

There’s something about seeing a second night played at the same venue. Not that I was sure the setlist would differ significantly, as you can never predict this man’s moods. He could just as easily have played the same songs in the same order as he had the night before. But he’s also capable of surprising me, and to my delight he made extensive changes, which he almost never does, letting go of What She Said (and its snippet of Rubber Ring, which would have been landmark to hear), Yes I Am Blind, two new songs, plus I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris, which I’ve always found dull. I’ve got a list going on Facebook of gigs I’ve seen, and perhaps the nerdiest aspect of it is the Moz song list. Eighty-six different songs played at 16 gigs over nine years and four months. So I’m checking the list now to see how many new songs I got to hear… seven! That is remarkable. The total now sits at 93.

He opened with an acapella line “If I made you feel second best, I'm so sorry I was blind” (from Always On My Mind) then launched into You’ll Be Gone, one of only 10 songwriting credits that had the name Elvis Presley listed (I suspect he didn’t do much writing for any of those). Let’s get the new song statistics out of the way first. That Elvis tune, obviously. Super obscure song Let The Right One Slip In, a B-side leftover from the Your Arsenal sessions (more Ronson production genius), check. Boxers, a one-off single to promote a 1995 tour, shoved on a compilation (World Of Morrissey) shortly after, check. My Dearest Love, B-side of All You Need Is Me (great song), check. Alma Matters, a bad pun and the first single from Maladjusted, which I thought I’d heard before, but hadn’t, check. Oboe Concerto, from the new album, let’s face it a rewritten version of Death Of A Disco Dancer, and almost as good, check. And finally, to push our devotion to critical mass, one of his most beautiful and most Moz-like songs ever, Will Never Marry. It’s mostly swelling strings, not much to sing, but every word is meaningful:

I’m writing this to say
In a gentle way, thank you, but no
I will live my life as I will undoubtedly die, alone
I’m writing this to say
In a gentle way, thank you
I will live my life as I
For whether you stay or you stray an inbuilt guilt catches up with you
And as it comes around to your place at 5 a.m., wakes you up
And it laughs in your face


I feel like I’ve been waiting to hear that song since the second I saw the video, in which he receives heartfelt expressions of love and affection from total strangers. If that is the last new song I ever hear him sing, I can live with that. But I don’t fall for all that drama; I think the tickets under-sold (they were very expensive) and he wanted to drum up some attention. And despite his lengthy list of issues with Bowie, I also think it was a little nod to the last Ziggy show. Without getting into too much detail, it’s fairly obvious that his whole ‘no record label wants me’ tantrum is bullshit. He has been offered countless deals and is known to turn them down because they are ‘360’, meaning that, like everyone else in music who is asked to sign a record contract, a slice of touring is part of the package due to the state of record sales. But since Moz lives in 1973 in his head – obsessed with airplay and chart positions, the quicksand last quarter of his autobiography is devoted to such statistics – he does not (perhaps understandably) want to give anyone a cut of the only way he makes money. So he remains unsigned. Then says nobody is interested in signing him. It’s a classic Moz move. Ever poetic, near the end, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard asking DeMille for her close-up, he tells the crowd, “our UK days conclude, but there is no need for me to say goodbye because we will all be close for the rest of our days” before launching into the last song of the night: a frenzied version of the ever-powerful and subversive The Queen Is Dead.

In the face of endless criticism for loving Morrissey, what is it exactly that makes me go again and again just so I can look at that square jaw and greying quiff? My gig-going companion saw him before we met at the Livid Festival in Brisbane in October 2002, 10 days no less after I saw Bowie at Hammersmith (that took some Googling!). I remember her telling me someone threw a bra onstage, which he picked up, made a disgusted face and threw back into the audience. Of course he did. He also played Meat Is Murder, bathed in red light, and that was it for her, that light-switches-on moment. I didn’t imagine when she took me to see my first show in 2006 that I’d equal the number of times I saw Bowie. She has a theory about him, which we’ve come to call ‘Morrissey is me’. I can’t do it justice but it’s about his flaws being our flaws. His imperfections and oddness and madness and anger and bitterness and vulnerability and aloneness being reflections of ours. He makes many mistakes and they are our mistakes too. And no matter how many people tell you Morrissey is a prick both online and to your face it only strengthens your adoration. Or something like that, I can’t get it right but I will never tire of hearing it. Why only this week, as I wrote this, another torrent of ridicule and humiliation has come his way, due to the release of his first, and surely last, novel List of the Lost. Nobody is taking any pleasure in reporting that it’s an unedited disaster, an unreadable mess that a renowned publisher like Penguin should hang their heads in shame over putting out in such a state. The reviews I’ve read are by wounded Moz fans who just feel let down by him (not for the first time), from Michael Hann at the Guardian to Medium’s Emily Reynolds; they seem to be in some sort of physical pain from having to report that the book is dreck. They took one for the team and read it so we don’t have to; the consensus is that it makes his Autobiography (which was brilliant until it wasn’t) look like Ulysses. But again, this only somehow strengthens everyone’s devotion. So he’s written an awful book, so what? Love can’t be extinguished by his poor judgement – if it could we’d all have abandoned him years ago.

Of course, he can go too far, even for me. I’m already a vegetarian man, because of you, what more do you want of me? He makes me sit through footage of animal slaughter, the backdrop to Meat Is Murder; usually it doesn’t get to me, but this time it really did. I was quite near the front, maybe 15 or 20 feet back, so I got hooked in for the first minute. To illustrate his point, which you know he feels he must make night after night, he has sought out the worst examples of animal cruelty, factory farming. It’s too much for a lot of people; many look away. Cows imprisoned in tiny cages. Chickens having their beaks sliced off. That kind of thing. But of course, the very worst examples of slaughter practices are the creation of halal and kosher meat, so I’m confronted with the unedifying spectacle of Hebrew and Arabic captions stating that a lot of the footage is taken from Middle Eastern slaughterhouses, which makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. This is a language I have a tattoo in (shalom: peace), below my Morrissey tattoo, and it appears on screen as writhing, distressed animals’ throats are slit and blood pours out as their lives drain away. Stunning animals (so, it’s said, they aren’t conscious as they are slaughtered) is accepted worldwide as the only humane part of this animal losing its life so someone can eat a burger but it is banned in kosher/halal processes, for spurious reasons of course, as is true of most religion-based rulings. Too complex to go into the details (Google ‘shechita’ if you’re interested) but of course it makes for a snuff film that this trapped audience must tolerate. Of course, he goes too far sometimes and in interviews has compared the daily animal slaughter to the Holocaust, which despite my passion for animal welfare I find to be way over the line. Nevertheless, when you must stand and listen (even if you look away from much of the footage, as I did) to sound clips of cows mooing, with those brutal lyrics, which he now embellishes to make the audience feel as bad as possible, well, anyone would come away feeling sick. And that’s what he wants.

Earlier in the show, not to neglect humans, during Ganglord the screen shows extreme footage of police brutality, including murders of innocent, mostly African-American, citizens by power-crazed cops. More snuff films. This is who he is. You walk into his house, where you’re held captive and confronted with the worst of humanity, the worst of human behaviours. And yet, in between songs he makes you laugh hard, he gives you every droplet of sweat from his body, he encourages fans to try to make it onto the stage to touch him, he reaches down and touches as many hands as he can. This is the dissonance that makes us go back again and again.

On the musical side, he’s finally added some nuance and subtlety to his band, who’ve been slogging on behind him for a decade or more, with occasional member changes. Mostly this comes in the form of Colombian-American Gustavo Manzur, who plays keyboards, trumpet, accordion, flamenco guitar, and even steps forward to sing the last half of Speedway in Spanish. He’s genuinely added something new, a Latino flavour which fits perfectly, to the proceedings. He joined in 2009 but his impact has grown year on year, with his influence felt in all corners of World Peace Is None Of Your Business. The new Alain Whyte is finally here.

After Meat Is Murder, which only a heartless person would be untouched by, he creates a calm after the storm as we reach the show’s end. It’s like he’s thanking you for sitting through the red light, torture and feedback by playing one of his sweetest, gentlest, most touching songs, Now My Heart Is Full. It’s the perfect five words. It’s how every fibre of my being feels during one of his concerts. That man gave me life in Hammersmith and will do so again today and the next day. He is me, I am him, and we are all together.

The gig ends in chaos of course, like all of his do. The crowd surges forward to catch his discarded shirt, with the fight for it broken up by exhausted security guards and their scissors long after the lights have come up and the venue is nearly empty. They don’t want to let go. That, I understand. Until the next time.

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You'll Be Gone / Let The Right One Slip In / Suedehead / Speedway / Ganglord / Boxers / World Peace Is None Of Your Business / Kiss Me A Lot / Staircase At The University / Alma Matters / Will Never Marry / My Dearest Love / The Bullfighter Dies / The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores / Oboe Concerto / Meat Is Murder / Now My Heart Is Full / Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed / I Will See You In Far-Off Places / Everyday Is Like Sunday // The Queen Is Dead






Fleetwood Mac :: O2, London, 24th June 2015

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In 1997, during a visit to London, I saw The Dance, a VH1 concert that Fleetwood Mac had been persuaded into reforming for; Lindsey Buckingham had been out of the band for a decade by then, with the exception of an appearance at, erm, Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball in 1993 (he’d used Don’t Stop as his campaign song). I was instantly smitten by such perfectly formed songs – I also developed quite the crush on Lindsey, I freely admit. More than that, I was utterly entranced by Stevie’s voice and that whole lace-clad ethereal gypsy persona (much copied, stand up Florence, Courtney Love (love this cover), and many more). She threw him some serious shade, as they sang to each other:

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain.


I’d never seen anything like it, that charged connection between two singers, and his incredible, intuitive guitar playing, without a pick, which was another first for my eyes. I knew very little about them, but learned fast, via the BBC’s brilliant Rock Family Trees documentary series. I may have a tendency toward sonic oddities, but I love, just absolutely love, impeccably sophisticated pop music, which no doubt comes from being raised on Motown and the Beatles/Stones. I never bought into the idea that Fleetwood Mac were bland soft rock. They are not The Eagles. I think that attitude toward them came from post-Peter Green snobbery, based around the opinion that a blues band is more authentic and should be more respected than a band who ditches that style entirely and brings the hippy Californians in so they can become huge-selling. The Fleetwood Mac of the late 60s and early 70s is dramatically different in tone from the Buckingham/Nicks version and I think English blues fans, my parents included, felt they had lost something. To me, they had moved forward, with only the band name remaining the same. Peter Green’s FM are great, but the mid-70s output is what I fell for. I also only recently discovered the album that got the Yanks into the band, the superb Buckingham Nicks, which has never been reissued or remastered on any format since it came out in 1973.

Everyone knows the tales – addiction, rehab, affairs, divorces, rancour, break-ups; they embodied that 70s private jet, separate limos, bowls of coke excess – and to an extent that lived experience is part of the attraction if you see them live. You’re paying to see Stevie and Lindsay, who met in high school and were together for almost a decade, a lifetime ago, give each other the side-eye and bicker. You’re there to witness that attraction between them that will never end. You get the feeling neither is still entirely comfortable with having to spend their professional lives together, playing out songs from their break-up every night on stage, like a lifelong version of The Mousetrap, but they accept they are destined to stand on stage together, holding hands, until someone drops. Neither seems to be easy to get on with either. Lest we forget, in 1987, with a tour for their hugely well received comeback album Tango In The Night already booked, Lindsey airily announced at a band meeting that he had had enough and was leaving. Stevie chased him out of his own house, pinned him to a car bonnet and tried to strangle him. These rock tales are part of the attraction, but there is also clearly genuine affection between them, if a little sadness on her part. By virtue of biology, men get to move on in ways women can’t, inhibited by time. In his 50s Lindsey (now 65) met a blonde woman just over half his age and got married, then had a family; Stevie has said she knew it was finally over when his first child was born. A woman is not afforded that same luxury. Stevie married her best friend’s husband in the early 80s, a few months after losing her (cancer grief makes people do odd things), annulling the marriage a few months later, but she seems not to have had a significant relationship since, aside from one in the 90s with a younger non-famous man. It fell apart because, she said, they couldn’t go anywhere because of her fame. I get the sense she never got over Lindsey, that he is her great lost love. Incidentally, how weird must it be for his wife to see him holding his ex’s hand, singing to her every night? He’s worked through it all – it might be easier when love is found again – and you can tell he’s spent a long time in therapy just from the way he talks about full circles and patterns, that slightly loopy Esalen-style psychobabble. That story, that dynamic, is how you get drawn in, true enough, but if the music was average your attention couldn’t possibly justify the investment. It’s those songs; they are for the ages. I’d walk a million miles to hear their masterpiece Landslide, which has taken on such a poignant ache now the duo are approaching 70….

I took my love and took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Till the landslide brought me down

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Well, I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too


There is also one, very new, X factor in this soapy drama: the return of Christine McVie (the oldest, at 71). If Lindsey’s tenure out of the band had ground them to a halt between 1987 and 1997 (they toured without him after his Tango tantrum but it was half-hearted), Christine’s departure in 1998 didn’t change the band’s plans. They toured without her because they had the momentum, even though it wasn’t the same and led to the loss of many great songs from the setlist (Say You Love Me, Everywhere, Little Lies, Songbird, You Make Loving Fun). She was happy and had retired to the Kent countryside; nobody expected her to return to the band, who, remember, have weathered the departures of Spinal Tap levels of members. Peter Green took too much acid, went mad and left. Jeremy Spencer got plucked off the street in LA by a religious cult and went off down his own path (still touring and making music at least). Danny Kirwan’s alcoholism got him fired. Bob Weston was fired for having an affair with Mick’s wife. And so on. So they are used to moving forward when a member has had their day. But it felt different with Christine. She’s always been the heart of the band, a hugely gifted songwriter and keyboardist, with a flawless voice, and her returned presence alone seems to just knit everything together. Stevie is visibly happier since she returned, following a one-off 2012 appearance at the O2 that last year turned into full un-retirement (she’s older than Bowie. It’s never too late. I’m just saying). Everyone seems thrilled she is back; they’re genuinely having a grand old time doing what they were born to do. The vibe on stage is warm and filled with energy. Mick and John in particularly are quite a pair of old boys, travelling musicians, on the road for nearly 50 years together. It’s what they do, it’s who they are. It’s life, living in hotels, always on the move, the adrenalin ups and managed downs (not with mountains of coke, these days, fortunately).

I’d never seen them live before; I’d been tempted on many occasions in the last decade but somehow never got round to it, perhaps it never felt right. I’m glad now that I didn’t see them without Christine – those five people are special, you can’t replicate that chemistry with just the four. For a while there I thought I might not see them ever, what with John McVie’s cancer diagnosis last year. He was looking a little grey around the gills (he’s 69) and only a few weeks ago talked about how he’s not got much more touring left in him, which is understandable. His musical partner and best friend Mick Fleetwood (68 and behaves like a teenager) is going to tour until he drops dead on stage, of that I am quite certain. His energy levels put us all to shame; he’s a funny, eccentric man who would have fitted in quite nicely to a Bonzo Dog Doo Dah line-up. He once played a fish in Star Trek: TNG you know. Anyway, my excitement level for this gig was sky high, as I’d loved this band for nearly two decades. I think perhaps the moment I realised they were for me back in 1997 was this crazy brilliant solo version of Big Love, where Lindsey plays both rhythm and lead parts at the same time; it’s a remarkable piece of work, I still have no idea how he does it. People don’t play guitar like him anymore, the way he does it, with all the solos and O-faces (seeing Santana next month, mind you, am expecting a two-hour-long solo). I wasn’t certain if they played it live, and given that the version from The Dance is nearly two decades old, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d chosen to play it a bit safer (with full band, like the original). So, I was utterly thrilled to hear the acoustic version exactly like I remembered it, now that was a serious highlight.

The big tunes kept coming, breathlessly, with the three singles from Tango In The Night – Big Love, Everywhere, Little Lies – getting huge responses. As many fans present were in their 40s and grew up hearing those late 80s singles as remember Rumours from the 70s. The only lengthy interludes, aside from a ridiculous drum solo (is there any other kind?), were a pair of songs back-to-back that saw them play around beautifully outside of their comfort zones as four-minute pop song purveyors. I’m So Afraid had such prog majesty it bordered on Pink Floyd-esque. But my highlight was a dramatic, lengthy, epic version of Gold Dust Woman, with Stevie doing her twirling mystical thing and the band getting a real head of steam on.

