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Showing posts with label st vincent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label st vincent. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
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As shiny new 2015 hoves into view, I've got to admit I'm going to miss the ol' scuffed up, 2014. I squeezed in an awful lot into 365 days, so with New Year approaching here's a few traditional 'Best of' lists. Today: gigs! To come: albums, films, plays, art and maybe videogames.
Honourable Mentions:
Eels at Royal Albert Hall, 30th June 2014
After a physically and mentally exhausting Glastonbury Festival the last thing I wanted to do was troop across London to see yet more live music. But then Beautiful Freak was one of the first albums I ever owned and for many years Eels were my favourite band. A couple of years of middling albums haven taken the shine off them, so I was there out of duty more than genuine passion. But Mark Oliver Everett and company knocked me for six, reminding me precisely why younger me was so doolally over him. The perfect way to get through the post festival blues.
'Miley Cyrus: Bangerz' at the o2 Arena, 6th May 2014
They laughed - laughed - at me for splashing out £50 on a Miley Cyrus ticket! Joke's on them, she was one of the funnest/weirdest/bonkers things I saw all year. Admittedly, a 30 year old man turning up alone to a Miley Cyrus gig isn't the greatest look, but I don't regret a single moment. Even leaving aside the bonkers cartoons and psychedelic cat projections, Bangerz is a goddamn excellent pop album, and hearing songs like Adore You, SMS Bangerz and 4x4 played at ear-splitting volume made me grin like an idiot. Pop concert as sensory overload.
St Vincent at The Cambridge Junction, 19th August 2014
Well I didn't manage to score Kate Bush tickets (not for want of trying mind you), but Annie Clarke was probably the better gig. 2014 was the year St Vincent blossomed from 'merely' great into spectacular. After knocking me dead at a festival gig over the summer I immediately got gig tickets to see her in Cambridge (her Roundhouse gigclashed with an ultimately disappointing Lady Gaga gig). It was amazing, the kind of artist that turns her fans into evangelists and blows your mind clean out. While she plays there may as well not be any other musicians in the world. Annie Clarke is a class apart, a woman so talented you feel privileged to be spending time in the same room as her.
WINNER:
Dolly Parton at Glastonbury Festival, 29th June 2014
After 4 days and nights of non-stop partying, torrential rain and glue-like mud I thought I'd exhausted my brain's serotonin reserves. Running on just a couple of hours sleep, Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury found me a numb zombie, barely able to lift a paper cup of beer to my mouth. I am no real fan of Dolly Parton; but like most people I like 9 to 5, Jolene and so on, and figured as everyone was going I may as well go along too.
The very second she took to the stage it was like I learned how to experience emotion for the first time. She sent waves of good vibes careening around the 100,000 strong crowd, sending us into a worshipful fervous. It was powerfully amazing, leaving me astonished that, of all genres, country and western gave me a bigger buzz than all the mad-mental-crazy dance music that's my festival. From then until the day I die, Dolly Parton will hold a very special place in my heart.
Glastonbury was amazing, but she was the cherry on top of the cake.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
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“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.
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
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Sunburnt, sleep-deprived and covered in mud I stumbled home from Glastonbury. I had a brain full of bad wiring and a body that was in the process of shutting down, organ by organ. This is the physical impact of living in a muddy field for five days, grabbing two or three hours sleep each night, eating the odd bit of junk food to keep fuel in the tank and dancing dancing dancing furiously from noon until 7am the next morning. Like some thousand-year-stare GI returning from the shit you glassily gaze out at the uncomprehending world, muttering "you weren't there man, you don't know".
Though there's 200,000 people in attendance most people experience Glastonbury through a TV set. Digitally flitting from stage to stage, you catch highlights here and there and marvel at the headliners from a comfy sofa. It's a decent way to watch live music on TV, but the music is merely the icing on top of the cake. Great icing though; my highlights were the body-thudding laser-chaos of Skrillex, the future rock performance art of St Vincent and, of course, Dolly Parton, whose performance took me to hitherto unknown heights of joy. But if you want to read gig reviews go check out The Guardian's coverage.
