LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Monday, November 9, 2015

'Tom Jones and Van Morrison' at the o2, 8th November 2015

Monday, November 9, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Someone screwed up at the Prudential BluesFest. You'd think a twofer gig featuring Van Morrison and Tom Jones, musicians with hundreds of millions records sold between them over the last 50 years, would be an easy sell. Apparently not; whether it be a failure of marketing, pricing or simply that there wasn't as much audience overlap between the two as anticipated.

Whatever the reason, there was a gargantuan queue snaking its way around the o2 hungry for freely distributed comp tickets. I'd snaffled one up myself, figuring that while I'd never go out of my way to attend a Tom Jones or Van Morrison gig, it sure beats sitting at home doing nothing.

So that's how I found myself squeezed into the vertigo inducing fourth tier of the o2 Arena watching men with a combined age of 145 plough their way through two idiosyncratic setlists. The nosebleed seat I was given was as far away from the action as you're able to get: 'Row U, Seat 835'. From my lofty vantage point the stage was maybe a kilometre away - even the jumbotron video screens were difficult to make out.

This hangar-like performance space is generally best suited to theatrical pop spectacles with huge props, big costumes and thumping great basslines. Sadly, this meant that Van Morrison (who I saw and enjoyed at Glastonbury in 2005) was less than thrilling. Within the vast space his band sounded reedy and muted, with Van himself cutting an indistinct figure in the centre of it all. As he meandered his way through a setlist of samey sounding R&B muzak, attention began to wane.

I suspect I'd be more positive if I'd seen this exact gig in a more intimate setting. There you'd be able to see the band truly at work and piece together the jigsaw of each musical interaction, and properly watch how Morrison's style as band leader dictates pace and mood. All that was lost in the cavernous emptiness between performer and audience, resulting in a disappointingly impersonal and bland experience.

It was at about the halfway point that an early tube home started to seem attractive. By now, Tom Jones had even joined Morrison on stage for a couple of not-particularly-inspiring duets - if this was to be the peak of the night then....

But, curious to what Jones' act is like after more than fifty years in the business, I stuck around. I'm glad I did. Tom Jones has apparently reached the 'Johnny Cash' stage in his career: his age, rumbling voice and onstage making him an unlikely harbinger of old-school-Christian apocalyptic Judgement Day drama.

Opening with Burning Hell, followed swiftly by God's Gonna Cut You Down and 'Til My Back Ain't Got No Bone, the setlist swiftly transforms the hitherto harmless crooner into an ominous omen of doom. He's helped by a band firmly locked into down-at-heel doom rock, the chugging, hypnotic guitar riffs sounding like they're chiming in the four horsemen and a lighting design that covers the stage in sickly low-lit neon - a faux draped curtain backdrop making things look all Twin Peaks red-roomsy.

And this is Tom Jones! Lovely, huggable, reality TV crooner, national institute Sir Tom "Granny's bit of rough" Jones! He seems to take pleasure in playing against type, taking advantage of the opportunity to headline a highbrow Blues festival and largely skip over the expected hits. Granted, he reverts to his usual gregarious personality between songs, but his faintly aged but still powerfully sonorous voice fuels an intense set that even manages to  partially redeem Sex Bomb.

The highlight is a cover of Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song. Watching Jones perform you feel like you're participating in a chain of musical history. Leaving aside Jones' iconic songs, he's associated with the best and brightest - from Presley to Portishead. Tower of Song cements him in this company, feeling like it's been written for him to solemnly boom out lyrics like:

"I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song"

It's a neat bit of self-mythologising, painting Jones as passenger to his prodigious vocal talents - managing to both humanise and deify him all at once. It's such a shivers up the spine moment that following it with It's Not Unusual comes across as a little cheap. I'm not going to deny that I didn't have fun watching him work through his signature tune, but switching gears into this crowdpleaser immediately dissipated all the atmosphere he'd painstakingly built throughout the set.  Oh well, the audience seemed happy. 

This marks the end of his solo set, after which he's rejoined by Van Morrison for a couple more iffy duets. By this point they look like they're having fun, but it proves to be a rather anti-climactic end to the evening, with the audience steadily leaking out into the drizzly London night.  

Van Morrison I can take or leave, but I don't think he's best suited to a venue of this size. Conversely, Tom Jones more than fills it, delivering a portentous musical performance that's refreshingly (and surprisingly) low on cheese. Top stuff, Tom.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Super Furry Animals at Brixton Academy, 8th May 2015

Saturday, May 9, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The eighth of May 2015 was a shitty day in almost all respects. At 6am the sun slithered over the horizon to greet the full horror of a Conservative Party majority government. On television, newspapers, the internet - even video displays on bus shelters - David Cameron beamed, the man turgid with excitement at the prospect of realising his darkest free market fantasies. I was coming off all an all nighter for the election; the experience hurling me through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief.

Having spent most of the day nakedly quivering in fear and disappointment underneath a duvet, I walked into the Brixton Academy with a heavy heart. But c'mon, if any band are going to cheer me up it's going to be the Super Furry Animals. 

Led by affable polymath Gruff Rhys, the band are, for my money, the finest band to come out of Wales in the last 20 years (maybe longer!). Though they successfully rode the Britpop wave to success, they never quite rose to the heights of a Blur, Oasis or Pulp. Nonetheless, their unique combination of pop, psychedelia, surreal lyrics and experimentalism has aged beautifully. Now, this 'reunion' tour functions as a tour through Super Furry history, pulling dusty old costumes and props out of storage, running through the best tunes and reminding everyone just how damn good this band is.