Oh, Stevie Nicks (the youngest of the five at 67). As 70s icons go – Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell – she is in their exalted company, easily. Her voice has no high range these days but she’s developed this gorgeous, deep, gravelly, powerful tone that has no trouble at all delivering these songs. She’s just so likeable, too; she exudes a kind of maternal kindness. And to have her girl Chris back in the band, it’s just added so much to the dynamic, musically and personally (interesting section in there about how they both felt unable to have families, like the men did). Stevie, incredibly, was only accepted into the band in the first place because Mick wanted her boyfriend in to play guitar and they were a package deal. They had no idea what they had; what a singer/songwriter she is, well able to write beyond the band too – her 1981 solo album Belladonna is superb (there’s no beating Edge Of Seventeen, a classic, or Leather and Lace, a Don Henley duet). She told a long, entertaining story before Gypsy – she probably tells the same one every night but I don’t care – about how she and Lindsey supported some of the big bands in San Francisco in the late 60s (Hendrix, Santana, Janis, who she is not a million miles away from, a pop version if you like). Her day job, as a waitress, supported them both while they toiled away, waiting to be discovered. There was a clothing store in the Bay Area, called The Velvet Underground (said without irony; how many minds but mine in the O2 wandered to think of the band?), which sold hippy clothes to the local rock stars, like Janis and Grace Slick. Stevie would go in and know she couldn’t afford anything, but dreamed of being able to buy something without looking at the price tag, which she went back and did only a few years later. Like most stories told by people in therapy/recovery she makes it a paean to not giving in, believing in yourself and following your heart/dreams and all that kind of West coast guff. Gypsy’s opening lyric, of course, runs:

So I'm back, to the velvet underground
Back to the floor, that I love
To a room with some lace and paper flowers
Back to the gypsy that I was
To the gypsy... that I was
And it all comes down to you
Well, you know that it does


I enjoyed the story, it was well told, and the song itself has a beautiful simplicity to it, which is not something you could accuse this band of too much. Their Rumours follow-up, the sprawling but not unlistenable double album Tusk, cost over $1m to make and Lindsey was so out of it, and being an unbearable control freak, he thought it sensible to hire a 112-piece marching band for the title track. Fleetwood Mac are why punk had to happen.

Anyway, regardless of their crowded and complex history, and disparate personalities, all given equal front-time, when they are on stage they click into that rhythm that all great bands have, and everything just works like magic. You get exactly what you want, without that predictability ever being a bad thing; this was their 95th gig of the tour and it still felt fresh as gig 1. You sing and do embarrassing white person dancing and everyone is just so happy. What more could anyone ever want from a gig? I hope I get the chance to see them many more times.


The Chain
You Make Loving Fun
Dreams
Second Hand News
Rhiannon
Everywhere
I Know I'm Not Wrong
Tusk
Sisters of the Moon
Say You Love Me

(Acoustic Set)
Big Love (Lindsey solo)
Landslide
Never Going Back Again

Over My Head

Gypsy
Little Lies
Gold Dust Woman
I'm So Afraid
Go Your Own Way

Encore:
World Turning
Don't Stop
Silver Springs

Encore 2:
Songbird (Christine solo at piano)


Laura Marling :: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London :: April 30th 2015

Richard Etteridge credit
Photo by Richard Etteridge


Not for the first time, I had a moment of realisation last night. There’s an endless list of reasons why I love gigs so much but I think a big one is the utter immersion of it. You’re in a dark room, with strangers. You don’t have anything to worry about, you leave (you should leave) your work/life stresses at the door. You’re shut in. Sound and visual stimulation sweep the space. Anything could be happening outside that room and you wouldn’t know about it. An asteroid could have knocked out half of Europe, austerity riots could be in full swing, a lake of fire could be where the Thames was, or a politician could have nearly done the full Madonna and stumbled off a stage on Question Time. Ok, that last one actually happened. But nothing matters outside the room. It’s like a football match, it’s the most pure here and now of a moment. You’re transported somewhere. Of course, not all gigs are the same. The average, good and sometimes even great ones can cause my attention span to wander (that’s what nearly two decades of being online will do to you)… what Tube route should I take home (for the South Bank I’ve taken to walking across the bridge by Embankment station, it’s lovely)? I wonder if I will get any work in tomorrow? I wonder if that person will reply to that email? Should I get a snack on the way home (I shouldn’t)? I hope I get Dylan tickets in the morning (I did). Some of it boring detritus, some is important thoughts that you wish you weren’t thinking. But not last night, not with Laura Marling. There was no distraction that floated in. I was immersed, rapt, dazzled, by this gifted young woman.

In the current age, where media training faces off in a heavyweight battle with the over-share, we both dread and desire the knowability of the famous. It’s not a new thing, prying into the private lives of people whose creativity has a crucial presence in our lives. I’m sure that admirers and benefactors hounded Mozart about his marriage, while Lennon’s wife and child were hidden from the public in the white-hot glare of early Beatlemania, and this was all before the advent of the internet. Yet, women in music seem to occupy a more studied, criticised, judged place. Perhaps the ground zero for this is Joni Mitchell, an article about whom is never written without mentioning the men she’s slept with and been disappointed by. In her rare but always compelling interviews (try to ignore the interviewer, a now-disgraced Canadian journalist, Google him at your peril) she seems to constantly exist in a state of bitterness at being treated a certain way by the music industry (meaning: men). This is how she is defined – by the male gaze. It’s how she’s defined by others and, despite being brilliant and insightful and worth more, it’s how she defines herself. She always has a bad word to say about her treatment, not without cause. And Marling has been subject to the same clichés, as each article and interview mentions how many folk band boyfriends she’s had (the singers from Noah and the Whale, and Mumford and Sons, articles are keen to tell us) and how she moved to America because she fell in love with a boy, and then they broke up and she’s back here now and she might be single, might not be… and so on. Is this newsworthy? Only if you care about that kind of thing. Does it matter even a tiny fucking amount when you listen to her songs? No.

On stage, it is only about music. Nothing else matters. She barely speaks to the audience. Dylan, incidentally, almost never says a single word between songs. Saving his voice perhaps? (eyebrow raise). She says hello about 20 minutes in, after the first suite of songs, played without breaks, has ended, as the applause and energy that has built up over those minutes explodes. The only other time she speaks is 10 minutes before the end, where she gives a short speech about how she did an encore for the first time the other night, didn’t like it, isn’t going to do it again, and if you want one, well, it’s about to happen right now. She said she had been giving variations on that ‘encore’ speech for the last 8 years. It was charming and the audience lapped it up. Perhaps they had been crying out to be verbally connected to? I hadn’t. I don’t need to know her. I was inside the songs, mesmerised by her voice and the film playing on a big screen behind her. I thought at first it was a photograph of a desert vista: a late afternoon, a low mountain range in the background, with two trails of sandy footprints leading towards (or away from, if you want to think of it that way) the camera. But when I would lose track of it just for a minute or two a small thing would change, like a time-lapse tableau; a half-moon appeared in the distance, the lighting changed, at first imperceptibly, and then the sky started to get darker, glacially slowly. Near the end of the show, time started to move faster – car headlights appeared in the distance, snaking from left to right across a northern California highway. The moon disappeared, and then real darkness fell. The camera started to tilt up inch by inch as the stars came out. By the end the mountains and sand were out of sight and a million pinprick holes glittered, like a shot from the Hubble Telescope. By the time the stars had arrived, and as she sang the aching, poignant Goodbye England (Covered In Snow), given added meaning now she has returned to live here, I felt myself well up and wondered if I could experience a more pure moment than this.

music-laura-marling-qeh-by-kate-goodacre
She had stood, dressed in white and barefoot, in front of subtle spotlighting, which formed a halo above her platinum pixie-cut. A three-piece band (Pete Randell, guitar; Nick Pini, bass/double bass; Matt Ingram, drums/percussion) played neatly, tightly, with precision, yet were able to let loose when required, behind her. I had seen her live once before, at a pretty strange Secret Cinema gimmick gig. Walking around a converted school with hipsters in flapper/tux fancy dress, I had almost forgotten I was there for a concert. She played in a gym/sports hall at the end of the night and it was extremely good but by then, after 3 hours of walking around, I was pretty disengaged. This time I was fully present. She is more electric (in every sense) these days, and it seems to me that great efforts at moving her guitar playing forward have taken place. She’s not at a St Vincent level of virtuosity, but she certainly has improved her already very good guitar playing by several levels. Very little acoustic material was played – many of the songs were just her on guitar, but it was a beautiful Dobro resonator, half-electric/half-acoustic sound that rang out, led by a powerful, but delicate when it has to be, voice that will need to be protected (roll-ups are a favourite; she’d do well to note that Joni can no longer sing because of smoking). Age shouldn’t be a factor but it is rare, very rare, that someone who a couple of months ago turned 25 should already have five albums so carefully crafted and mature under her belt. The level of songwriting technique at that age I’ve only seen in Joni before (and Dylan, as my dad insisted I say). Whether she is capable of the level of invention and innovation that Joni reached in the rest of her 20s and 30s who can say? Comparisons may be unfair but they also feel right: this majestic track from Short Movie, Gurdjieff’s Daughter (what a warm and playful video, incidentally), which wasn’t played unfortunately, has that fragrant scent of Hejira’s Coyote about it (don’t tell the estate of Marvin Gaye, they’ll be on the phone to a lawyer before the song’s over).

She exudes a kind of icy diffidence; she knows how good she is and isn’t wasting time and words by pretending to be your pal, your mate. She’s not in it for Spinal Tap-style ‘Hello Cleveland!’ sucking up. Without appearing arrogant, or the wrong side of aloof, she projects a mix of toughness and vulnerability. She also manages, remarkably, to not fall prey to the class-based bias that seems to affect artists whom the media designates as annoying or unworthy of success since they are felt to have gained an unfair advantage because of their white middle/upper-class-ness. Anyone else – she is actual aristocracy, the 5th generation of baronets and knights from affluent Hampshire – would get it in the neck for being a toff. I guess you have to be this good to bat away that kind of classist nonsense seemingly without any effort.

Most of her new album, Short Movie, was played. The title derives from a hippy, who turned out to be a shaman (of course, if you will live in California…), she befriended in a bar; he would say, at the end of sentences, ‘It’s a short fucking movie, man’. You get the sense she doesn’t have an interest in wasting a single minute. In a sense, the songs run into each other, but that doesn’t mean they don’t stand out. There’s just a beautiful flow to the evening, tracked by the level of control she exerts over every breath, every word. She runs through a litany of perfectly formed songs, relying heavily on Short Movie and its predecessor, Once I Was An Eagle. Time is also found for a gorgeous, delicate rendition of one of the great blues standards, Jackson C. Frank’s Blues Run The Game. Having a go at, and nailing, a song covered by everyone from Nick Drake to Simon and Garfunkel, Bert Jansch to Sandy Denny, puts you in rarefied air, where she sits with ease. Looking at the setlist, the song titles are quite bland, without much personality. Titles like How Can I, What He Wrote, You Know, Breathe, False Hope, Walk Alone, I Feel Your Love. Nothing titles. It’s hardly The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores (oh Moz, master of the pithy song title, so much to answer for). I listen to her albums while I work and that means I know all the songs but aside from the odd one, like Master Hunter, I tend not to know what they’re called anyway. It doesn’t matter. She’s building a collection. It always feels like a privilege to sit in a room and, speaking as a non-creative person, have an artist express themselves at you, to you. I could never tire of it if I went to 1000 gigs.

At the best shows, I sometimes am overcome by a heavenly feeling. Not that I believe in it, a literal version of heaven. Of course I don’t. But if it existed, that’s what I would want it to be. The music I love, surrounded by happy strangers and friends, playing for all eternity. I’ve felt that way hundreds of times. That if I was stuck in one day, I’d want it to be this one day. This one great night. At its best, that’s exactly how music should make you feel. Add up all those great nights, and you can make a great life.


Howl
Walk Alone
Take the Night Off
I Was an Eagle
You Know
Breathe
I Feel Your Love
How Can I
What He Wrote
Rambling Man
Love Be Brave
False Hope
Master Hunter
Strange
The Muse
Warrior
Sophia
Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)
Blues Run the Game
Daisy
Worship Me
Short Movie

The Cure :: Hammersmith Apollo, 23-12-14

The-Cure-Perform-At-Event-012
Photograph: Gaelle Beri/Redferns via Getty Images


I was a slightly odd teenager. I know, not a big shock. Fairly sheltered, I didn’t go to friends’ houses nor did they come to mine (they lived too far away, we had no car) and I spent the weekends with my grandparents, and from 1990 onwards just gran, who really raised me as much as my parents did. I didn’t go out partying until I was nearly 17 (which I turned in October 1993); gran would visit London and I’d be left to my own devices in her flat, where adult merriment was had. Before then, in the more innocent late 80s and very early 90s, I’d spend time watching old movies and mountains of music videos. Pop promos were the big thing in those days; they actually mattered to a career and defined bands and their songs. I taped the videos for new singles onto VHS and played them until they wore out and watched the more niche clips on TV shows (like ITV’s Raw Power) that ran well after midnight. I remember staying up late to watch the premieres of Madonna and Michael Jackson videos on Channel 4: a new pop promo was a huge deal in those days and warranted great fanfare. I didn’t have MTV, so I would tape hours of it when I went down to London to visit my aunt and uncle and their little ones. The MTV rock show Headbangers Ball was a fave, I was really into metal in those days. Anything slightly weird and/or outside of the charts caught my eye and ear, functioning alongside the musical education I was receiving from my parents. I haven’t watched MTV in years but I don’t think they put much music on now, and the videos they do put on are simple – pedestrian pop music with ladies in various states of undress. Anyway, one night I was watching 120 Minutes, their flagship alternative/indie show. It was late 1990, I was shortly about to turn 14, and this video came on.

I had never seen anything like it. It looked like what would now pass for an episode of American Horror Story. A band with big backcombed hair (and not in a Motley Crüe kind of way) and plenty of poorly applied foundation and red lipstick (men in make-up had been my thing since childhood; as I said: odd kid). It was a big dark pop tune, with an unusual voice selling it to me. The video told a tale of a carny sideshow. I had never seen anything like it. Last night, I got to hear that song, Never Enough, 24 years after I fell in love with that pop group, The Cure. I got the ticket by chance. With the closure of the essential Scarlet Mist, a face value ticket exchange, which I have benefitted from so very many times, I’ve been on the lookout for a new ticketing marketplace in order to avoid being ripped off by touts if my admittedly famed ticket-getting karma fails me. The most reliable source now is Twickets, an app (no use to me, my phone purposely has no online access) and Twitter feed. For no particular reason I was browsing my feed and a post popped up offering a ticket to see The Cure at the Hammersmith Apollo. Less than a minute had passed and I was the first to reply. I had no time to think, I just did it. Be ready to take your chances, I always say. A lovely Scouse girl had a spare, and was coming down for the show. Several excitable texts later and the ticket was mine. I met a friend at the venue and tried to prepare, for I had been warned by friends, you see, to steel myself. I already knew that they play long shows. I mean, Springsteen long. The night before they’d done a 40-song setlist. Forty songs. Ok, this is not The Grateful Dead, and their 15+ minutes of meandering solos. These are short, sharp, perfect pop songs. But still, that equated to quite the marathon, and I ain’t as young as I used to be, so my standing ticket was going to be a bit of a challenge. Wisely, I suggested we go over to one side, just behind the disabled section (where a fight nearly broke out later, due to a drunken idiot, but that’s another story) and perch by the wall, so we could lean on something. Very smart move, it turned out. For I was to get 40 songs too, and the longest gig I’ve ever seen by a single band (the previous record was Bowie, in the same venue in 2002: 33 songs and 2½ hours or so).

The support act was terrible, though the hardcore at the front seemed to like them. I didn’t realise there were still lead singers who took themselves that seriously. A bit of Ian Curtis crossed with Jim Morrison and the talent and presence of neither. A bit shoegaze-y and a bit goth, you could see why they’d been chosen. Interminable though. I remembered there’s a reason why I usually spend the minutes leading up to the headliner in the pub. They were called And Also The Trees and, as it turns out, having just researched them (they’re The Cure’s pet project, I’m unsurprised to learn), they’re ancient. That makes it worse somehow. A new band being so derivatively naïve you wouldn’t mind, you’d think it was almost sweet. Now I see they’ve been around for 30+ years – get a new act. Please. You don’t do gloomy torch songs well, move on.

The crowd seemed arranged by age: young sweet alt kids at the front; in the middle, the fans in their 20s, out of university and letting their hipster flag and luminescent hair fly. Then, in the good standing spots, the rest of us in our 30s and 40s, being sensible and not wishing to get pushed around. I’ve been each one of those groups; now and then I dip in and turn the clock back but mostly I’m the one near the bar these days, nodding and singing along; mentally, and subconsciously, noting everything. I know as much about The Cure as I do any other band from the 80s and 90s I’ve loved for years, because even though I’m certain they make new albums, I don’t pay attention to them. I’m not sure anyone outside their fanbase does. But I knew they had an august reputation as a live band, because I have a couple of friends who adore them. Strangely, I’m scooping up all the classic bands at the moment, not entirely accidentally or on purpose, and this felt like another one to tick off. See ‘em before they pop off, Leah said to me a couple of years ago, after we saw some ancient pop star I forget the name of. She’s right. It sounds a bit doomy but we’re living in an age where nearly all the great rock stars of the 50s are gone (Fats, Little Richard, Jerry Lee and Chuck are clinging on, that’s it really) and the ones of the 60s and 70s are about to start dropping like flies (the brilliant Joe Cocker left us as I was travelling to this gig). In the next decade we will lose people that… well, let’s just say I’m glad my mother won’t be here to see it. There’s a reason Lou going hit so hard, the great unspeakable truth of it is too much to contemplate... Those parts of your life since youth, those artists and iconic figures – they taught you, you made yourself out of them. They won’t be here forever.

Of course, Robert Smith is 55 and his lifelong bandmate Simon Gallup (as always, a hot tattooed quiffed rockabilly goth) is 54 so I don’t refer to them. I mention it because in 2015 I’ll be seeing a bunch of old geezers do their thing. Queen (and the terrifically entertaining Adam Lambert) in January, a band I’ve waited for a quarter of a century to properly see. The first band I loved. In March, The Who. In June, Fleetwood Mac (waited 18 years for that one). Then, ridiculously, Bette Midler in July (which will be a highly entertaining old school vaudeville throwback). Then Santana, the week after. Of all people! Rock history, right there, dad has persuaded me I must see him. In between all that, yes, I’ll see Tune-Yards and Flying Lotus and FKA Twigs and who knows who else, but I’m going on a 2015 tour of rock history (including two acts who played Woodstock, for goodness sake). So in that spirit, The Cure, as one of the favourite bands of my teen years, found themselves on that bucket list of bands to see.

And I have to say, it was one of the great pop concerts I have ever seen. Most gigs follow patterns, delineated by the material – new, old and/or obscure (deep cuts, B-sides, remember those?). The flow of a concert will be consistent with a new artist (like the aforementioned FKA Twigs, say), as everyone’s there to hear the new album. Someone with a few records under their belt (like Arcade Fire) will play half new/half old setlists, with the temperature hovering around a simmer, going up to a boil for the songs everyone loves. The Cure somehow managed to keep it at a consistent boil throughout with the occasional wild mad energy jump for the biggest hits. Even the songs of theirs I didn’t know, and there were plenty, felt familiar and were a joy to hear.

As a writer, Robert Smith knows well enough how to work incredibly hard and make it look easy. He’s so gifted as a creator of pop music; the songs are just unutterably pleasant to listen to even if they’re strangers to you. You manage to forget exactly how many, for want of a better word, ‘famous’ songs he’s written. With the exception of one of the great 90s pop tunes, Friday, I’m In Love, and Let’s Go To Bed they played everything any gig-goer could have wanted. The show was so compelling, so brilliantly executed, I forgot what hadn’t been played yet and the third and fourth encores were a blizzard of hits that genuinely surprised me. It was a special night. I made a quick exit as they played their last song and that was as the show ticked over to the three hours and ten minutes mark. I had so many moments where my brain went ‘Aw, wow, I forgot about this one!’ Like when they started the gorgeous Pictures Of You. I had simply forgotten it existed, so rapt was I by the performance. Every part of each song was delivered with care: not a note was wasted. Propulsive drumming (Jason Cooper, magnificent, drove the whole show), flawless keyboard parts (Roger O’Donnell, who has been in and out of The Cure for 27 years), Gallup’s winding, sonorous bass played like a lead guitar, and Smith’s voice sounding just like the records, strong and slightly whiny, but charming. No backing vocalists – it was all just him, though I admit I couldn’t hear a word of his between-song mumbling, though I could gather he was content and happy to be there. The chemistry between Smith and Gallup is always such a pleasure to watch, those two old stagers doing their thing for the 38th year in a row.

I also derived some amusement from the guitarist recently drafted in – our old friend Reeves Gabrels (note: their current absent long-term guitarist Porl Thompson is now a trans woman called Pearl, how wonderful). A lifetime, a century, ago (1999) he was fired by Bowie because of his coke habit. He’s obviously sorted his life out and it was quite nice to see him back, looking well, with Doc Brown-esque plug socket hair, and adding a great new sonic palate to another bunch of classic songs. Admittedly, he doesn’t seem stretched (jokes aside, he’s a gifted musician) but he’s a creditable addition, fits in nicely and kept the ridiculous guitar solos to a tolerable minimum. He gets to play legendary pop songs night after night; it’s not a bad job to have. Those songs, those towering songs… they just kept coming. They were judiciously dotted around the first 2 ½ hours of the set like gemstones sparkling at the bottom of a pool. A Night Like This, Lovesong, In Between Days, Just Like Heaven (which has one of my favourite first verses, what great writing), The Walk, A Forest, Three Imaginary Boys, Charlotte Sometimes and on and on.

It felt so good. Like a piece of my teenage years had come to meet me as I push 40 over here. I was obsessed with Lullaby in my youth. I listened to it over and over and transcribed the lyrics (with a pencil!) from the cassette tape, just because I wanted to read them (ah, the pre-internet universe!) The band were as tight as a drum, and it was a pleasure to see musicians enjoying themselves. They set about their task with great determination, stamina and style, for I can’t think of which other artist does shows like this, with such a wide scope of song choice and devotion to their audience. I suppose Springsteen is the closest, as he also plays marathons and plucks out album track obscurities for the delight of the hardcore fans and his own amusement. All pop/rock gigs are ‘a bit of what I want to play/a bit of what you want to hear’ but this one felt different, most likely because of the sheer length of the show. You felt like everyone was on this journey together, through our lives and theirs, and it built and built. People are used to 90-minute shows then schlepping home and worrying about getting up for work in the morning. Everyone just utterly lost themselves at this gig. A few filtered out, as they had trains to catch, but 99% stayed and revelled and hoped it would never end. And those songs, they kept on coming – Lullaby was extraordinary, greeted with such love. Fascination Street. Why Can’t I Be You? The Lovecats, Close To Me (incidentally, haven’t their videos aged incredibly well?!)… And of course, an oddly slowed down, but no less powerful, Boys Don’t Cry. Everything was spent, delivered, given to us. We gave our hearts back.


1. Shake Dog Shake
2. Piggy in the Mirror
3. A Night Like This
4. Push
5. In Between Days
6. Just Like Heaven
7. Bananafishbones
8. The Caterpillar
9. The Walk
10. A Man Inside My Mouth
11. Wailing Wall
12. Three Imaginary Boys
13. Never Enough
14. Wrong Number
15. Birdmad Girl
16. Lovesong
17. Like Cockatoos
18. From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea
19. Kyoto Song
20. alt.end
21. Want
22. The Hungry Ghost
23. One Hundred Years
24. Give Me It
25. The Top

Encore:
26. The Empty World
27. Charlotte Sometimes
28. Primary

Encore 2:
29. M
30. Play for Today
31. A Forest

Encore 3:
32. Pictures of You
33. Lullaby
34. Fascination Street

Encore 4:
35. Dressing Up
36. The Lovecats
37. Close to Me
38. Why Can't I Be You?
39. Boys Don't Cry
40. Hey You!


...

Morrissey :: The O2, London, 29/11/14

morrissey-o2-291114-bc02_541_361
Photo by Burak Cingi (click to see a gallery)

Morrissey must have big balls. Big brass northern balls. I grant you, this is a fairly odd way to start a review. My current slightly loopy demeanour is a result of sleep deprivation. I got home not particularly late after the show but just could not get off the high. I’m finding it increasingly tough to wind down after I get home late, and there’s a sliding scale. If I’m out for dinner I’ll get home early and usually I’m fine. If I’m at a gig and I get home by 11, which is fairly rare, that might be fine too. If I get home from a gig near midnight I might try and stay up for an hour but not go online so it gives me the best chance of dropping off. And then there’s Morrissey. I got home at a reasonable hour, just before midnight, but couldn’t resist spending an hour online, messaging and checking Twitter and watching clips and generally indulging my Moz glow. And it screwed me up for sleeping beyond words. My heart was pounding and wouldn’t slow down. I was humming with vibration. My mind had songs playing in it like a jukebox. Finally, at nearly 5am I passed out. I woke just before 10 and now here I sit, at 10.30, trying to find a way to describe what happened. This shouldn’t be new. I’ve seen Morrissey 14 (I think) times now. I’ve written about him before. And god knows I’ve heard better setlists, at least I think so, but I suppose it depends on your criteria and interest levels in the varying periods of his career. And yet somehow, somehow, somehow I have rarely seen him do a better show and never felt more in love with him than I do at this moment. How did he pull off this magic trick? To play his new album in near-entirety and still have the biggest audience he’s ever attracted in London in the palm of his hand?

I’ve spoken before about how, and this is not to cause offense or make musical comparisons, he has a surrogate Bowie effect on me and my fellow Moz traveller. We never saw Bowie live together and so somehow he has taken on this mythical quality as a performer, someone I speak about in both boastful and grateful tones, recognising how monumentally lucky I was to, as it were, follow him around Europe (and to New York) on the Reality Tour. I’m not comparing him to Morrissey as a performer – they are so very different. But that intangible quality, call it an aura if you like, is something both have a ton of (alright, Bowie has more, for the record). I can be front row, or in the swaying, violent semi-moshpit, or at the side craning my neck, or half way back so he’s nearly a dot, and the same thing will happen every time. You fear he’ll let you down and he doesn’t. And then, when he doesn’t, you think, well of course you wouldn’t let me down, let us down. You would never do that. It’s a complex relationship and it can’t be compared to anything I feel for anyone else now, not even Bowie. I have seen Morrissey deliver songs (never perform; he says: “if you have a true and physical need to sing a song then you are not performing. Performance is forced and artificial, and you are either a singer, or else you are... simply ... a costume”) from every album, band and solo, that he has in his arsenal. But last night he started and then ended with a pair of songs everyone knew, but somehow managed to make everyone embrace the fact that the songs between those four were largely unknown. And we loved him for it. And Twitter, the first place any complainer goes, you best believe it was unanimous in love (I said love L-U-V, as the Dolls go) for him. He played 20 songs (that’s a lot for him, he usually does a few less) and of the 16 in between the opening pairs he started with three from his new record in a row. Then I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris, a thoroughly average song from his last album. Then three more new songs, again in a row – I must confess to thinking that the lyrics are somewhat lacking on both World Peace… in general and on its adolescent title track (it’s the kind of impractical idealistic ‘don’t vote, viva la revolución!’ nonsense you hear from Russell Brand – this is not a compliment). He can do so much better. But just when you think ‘get on with it’ comes the extraordinary obscurity Trouble Loves Me, more of which later. And then, yes, another couple of new songs. At this point I’m amazed that he’s making no concessions to nearly 20,000 people, almost all of whom must be there to hear the hits. It’s nearly Dylan-esque in its contrariness! And what happens next? He goes into the dirge-like raw brutality of Meat Is Murder, a song still so shocking and powerful nearly 30 years after its release that has converted more humans to vegetarianism (myself included) than any other piece of art yet created. He prefaced it with: “I read the other day that 75% of chicken sold in the UK is contaminated, therefore poisonous - and I thought to myself ‘ha ha ha ha!’ (Not entirely true: there is a toxic bacteria in most chicken, true, but it gets destroyed during cooking, so unless you’re eating raw meat… never let the facts get in the way of a good story; as Tony Wilson said: print the legend). He accompanies the song with a video of vivisection, factory farming, caged animal slaughter and torture, which everyone is forced to watch, while bathed in red light, and it makes the entire audience feel sick and disgusted. And we love him for it. It’s a prestige the like of which Houdini would be proud. Also bear in mind that he had commanded the O2 to cease selling any meat products on the night of his show – an unprecedented request to which, incredibly, they agreed. They must have lost money but did it anyway. Incidentally, he’d also previously gotten the Staples Center in LA (where he’s a god, basically, and can sell out arenas with ease mostly due to his rabid Latino fanbase) to do the same. They had already said no to McCartney. These are more useful victories derived from the small amount of power he has than being snooty about the political process, if you ask me.

So then, yes, you guessed it, a trio more of new songs (and oh the irony, my favourite new song, Oboe Concerto, is not played). The main show ends with another wonderfully obscure non-hit, Speedway, the song from which I have taken my lyric tattoo design, and we’re finished. Encore. The end. And people are going absolutely mad. They’re throwing flowers they have brought at the stage. They are throwing themselves at the stage, just trying to touch him. This is normal gig behaviour at his shows and nowhere else in music have I seen it – weeping humans of all shapes and sizes and genders and ages and sexualities simply prostrating their bodies to him to touch and, one imagines, be healed. Each touch of hands provokes a roar. You’re cheering for each human who needs, just needs desperately, to feel his touch because they are you.

The setlist and its 11 new songs are a marvel, a miracle (with I’m Not A Man and Istanbul working particularly well). I’ve heard him perform everything you could imagine, from How Soon Is Now? to This Charming Man. From Death Of A Disco Dancer to Last Of The Famous International Playboys. From There Is A Light That Never Goes Out to Please Please Please (Let Me Get What I Want). From Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me to Panic to Girlfriend In A Coma and so on and so on and so on. This man has 100 songs to spare. He could perform any of his albums in entirety. Until last night I had heard 72 different songs – it’s now 84. And in researching my own Moz history just now I realised I’ve seen him 15, not 14, times (not counting that Roundhouse one where his voice gave out after three songs and the gig was abandoned). I saw Bowie 16 times. He’s getting there. I’ve had to wait two years for this 15th show, mind you. I have to hope he has many more in him. Remarkably, I cannot remember his voice ever sounding this good. He seems to be either dreadfully unlucky or prone to health issues, which he has recently alluded to without properly discussing, and why should he, as his health, like world peace, is none of my business. And yet, he looks great, muscular and determined and ornery as ever. As one might expect, he’s lost none of his tendency to confront, which feels oddly comforting. Without perceived injustice (the charts, record labels, hunting, animal welfare, the Royals, celebrities) who would he even be?

We’d managed to engineer a pretty perfect show day, it must be said. This despite the fact that I’m suffering from a trapped sciatic nerve and can’t stand or walk for more than five minutes at a time. A lovely day in the pub, then a sobering-up dinner and then a spot by the mixing desk. My location on the arena floor was not at all how I planned it. Pre-nerve-injury I was so very up for being front and centre, right in the pit. I was pretty gutted, in all honesty, about having to abandon that plan, having waited two years to see him live again. I held up pretty well in the end, despite having to spend some time crouching on the ground or bent at the waist to stave off the pain. I didn’t care. He was singing to me, he was mine again. My love affair with this Mancunian hero had started eight years ago. I liked him fine before then, I knew what The Smiths meant, but he hadn’t found me as a solo artist. One night – May 1st 2006 – at Alexandra Palace changed all that and since then… god, he gets on my nerves sometimes, with some of the outlandish nonsense he says. But I always forgive him, why? I understand him, through all the madness and militancy and attention seeking and drama.

The show began (following a lengthy set of clips – the Dolls, Nico, drag legend Lypsinka etc.) as an image of a grumpy-looking Queen appeared on the big screen. She was giving the crowd the finger, with both hands. And then, yes, of course he did it: he played The Queen Is Dead, which I had never heard him do before. The lyrics, one of his finest, which I now realise I must put here, are as follows:

Farewell to this land's cheerless marshes
Hemmed in like a boar between arches
Her very Lowness with her head in a sling
I’m truly sorry - but it sounds like a wonderful thing
I said Charles, don't you ever crave
To appear on the front of the Daily Mail
Dressed in your mother’s bridal veil?

And so I checked all the registered historical facts
And I was shocked into shame to discover
How I'm the 18th pale descendant
Of some old queen or other

Oh has the world changed, or have I changed?
Oh has the world changed, or have I changed?

Some 9-year-old tough who peddles drugs
I swear to God, I swear: I never even knew what drugs were
So, I broke into the palace
With a sponge and a rusty spanner
She said: “Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing”
I said: "That’s nothing - you should hear me play piano"

We can go for a walk where it’s quiet and dry
And talk about precious things
But when you're tied to your mother's apron
No-one talks about castration

We can go for a walk where it’s quiet and dry
And talk about precious things
Like love and law and poverty
Oh, oh, these are the things that kill me

We can go for a walk where it’s quiet and dry
And talk about precious things
But the rain that flattens my hair...
Oh, these are the things that kill me

All their lies about make-up and long hair are still there…

Past the pub who saps your body
And the church who’ll snatch your money
The Queen is dead, boys
And it’s so lonely on a limb
Past the pub that wrecks your body
And the church - all it wants is your money
The Queen is dead, boys
And it’s so lonely on a limb

Life is very long, when you're lonely


People have been sent to the Tower, frankly, for less. The crowd roared every word and we jumped and danced and punched the air and the entire O2, filled to the brim, realised we were in the presence of perhaps the greatest living Englishman, certainly the greatest one currently touring! A sweet nostalgia blast, next up, was Suedehead, his first solo single, which was surely the moment post-Smiths breakup where everyone had gone, aha, he doesn’t need Johnny to write great songs. Of course, there are many arguments to be made about the relative quality, similarity and lack of adventurousness in some of his solo output. However, he’s a pop artist and he makes pop songs because that’s the music that mattered to him when he was growing up. The (older) lyrics may be sophisticated but the music is not – and who cares? He’s not avant-garde and nor does he care for it. He likes crooners and pop music and his subversion lies in the words and persona. It is telling that this morning’s reviews make reference to his attacks on the Royal family, the meat industry, the government and his own record label. The Telegraph even makes hay out of his recent health issues, which he hasn’t discussed at all coherently. Talking of Asleep, they went full on: “Dimly lit, face obscured, it felt like he was delivering his own eulogy, made even more poignant by his health problems.” Please. Really? As if any of this were newsworthy somehow – unusual proclamations and events are just par for the course at one of his shows. Rarely do artists say or do anything beyond what is expected of them at a performance, and certainly even fewer challenge their own crowd between songs to think about animal welfare (we sing happily: “Hooray, hooray, the bullfighter dies, and nobody cries”) or the nature of how record labels shaft artists or the love of hunting demonstrated constantly by a bunch of toffs we all pay for. That’s just him. He has said he is only controversial because it’s so easy to be controversial in pop music: nobody ever is. Most of the reviews I’ve read have called the show ‘emotional’ – to which I reply, when is he not? Seeing Morrissey live is always a moving experience, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.