The setlist draws from the first half of the career, with only one song from 2005's Lovekraft and nothing from Hey Venus! (2007) or Dark Days/Light Years (2009). Those albums are certainly no slouches, but this is essentially a greatest hits show, so damn near every single and famous album song from their early career is jammed into an extensive and well-curated two hours. 

Obvious highlights are the electro surf-rock of (Drawing) Rings Around the World, with scratchy garage band riffs competing with ascending synth lines in the background as Gruff Rhys authoritatively sings "Earth will become Saturn II!" and references Shin'ya Tsukamoto's excellent freak-horror flick Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. Similar fun comes in the stupidly fun Golden Retriever, sending the crowd into a happy, sweaty, bouncy fit of pleasure, as does Something 4 the Weekend from their debut album.

Things take a turn towards low-fi pastoral in a lengthy segue through Mwng, their recently r-released 2000 Welsh language album. This marks the one point in the show where the audience calms down a bit. Mwng is an excellent album, but four peaceful sunset songs in a row drains a little energy from the audience. Plus, it's hard to sing along in Welsh. Even so, there's a perverse thrill in being at a sold out Brixton Academy gig watching a London audience enjoying a series of Welsh language songs.

But it's Receptacle for the Respectable, Slow Life, Mountain People and Run Christian Run! that left me most dazzled. These songs are epic musical adventures, switching up genres mid-song, willing to have extensive techno interludes and building to gargantuan, sensory overloading, maelstroms of sound and light. A gigantic projection screen playing snatches of blurred archive footage, remixes of their videos and what looks like recreations of the 'Beyond the Infinite' sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. On top of that, a tiny spherical robot positioned at stage rear emits hypnotic laser rainbow loops. Slices of light revolve above us, transforming the slowly evaporating sweat of the crowd into shimmering, dancing fractal patterns. It's pretty far out.

My highlight of highlights was Hello Sunshine. This gentle Beatles-y number is one of their best songs and contains the immortally romantic couplet "I'm a minger. You're a minger too. So come on minger, I want to ming with you." It's touching, humble, sweet and funny all at once - the cherry on top of a perfectly happy pop song. But last night something weird happened. Midway through the song, the band paused before those famous lines and the crowd spontaneously went completely fucking bananas. This wasn't an ordinary cheer, more like some psychic release valve being opened. For me, after an incredibly shitty day it was the first time I felt a glimmer of hope pierce the misery. For the only point that night the band looked perplexed, looking over at each other and shrugging. With no sign of it abating, Gruff Rhys smiled and gave us a confused thumbs-up, allowing him to get on with the song.

With that, and the climactic mass mosh pit of The Man Don't Give a Fuck, I left the place cheered up. Unless you're a rich man the next five years are going to be a grim era of ashes and tears, but even in the midst of that there's still precious moments that we need to cling onto as tightly as we can. 

It was a truly excellent gig, underlining the this band's place in the British musical canon and reminding us of the sheer wealth of pleasures contained in the band's songbook. Though Gruff Rhys, with his solo albums, side projects and documentaries, is far from a distant presence, I hope the Super Furry Animals project remains a going concern. There's an abundance of life, good cheer and joy in the Super Furry Animals - who're capable of putting a silver lining on even the most threateningly grey and gigantic of clouds.

Super Furry Animals play the Brixton Academy again tonight

All pictures used courtesy of Jason Williamson. www.jasonwilliamsonphotography.co.uk

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Squarepusher at the Barbican Centre, 18th March 2015

Thursday, March 19, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Jesus fucking Christ. Where to begin? I've been a lot of bizarre concerts and heard a lot of weird music. But Squarepusher at the Barbican was (by some distance) the craziest, most aggressive electronic gig I've ever attended. Firmly putting the 'mental' in 'experimental music', this was about 90 minutes of ear-splitting, atonal noise accompanied by gigantic epilepsy-inducing abstract visuals.

Squarepusher (aka Tom Jenkinson) emerged from the electronica scene of the mid-90s and has subsequently been producing music that ranges from drum n' bass to soothing ambient electro (and almost everything in between). I got into him after seeing the Chris Cunningham directed video for Come On My Selector sometime in the late 90s, my teenage self highly impressed with the equally barmy audio and visuals. Now, after forays into jazz, solo bass guitar and last year's Music for Robots project, in which Jenkinson collaborated with a team of Japanese engineers to create robots capable of playing beyond the capabilities of puny flesh musicians, he's back in the studio for Damogen Furies, his fourteenth album.

2015 is an interesting time for Squarepusher's brand of electronica. With EDM surging in popularity, temptation has come knocking at the door. Cover yourself in LEDs, laser beams and billowing crowds of dry ice, play tracks constructed around gigantic bass drops and watch the money roll in. Though this gig firmly isn't appealing to the mainstream, elements of popular EDM have nonetheless crept in. Hidden amongst the clanging atonal madness are the odd build up and big drop, a couple of synth melodies and what almost sounds like a sample from The Cure's Just Like Heaven. That aside, this is fiercely aggressive, head-meltingly strange music - bizarre to the point that I'm perplexed that enough people like this stuff to fill the Barbican Hall.