So after Suedehead off we went for an hour of 11 new songs and an animal torture video. But in the middle of it all, as my pain kicked in and I started to flag, out came Trouble Loves Me. From 1997’s fairly forgotten Maladjusted, this one is an epic Bond theme of a record. I’d heard it live once before, the first time I saw him, and I didn’t know it then. But I can pinpoint it as the song that made me fall for him, this Hulmerist, flaws and all. And so we sang and swayed arm in arm and it was overwhelming. So, right now, I am exhausted and starting to feel emotional about the night. I must wrap up. I cannot imagine what life would be like if I didn’t get to be in a room with that man every so often. He has come to mean so much to me. In between the times when I get to see him live I’m challenged by much of what he says – his own sometimes-muddled naïve invective, the abuse for loving him that I receive from acquaintance and stranger alike… I sometimes forget why I like him at all. But seeing him live reminds me, so perfectly, why he’s worth every second of my time. It fills you up, somehow, until the next show. It always feels like a re-acquaintance – never a goodbye.

The two-song encore began with a fairly obscure Smiths B-side, Asleep. It reminded me of an old bedtime rhyme my great-grandma, Rose, used to sing to me when I was little: “show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed…” Maybe his gran sang it to him a few miles (and a couple of decades) away from where my great-gran sang it to me… he stole the second line straight out:

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I'm tired and I
I want to go to bed

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
And then leave me alone
Don't try to wake me in the morning
'Cause I will be gone
Don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I will feel so glad to go

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I don't want to wake up
On my own anymore


You could feel the emotion coursing through the venue. You could hear a pin drop. He won over every person there, with a couple of old songs and a ton of new ones. His first words to the crowd were “I am privileged beyond my wildest dreams.” His last, delivered with a dramatic flourish, as ever, were “Remember me. Forget my fate” (a quote from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas). And then, the last song was with us, the ubiquitous Everyday Is Like Sunday, greeted like an old friend. The lights came up and Klaus Nomi’s aria Death (from Dido’s Lament, also, of course, from Dido and Aeneas) ushered us out into the cold night. People sang his songs as we made our way to the Tube, joined forever by this unique human being.


The Queen Is Dead / Suedehead / Staircase At The University / World Peace Is None Of Your Business / Kiss Me A Lot / I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris / Istanbul / Smiler With Knife / The Bullfighter Dies / Trouble Loves Me / Earth Is The Loneliest Planet / Neal Cassady Drops Dead / Meat Is Murder / Scandinavia / Kick The Bride Down The Aisle / I'm Not A Man / Speedway // Asleep / Everyday Is Like Sunday

...

Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters :: The Roundhouse, Camden, 12-11-14

Startraks Photo:REX
Startraks Photo/REX


Robert Plant, possibly the greatest rock singer of all time, and I go way back. I wish I could remember the exact moment I fell for him, like I can with Bowie, but in the mists of time I can only recall that it happened when he released Manic Nirvana in early 1990. In my evenings, after school, I was listening, on cassette, to New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough. I was still in the grip of that perfectly normal teen phase, which had started in early 1988, of liking the pretty boys and the pop music designed just for me. However, I was already a fan of more substantial music, due to my parents, by then. I was surely the only 13-year-old who could name 10 Dylan albums, watched Doors VHS tapes every weekend, rented Bowie’s movies obsessively (I had Glass Spider but it was the films that made me swoon) and knew who Robert Johnson was. And yet… and yet, I was in the grip of wanting to be some sort of normal teenager and the boybands had their hooks in. 1990 was the year it all changed. Manic Nirvana was the album that stole me away and set me on a path of seeing gigs that continues to this day. It grabbed hold of my NKOTB and Bros cassettes and threw them away because I was ready to move on.

Up to that point, Plant’s solo albums hadn’t quite registered in the old-fashioned rock world, which seems remarkable when you consider what a respected (and Album Of The Year Grammy-winning) solo performer he is today. Back then, everyone was just waiting around for him to reunite his old band; mind you, looking at the landscape of the questions he is still being asked, following the 2007 O2 reunion, you can see how little things have changed. Every week, it seems, there’s a story about how he’s turned down a truckload of cash to play soulless arenas and I love him a little more each time he talks about how little it interests him and then brushes it off with that West Bromwich charm. The man is just not bothered. He’s got a life to get on with and it doesn’t involve doing what everyone else craves so greatly.

When Manic Nirvana came out people were, frankly, surprised it was any good, as his solo output had been pretty average until then. He’d had a big solo hit with the of-its-time brilliantly awful, and comically named, Big Log (too many jokes to make) in 1983 and a trio of thoroughly average albums followed. In 1988 he released Now and Zen (as a pun connoisseur, that is a shocker) which was notable only for the excellent, and now dated, Heaven Knows, replete with overblown backing vocals and a brilliant solo (in the era of guitar solos) by Jimmy Page, the very same. But still, no cohesive whole album had made a dent. Manic Nirvana, at the time, was deemed to be a very good record, though when you listen now only a handful of tracks stand the test of time. What the album accomplished was to signal the beginning of a new career as a creditable solo artist, finally, a decade after LZ ended in a blaze of Bonzo’s alcoholism. My mum loved the album, so I did too. She must have suggested we go see him live; he was playing the Manchester Apollo that December, a few months after I’d started to wake up out of my boyband stupor (in August 1990 I saw Prince, Bowie and the Stones live in 23 life-changing days). She handed out homework to prepare me – don’t ask me why, but she put the vinyl of LZII into my hands. I can’t imagine why she picked that particular album to tell me to listen to, out of them all, but listen incessantly I did. When we saw him he actually did two songs from it; did she know that Ramble On and Living Loving Maid were coming? Impossible. I remember asking her: “Ma, do you think he’ll play Stairway?” I snort now with the notion. I didn’t know then about the two Plants. I call them pre and post the discovery of irony. (A digression: he’s had the nickname Percy since the 70s and my mum would never tell me why! As an adult, I found out that Percy was a movie starring Hywel Bennett about a man who gets a (huge) penis transplant! A rock magazine had run a pic of him in particularly snug and revealing trousers and captioned it ‘Robert “Percy” Plant’ and it stuck; always makes me smile now to think of it.)

You see, at some point between 1976’s Presence and 1979’s In Through The Out Door, Robert Plant realised he was ridiculous. He realised his band was ridiculous. And that travelling around in a private jet with mountains of coke, groupies, roadies getting favours for passes, endless thugs in security and smashed up hotel rooms were all ridiculous. Hammer Of The Gods and all that. The reasons why he woke up and saw the madness of the clichéd rock life that surrounded him are numerous, most likely derived from a combination of the loss of his son, the after effects of a bad car accident and the arrival of punk. That perfect storm of tragedy and the changing musical landscape had a marked effect on him and you can see it clearly in later LZ footage. The rock god poses struck came to be accompanied by smirks and winks; he’d clearly just become much more self-aware, self-knowing. By the time Zep were on their death knell, though they didn’t know it, at Knebworth in 1979, he was mentally out. He had been a Golden God, with his bare chest stuck out, circulation-cutting jeans and blond locks flowing, as he rescued a maiden from a castle. But he was done. A very smart man, he stopped wanting to play that part long before the hair metal understudies took over. So into the 80s he went, perm resplendent, and tried to escape the weight of being ¼ of a colossus that bestrode the planet. The 80s was a tough time generally for the old guard; Dylan, Bowie, Neil Young and many others all found themselves adrift. Manic Nirvana was the first sign of him finding his feet.

I love Led Zeppelin. Even though I don’t know what a single one of their songs are about (does anyone?) they are without doubt the most powerful and perfect rock band that has ever been. But, like Bowie, Plant had a bit of trouble in the 90s coming to terms with his legacy; he largely refused to play the so-called big songs (LZ released few singles so technically didn’t have many hits). And like Bowie, he got over it. What he does now is really what Dylan should be doing, instead of unintelligible, unrecognisable renditions coming at you via his cat-like nasal delivery (it’s just about charming, but only when you're at the front or in a small venue; seeing Bob in an arena with no screens – he refuses to have them – is frankly a shitty experience). Plant leaves the odd motif in and rewrites some of the song structure, but largely keeps the lyrical melody line intact. It makes for some nice surprises. So a song will begin and it’s familiar but you can’t put your finger on why and then he’ll start singing and this pure rush of joy will spread through the audience when everyone realises it’s Going To California.

As it happens, his new album …Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar is very good indeed, for my money the best solo record he’s ever put out. So I was very much looking forward to hearing it performed live; anything else that came along would simply be a nice little bonus. Having watched his highly enjoyable Glastonbury performance (on telly, am too old for that tent shit now) in July I knew that I was going to get Whole Lotta Love. I was ready for it. A song like that is sewn into the fabric of being English and loving music. It exists like any Beatles song or Satisfaction or Life On Mars or Won’t Get Fooled Again (speaking of, they’re the only big rock band of that era I’ve never seen live: must fix that). So I’ve done ok with gigs, let’s face it. In nearly 300 shows, and counting, I’ve seen the Stones and CSN thrice, Macca twice, Bowie has passed my eyeballs and earholes 16 times, and I’ve even seen Ian Astbury fronting The Doors; a roster of everyone who’s been anyone in popular music of the last 50 years. When I saw Plant in 1990 he performed those two Zep songs but I don’t remember any further ones; history shows the night before in Newcastle he did Immigrant Song and Nobody’s Fault But Mine so it’s very possible I heard four but it was a long time ago. When I saw him at the Freddie Mercury tribute he did Queen songs (he did Innuendo like it was Kashmir (even sneaking in a couplet from that song to make the association clear) and Crazy Little Thing Called Love like the Elvis pastiche it is) and snuck in a little bit of Thank You (said to be Freddie’s favourite Zep song). I saw him again in 2000 in a small club in Manchester but he was on a covers tour, so did no original material at all. I didn’t care: I was on the front row. Last night, well, that was my first time really hearing Zeppelin songs and it was just as monumental, adrenalin-fuelled and emotional as you imagine.

I think my highlight of hearing him delve into that particular part of his history was What Is And What Should Never Be, which blew my mind. His voice is still powerful, strong and all that, but now because it’s lost range there’s much more emotion and nuance to it. He’s using it as a greater, but more careful, instrument than he has before, is learning more about his ability to interpret than ever before, and has certainly been finding new ways to convey his own musical loves. There’s a touch of Ralph Stanley here, a bit of Appalachian folk there, and a big slice of north west African rhythms, which go back a long way. His passion for Moroccan music and culture goes back to the 60s and he he performed at Mali’s Festival in the Desert in 2003. His fascination with Indian music is also well known – his and Page’s 1994 collaboration with Najma Akhtar (replacing the late Sandy Denny) on the Battle of Evermore is a joy to hear. His vocal style of the past couple of decades also undoubtedly owes a lot to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (who Jeff Buckley was famously obsessed with; his #2 obsession after, of course, Zeppelin). Then there’s his background as, frankly, a blues scholar; he knows his stuff and leads his brilliant band around a rip-roaring, heavy version of Bukka White’s Fixin’ To Die. Mention must go to the companions he uses to get the job done: what a fantastic collective they are, the Sensational Space Shifters. Playing a synthesis of African-influenced Celtic bluegrass folk blues, they’re partly made up of members of a former backing band of his, Strange Sensation. Liam Tyson from Britpop legends Cast and world music luminary Justin Adams lead the show on guitars. John Baggott on keyboards, Dave Smith on drums, Billy Fuller on bass and, perhaps the star of the show, Juldeh Camara complete the line-up. From the Gambia, Camara is known as a griot, a storyteller, and plays the riti, a one-stringed fiddle. You would not believe the range of noise and melody he coaxes from this deceptively simple instrument.

Plant acknowledges his past, takes the bits he wants, leaves the rest, and escapes from its weight with ease. I love him so very much for having less than zero interest in schlepping around some shitty arena in the Midwest playing Black Dog for the millionth time. You want to hear him sing a famous old rock tune? Go ahead. He ended the show with a drastically reworked version of Rock And Roll. It’s on his terms, take it or leave it.

He had opened the show with Friends from LZIII and I was knocked off my feet. The crowd, hoary old rock blokes mixed with old school rock chicks and, of course, some hipsters and students, loved every second of it. And by that I mean not just the old stuff but they were clearly familiar with the new album as well, and I find that to be quite something. How many heritage acts (ugh, horrible term, let’s think of something else) are releasing new material that’s resonating with audiences who look forward to hearing it live? Yes, Dylan and Cohen are putting out great albums but nobody (hardcore fans aside) wants to hear them live. They know what they want to hear and it ain’t Tempest. Plant still has priapic charisma to burn as well, and doesn’t mind at all being a bit of a crowd-pleaser. He’s relatable, seems down to earth and has shed his rock god aura. Mostly. There are moments when you do see the flash of it, the flash of former self, and you realise exactly who he is and what stages he has stood upon. And that only makes it all the more remarkable. It would be very easy to crave stadia adulation; frankly, most rock stars on his level do. I just paid £141 for a ticket to see Fleetwood Mac churn out Rumours at the O2: the ticket to see Plant was £43. He’s come from an era where albums were sold, meaning he’s got enough money, and he doesn’t seem to feel that need at all, which is hugely refreshing. He wants to play new songs to 3000 people. He doesn’t want to be a human jukebox for 150 quid a head. He played the Roundhouse 46 years ago, almost exactly. And back there again, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be, singing and banging a bendir drum during the interludes. Except perhaps Molineux on a cold Saturday afternoon.


Friends
Spoonful (Howlin’ Wolf)
Turn It Up
Going to California
Embrace Another Fall
Rainbow
What Is and What Should Never Be
No Place to Go (Howlin’ Wolf )
Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You (Anne Bredon)
Little Maggie
Fixin' to Die (Bukka White)
I Just Want to Make Love to You (Willie Dixon)/Whole Lotta Love/ Who Do You Love (Bo Diddley)

Encore:

A Stolen Kiss
Rock and Roll

...

Kate Bush :: Before The Dawn :: Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, 17-9-14


Who knows who wrote that song of summer
That blackbirds sing at dusk
This is a song of colour
Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust
Then climb into bed and turn to dust


Here I sit. Staring at an unforgiving blank page. It’s so white, it’s so empty. In the past, when I’ve seen a consciousness-altering gig I’ve come here, to trusty old Word, and the text has just flowed. From where, I do not know. It all just tumbles out, and then I leave it alone. I go back later (1-3 hours typically), and rewrite perhaps half of it (and I’m doing that right now, and right now, get your head around that…). And it’s at that point where I’ve largely figured out what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to get the constituent parts to hang together. I’m trying to collate words that illustrate the pictures and sounds in my mind. My retinas have let my brain collect images, stored into my mind bank forever. My ears have let sound slip in and swirl around, resonances which can be recalled forever, like a jukebox inside my head. The next stage, the third draft, and I know this might make me sound crazy, is to read what I’ve written out loud once or even twice, at which point I then rewrite about 10%. Somehow, my own voice, and my own ‘acting’, as it were, of the writing manages to show up the bits that don’t work, that I’m not explaining well, that don’t read well. Because really, it’s my voice that people hear (whether they want to or not!) when they read something I’ve written. People I know, anyway. Strangers can’t hear me but I hope to convey a bit of myself in reviews like this. I will then read it once more aloud to my dad, over the phone, tweak it a little more and finally send it off to the ether. That is the process. Even this paragraph explaining how I write will get rewritten; how meta, how postmodern!

20140918_162018
And yet, here I delay. I talked to a writer friend today about the show. A fan since childhood, she’d seen it the night before I did and wept throughout. I didn’t do that, perhaps because I haven’t had a lifelong attachment to Kate Bush, or maybe because my journey has one more chapter to be written as I’m seeing it again next week. I did feel a bit weepy during a couple of points (And Dream Of Sheep in particular) but not greatly. I was just in shock, really. How can I put this… it made me forget everything about myself I don’t like. I forgot my anxieties. I forgot about the ups and downs of work. I stopped thinking about the things that make my brain a tough place to live sometimes. I just let go of everything and was consumed by this theatrical and musical spectacular. I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced a concert like it, nor am I ever likely to again (next week aside!). So I talked to my friend about the show and told her the truth – that I didn’t know where to begin. She’s pretty much a genius, and said: start with the birds, start with the nature.

Kate Bush was once asked who her favourite singer was. She said: the blackbird, then the thrush. She is an ordinary, extraordinary human being. Her level of creative control over her career has not come easy; it is something she has insisted upon, and fought for, and been bullied over, and people have tried to take it away from her. In the concert programme, a beautifully printed annual-type book (with some pages that don’t quite open, though you can see inside them, just because), the following exchange describes a meeting with Adrian Noble, the former head of the RSC who co-directs the show:

He was charm personified and was really, really enthusiastic about being involved in the show. He loved the idea of working on something that could integrate contemporary music with theatre.

But would we get on? Still a little nervous of him taking over, we met and I gave him the full blown lecture: “I’ve had to fight all my career to be heard… people always think I’m talking out of my arse… I don’t want you to just walk in and take over.” He sat very politely while I ranted and gave me the look I know so well: “We’ve got a right one ‘ere”.


This is, I think, hugely illuminating. Of course, as the world knows, a man would never have to fight and battle and be sublimated into a passive role in his own music career. But behind that warm, genuine, gentle persona she is a formidable opponent. So here she is, as ever doing what she wants in her own time and offering us all a look inside her head with Before The Dawn. And what lives in there? Birdsong, it turns out. Nature. The calmness of a single day, from dawn to dusk, to moonlight, to dawn again. This is the story of the second half of the concert. We’ve all been pounded and hammered and, frankly, a bit disturbed by the bleak tale of the first half. Battered around the head by more emotions than you’d think possible. The second half is where she attempts to take you by the metaphorical hand into a comedown room, one of those soft chill-out spaces found (when we were all younger) in clubs and festivals. That room where you need to go to breathe, because everything has become too much, you crave human contact and just want a nice cuddle. The sounds are temperate, the surroundings are welcoming, there is nothing to be afraid of, and you get into a corner, in your own space, in your own head, and everything is alright again. That’s what the second half was like. Having Kate Bush be your mum and make everything ok. I didn’t think of this at all last night, the maternal wave that envelopes the second half, but I’m thinking of it now, which is making me think of my own mother. She was so many things, too numerous to even begin to talk about here, but the one thing she was, above everything, was kind. She never thought of herself before me. She was interested and engaged and passionate about everything I did. Though not really, in any way, a traditional Jewish mother type, in her own way she made me the centre of her universe. And that, again, was what the second half felt like: to be spoken to, and have the thoughts in another person’s head directed at you. It was so light and positive and charming and, I keep saying this, warm. She was our mum, and she held us. And above all, throughout the whole night, you got this sense that she is just a good person. She thanked everyone, multiple times; the band, the cast, the audience. It was sincere and genuine. You could feel it, in your heart.

She goes for that same kind of state of human existence in the universe connection that Björk does. That sense of: marvel at the solar system, nature, animals, birds, the earth, the sky, the sun, the moon, it is all here, for you, and in the pinprick millisecond you live on this rotating blue rock it is a miracle that you are alive. You’re only here once, so you take her hand and walk through a single day by her side. Most crucially, though, the second half is really about light. How it gives life and how it wakes birds up to let them sing their songs; and then it goes away at night and the birds go to sleep. Light is what controls nature. The soundtrack to this reverie is the second half of Aerial, my favourite album of hers. The way it was built, block-by-block, going from a lazy morning to the blasted freak out of the title track was an hour I would like to relive every day. A trilogy of its songs were worth the price of admission: the Balearic, flamenco tour de force of Sunset, the driving, spectacular Nocturn and then the sonic frenzy of Aerial itself. It felt like something just for me; many of the reviews have focused on The Ninth Wave. Is that because perhaps 75% of the audience simply don’t know Aerial that well? If this concert series accomplishes anything, it’s that everyone should realise now what a brilliant album it is.


So, as I thought it would be, it was all too much. But ‘too much’ is why we came, it’s what we knew would happen. The second half’s Sky Of Honey, as she calls it, is remarkable. As a musical, visual, auditory, theatrical experience, she has raised the bar beyond what anyone (yes, this includes Bowie) could reach, today, tomorrow, or ever again. She’s set a new level, a new benchmark for how music and visuals can be matched together in a live context. And that’s not bad at all considering that she herself had almost no live context three weeks ago. A solitary, exhausting 1979 tour, some TV appearances, a few one-off-one-song live performances, and that’s your lot. It started thus:

In March of 2013, I said to Bertie, “Shall we do some live shows?” He said, “Yes. Absolutely!” I really wanted to do something different from working on another album and felt a real desire to have contact with the audience that still liked my work.

First, praise that sweet boy, Bertie. His support seems to have made the whole thing possible. For all of her feminine credentials, incidentally, she most often surrounds herself with men as collaborators. From these live musicians to her studio bands to the creative team, the only women present are a couple of backing singers and the hair/make-up/wardrobe team. It’s interesting in itself that she relies so heavily on male energy yet creates music that is so very female; perhaps she brings the feminine side out of her musicians, as there is nothing macho about the intuitive band around her.

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So where did this newfound desire to perform come from? She’d never had any need, at all, to have contact with her audience, in person, in the same room, not for decades. Will it spark a larger desire to travel and meet her audiences all over the world, or is this just some wonderful one-off that precious few (relatively, 3600 people x 22 nights) will witness on a night that will be remembered by each and every person who got a golden ticket? Right now, none of that matters, as I play the show over in my head, like a bootleg nobody else can see or hear. I know this review is a bit abstract, not taking the form I usually use, but I don’t feel very normal today. I couldn’t come down from the gig at all when I got in. I find it hard to sleep when I get home late anyway, and I just lay there, vibrating, turning over and over, for hours. I’m reading a book on insomnia and how to resolve it through cognitive behavioural therapy at the moment. Among a whole host of information, derived from decades of neurologically based sleep research, it stresses the importance of never napping, attaining consistency in bedtime routine and so on. It tells you that good sleepers don’t worry about sleeping. They just do it. Is it that simple? Can you improve your sleep by simply not thinking about it? Brain training, i.e. CBT, gives you that control, but it’s not easy. Regardless, that wasn’t possible last night; my mind was full of… puppets, water, lifejackets and buoys, feathers, drumming, painting, (terrifying) skeletal fish heads, bare feet, birdsong, and her voice, that voice. Untouched by years of touring, some of the time it simply rendered the songs as you’ve heard them before, and sometimes it just let go, and hit glorious, perfect soaring notes. Singers convey something no musician can, as that window is unique, and just hearing her voice was indescribably powerful and personal.

During the whole show, nobody looked at their phone, incidentally, and what a pleasure that was. But here’s the thing about the show, aside from all the majesty and creativity and musicianship and theatrics and performance. The thing is this: you’ve never heard this stuff live before because none of these songs have ever been played live before. Not ever! Well, ok, you can watch, if you wish, a couple of performances of
Hounds of Love (mimed) and Running Up That Hill but that’s two songs, out of the 26 performed, that have been played before. The unique part, and what sets her apart from anyone else, is that you have no relationship to these tracks outside of their album context. Nobody does. The only songs her fans have a relationship to are the songs played in 1979 – and she plays precisely zero songs from that tour, from her first four albums or, for that matter, from The Sensual World (imagine if she’d done This Woman’s Work… talk about too much!). And that, for a living artist, is unprecedented. I’ve got plenty of albums, hundreds, by people who I’ve never seen live but they’ve all passed on, pining for the fjords, as it goes. Apart from Joni and Tom Waits, that is – sure, they don’t play live now but, like Bowie, they certainly have and live footage is easy to find (of the three, Tom does the odd gig so I live in hope). But even in the cases of artists long gone, if I didn’t see them live, they did of course play concerts (again, an exception: Nick Drake, no live footage of any kind exists) and you can get hold of recordings, easily. With Kate Bush, this is all new territory. Your whole life, you’ve been listening to her music as a recorded document, exactly as she wanted you to hear it, and it is your only source. And now, as if by magic, decades after her career started, she’s standing RIGHT THERE in front of you, singing at you, singing these songs and giving them a new, brand new, brand shiny and new, context. You have never laid eyes on her in person and you may never again. As Caitlin Moran said in her review, it is unquantifiably too much.

I was happy with the way the show was going even before the theatrical part began. It was a perfectly normal, perfectly brilliant rock show. The first half dozen songs were simply, powerfully, emotionally rendered, a little walk around Aerial and Hounds of Love and The Red Shoes. Lily, from that album (gave me a little smile: it’s my gran’s name), opened the show, and was later joined by Top Of The City, from the same record; the delivery on that song knocked me back in my seat. I’ve rarely heard a live vocal sound better. An Aerial track, Joanni, was sandwiched between the opener and a good old-fashioned crowd pleaser, Hounds Of Love itself. I mean, this is not up for argument: that is one of the great pop songs of the last century. As is Running Up That Hill, of course it is, which followed shortly after. What a pleasure, hearing those two songs was. But in that opening six-song salvo, which works as a sort of warm-up for The Ninth Wave, which I’m going to get to shortly, finally, the track that fucking KILLED was Aerial’s King Of the Mountain. I just can’t… there’s just no way… you’ll have to wait to hear it. It built and built (like Aerial’s title track did later on) to this sturm und drang turmoil and the backline core of the band, led by drumming legend Omar Hakim (what a privilege to see this guy play), just completely owned it.

Interlude:: my bootleg has just finished downloading. How nice. This may help with the rest of the review ::

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I put Hounds Of Love on as I had to hear it first. The bootleg – and it’s been about a hundred years since I cared enough to get a boot of anything – is of the first night. The crowd are insane, they have certifiably lost their minds. I knew what was coming, pretty much, but they didn’t know a thing. It’s the newness of everything that gets you. That was the moment, for me, last night, when I thought… oh! Running Up That Hill doesn’t sound like the recording! This may sound like a strange observation. But the admittedly brilliant live version I’ve heard before (with David Gilmour on guitar at the 1987 Secret Policeman’s Ball sounds very much like the record (Gilmour’s superb work aside). This version had an elasticity, as it was being played by these consummate musicians. I don’t say that to make them sound like faceless session musos, that is the last thing they were. The keyboard player Kevin McAlea, the sole player remaining from her 1979 tour, got to send out some of the most iconic sounds in her canon. The brilliant Mino Cinélu provided the perfect percussive foil behind the heart of the band, Omar Hakim, and his propulsive drumming. A couple of jazz fusion links were inevitable, given the level of musicianship here: Cinélu played with Miles in the 80s, Hakim was in Weather Report; while Jon Carin on keyboards (a Pink Floyd alumni), the liquid bass of John Giblin (a veteran of five Bush albums), and Friðrik Karlsson and David Rhodes on guitars and various other stringed instruments completed the line-up. The company, which she calls The KT Fellowship, are rounded out by a set of excellent backing singers (more of a Greek chorus, really) plus actors/puppeteers. It’s a production where your eyes dart back and forth, never running out of something to look at. Greg Walsh’s innovative sound design did it to me in the earholes. While Mark Henderson’s lighting designs have graced West End and Broadway stages and he designed the National Theatre’s fantastic 50 Years On Stage celebration last year.

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As I said, just hearing the songs, performed so well, would have been enough. But as King Of The Mountain, and I can’t tell you enough how brilliant it sounded, came to its end, we delved headfirst into The Ninth Wave, the name given to Hounds Of Love’s B side, and it all got a bit darker. I was rapt, on the edge of my seat, following the rather chilling and ghostly story of a drowning woman facing death, thinking of her family as she struggles to cling on. This was a glimpse into Kate Bush’s mind; sometimes it’s light and life affirming like in the second half, and sometimes it’s preoccupied with universal themes of life and death, family, fear and loss. You genuinely felt drawn in, as she appeared on the screen, spluttering and thrashing around in the water, desperate for breath, watching her life slip away and using scenes from it to keep from going under with only a lifejacket for company. All of this unfolds as a huge piece of rigging mimicking a helicopter lurches out over the audience to look for her, searchlights blazing and billowing smoke. It’s audacious, not a little bit bonkers and utterly dazzling. It could have ended there, and that would have been enough of a live show. But we had the Aerial second half to come, then for the encore 50 Words For Snow’s Among Angels, just her on the piano and you could have heard a pin drop, before a big Cloudbusting finale.

I looked around the venue (recently refurbished and looking lovely, I’m glad to say, no longer the dump it latterly became) after it was all over and considered its history for both Kate Bush and myself. Epiphanies abounded. She sat in a seat not dissimilar to mine a few weeks before her 15
th birthday on July 3rd 1973 and saw Bowie’s ‘final’ show there, then sought out his mime teacher (to have such a thing, how very 70s) and took herself forward. (Sidebar: by then she had already written The Man With The Child In His Eyes, when she was 13; she recorded the album version when she was 16). In 1979 her tour ended in Hammersmith. In 2002 I saw Bowie there, and that was a landmark night. I’m not interested particularly in ranking and lists, but I can’t deny that last night was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen, or likely ever will see. The love in the room was unlike anything I’ve experienced at a live show. At the end of Aerial, she sprouted a blackbird’s wing and flew away. Of course she did, because it was a remarkable and unforgettable night where anything was possible.

Introduction
Lily
Hounds of Love
Joanni
Top of the City
Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)
King of the Mountain

The Ninth Wave

Video Interlude - And Dream of Sheep
Under Ice
Waking the Witch
Watching You Without Me
Little Light
Jig of Life
Hello Earth
The Morning Fog

A Sky of Honey

Prelude
Prologue
An Architect's Dream
The Painter's Link
Sunset
Aerial Tal
Somewhere in Between
Tawny Moon (performed by Albert McIntosh)
Nocturn
Aerial

Encore

Among Angels
Cloudbusting


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Kevin Spacey – Clarence Darrow :: Old Vic Theatre, London :: 4-6-2014

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Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan for The Guardian


I am pleading for the future… when hatred and cruelty will not control our hearts, when we can learn that all life is worth saving; that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

For an actor, assuming you’re not one of the out-of-work ones (rare itself), there’s a certain career path that has been well-trodden over the last half century, since the end of the studio system and the exclusivity contracts given to their stables of stars. The early fight for supporting roles, the toil through endless auditions, catching the eye in average movies, which lets you move onto the next rung, then perhaps getting a decent agent, and then even more supporting roles but maybe in better movies. Depending on what you look like, you could make it to the part of the best friend or love interest, though it would actually be better to be unusual or even average looking, because only then might the parts get interesting. Perhaps you’ll pull the supporting role of a lifetime, the unlikely hero or the revealed villain, and steal the movie. You can succeed because it’s been pre-decided, due to your non-Jackman/Pitt/Cruise level looks, that you’re not the leading man, but you’re eye-catching enough to form important connections with people who’ll stand up for you when the studio wants someone more traditionally handsome for their next Oscar-bait drama: the kind that Hollywood used to make, until fairly recently. This path was largely unaltered until around fifteen years ago, when a shift started to happen in the mainstream movie business. The Hollywood paymasters shoved real creatives toward the margins and even the smaller movies started to be made by committee. The approach itself wasn’t new but the players were. Marketing executives with an eye on toy markets, merchandising, one-sheets, TV spots and sequels were now sending notes back on scripts – these people had not a clue on earth what components a film needed to be good. They used to come in after a movie was made, with no part played in the creative process, but it all changed and getting great writing onto the big screen suddenly became as easy as pushing water up a hill.

Disillusioned creatives saw this commerce, rather than arts, driven approach becoming the new normal and started to do something drastic and unprecedented – they moved to TV. Before, TV had been the last refuge of the failed movie actor. There’s a lot to be said for a steady paycheck. The first stirrings were seen as the century ended, with the 1999 premieres of both The West Wing on broadcast (the channels everyone gets) and The Sopranos on cable, (which you pay for, in the US model). Bit by bit, the best actors started dropping out of movies and into TV, because that’s where the great dramas were now being made. They ran away from the comic book adaptations, the tent-pole summer blockbusters and the sequels, perhaps indulging in a little voice acting for animations to top up the bank balance. Some rushed straight into TV, while others rushed straight to the stage. A few were clever enough to do everything: take a good part in a small movie for a nice wage when the script was good enough, focus on theatre and help to get plays on not just by starring in them but by producing them, and finally, only when the absolutely perfect part came along, created by none of the established cable networks (operating outside even HBO/AMC/Showtime et al. without any constraints, the newest players are Netflix, Hulu and Amazon: with no track record comes no fear, nor limits on adventure or investment), jump on it and create a career where half the year is spent doing a remarkable TV show and the other half is spent with theatre sawdust in the nostrils. This is how to conduct a career, be in charge of it, while taking or creating the best opportunities. And thus, we come to Kevin Spacey.