As I sat there getting my face blasted off I looked around the seated crowd, wondering just who the hell these people were. I can only assume they're old school rave casualties: so accustomed to high BPM acid-techno that they can now stomach only the most corrosive of of corrosive music. Even among this sturdy lot reactions varied; one gangly man attempted to gain access to the stage, then proceeded to cavort, limbs flailing, around the auditorium, closely pursued by security. Conversely a steady stream of people left throughout the show, presumably having been bludgeoned into submission by what was blaring out of the speakers.

One of the visuals.

As for me? From minute one I didn't know which  way was up. I felt like a prospective astronaut in high-G training, spun to dizzy unconsciousness in a giant centrifuge. At times it was like I was hearing five gigs at once, jagged shards of sound jumbling up together into something weird and alien. The brain doesn't quite know which angle to approach this from, the moment you identify what could plausibly be melodic progression things collapse into a hail of dissonant squeals and beeps. At it's peak I'm listening to music so fast that's one or two steps removed from static; a decent simulation of what it's like to be a superintelligent robot with a really bad migraine.

The visuals are similarly screwed. Endless tunnels of glitched out graphics and monochrome DOS smears pop up at a rate of two a second. Complex patterns, text and diagrams spin past, too rapid for the brain to process. The effect is as if Squarepusher is downloading something directly into our minds, beating the doors of perception tdown. There's a cyberpunk flavour throughout, the iconography of computing harnessed in an attempt to simulate silicon life. Eyes glued, ears ringing and mouth hanging slackly open it's as if you're living through William Gibson's wettest dream.

It ends with a hundred ears ringing in unison and shellshocked eyes blinking in confusion. I'm not sure I 'enjoyed' this gig per se, it was more as if something had happened to me over which I had no control, like being swept up in an tsunami of noise. On a visceral level I feel (even the next day) like a pneumatic drill has been taken to my head, but I also feel a strange calm, no matter what craziness the world throws at me I can probably deal with. 

Squarepusher is really pushing the boat out here - casting his net towards the bonkers end of the musical spectrum in an avalanche of unfriendly abstract sound. It's hard to imagine how much further he could go than this. It's hard to imagine that audiences could take much more than this.

Monday, October 27, 2014

'Lady Gaga's artRAVE' at the o2, 26th October 2014

Monday, October 27, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Prior to Lady Gaga I was a musically boring fuck.  The kind of chump who quivered at the announcement of a new Radiohead album or swooned over linen-shirted, bearded middle-aged men who clutch acoustic guitars like drowning men clutch liferafts.  Then I chanced across her 2009 VMA performance of Paparazzi.  Four minutes later, lost in a blizzard of glitter, flashbulbs, crutches, lots fake blood and demented piano playing, I was smitten.  

From that point on, as far as I was concerned this was it.  A perfect storm of performance art, theatre, pop and fashion - all encapsulated in a smart as hell, beautiful and risk-taking New Yorker.  Everything else in music seemed suddenly desaturated; as far as I'm concerned there's more honesty, truth and beauty in lyrics like "Let's have some fun / This beat is sick / I wanna take a ride on your disco stick" than there are in a thousand albums by noodly, string-backed acoustic warblers.

For a couple of years it was good, and we enjoyed Lady Gaga's imperial phase.  The triple combo of videos for Bad Romance, Telephone and Alejandro cemented her as the pop vision of the future; suddenly everyone started to look a little cooler.  Then came the colossally hyped Born This Way, which despite a tonne of great songs felt slightly bloated.  Then out came ARTPOP, which is actually pretty good, but the knives were pre-sharpened.  The pop music mill hungers for new flesh; and even Gaga, a popstar who shuffles personalities like a cardshark shuffles a deck, couldn't ride it forever.

And so we come to the artRAVE.  Is this Gaga's Waterloo?  One last big budget, stadium-sized splurge of extravagance before she slips into a comfortable place in the pop firmament; beloved by her fanbase, fondly remembered but never again truly on top?  If it is she certainly isn't going quietly; from start to finish we're dragged into a shimmering slice of pop nirvana.  Perspex walkways snake in organic shapes around the arena floor, allowing Gaga and her dancers to move around and over the audience.

This 'Little Monsters' friendly staging gives this night a unique sparkle.  With the heavenly scenery, the arena takes the aura of a religious revival with Gaga as high priestess leading us to sartorially adventurous promised land of sexual tolerance and unlimited self expression. I imagine that if you're not a fan, Gaga's messianic streak might seem a touch egotistical. But she's among her die-hard fans, and to them she's divinity made flesh.  You can taste their rapture it in the way they stretch their glitter-polished fingers towards her, hoping her touch will cure them of some modern scrofula.

:3

This builds to an emotional pinnacle when a note is thrown on stage.  Gaga picks it up and reads out a message from a cervical cancer sufferer who explains that Lady Gaga's poptimistic message has helped her fight it.  Gaga summons her up to the stage and in a flurry of hugs and kisses grants her personal blessing, then she parks her on a piano stool and devotes an acoustic reworking of Born This Way to her. There's not a dry eye in the house.  Oh well, if you're going to have a pop messiah you could do far worse than Lady Gaga.

What surrounds this particularly special little moment is a totally competent pop show that's only slightly hobbled by being  based around a slightly below-par album.  Of the new songs the perverted mud fuck stomp of Swine is an easy stand out, bleepy/bloopy aerodynamic mission statement of Artpop and the sincere loveliness of Dope and Gypsy.  In a 'fuck you' move to her detractors she opens with five songs from her newest album and delivers a slightly out of character broadside against people who are "just here for the hits".

After that it's a relief to hear the still-futuristic ultraparty beat of Just Dance kick in. Cheekily she mashes Poker Face and Telephone into a mini-medley, before launching into a top class Paparazzi.  All these are stone-cold poptimistic stunners, and with bass thudding throughout the arena, lasers blasting to the rafters and bewigged, joyful punters bopping around with dopey grins on their faces.  

I was one of them.  The simple sight of her dancing around on a stage in increasingly sillier outfits (cow patterned octopus girl, furrily-winged Koons-balled angel, what appear to be some folding chairs) flicks some innate joy-switch in my head, sending me spiralling into a blissy paroxysms of joy.

That said, as ace as this was, it wasn't as good as The Monster Ball.  That was a Gaga resplendent, confidently perched at the top of the pops.  artRAVE finds Lady Gaga ever so slightly on the back foot, obviously stinging from the critical and commercial reception of Artpop and taking solace in the unconditional love of her hardcore Little Monsters. This makes artRAVE more of a transitory show, one eye in the triumphant past and one looking towards an uncertain future.

I'm still deeply smitten.  I'll always be.  But I'm hungry to see where she's going next.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Aphex Twin 'Syro' Listening Party at The Laundry, 5th September 2014

Saturday, September 6, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

You'd think we were lambs being led to the slaughter.  After an hour's wait in a Hackney back street we're urged down a concrete ramp towards a dark cellar.  Our phones are stripped from us and bouncers systematically rifle through our pockets for recording devices.  Finally we emerge into a ill-lit cement basement.  The remains of a 1960s paintjob peel from the walls and old industrial fossils rustily jut from the ceiling.

It's moody, creepy and slightly oppressive.  The perfect spot to experience new Aphex Twin then. Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin, aka AFX, aka Polygon Window, aka The Tuss etc etc) is the mystery King of electronic music: the Mozart of mixers, the Beethoven of the breakbeat, the Shostakovich of sampling, the uh.. Kirchner of the Korg PS-3300.   He's the guy playing chess while his contemporaries are still struck on whack-a-mole. James inhabits a mist of pseudonyms, half-truths and urban legends, more than happy to let bizarre stories about his reclusive life and behaviour spread like wildfire - the enigma made ironic by constantly using his own sinisterly grinning face as a visual motif.

Much hype surrounds Syro being his first album in 13 years - as if James had been sitting around twiddling his thumbs since the 2001 release of Drukqs.  Frankly his output over this period diminishes the importance of the 'traditional' album release, including the monumental Analord series (four and a half hours of music over 11 EPs), his anonymous work as 'Brian and Karen Tregaskin', a (likely fictional) couple collaborating under the pseudonym 'The Tuss' and, apparently, ten completed and unreleased albums he doesn't feel ready to release yet.

This is a good way of announcing an album.

But the subject of tonight's event, Syro, described by James as  his "most accessible" record yet is very much ready to go.  'Accessible' is like a slight misnomer when it comes to Aphex Twin; his brand of insanely complex, sometimes aggressive and idiosyncratic dance music makes no concessions to commercial musical trends.  But it is accessible in that, unlike most high-falutin' experimental music, you can rave your tits off to it.

As the crowd finishes filing in, we stand, lit only by the soft yellow/green glow of a projector.  Then, *whump* minipops 67 kicks in.  I'd listened to it earlier in the day on headphones at home, but standing next to the speaker the initial beats are like taking a blow to the gut. The volume is ear-splittingly intense, the bass rattles my bones, the jelly of my brain wobbles away to the beat.  This is a good way to hear music for the first time.  

As we progress through the album we quickly hear that unmistakable Aphex sound - the skeleton of the music a beat thudding away in the background while infinitely varied synth melodies, drum flourishes and distorted samples frolic away in the gaps.  I hate the genre description 'intelligent dance music' (as James quite rightly pointed out it snootily implies "this is intelligent and everything else is stupid"), but after hearing music like this I can't help but think there's at least something to the description.  

His arrhythmic tangles of sounds, somehow both chaotic and ordered tease and cajole the brain.  There's just so much going on; the joy of hearing gossamer-light synthesiser melodies flitting into view like a butterflies before vanishing back into the beat.  Tiny snare rat-a-tats appear and run away, cheekily pulsating for a few seconds as if in opposition to the thumping bass.  Its not so much that this is dance music for intelligent people; more that you get more out of it the more you focus in on it, the music most beautiful in those brief moments where your brainwaves synchronise with what's you're hearing, the sensation of being able to divine order in chaos.

Or you can just let it sweep you away on a blissful amphetamine haze.  Listening to an album for the first time is usually a solitary affair for me; going out for a run or lying in bed with headphones on.  Experiencing it in a basement full of dancing bodies is a different story altogether. Smiles, whoops and happy claps fill the room when things get dead virtuoso, the mood enhanced by appearance of distorted Aphex logos projected on the wall and the deployment of a very powerful strobe when things get real heavy.  At the front of the room an insanely happy, very sweaty fat man is going bananas, stomping and screaming like a caveman that's brought down a mammoth - his presence immeasurably adding to my enjoyment of the music.