Put simply, eleven years ago he opted out of Hollywood, at a time when his star was sky high and $10m a movie was on the table. He saw that great movie drama was in trouble but wasn’t quite ready to be on the small screen. So he moved to London and became the artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre in Waterloo. Many thought this was some vanity project. A chance to use his name to act in a series of revivals and just get as many eyeballs on him as possible. That may be the perception, but the facts don’t bear it out: since 2003, he has directed only two plays and starred in seven (his last being 2011’s acclaimed Richard III, which saw a reunion with Sam Mendes), but has shepherded over forty onto the stage, by focusing his not inconsiderable reserves of personal charm onto fundraising and creative partnerships. While the Old Vic, at nearly 200 years of age, wasn’t quite the busted flush that some of the media suggested pre-Spacey’s arrival, he has turned it into a theatre that can attract the newest and most exciting plays, to rival the National Theatre (which once controlled it). His aim was not just to reinvigorate the place, but also to create a structure and innovative ethos that would allow it to continue long after he abdicated. Next year he will hand over to Matthew Warchus, whose credentials catch the eye; most recently, he directed the magical Matilda musical, which won seven Oliviers and five Tonys last year.

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Spacey will do, it’s said, one more onstage appearance at the Old Vic before his tenure ends (and he promises he will come back even after that, London now being his permanent home) but it seemed an irresistible aim to do his first one-man show. I happened to attend on press night, so I’ve been dipping into the reviews, which drip with superlatives. The adjectives are out in force: ferocious, passionate, powerful, spellbinding, mesmerising. It’s all true, and more. As anyone who attends gigs regularly will tell you: proximity is addictive. The Old Vic has been dramatically reconfigured, just for this play, in the round. The main stage has been removed; about 70% of the seats were on one side (the stalls plus the dress and Lilian Baylis circles), then there’s a small square, a cluttered, crumpled office set, with jury-like rows on each side, and then the remainder sit behind – I was four rows from the front in this section, seated on what would usually be the stage. It mattered not that some of the play was spent looking at his rear end, as he lurched like an ageing boxer into the audience’s faces, exhorting the crowd as if they were a jury he had to convince. Instead, it was just overwhelming to be so close to the action. He addressed my section frequently, leaning in to part with a lawyer’s secret like we were all behind a two-way mirror. In the theatre you can often feel preached to, shrunken into the crowd and simply the repository for the performer’s ego. Being confronted by Spacey’s version of legendary litigator Clarence Darrow was like being personally addressed in a courtroom. He drew you in, utterly and completely. The discipline is so very different to TV or film, which can reach you but is nothing like being in the same room as the performer. In this instance, being in the round and a few feet away, the sense of environment was amplified to wonderfully, unbearably intense levels.

Darrow has been called a civil rights lawyer, but this is an oversimplification. He defended murderers threatened with the death penalty to prevent the state from committing another display of dehumanising horror themselves, arguing that mercy is what makes society better, and how revenge will only make us harder people. He proudly saved 102 people from death row. Humanity’s good aims interested him more than America’s often Biblically inspired desire for revenge; he believed in trying to pry out people’s innate goodness. But more than this, his philosophy was to fight for the common man and woman. A full forty years before the turning point of the civil rights battle he lined up behind black defendants faced with all-white juries. The most celebrated case of this type was that of Ossian Sweet, a black doctor who had the temerity to move into a white neighbourhood. His home was surrounded by an angry mob and, as they advanced to his door, a shot was fired that killed one of the invaders. In many US states this would be allowed under the so-called ‘stand your ground’ law, sadly now used to free killers like George Zimmerman. Darrow defended Sweet and, in a landmark case, he was acquitted of murder.

The text of the play itself, written by David W. Rintels (based on the biography Clarence Darrow For The Defense by Irving Stone, who also wrote the famed van Gogh bio Lust For Life) and first performed by Henry Fonda in 1974, is fairly straightforward. It’s an autobiographical run through of Darrow’s most famed cases, after first illuminating his Ohio upbringing, to freethinking parents: his mother talked of suffrage in 1840, no less than 80 years before women gained countrywide voting rights. It briefly covers his move to Chicago, his first marriage, and even a little of the unfounded jury bribery allegations that beset him during the case of the McNamara brothers, who had planted a bomb in the offices of the Los Angeles Times during a labour union dispute: not intending to harm anyone, they had killed 21 newspaper employees; Darrow saved them from the noose. He defended Pennsylvania miners, who were working fourteen hours a day, 365 days a year, against their bosses, arguing for better pay and working conditions. Spacey made the audience gasp with a tale of an 11-year-old child miner who had a leg amputated due to employer negligence: he was manipulative in the way that all great arguers are. A champion of the unions, no doubt the right-wing would today call him a Communist. He never even claimed to be a socialist; he was simply a man who wanted to use his intellect and talents to stand up for the underdog. He was an inspiration to anyone who wants to speak for the vulnerable. He didn’t mind a bit of media-bait either, perhaps best encapsulated in the Scopes ‘monkey’ trial, following a schoolteacher’s prosecution for teaching evolution in the Bible Belt. The play finishes, inevitably, to a coruscating powerhouse denouement on perhaps Darrow’s most famous case, that of Leopold and Loeb, two rich teenagers who killed a 14-year-old boy merely for the experience and excitement, the challenge of getting away with it. This is where the concept of mercy came in, as Darrow fervently believed that we can only move forward as a collective culture when we reject the baser instincts of our human nature. He believed without pause in rehabilitation over retribution as a model for how a civilised society should behave.

Spacey had played Darrow no less than twice before. When pressed, he has said that the first occasion, a 1991 low budget PBS movie, was his favourite filming experience. The second time was in a 2009 Old Vic production of Inherit The Wind, (with the Darrow character alternately named Henry Drummond). He is the fourth fine actor to play the role: after Fonda, Orson Welles took him on in 1959’s Compulsion, a thinly fictionalised account of the Leopold and Loeb trial; perhaps the most famous incarnation was in the film adaptation of Inherit The Wind, with Spencer Tracy’s Oscar nominated version taking the plaudits.

A one-man (or woman) show is not to be trifled with, and few actors on earth could hold the rapt attention of a thousand people the way Spacey does. Once I got over the initial thrill of seeing such a renowned actor in person, and only a few feet away, it was an easy pleasure to get swept away in the invective and the complete command and control he has over an audience. It’s not just his level of stagecraft and experience, which is considerable (I’d seen him once before, unashamedly scene-stealing in The Philadelphia Story in this same venue) – it’s the sheer force of his charismatic presence. This is an actor at his absolute career peak, both in person and on screen. In his other job, House of Cards, he gives you barely a drip of humanity, and yet still you root for his Machiavellian politician. Such is his skill that he can strip away any remaining vestige of humanity, as in Se7en, and leave you disgusted but in awe. He can project a seductive quality, as in LA Confidential, or pathetic desperation, as in American Beauty. He can scenery-chew for a giggle, as in the otherwise unwatchable Superman Returns, or con you completely, in The Usual Suspects. He even stood up to his mentor Jack Lemmon, perhaps the actor he resembles the most in the cinema canon, in Glengarry Glen Ross. During the second half, I heard an anachronistic noise: it became clear that a mobile phone was going off (idiots are present everywhere) and, in character, without breaking a beat, he said ‘If you don’t answer that, I will.’ Everything appears to be effortless, which is as it should be when you work as hard as Spacey does.

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The set, beautifully designed by Alan Macdonald as a chaotic office, allowed for lots of fiddling with boxes and papers to show the audience headlines and photos, and the masterful direction by Thea Sharrock simply allowed him to take control and have every audience member hanging on his every word. I can’t think of another actor who could have pulled this off; yes, it was shouty, as he has to be heard in the back rows, but what an exhilarating spectacle. What a privilege to be present at a transformative display of a performer at the height of his powers. It was one of the great nights I’ve had in London.

Perhaps the only cautionary tale is that we should now be able to view Darrow’s humanitarianism as quaint, a relic of a more closed-minded century. Unfortunately, the world is no less right-wing (it just seems like it is because we talk more; activism is higher but pushback is greater) than it was during his heyday. While some progress has been made, governments are more secretive and still as keen to crush uprisings (for example, in the last year 40,000 protestors have been jailed in Egypt, with all forms of protest now banned by a government elected as a result of protests), while citizens are more suspicious, and rightly so given the inroads made on liberties and how much we are spied on daily. The game is rigged, with little advances made in social justice and minority interest groups dominating the conversation (belief in climate change is crazy and anti-business while belief in invisible gods is sky high). What is the internet itself, except a method from which data is collected on behaviours, and how long before it’s yanked under corporate control and net neutrality becomes a thing of the past? Most of the jail populations still come from backgrounds of poverty and poor education, while education funding itself is slashed and healthcare is sold to the highest bidder. He should be a winner on the right side of history, not an anomaly pushing against the tide. A century later, we need fighters like Darrow more than ever.

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Crosby, Stills and Nash :: Royal Albert Hall, London, 8-10-13/9-10-13

To dream of being in a successful band, perhaps in a different era, when the music industry worked in ways it doesn’t anymore. To make your way around the roadhouses, stinking pubs and clubs, along the B-roads of England and America. To push through an overstuffed landscape with a million other bands trying to get into a couple of magazines, the grey broadsheets and 40 chart spaces. To craft your songwriting, get a break, get a deal, the support slots that move you up the ladder, the first hit, the songs you get known for, to reach a point in culture where you’re recognised in the street. To start squabbling with your band members over stuff that, now, you can’t even remember. To search for an escape, a route out of there. This path, this well-known route, has happened to countless bands, like, let’s say, The Hollies (I’m not a fan, very twee), Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds . To work so hard to get there, and then to give it all up, walk away from everything because it didn’t feel right. You’re miserable, so you quit, or get fired, meet some cool guys, and form what would now be called a supergroup, in the hope that band number 2 is better. The chance of being in one big pop group is to face astronomical odds of failure. To get it, quit and have a second go? Madness. And yet, three men from those three bands not only did it, but the second band they formed became 10 times more successful than their original groups.

And so the splits went down like this: Graham Nash, from Salford, Manchester (though born in Blackpool), wrote a jaunty tune called Marrakesh Express and his band, The Hollies, hated it, which started off the trouble. I had always, somewhat unfairly, teased that Nash was a little Ringo-ish: a guy with the perfect personality who just fitted in with the more talented ones. I do find him a little cheesy, I admit, with his mid-Atlantic accent, but he’s a brilliant songwriter, with a lovely voice, and he’s even got a creditable second career, having been a digital art pioneer in the early 80s, as a rather excellent photographer. This is the man Joni wrote Blue about. There must be more to him.

David Crosby is truly one of my favourite people on earth. I met him once, at a solo show at the Jazz Café. I’d seen his former bandmate Roger McGuinn there earlier that same year, and though I’m not an autograph person, I happened to have pinched my parents’ Byrds box set and took the booklet along. Management gofers took handfuls of memorabilia, returning with signatures. McGuinn, well known as not being the nicest guy, refused to meet anyone. Crosby, on the other hand, held court in the bar upstairs, talking warmly with everyone, signing everything proffered at him. I have no recollection of my fangirl babble, but I do remember that he looked at me with the kindest face I’d ever seen, his big cheeks puffing out as he smiled, framing his magnificent white handlebar moustache. It’s what God, if he existed, should look like.

As he started to move away from the volcanic troubles in The Byrds, he found himself delving further into a hippy ideal and nowhere was that purer than, not Woodstock, at 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival. Of all of the landmark rock festivals, and there were plenty, that one, for me, is the standout. It had the best bill, the best atmosphere, no trouble, no lack of facilities and a manageable medium-sized 60,000 strong crowd (though the performance spaces only held 8,000 each, so most missed the bands; everyone was there for the vibe, man). Gene Clark had already left The Byrds by then, driven out by the stress of dealing with everyone else, McGuinn and Chris Hillman in particular. During their appearance, Crosby went off, ranting about Vietnam, and then further annoyed his bandmates by stepping in for an absent Neil Young to guest with Buffalo Springfield, at their leader Stephen Stills’ request. The cracks were there and, as these things go, it all happened pretty fast. Stephen and Graham quit, and David was fired. The three met for the first time at David’s house on one sunny Laurel Canyon day in 1968, and sang together for the first time.

Famously, Woodstock was only the second Crosby, Stills and Nash show. Neil Young, who did play with them briefly there but was too nervous to be filmed, had also jumped the Springfield ship and, of course, has been in and out of the band for many decades. But for me, it's all about the core three. The spikiness of Stills, who knows he’s the leader only when Neil’s absent, and the brotherly Crosby and Nash, who’ve made great duo records and often tour together. I’d seen them live at Glastonbury in 2009, though my overall experience that year wasn’t positive, and I remember little of their performance anyway. I got a last minute ticket from a woman called Barbara; after my failure to get Fleetwood Mac tickets the other week, it felt like I was meant to be there.

However much I thought I'd enjoy this concert, it completely exceeded my expectations. It was a 3-hour odyssey through some of the best songwriting of the last half-century. Crosby is now 72, Stills is 68 and Nash is 71. It’s dull to talk about ageing rock stars. There are no ageing painters or playwrights. There’s no need to be shocked when, despite grey hair and slightly wider waistbands, a band like this are in great shape. It’s what they do, what they’ve always done. They’re touring, hardened musicians who have been playing live for almost 50 years. Their energy does not flag, while new songs are numerous and hit the mark. ‘These new songs stop us from being The Eagles’, Graham quipped. One must admire their bullish insistence on playing several new compositions every night; as we know, many of their contemporaries don’t bother, either because of fear of clearing the venue or because the creative wellspring ran dry long ago. Nobody leaves for a loo/pint break during these new songs, like you usually see at gigs like this. And by ‘like this’ I mean the nonsensical concept of oldie or nostalgia acts. Get on, play the hits, the tickets are expensive, I want to get home before 11, the crowd think. A venue’s size at this level can, I think, influence the setlist, the choices made. At the Royal Albert Hall, which seats a crowd of around 4500, there was an undeniable emotional intimacy. Playing in a ‘small’ venue (as opposed to, say Wembley Arena or the O2) lets them indulge themselves a little more, maybe playing a more varied setlist. Perhaps it felt so intimate because I had seats on the surprisingly cosy floor. They made it feel like a living room.

This band have survived it all. Coked-up 70s madness, death (Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed in a car accident, which it’s been said he’s never recovered from, though he has been evened out by Jan, his wife of 36 years), fighting (you sense Neil vs. Stephen was the main attraction), a couple of overdoses (Stills, in the 70s), and yet they kept getting drawn back together. From the opening chords of Carry On , from 1970’s Déjà Vu, this was such a special night. Those three voices soared, backed ably by a brilliant band: Todd Caldwell, organ; Shane Fontayne, guitar; Steve DiStanislao, drums (superb!); Kevin McCormick, bass, and James Raymond (Crosby’s son) on keyboards.

There’s something about the beauty of vocal harmonies at this level (there’s little, Beach Boys aside, this good) that always gets me. In particular, David and Graham’s voices ache with exquisite sympatico. The tempo never dropped, incredible pop songs just kept on coming: Almost Cut My Hair (a Crosby tour-de-force), Buffalo Springfield song Bluebird, performed without C&N, which brought a rapturous ovation following fiery guitar work, Long Time Gone (used in the opening scene of Woodstock of course), the perfect pop of Nash’s Military Madness, it was endless. Cathedral was prefaced by his tale of its creation, “One day I decided to get up really early, take acid, rent a Rolls Royce, and go to Stonehenge. In those days you could touch the stones. I lay on the ground for a thousand years, or it could have been 10 seconds, I couldn’t tell. I walked to Winchester Cathedral, and found myself chilled to the bone as I stood on the grave of a soldier who had died in 1799, but on my birthday.” The RAH’s newly restored pipe organ was bathed in red light and its tones filled the room (though it was begging for a Spinal Tap papier-mâché model to descend). Before the sweet tale of domesticity that is Our House (which has had a second life as an accompaniment to various TV adverts), he started off by talking about Joni. One day they went out shopping and she saw this nice little vase, which he encouraged her to buy. When they got home, he said ‘I’ll light the fire, you put the flowers in the vase that you bought today.” The crowd broke into warm applause, recognising that simple post-shopping trip sentence as the first lyric couplet.

It went on: Helplessly Hoping, and its perfect harmonies, brought tears to the eyes, Crosby’s signature love song Guinnevere, Déjà Vu, Southern Cross, the magnificent Wooden Ships and, of course, Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. New songs and old, mountains of charm and passion, the kind of togetherness you feel lucky to witness, from men who’ve been through everything together, through rain and shine. I was overcome, by history, songwriting, guitar playing that’s hardly done like that anymore, and that sweet trio of voices. Unforgettable night. Graham’s hometown show in Manchester happens on Saturday, I envy my dad that he’ll see this remarkable band (for the first time: he’s seen solo Stills, CSNY and C&N, but never just all three).

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I’ve just made an offer on Scarlet Mist for a ticket for tonight’s show. Bonkers, you may say, but if a chance is in front of you, take it without regret.