This is what James means when he says that Syro is accessible.  This is experimental, bold and technically outstanding music, but it's music you can dance to.  In a 1995 article in The Wire magazine, they sent an Aphex Twin sampler to experimental music luminary Karlheinz Stockhausen for his opinion.  He loftily pronounced that James should "immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions".  James responded: "he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine ... then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to."

It's this inclusive, raver friendly ethos that powers Syro, an album utterly unashamed of being dance music.  The sway of hips to the beat, the shuffle of feet on the floor and palms shining upwards to the sky aren't something to be embarrassed about, they're the essence of the genre; the irresistible effect on the body of a crazy/fun beat.  To deny this is to miss the point.  And so, tucked away within the tracks are sonic quotes of twenty years of dance: the music crammed with strangely familiar beats and samples, dredging up memories of 6am sweatboxes, the frantic chewing of gum and pinpoint pupils.

Closing out the album is the beautiful aisatsana, departing from thumping bass for soft, slow, reflective piano repetitions.  Birdsong samples waft gently throughout the piece, conjuring up happy times of wandering home from a club in the early morning with promise of a hot cup of tea on arrival, reflecting on all the night.  It's the kind of song you wish could go on forever, James apparently never running out of minute pitch shifts and variations on the basic melody.  It's lovely.  

I sense that musicologists are still going to be listening to, unpicking and appreciating Richard D James a century from now.  I just hope they still know how to dance.

Syro is released 19th September on Warp Records.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

St Vincent at The Cambridge Junction, 19th August 2014

Wednesday, August 20, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

“Gotta make way for the homo superior”.  Amidst a din of clattering guitars, maniacal whoops and digital noise, Bowie's words ran laps around my head.  Why?  Because I'm pretty damn sure Annie Clark is the next stage in human evolution.  On stage she mixes up slithery, chaotic punk rock androgyny with dance moves like an android struggling to break free of its programming – all underscored by guitar virtuosity that's as gobsmacking as it is effortless.

As 2014 began I was already pretty appreciative of St Vincent.  Their 2011 album Strange Mercy had rolled around in rotation for a couple of weeks upon release and their 2012 David Byrne collaboration Love This Giant had tickled all my tastes.  Then I heard their latest release, the eponymous St Vincent.  Hot-shit-god-damn what an album!  Shot through with haunting, cryptic vocals that combine the domestic, the technological and weirdly erotic (“Oh what an ordinary day.  Take out the garbage, masturbate.”) I was hooked.  

Then at Glastonbury I finally saw them.  They were up against stiff competition, Jon Hopkins, Disclosure, Jack White and the outstandingly fun Dolly Parton, but emerged by an inch as the best thing I saw all weekend.  After a horde of fey young men sitting around mournfully plucking at acoustic guitars and warbling about their feelings, St Vincent functioned as musical electro-shock therapy.  As Clarke dove from the stage and thrashed around on the muddy floor, fingers a-blur on the fretboard, fizzling with manic alien energy I fell a tiny bit in love.

The day I got back from the festival I got online to see where she was playing in the UK next.  Cambridge?  A little far from my usual stomping grounds but fine, whatever.  It was worth the trip.  It would have been worth going to Mars.  At times I thought I was on Mars. Annie Clarke occupies the stage with supreme confidence – her every motion radiating style, every idiosyncratic lyric spilling out of her like she's carved a hole in her head and let her thoughts run rampant.

In person she's some fucked up hybrid of all my loves - like someone's stuffed my favourite musicians into the telepods from Cronenberg's The Fly - the woozy electro lyricism of Bjork with the guitar skills of Prince and the eccentricity and self-assured weirdness of Kate Bush.  Wearing a dress covered in sequinned eyes and brace-toothed mouths (all bleeding) and moving in a way that suggests she's communicating secret codes it's difficult to take my eyes from her.  Standing pressed against the front row centre I fool myself into thinking she's often staring right at me, making me feel like a deer caught in a hunter's spotlight.  

My highlights are all songs from her most recent album.  Digital Witness is elegant and precise, a circus stomp pah-rump paean to the blurred lines between fleshy reality and the electronic world.  To hear Bring Me Your Loves live is to tumble down a mountain in a skip full of broken synthesisers, her guitar sounding like an old modem screeching down a phone line, the song punctuated with killer, crunchy-as-hell riffs.  Best is Huey Newton with its hallucinatory painkiller lyrics.  Midway through there's a bass drop so fierce that Skrillex stares on with envious eyes, and Clarke launches into a guttural stream of consciousness about “fatherless features, you motherless creatures” and “the pop and the hiss in the city of misfits”.  The fluids in my body are fizzling with bass, strobes are threatening an early epileptic end and once again, she seems to be singing these words right at me.

Being stage front for a show like this is like chewing through a high voltage cable.  My musical tastes tend towards the energetic and pounding, but here even the slower, more emotional songs reek of majesty.  Temporarily shorn of her guitar, Clarke mounts the giant pink steps at the rear of the stage and poses like a renaissance painting. She's illuminated in bright primary colours, singing softly through Prince Johnny and I Prefer Your Love – delivering them like torch songs from the year 2200.  

So yeah – I had a pretty goddamn great time.  St Vincent feel tailored to me in particular, though given the rapturous reception the band got from Cambridge I suspect everyone feels this sensation, just as I'm sure they all felt like Clarke was singing directly at them too.  The climax of the concert is the epic Your Lips Are Red – a Class A freakout of clattering, punished guitars and a band going bonkers.  Clarke climbs into the audience and starts grabbing people's camera, snapping pictures and grinning  madly.

And with that she was gone.  St Vincent have had a stratospheric rise in my estimations this year; landing right on the list of bands that I will pull out all the stops to see; regardless of price, location of time.  Right now Annie Clarke is at the top of her game; she's Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon, she's Dylan at Newport Folk, she's Hillary on Everest. Go and see her, dammit.

First two pictures courtesy of Matt Thorpe (http://www.matt-thorpephotography.tumblr.com/), last crap one courtesy of my cameraphone.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Kanye West at Wireless Festival, 4th July 2014

Saturday, July 5, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Kanye West might be the weirdest performer I've ever seen - and I've seen some pretty weird shit.  I adore a bit of personality in music; I'm magnetically drawn to big personalities with a penchant for crazy shit, high fashion and, most of all, being totally unpredictable on stage. With all that in mind, Kanye West is an abundance of riches.  The man is straight up bonkers in the same vein as Michael Jackson or Prince; having gotten so big that any crazy idea they fart out is indulged by a smiling team of yes-men.

Having seen pictures of the man meeting Jesus on stage, or perched up a laser-lit stage mountain I was a touch disappointed that his only UK shows this year were as the headline act in the Wireless Festival.  But then Yeezus was the best album of 2013, so I dutifully bought my ticket and waited with baited breath.  To summarise the rest of the acts I saw; that day, Iggy Azalea was dead fun, Angel Haze (who I was seeing for second time within a week) was off the hook ace; Giorgio Moroder appeared to have hit 'play' on a prerecorded 80s playlist and Pharrell Williams was great to dance around as the sun set.  

Any other day they'd have been highlights ('cept Moroder), but not today.  Today was all about the egomaniacs, geniuses and nutjobs - a category within which Kanye West slides perfectly into.  Having wriggled my way to the front of the jampacked crowd, I was fully psyched.  As the corporate advertising wrapped up, the screens on stage went blank, the crowd whooped and.... The Beatles began playing?  After Come Together came Time by Pink Floyd - the very last band I'd have expected Kanye West to take the stage to.

Eventually the man of the hour arrived.  Bathed in eye-stingingly bright red light, wearing a tattered looking quasi-camouflage jacket and a full head mask he strode to the middle of the stage, grabbed the mic and launched straight into the rabid glam-rock stomp of Black Skinhead.  The crowd, quite understandably, went mental.  A mosh pit instantly formed nearby and right away I got a full faceful of someone's CKOne scented back as hundreds of people sway dangerously around in a sweaty soup of sweat, weed smoke and rolling eyeballs. It's all too much for one poor girl. She goes all Mia Wallace: collapsing, juddering and foaming before being dragged backwards by her freaked out friends.  I hope she's okay.

Through a tangle of pogostick bodies and arms waving like riverside reeds I occasionally get a glimpse of the man himself.  He looks amazing and absurd; his mask like chainmail armour, the fabric gently oscillating as he furiously rat-a-tats lyrics into the cool Finsbury night. It's a testament to Kanye's stage presence that even with his face completely obscured he's still an impossibly charismatic stage presence; entirely at ease being the dead centre of the world.

The mask is difficult thing to ignore; but in a perverse twist damn near everything on stage is set up to prevent us ever properly seeing Kanye's face.  Throughout the entire set he's constantly lit from behind, rendering him a bouncing silhouette in front of his gigantic video screen. Earlier in the day the video screens to stage left and right were crammed full of Wireless branding and closeups of the grinning crowd.  During Kanye they're mostly blank, occasionally lighting up to reveal his bemasked figure with the colours inverted - a black-clad, superhero/villain BDSM preacher with a neon electric blue sea behind him.  The cumulative effect is that he looks oddly computer generated: his outline jaggedly pixelated and his body language sharp and statue-like.

His control over what the audience sees of him is so complete that at one point he stops mid-song, (having angrily noticed that Wireless have switched to a non-inverted, stageside view) and gives precise directions to the cameramen on stage what he wants to see on the monitors. To go to these extremes means that Kanye must have a reason for all this obfuscation - but what the hell is it?  What kind of man stands in front of thousands and won't let them see his face?

We get a clue during a trademark rambling rant.  After 10 minutes or so of excoriating an apparently racist Nike for not allowing him to design shoes for them (I.. think?) he launches into a vocoded sing-songy caricature of a shoe executive advising him that he should stick to what he's supposed to do and save face.  Kanye responds (to himself); "That's why I got this fuckin' mask on, because I ain't worried about saving face. Fuck my face!  ... Fuck whatever my face is supposed to mean and fuck whatever the name Kanye is supposed to mean!  It's about my dreams!".

Well I'm glad he cleared that up. For me, the idea of the multimillionaire international superstar Kanye West whining that he's not allowed to do whatever he wants is so perverse it rockets right past offensive and lands comfortably a couple of miles into straight-up deluded territory.  To make things clear; this is a man who is currently standing in front an audience of thousands lecturing us about how no-one listens to him.   A man who is apparently soon to release a three hour spoken word album.  Damn Kanye, if you don't think you can do whatever you want now have a go living our lives.