Incidentally, it seems to be considered odd to see multiple gigs on one tour. Few understand why I’ve done it so often. It’s normal to see the same band a year apart, on the next tour, but strange to see them a day apart? In all honesty, I haven’t felt like this for 18 months. I’ve enjoyed the gigs I’ve attended, but last night felt like something old was coming back, some spark of joy in myself that had been lost. It’s a tiny step, but nevertheless, it feels very real. That’s why I’m going again. More to come…
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So, the second show. An even better seat this time, giving me a new angle, letting me see details previously invisible. Graham Nash performs barefoot, who knew? The stage is festooned with rugs and a couple of scarves. The interplay is much clearer second time around. You can still see, even now, the divisions between Stills and the others. I wonder if he’s jealous of their brotherhood? Maybe. I do think he’s bemused and annoyed by not being Neil Young. You get the sense he can’t believe he’s not playing arenas by himself whereas the other two don’t care at all, they’re just happy to be performing. A passage in Nash’s autobiography sums up the differing vibes, the personalities, of his bandmates: “I had never met anybody like Crosby. He was an irreverent, funny, brilliant hedonist who had been thrown out of The Byrds the previous year. He always had the best drugs, the most beautiful women, and they were always naked. Stephen was a guy in a similar mould. He was brash, egotistical, opinionated, provocative, volatile, temperamental, and so talented. A very complex cat, and a little crazy.”

Graham, though it pains me to praise a United fan, is very charming. Joni’s famous quote about free love (what bullshit it was, how it was only good for men) was, I suspect, said with him in mind. She’s the one that got away, certainly, but his wandering eye paid to that, though initially she had tracked him down and seduced him. You constantly hear ‘hey, it was the 60s/70s!’ to excuse a lot of misogynist behaviour. Not that times and the perception of morals weren’t different then. Joni had had a brief fling with Crosby, who wasn’t the possessive type and was cool when she invited Graham to live with her on his first day in LA. Indeed, he later shared one of his other girlfriends with Nash, who stole Rita Coolidge from Stills, who had a long relationship with Judy Collins and so on and on. But the machinations and treatment of women in the 1970s is a subject for another day…

I enjoyed the second gig just as much as the first, undoubtedly. It was another intimate, emotional night, which made the venue seem small. It was fun, as it always is, to watch middle-aged, middle-class, white people try to let go. A foot tap, a head bob, polite applause for Stills’ guitar virtuosity… English people are so tightly wound sometimes. Particular treats were To The Last Whale, from Wind On The Water, Crosby & Nash’s 2nd album, and a magnificent version of Triad, David’s odd yet sweet invocation of the benefits of threesomes. He’d written it during his time in The Byrds but McGuinn rejected it, horrified. Jefferson Airplane were not so squeamish and took it on, covering it on their album Crown Of Creation. Again, the S-only (no C&N) version of Buffalo Springfield’s Bluebird just blew me away. I closed my eyes and, during the free psychedelic blues jam freakout of its second half, was simply transported to another place entirely.

It’s hard to put your finger on what keeps this band together, given their histories of bickering and drug trouble. I can only surmise that it’s just pure chemistry, the non-narcotic kind, because when you watch them live it’s a magical experience. They know it, from first note to last: that they are greater together than apart. It’s all about those hugely different voices. The high notes left Stephen long ago, but a gravelly tone serves him so well, despite the odd note missed. Amazingly, Graham can still sing in a nicely high register, which is particularly welcome and surprising. Perhaps David’s voice is the strongest individually, which considering he’s been through decades of drug addiction, culminating most spectacularly in a spell in prison in the early 80s, almost feels shocking. It’s like watching Keith Richards’ gnarled, deformed, arthritic hands play a perfect solo during Sympathy For The Devil. It makes no sense but there it is, your eyes and ears don’t lie. He’s got the same childlike joy as Keith has; he’s a survivor who’s just happy, and genuinely surprised, to be alive. The harmonies might not hit the same high notes they used to but during Helplessly Hoping it was like time stood still, I’ve never heard voices so sweet. Even in lower tones, it was remarkable to witness. As the band left the stage and I took a deep happy breath, the tannoy led the crowd out with refrains of We’ll Meet Again. I hope so.

Carry On/Questions (CSNY)
Pre-Road Downs
Long Time Gone
Just a Song Before I Go
Southern Cross
Marrakesh Express (night 1 only)
Lay Me Down (C&N)
Military Madness (night 1 only)
Time I Have
Cathedral
Bluebird (Buffalo Springfield)
Déjà Vu (CSNY)
49 Bye-Byes

Set 2
Helplessly Hoping
Teach Your Children (CSNY)
Treetop Flyer (Stephen Stills song)
Golden Days (2nd night only)
What Are Their Names
Guinnevere
Burning for the Buddha
Triad (Jefferson Airplane cover)
Critical Mass/Wind On The Water (2nd night only)
Our House
Almost Cut My Hair (CSNY)
Wooden Ships

Encore:
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

_____________________________

Addendum:

Dad’s report – amazing, emotional show. Judy Blue Eyes was not played (they ran over the curfew I suspect). Graham dedicated a song to his sister and her family, who were present. David said ‘I have so much to thank Manchester for; you gave me my best friend in life.’

Dad wanted to add to this the story of how he ignored Joni Mitchell. In early 1970 he was working in Burtons, a men’s clothes store on Deansgate in Manchester. A crowd of four came in and he immediately recognised one as Graham Nash. He ran up to him and engaged him in conversation, and they chatted for a while. He told Graham he’d just bought the first Santana album and loved it, to which Graham replied that they’d just played a gig with them in New York. They talked about music, and Graham bought a sheepskin coat for his step-dad. What a trip, right? A few weeks later a colleague said ‘wasn’t that amazing, when he came in with Joni Mitchell’. The blood drained from dad’s face.

The three women had been Graham’s mother, sister and girlfriend. He had ignored her completely, so wrapped up was he in talking music. He later wrote to MOJO, apologising to Joni for ignoring her, as she was the love of his life, adding ‘don’t worry, my wife knows about that!’

...

The Rolling Stones :: Hyde Park, London, 13-7-13


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The Rolling Stones are unreviewable. There is no element of surprise with a live show like theirs: you know what you’re going to get. The only surprise comes from your own muscle memory, how these songs are part of your heart and brain, how you instinctively know every note and word. For me anyway, they trace the line of so much, including my relationship with my mother, who was trying to get me into Mick when she showed me the video for Dancing In The Street. She finally got me in 1990 when we watched the VHS of 25x5 until the tape was worn out. We saw them live on August 25th 1990 at Wembley Stadium – she would always tease me and say ‘you said Keith looked straight at you!’ Hey, I was 13, we were quite near the front, and I coulda sworn he had. They were her favourite band: they were our band. More than her other faves like Miles, Bob or even the Beatles – the Stones belonged to us.

I hadn’t seen them live since we saw them again in Sheffield in 1995 – they’ve toured several times since but I always said ‘they’ve had enough of my money’. When they announced a return to Hyde Park, for the first time since the concert they had played there following the death of Brian Jones, I did raise an eyebrow but it fell on the night of a Bowie party long in the planning. But then, when they announced a show the week after, it felt like I was meant to be there – following in mum’s footsteps, she had attended the 1969 show. When I got lucky with tickets, it was on.

Concert-going, in the pop/rock arena, is split into sections – young artists, who plough their debut albums in small venues; the mid-level bands on albums 3 or 4 doing the same in slightly larger, say Roundhouse-size, places, who throw in well-received tracks from their previous records. There’s your established acts, say aged between 30-45, who are probably big enough to play an arena but prefer a run of gigs at a theatre. The audience care about the new record but the band knows there’s a balance to be found. Then there’s that hideous phrase, the heritage act. With the notable exceptions of Neil Young, Robert Plant, Bruce Springsteen and a few others, new stuff is neither played nor wanted. A nostalgia party takes place. There’s a couple who don’t tour at all, like Bowie and Joni, but that’s rare, most want to fill an arena and relive their glory days. At the older end of even that scale the Stones stand alone – they don’t much care about new material, and neither does anybody else. They wouldn’t, they couldn’t, do a version of The Next Day; adding to the musical canon matters not. It’s about leaving something behind that people can actually see. It’s about the experience of being in their presence. The notion of retirement has always been a stupid question, for a different day. The blues guys they worship went on into their 80s (partly because they were ripped off and had to but that’s yet another issue) and nobody suggests that actors or painters or musicians playing jazz or classical music give it all up when they’re over 60. Pop music is certainly a young person’s game but if you can still deliver, why the fuck shouldn’t you? I watched what was allowed to be televised at Glastonbury the other week. They hit some high spots but honestly, it wasn’t great. However, many bands try and fail at that level, where you’re piloting into someone else’s stage, sound system, technicians, cameras etc. U2 fell a little flat when they headlined too, though to be fair to them that was more to do with torrential rain turning the stage into an ice rink, rendering them static and nervous. I’d seen a few clips of the O2 shows they did at the end of last year, and those were better. As such, at this level, and given the famed level of control Mick loves, when they’re on their own turf everything tends to come together.

Having said that, they are not, and have never been, polished. They don’t churn out perfect Fleetwood Mac style MOR and they don’t play note-perfect recreations a la Pink Floyd. Stay at home and listen to the records, if that’s what you want. They are a bit ramshackle, it could all fall to bits, there’s the odd bum note, but this is a band with Keith Richards in it after all, and he is the musical leader, so that can’t bother you. If it does, you don’t know your Stones history very well. Their shows might not offer the danger of yore, and their (or at least Mick and Charlie’s) approach might be super-professional, but you can still let go and see the sparks between them. They’re breaking this mould – there are no other rock bands who’ve been together for 50 years. Think about that time frame, think about how many generations have come and gone, how many challengers they’ve seen off. They’re not flawless, they’re a little bit dirty and messy, and that’s why I’ve loved them so much for nearly 25 years.

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The attendees were mostly the usual outdoor show types, not the kind to follow this band around (I’m guessing those were in Tiers 1 and 2, but more of that later), perhaps the type who might see Coldplay. Middle-aged couples, lads, pretty girls in cut-off denims, and a fair few kids, who were no doubt younger than I was when I first saw them. There was a real buzz around the park, and I’ve never seen so many band shirts at a gig. The most iconic band logo of all time though, isn’t it? Our £107 tickets (£95 plus booking fee) got us into what they called Tier 3. This meant you could go only as far as a barrier that had been erected a long, long way back. I didn’t care particularly but it did feel like being on a cruise ship, stuck in steerage while the richer people had fancy dinners with the captain. To be fair, Tier 2 were £150 (i.e. not that much more than ours), and then Tier 1 (which must have been a section even within the section we couldn’t get into) was considerably more, and came with access to a hospitality area that looked like a cricket pavilion. Even for those of us in the cheap seats, dotted around the park was the kind of luxury I wasn’t used to at outdoor shows – poncy artisanal organic food, constructed pubs, air-conditioned tents, and real toilets. It’s hard to say whether this is the new face of beautifully organised summer gigs or whether the sponsor had simply learned from last year’s event organisers, who were so roundly ridiculed for screwing up Springsteen’s encore last summer, or even whether it’s just because it’s an expensive Stones show. Regardless, it was nice to be treated like a human being – when I see sit-down shows or jazz gigs or classical concerts the treatment of the patrons is markedly different. Compare any recital on the South Bank to the sticky floors and overflowing toilets of the Brixton Academy et al, you’ll see how different fan groups are treated.

It was a beautiful, blue-skied day, and we sat in the sun for a few hours before the quite enjoyable Jake Bugg came on. He’s pretty great for a teenager. We’d smuggled rum into the venue in the back of our trousers (it’s not my first time) and this turned out to be a wise move. A few bottles of mixers were procured and we were set for the evening, having found a great spot by one of the screens. The pre-show warm-up tape was a bit of blues, as you’d expect, but then on came Milestones, the 1958 classic by Miles Davis. A second later a woman wearing a Star of David walked past me. It might sound like I’m full of shit but I had a little moment where I felt like my mum was right there. The show started with a brief film of the original Hyde Park show, right on time, on the dot of 8.25pm. Start Me Up! Then It’s Only Rock And Roll, and then Tumbling Dice. Big punches, thrown one after the other, they’ve got songs to burn. The energy and noise level started to rise and, despite it being the hottest day of the year, stayed sky high for the next 2 hours. It was a pleasure to hear the languid disco funk of Emotional Rescue, a bit of a surprise (played for the first time ever 2 months ago, this was its first European performance, amazingly), and I couldn’t help but smile as Mick’s perfect falsetto rang out across the grass. It’s a ridiculous song, a daft attempt at being on-trend in the Studio 54 era, but it also feels like an old friend.

The backing players are staples now themselves – bassist Darryl Jones, who has been playing with them for two decades, impressed hugely, and nobody gave a thought to the old Bill. Backing vocalists Lisa Fischer (incredible on Gimme Shelter) and Bernard Edwards, in their 25th year of touring with the band, are beautifully settled and woven in. Chuck Leavell, a Stones veteran of some 31 years, adds boogie-woogie piano that Ian Stewart would have been proud of. And of course, the tough Texan warhorse Bobby Keys has been playing sax with these old boys longer than Ronnie’s been in the band (on and off from 1970-81 but a constant from ’82 onwards). Mick Taylor had been asked to join in June ’69 after Brian was fired and, less than a month later, two days after Brian died, he was making his stage debut. Arguably, he’s the best guitarist that’s ever played with them, and certainly their highest creative points were reached in his years with the band (1969-75). He has been playing with them on this tour and, though I knew it was coming, what a pleasure it was to hear him play on a mindblowing version of my favourite live Stones song Midnight Rambler (pleasingly, he made another bow in Satisfaction, at the end).

Charlie is of course solidity personified, even if you know he’d rather be at Ronnie Scott’s playing some Art Blakey licks. It’s charming that he’s still so thoroughly unimpressed by the machinery of the rock music industry all these years later. He likes to complain about being in this band, but he always answers Keith’s call. Ronnie, however, I was left in no doubt, is the glue that holds it all together. He was always the social glue; he was hired, effectively, to give Keith a companion who’d keep up with him and then hold him back, as and when it was needed. But now, what with Keith’s arthritis, and his attached inability to play quite as solidly, or certainly as consistently, as he once could, it falls to Woody to hold this whole thing together. Keith still leads the band, as ever, but Ronnie circles him, musically and literally, and plays through everything. He is quite brilliant, and clearly, unlike in some previous tours, on the wagon – he couldn’t possibly perform like this if he was drinking.

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Keith Richards. Oh you know, what can I, or anyone, say? Apart from the old clichés, he’s a man with a great will to be around, with a love of life, of living, with an obvious gratitude for what he has. He’s an intelligent, well-read man, and very moral, which seems to surprise people but, if you pay attention, he’s always been quite the purveyor of personal etiquette. Sure, he’s a little rough around the edges, but he is remarkable, and surprisingly lucid, in so many ways. Wave after wave of love was transmitted to him from this 65,000 strong crowd and he absorbed it all, like a regenerating Doctor. When he had to step up and play the shit out of something (Paint It Black, Sympathy For The Devil, Honky Tonk Women, JJ Flash) he did so and when he got his 2-song cameo (You Got The Silver, from Let It Bleed, and Happy, accompanied by terrific pedal steel work from Ronnie) he delivered beautiful versions of both. He’s a force of nature, a survivor. Nothing surprises me about Keith – if he popped off tomorrow or if he lived to 100, I’d shrug. He’s capable of anything.

On July 26th, in just over a week, Michael Philip Jagger will turn 70 years old. I want you to imagine what a normal 70 year old man is like. Perhaps he’ll be still working in a job he hates. He could be retired and filling his days with gardening or reading or going on a cruise perhaps. He might have a bit of middle-aged spread (as goodness knows a lot of the men in the audience did, and felt no compunction about showing off), or even an overflowing beer gut that clothing fails to tame. The once lustrous hair he had has started to thin or even made its escape completely. Then watch Jagger, howling it out, losing himself on harmonica, he never stops moving or working. And so, despite an undeniably wrinkly face, I cannot fail to marvel at what this particular pensioner puts in. He has a nice line in acting, all that mockney ‘Ar ya doin tonight Laandaahn!’ His voice, always a classic rock instrument, is in perfect nick, and just the sheer energy and approach of his performance is staggering. Morrissey always says he ‘appears’; he doesn’t perform. What he means is that he and his emotions are ‘real’ and his singing is from the soul, he’s not putting anything on. Mick is a performer in every sense. It’s so affected as to almost be cartoonish. He has always played this rock frontman character, which is a mile away from the cultured, yet bohemian, mischievous but whip-smart economist that he really is. What he does is a job. It’s a part he plays and my god, he plays it well. He prepares himself like a marathon runner, he trains and, on stage, he works his tiny little arse off. He runs miles and engages and communicates and it is his job to get the audience off, to never let the energy level drop. He’s one of the greatest and I felt lucky to have left it 18 years since I last saw him and for the performance to be better than it was then. Good genes (his dad was a PE teacher and both parents lived well into their 90s), hard bloody work and natural gifts make him what he is. It’s easy to take the piss, but you can’t watch him and be unimpressed. It’s impossible. I won’t go on about the songs because you’ll see the setlist below – it was all a highlight. Mick even found a smock dress to put on, in the same style as the one he wore for the ’69 show. And Ruby Tuesday (pardon my shaky, excited hand), played for the first time on this tour, took me back to 1990; I remember hearing it at Wembley so clearly. There were no low points, there was no filler (even new song Doom and Gloom sounds like classic Stones) and it made me want to see them again and again.