Kanye West is, without doubt, a dickhead of the highest order.  So it's fortunate that he's an interesting, enormously entertaining dickhead.  His complete lack of modesty in proclaiming himself a genius at every opportunity ("At the end of the day I'm going down as a legend whether you like me or not.  I am the new Jim Morrison.  I am the new Kurt Cobain.") is both hilarious and accurate.  Given a choice between the fake modesty of your Chris Martins and your Ed Sheerans I'll take the frothing, theatrical self-involvement of Kanye West any day of the week.

It's this invincible ultraconfidence that made this show so  fascinating.  He's never bashful or polite, speaking everything on his mind secure in the knowledge that he's right about everything.  He closes with the epic Blood on the Leaves, an audacious mashup of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, a killer bombastic horn drop and Kanye equating him not being allowed to sit where he wants at a basketball game to apartheid.  I don't even know where to begin unpacking all that.  What I do know is that with the stage transforming into a stygian crimson nightmare, Kanye wildly yelling into the mic and the crowd going fucking bananas the place becomes a frantic psycho whirlpool of bass, sweat and happiness.  The very ground quakes as countless trainers tramp the grass down. 

When asked what his biggest regret was, Kanye once responded "That I will never be able to see myself perform live."  Having now seen him I've got to admit he has a point. 

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

eels at Royal Albert Hall, 30th June 2014

Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Maybe booking tickets to a gig the very day I arrive back from Glastonbury wasn't the best idea in the world.  I'd partied my little heart out until 7am that morning before grubbily hopping on a coach to London and shuffling zombie-like back home.  Perhaps, I thought, I should skip this gig.  After all I haven't really slept in days, I've watched tons of live music and, to rub salt into the wound, it's just started raining.  I was so done with rain at this point.

If it were any other band I'd have shrugged, climbed underneath a big blanket and enjoyed 12 hours of loglike slumber.  But eels aren't just any other band.  The very first album I ever bought was their debut Beautiful Freak back in 1996, and the subsequent releases Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies of the Galaxy meant an awful lot to teenage me.  Their high water mark was the 2005 release of their magnum opus Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, and attending one of the best concerts of my life at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall to see it played live.  Since then I had the uneasy feeling that eels had settled into an overfamiliar rut.  They put out a run of middling albums (all of which I dutifully listened to once) populated by melancholy tracks punctuated with one wearily upbeat song to close out.  It had all got a bit formulaic. 

Even so, I've been an eels fan through thick and thin and even exhausted and fuzzy-headed I'm going to drag myself down to see them at the Royal Albert Hall.  Supporting was Melanie De Biasio, an ethereal singer whose minimalist, haunting compositions completely filled the enormous auditorium.  She was amazing.  I instantly fell asleep.  As I jerked back to consciousness I thought maybe this was a bad idea: if I slept through an eels concert I'd absolutely hate myself.

Photo by Sara Amroussi-Gilissen

These fears were instantly banished as E took to the stage.  Reassurringly bearded and dressed in a simple grey suit, his husky voice enveloped me like a much-loved old coat.  With his similarly suited band behind him surrounded by a jumble-sale of acoustic instruments everything seemed right in the world.  After a short instrumental introduction he sat down at his piano and began a straight up heartbreaking cover of When You Wish Upon a Star.  My malfunctioning brain, already perched on an emotional knife-edge, was sent into a total tizzy, my eyes welling up and a lump forming in my throat that remained for the rest of the gig.

There's a strange disconnect at the heart of eels. E is a famed purveyor of misery; a man who converts the loss, depression and bereavement in his life into (as he describes it) "sweet, soft, bummer rock" so beautiful it may as well whip out a scalpel and go straight for the my heart. Emotional highlights are a crushingly sad A Daisy Through Concrete that had me sniffling quietly into my drink and the disturbingly morbid Gentlemen's Choice: "The life that I've led / I'm better off dead / The world has no room for my kind".  You just want to give him a big hug.

And, amazingly, we can.  Despite his morose lyrics E is a remarkably chipper chap.  In fact he's often full on hilarious, explaining that The Beatles and The Rolling Stones once played this stage on the same night, and bending down to kiss the floor where John Lennon once stood, before wiping his lips and remarking that that spot tasted more like Keith Richards.  As he self-deprecatingly apologises for his songs being so depressing (introducing It's a Motherfucker as "a next-level bummer") it's almost as if we're going through therapy alongside him, the audience sensing that it's our participation and applause that's spurring him on.  The emotional climax comes towards the end when E beams out at us and says he wants to give us all a big hug.

Photo by Sara Amroussi-Gilissen

He proceeds to do just that.  Clambering off stage he makes his way around the vast room, hugging everyone on his way.  Countless people with tears in their eyes embrace him with open arms.  He must have hugged about a hundred people by the time he makes his way on stage ten minutes later, his suit and hair rumpled.  He then explains that he's going to ditch the encore bullshit and get straight back to business.

After Blinking Lights and Last Stop: This Town, the band leave the stage and the audience rises to their feet and raises the roof with the most enthusiastic applause I've heard in a very long time.  Boots are stamped on the floor, hoarse cheering drifts up the rafters and palms turn an angry shade of red as they're enthusiastically beaten together.  A consensus quickly forms among the crowd that we're not going to stop until they return to the stage - which, after ten minutes of this din, they do.  The tip-top of the second encore is an absolutely wonderful piano cover of Can't Help Falling in Love, E's warm, sad voice injecting a ridiculous amount of pathos into the song.  

More crazy applause.  Still the house lights don't come up.  What can they possibly do to top this?  Earlier in the night E had bemoaned that the last time he played here they wouldn't let him anywhere near the Royal Albert Hall's famous pipe organ - not without joining The Royal Society of Pipe Organists anyway.  He vows that one day he'll get to play it... One day...

Photo by Sara Amroussi-Gilissen

Suddenly the lights dim and maniacal laughter rings through the room.  A huge sheet drops to reveal E, dressed in round shades and a theatrical cape standing in front of the organ.  With a silly, joyous grin on his face he sits down and blasts out a instrumental version of The Sound of Fear and Flyswatter on the gigantic instrument.  Woooooooooooooow.

It's the perfect end to an absolutely perfect night.  eels remain one of the warmest, musically proficient, sad, funny and straight up most entertaining live bands around.  As we filed out in the London night, a bounce in our step, audience consensus was that we'd seen something really special.  This was a performance to treasure.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Janelle Monáe at Brixton Academy, 9th May 2014

Monday, May 12, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Janelle Monáe would be a superstar at any point in human history.  She'd have rocked the rock and roll stages of the 1950s, been a disco queen of the 1970s, probably been worshipped as some kind of minor deity by ancient Egyptians - hell - if she were around in prehistoric times you'd be finding cave paintings of a razor sharp dancer clad in black and white furs with adoring neanderthals gathered around her.  She's the whole package: all-dancing, all-singing, all-stylish, smart as a damn whip and supported by the one of the tightest backing bands about.

Monáe is a woman of many names; Cyndi Mayweather, the Electric Lady, ArchAndroid - yet this isn't a woman playing a series of roles, rather different aspects of personality filtered through prisms of style.  Dressed from top-to-toe in her trademark monochrome she arrives on stage to the cabaret nightmare beat of her Suite IV Electric Overture before launching straight into the insistent stomp beat of Givin Em What They Love - the first ten minutes of her set reaching the heights most big bands save for the finale. Having opened in the stratosphere, Monáe proceeds to shoot for the stars.

For two hours she rattles through hit after hit, an astonishingly strong setlist given that she's only on her second album (and an EP).  Standouts are the incredibly fun Dance Apocalyptic and Tightrope, two songs that it's impossible to resist wiggling your ass too - a smiling audience pulling their own shapes on miniature dancefloors carved out from the crowd.  Occasionally she'll pull out a cover, the best an astonishingly accomplished ABC by the Jackson 5 - Monáe conjuring up the ghost of the dead King of Pop with a tremendous moonwalk across to an swell of amazed applause.

It's all pretty damn great stuff, but the undisputed highlight for me was Cold War. Sobering up for a moment, Monáe stops and decries the kind of horrible world where 200 Nigerian schoolgirls can be sold into slavery and no-one lifts a damn finger.  This is tricky ground for a pop musician to tread on, and I had a tingle of worry that things were going to collapse into mawkish sentimentality.  But as the coolly synthetic 80s electronica of Cold War kicks in, her comments give her gravitas, transforming what's already a virtuoso performance into something with social relevance.  Midway through the song the lyrics devolve into a series of tortured, tuneful howls, a tiny moment that's easily one of the most powerful things I've seen a live singer do of late.

Throughout the show I couldn't help but compare and contrast it to Miley Cyrus' Bangerz show, which I'd seen a few days earlier.  Though both solo female pop artists, the two occupy opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum.  Whereas Miley wraps herself in flashy, intense videos and an ADHD influenced momentum, Monáe strips things down to the bone.  Her backdrop is simply a large blank white sheet that wraps around the stage, lit by various coloured lights, our eyes drawn down to the musicians rather than distracted by any maximalist frippery.

Both gigs were hugely entertaining, their aesthetic differences serving to amplify each artist's strengths.  But if I was absolutely forced to choose between them I'd go with Janelle Monáe - though it's the kind of show that relies on a truly exceptional artist at the centre of it all, one able to shoulder the burden of carrying the whole show on her shoulders. She's more than up to the task - a performance suffused with crazy amounts of confidence, at times while watching her you begin to believe she's capable of anything.

Watching her twist, spin and moonwalk across the stage, every molecule of her body geared to the rhythm, all the while singing in perfect tune made me feel like a complete turnip.  I can 'dance' - anyone can 'dance' - but I this is dancing dammit.  She moves with tireless energy, executing whipcrack precise motions, moving like a black and white flickering zoetrope.  She's a musical Bruce Lee, a complete pop package that, quite frankly, diminishes her musical contemporaries purely by occupying the same industry.

Janelle Monáe obviously has a long career ahead of her, and when she's treading stages in the 2050s she'll still be a hot ticket.  But she'll be echoing the performances she's doing right now.  Seeing her now is like seeing Michael Jackson in his Off the Wall phase, a young and hungry Prince or Elvis before he joined the army.  These are the gigs that people will one day look back on and wish they'd had the chance to attend.  I suspect Monáe's biggest days are still ahead of her, one really big hit single and she'll be deservedly packing out arenas around the world.  

For now though, seeing up close in a packed out Brixton Academy makes me feel privileged.  She is barnstormingly amazing at everything she does; destined to one day take her place in the pantheon of iconic artists.  I can't really imagine anyone not enjoying her gigs - so beg, borrow and steal tickets wherever you can!  

All pictures (c) Jason Williamson