The whole experience was a magical blur and seemed to be over far too quickly. Nobody does this kind of thing better. Their songs are part of the fabric of this country and they have always been cooler and sexier than The Beatles ever were. The Beatles get you in the heart: the Stones aim somewhat lower. I’ve seen McCartney too and it is joyous, but not as passionate or visceral or real as it is watching the Stones. I couldn’t help think how happy mum would have been that I went to see her boys. She saw them in 1964 when she was 13. She took me to see them in 1990 when I was 13. And I saw plenty of kids the same age, whose grandparents are younger than the band, revelling in this extraordinary day, something they’ll be able to tell their grandkids about when we’re all gone. All except Keith of course, obviously. He’ll be around forever.

Start Me Up
It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)
Tumbling Dice
Emotional Rescue
Street Fighting Man
Ruby Tuesday
Doom and Gloom
Paint It Black
Honky Tonk Women
You Got the Silver
Happy
Miss You
Midnight Rambler
Gimme Shelter
Jumpin' Jack Flash
Sympathy for the Devil
Brown Sugar

Encore:
You Can't Always Get What You Want
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

...

Patti Smith :: Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London, 19-6-13

I feel like I’m taking part in some kind of gig marathon, the like of which I’ve not done since I saw four Bowie shows in 11 days (and, in total, 11 shows in four months) in 2003. I’m not as young as I used to be, so I did feel like I needed a night at home, but this gig was a truly special evening, one I’m glad to have been able to be part of. So, gig 3 of 4 (the last is Yoko on Sunday) was the inestimable Patti Smith. It’s a great venue in which to see a show, the Empire. It’s getting a little run down though, I must say. I thought these corporate naming deals were supposed to mean the place has a bit of cash to not look like it's falling to bits? The rough and unpolished venue, however, seemed to suit the evening’s contents. I’ve loved Patti Smith for years, ever since I first heard Horses as a teenager. I wasn’t the only one. Some of the people I adore the most (Morrissey, Stipe) also count that record as one of the great turning points of their life. I’ve been deeply moved and in thrall to a great many pieces of art, theatre, film and even television but, and perhaps this is just me, I don’t find anything as transformative as music. Nothing lifts me off the ground in the same way.

She has always had that same rumpled charm, since the beginning. I can’t think of any women in her profession who changed the visual aesthetic in popular music so greatly. Before her, you had 60s girl groups, Janis (not beautiful but certainly intending to exude sex), Joni, and of course the Debbie Harry’s of the world, and all that came after. People knew how to treat, and react to, beautiful women in music. They were either taken seriously ‘despite’ their looks or not taken seriously at all. You sang someone else’s songs, like Dusty, with glamour, or you wrote your own, like Joni, and both critics and the public did their best to fit you into a box. I watched an interview with Joni recently where she spoke candidly about the abuse she received in the early 70s for having the temerity, as a 21 year old, to write a song that went ‘I’ve looked at love from both sides now.’ How dare she, at that age, think she knows about such things in such depth? You can’t imagine that happening now. And it certainly didn’t happen to men – nobody had a go at Dylan for writing Masters Of War at 23 even though he’d never been further than New York and Minnesota.

So in 1975, this extraordinary woman appeared. With matted hair, wearing men’s clothes, she sang political songs and was certainly not what was accepted as beautiful. She didn’t play anyone else’s game. She wasn’t gamine or coquettish, she led a band of men, she had a gay boyfriend (Robert Mapplethorpe of course), and she had a song called Rock N Roll Nigger. People must have been horrified. She got called angry, because if women aren’t overly emotional or subservient (think of the women in Mad Men, and how Peggy and Joan are treated for not being obedient) they’re angry don’t you know, and she got called a man, and a hundred worse things. She might have arrived in the 70s but the reaction to her as a woman was very mid-60s. Now, she is accepted without question but back then she was treated as a threat. It was bad enough for Joni, and she was pretty and blonde.

You’d think all of this treatment would make her a bitter person, but that was absolutely not the woman who walked on stage last night. Your audience reflects you, understands you, and she knew it, she was grateful for it. She spent most of the show smiling, between songs, talking about how stupid she is, how she knows that striking poses is what’s expected of her, but can’t stop talking about silly things on stage. And then in the next second she’s talking about the usual protest singer stuff (fuck corporations, governments, capitalism etc), telling us we have to take our freedom, talking of violent protests in Istanbul and Brazil, spelling out P-U-S-S-Y R-I-OT in the style of G-L-O-R-I-A near the end of the show, to roars. She knows how to play the audience, how to create the show in her image, but she is tremendously charismatic, likeable and sincere.

This is a woman who, between the 17 years of 1979’s Wave and 1996’s Gone Again released one album, Dream Of Life, having basically given up her music career in large part to raise her two children. Another move that confounded the male-dominated corners of music theory who had painted her as a lesbian or a feminist, as if those things are all mutually exclusive and motherhood is incompatible with either. Her daughter, Jesse, joined her on stage, to play keyboards for the last third of the set, following bandleader Lenny Kaye’s three-song sojourn into Nuggets territory, with a nicely judged solo cameo, taking in covers by The Music Machine and Count Five . Incidentally, in the pantheon of albums about loss (Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin et al), her record Gone Again must be right up there. The acute concentration of the deaths of her husband, her brother Todd, her keyboardist Richard Sohl and Mapplethorpe was poured into the record, but rather than such pain being simply too hard to listen to, it’s comforting, relatable and empathic. She dedicated Because The Night, an inevitable highlight, to her late husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, ‘the man it was written for’. There were plenty of other tributes too, with songs dedicated to and Johnny Smith and Amy Winehouse, the latter eulogised beautifully in This Is The Girl.

On stage, she is compelling, proselytising, and frankly, shamanistic. You’d follow her anywhere. I have friends in New York who have seen her play live repeatedly, and I never quite understood why until now. Her voice, a deep and powerful instrument, propels these songs of fight and hope to every corner of the venue. I was standing at the back, near the bar, where much conversation was taking place. After a few songs, people started shushing each other, during her between-song chats – something I have never seen in London at a concert. Gradually, the chatter lessened and the crowd stopped thinking about their drink orders or jobs or catching up with friends and focused their complete attention on the stage.

I’ve had a fair few live music experiences in my time. But I can honestly say that a life highlight was seeing the epic Horses/Gloria rendition at this concert. I can barely speak about it, the transformation of how I felt, the elevation, being utterly removed from the space I was standing in to feel transported to completely another place. Not just in the physical sense, where my mind fluttered to CBGBs and how it must have felt to stand in that shithole and hear the song for the first time. But also in the metaphysical sense, of being raised up off the ground. Like I said, only music does that so completely to me. It was an honour to be there, to be so consumed by a song I forgot where I was. The noise level after it was deafening, as she left the stage. The encore started with Banga, her most recent album’s title track and flew into the deceptively poppy People Have The Power. She led us on another treatise on being free, escaping governmental power and, even though you’d think a rich rock star telling us all to protest and find our joy in the world might be annoying or presumptuous or even ridiculous it just wasn’t, none of it was. Even a roomful of white people singing Rock and Roll Nigger didn’t feel bizarre or out of place, such was the power of the performer. The audience members were among the most varied at a rock concert I’d ever seen. There were people who must have jumped the Glasto fence in the 80s, old crusties, hippies, Red Wedge types, mums and dads, tattooed pin-up girls, students, hipsters, old punks, Guardian/Socialist Worker readers, people in suits who’d just left work, the age range going from fresh-eyed teenagers to desperate-to-escape wage slaves to baby boomers. Everyone listened, everyone heard, and everyone believed in the moment that we could all escape and take her advice, that we could be inspired to not put up with the social and economic conditions in which we live. Even if it was just for a moment, so what? It's better to lose yourself in it than to be a cynic, and it’s preferable to allow yourself that humanistic moment of naivety, of idealism.

It was a special night, a special connection, between two bodies of people. ‘You’re my fuckin’ show, thank you so much!’ That rare thing happened, the performer gave to us, we gave back, and the circle was complete.

Ask the Angels
Privilege (Set Me Free)
Break It Up
April Fool
Kimberly
This Is the Girl
Summertime Blues
Ain't It Strange
Beneath the Southern Cross
Talk Talk
Distant Fingers
Psychotic Reaction (Count Five cover)
Dancing Barefoot
Pissing in a River
Because the Night
Land
Horses/Gloria

Encore:
Banga
People Have the Power
Babelogue
Rock 'n' Roll Nigger

...

Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Los Lobos :: The O2, London, 17-6-13

How does he do it? How does he win, lose and win his audience, several times, during the course of a show? How can he be brilliant and bonkers, distant and self-indulgent but then self-deprecating and charming, sometimes all within the same song? I can’t start with such weighty questions so let’s begin with the support act, the wonderful Los Lobos. They know that all but the Uncut/MOJO readers in the audience know them for their one-hit wonder, La Bamba. They are hewn from tough Mexican-American East Los Angeles neighbourhoods but that cultural pastiche really does bear little resemblance to the rest of their output, which sometimes has a Latino tinge but more obviously just blows the roof off any venue they’re in by sheer rock and roll propulsion. This is a band carved in stone, made for decades of touring. You really have to play gigs in the four figures to stay as tight as this. And it's their biggest ever break in the UK, opening for Neil (though their lynchpin guitarist Cesar Rosas was mysteriously absent). They grab it with both hands and win the half-full venue over. Their final song had everyone grinning – off it goes, and within 10 seconds you realise it’s Like A Rolling Stone. How surprising! Then, when ‘Once upon a time, you dressed so fine…’ should come in, leader David Hidalgo (who has played accordion, which he broke out here to great effect on one song, and guitar on three Dylan albums) starts to sing… ‘Para bailar la bamba se necesita una poca de gracia…’ and everyone realises there’s an unlikely mash-up happening. It’s audacious and fantastic. They don’t usually play La Bamba, but this is clever stuff. Tremendous band, and actually, it shows the lack of ego of Crazy Horse to allow an arguably better band than them, with such swing and style, to open.

So, to Neil Young, and his inexplicably odd approach to an arena show. At the start of his classic concert movie, 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, there’s a weird play going on, where men in Ewok-style hooded cloaks are constructing the stage and arguing with each other. This time, it was mad scientists, in white coats and big white wigs, all taking place to the soundtrack of A Day In The Life. The same props from that tour were also present – 20-foot microphone, outsized speaker stacks and flight cases and so on. And then suddenly, the entire band were stood on stage, in a row, hands on heart, as a Union Flag unfurled and God Save The Queen (he covered it on his album Americana) played. No fanfare, no big intro, he was just there, all in black, saluting the national anthem. Alright then. On went the fedora, followed by the battered Gibson, and we were off. It’s a beautiful guitar sound he makes, crunchy and precise yet distorted and savage, and the collective muscle memory of this band – Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro (who replaced original guitarist Danny Whitten) – forms a cocoon around him. They’ve played together, on and off, since 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The first few songs went relatively normally, and then came Walk Like A Giant from his new record Psychedelic Pill.

It’s hard to say what audiences expect when they pay big bucks to see one of the so-called ‘heritage’ acts. But I’m fairly certain it wasn’t a 20-minute dirge, half of which was atonal feedback while pieces of paper blew across the stage. You could feel the collective disappointment that such a big portion of this show was being wasted by self-indulgence (or, if you want to pretend it’s interesting, and not pretentious, you can call it ‘a startling act of agitprop provocation’). However, in a sense, it’s entirely the crowd’s fault if they were disappointed. They should know better. I want you to imagine Mick Jagger as a quite adorable small dog. He jumps up repeatedly at the kitchen table, trying to get your attention, because he wants treats. So you make him perform for you a bit and reward him with love. He’s so keen, and he wants you to love him so desperately. Now think of Neil Young, and imagine a cat that just doesn’t give a fuck. He views you with disdain, accepts your food if you’re lucky, makes you work for affection, and buggers off out of the house if he’s bored with you.

This is the difference between someone who works hard to make you love him and someone who does exactly whatever the hell he wants and if you don’t like it that’s just tough. In a way, I just adore and hugely admire this approach. He plays his own game, and he doesn’t think about the audience at all for large parts of the show. Later on, he says ‘At times tonight, frankly, we sucked; but with what we do, that’s always a possibility’. He’s out there on a limb, and if the audience have come to hear Rockin’ In The Free World (which to be fair he does play sometimes) and half of Harvest, they’re in big trouble. He doesn’t care if there’s 200 or 20,000 people watching. He does what he does, and makes little concession, unlike pretty much all of his contemporaries. It's true that, in the current musical landscape, where getting people to shell out money is getting harder every day, live performance seems to have become more important than ever. So, what are we expecting when we pay for a gig, when the stakes are so high for the performer (though arguably, Neil is plenty rich and doesn’t actually need to do this to earn a living)? The wonderful Low recently played a gig that consisted of one song lasting 27 minutes and I’ll see Patti Smith, who’s had only had one hit record, this week. However, in the latter case, it’s a small venue, so there’s an unspoken agreement that you’re paying for proximity and the artist can do what they like. A normal musician, in the O2, would recognise that there’s 20,000 people present and tailor their setlist accordingly. But not Neil Young, not until a crowd-pleasing encore. In a way it’s maddening, but in another you just have to admire what he does, when faced with demands from a big audience. Almost every single song dribbles to an extended end, finishing with feedback and false endings. It’s almost funny, as you get kinda sorta tricked into applauding because you think it’s the end, only for the song to come back and drone on for another minute. And this from a man who has about 50 extraordinary songs to play you – instead, you sit there listening to walls of feedback for minutes on end. It’s crackers, let’s face it.

It’s not like he’s up there making no effort, he’s completely lost in the moment with his band, huddled together in the centre of the stage. He wrings every note out with utter conviction and passion. But it has its trying moments. I personally don’t get hung up in setlists, and I know enough about Neil to have expected some of the madness that met me, but even I had my patience tested. It’s a high-wire act; sometimes it works, now and then it doesn’t, but you have to appreciate the stubborn approach. After the interminable Walk Like A Giant wall of noise ended, he embarked on a trio of acoustic songs – which were utterly beautiful, and you’re even more baffled, being swung this way and that. First up, Red Sun from 2000’s Silver & Gold, then the gorgeous Comes A Time and then… Blowin’ In The Wind. It sounded beautiful, moving, and better than Bob could ever do it now. A piano-led new song followed (accompanied by another piece of theatrical eccentricity: a young woman, guitar case in hand, wandering about the stage before disappearing) and then it was back to the main show, though I could have stood for a longer acoustic section, such was its beauty. His voice, incredibly, seems untouched by decades of touring and held out its lovely high tone throughout. Then, the energy level rose, with Cinnamon Girl, but dropped on a 15-minute version of Fuckin’ Up – which was mildly funny, getting the crowd to repeat one profane line over and over, but wore thin, again (though it was amusing to see the insipid corporate hell of the O2 subjected to such a venture). My head was spinning, and then came a lovely surprise, a classic track, Mr Soul, by his old band Buffalo Springfield. A song that lasted less than 5 minutes too, how novel. He then fancied a little chat with the audience, which was just so heartfelt and charming, and started with the bit about the band sucking, and took in a whole heap of gratitude, that he understood people had to leave because it was getting late, then particularly thanked parents with little ones for coming and that he hoped they were in bed without a care in the world by now. This was followed by a massive, crunching, monstrous version of Hey Hey My My. This is a song that will be played in 100 years, a song that can never get old. The place roared its approval and then it was over, and people started making their way to the Tube. What a bizarre, brilliant and crazy show.

But then, he bounced back onto the stage, this man of 67, who was hours from death to a brain aneurysm only 8 years ago, and ripped into one of the best encores I’ve ever heard, as people danced in the aisles. First, Like a Hurricane. Second, from one of his best ever albums Tonight’s The Night, Roll Another Number For The Road, and then just one more, as we flew past the 11pm curfew: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, truly one of his best songs, to end the night. It was worth the fine he’ll have to pay (he told his management to get out their calculators). It was baffling and wonderful, maddening and affirming, unexpected and expected. He’s a crazy old bastard, but he does it all exactly how he wants it, with few allowances. How many others can say that? At his first gig in Newcastle, last week, he took on an interloper: "Sing like you mean it?" he rounds on a heckler. "What the fuck would you sing for if you don't mean it?". Exactly.

Love and Only Love
Powderfinger
Psychedelic Pill
Walk Like a Giant
Hole in the Sky
Red Sun
Comes a Time
Blowin' in the Wind
Singer Without a Song
Ramada Inn
Cinnamon Girl
Fuckin' Up
Mr. Soul
Hey Hey, My My

Like a Hurricane
Roll Another Number (For the Road)
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

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