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| Glastonbury by night. Photo by Mikki Sandhu |
This review is about the side of Glastonbury that's left out of most article; behind the A-list music glitz, behind the pyrotechnics bursting from the main stages; behind the huge crowds lies the real joy of the festival: exploration. Glastonbury is pretty much a fractal experience, the more you burrow into its deepest corners the more you find squirrelled away. Squeezed into every darkened nook and cranny are secrets that only the intrepid and attentive will ever discover, a ever-shifting kaleidoscope of woozy, half remembered interactions that now feel like dreams than something that actually happened to me.
Most of these take place in the darkened, fiery labyrinth of Shangri La, Block 9, the Unfairground and The Common. These are the intense, crammed late night hangouts, teeming with a crowd that has pupils like saucers and tense, rictus jaws. Walking around here is like being stuck in a tumble dryer full of the demented. You get jostled left and right, dazzled by lasers and building wide projections, freaked out by professionally trained weirdos. Eventually you're lost deep within this whirlpool, hoping desperately you don't actually lose your mind.
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| London Underground at Block 9. Photo by Peter Podworski. |
My favourite of these areas was Block 9. Having arrived from the grimy city I was initially a bit non-plussed to see that they were constructing a grotty tower block in the middle of all this greenery. If I'd wanted to wander around damp council shitholes I could do that quite easily back home. But at night, with sickly green lighting illuminating everything, trashy transvestites dragging it up through shattered holes in the buildings and pounding dance music filling the air I was totally in my element.
A little birdy had tipped me off about some secret stuff going in the corner of this tower block; telling me to make my way underneath the tube train that'd smashed through the building and ask to jump the queue into the club within. I did and got hustled into a pen outside full of chatty people. What followed once I was inside was a blizzard of intense oddness; hell-nurses wanted to shove suppositories up my arse, lovelorn women living in trash that I got pregnant and being threatened that my cock was going to be cut off while having a close-up polaroid of a puckered anus shoved in my face.
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| And yes there was a lot of mud. Photo by Mikki Sandhu. |
It was an experience designed to fuck with the chemically altered mind as much as possible. This was the Roundhouse Theatre's contribution to the festival, and it was so good I couldn't shut up about it all weekend. I made it a mission to drag as many friends as possible along, taking a sadistic pleasure in watching them pop confusedly through the double doors only to emerge with twisted brains and big silly smiles on their faces.
On a slightly less psychologically intense front was the excellent Back O' Beyond bar in The Common. Taking on a slightly slanted Day of the Dead theme, the bar was staffed by skeleton boys and girls. To the sounds of rickety retro-rock I lay down in a coffin and got turned into a skeleton man, then capered around the garden outside to You Know You Make Wanna (Shout) like a madman. This bar was off the beaten track, yet stuffed with teeny-weeny details within details. Within a Jesus knick-knack shrine at the back was a fence - I spotted a hinge in it and found a small shed with another man inside. He made us burst out onto the dancefloor to make a scene. We did.
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| Me being turned into a skeleton man. |
Eventually the nights took on a freaky pattern. We'd find a series of tiny, packed out raves, each hotter, smaller and crazier than the last. Everytime we ventured somewhere we'd find faster and faster dance music; culminating in a 4am arrival at a tent playing music like this. It was full of freakshow circus performers and an audience who looked like someone had shoved an egg whisk in their brain and hit omelette. In my burnt-out, ruinous state I thought for a moment that I was actually going mad, figuring there was about a 50/50 chance I was imagining all this from within a padded cell.
There is nothing and nowhere on earth that matches Glastonbury. But for all the amazing experiences, fantastic music and beautiful scenery the real highlight was spending the weekend with amazing people. It's the tiny personal moments that are going to stay with me the longest; everyone holding hands and snaking through a packed crowd; linking arms with a friend and negotiating especially slippery mud; pretending to sleep in someone's lap to get away from a boring man at the Stone Circle; bumping into old friends I haven't seen in years and years; hiding from a torrential downpour next to a veggie burger van; waking up in a boiling, sweaty tent and grinning as I remember where I am; helping a stranger out who's stuck in a muddy pit; even something as simple as catching someone's eye and both smiling like idiots at how much of a great time we're having.
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| Sunset at Glastonbury. Photo by Mikki Sandhu. |
Dolly Parton said "Wouldn't it be great if we could all just live like this?", a thought I guarantee has gone through the mind of everyone who's stared out contentedly at the sun slowly setting over a throng of ludicrously happy, mud-stained people. But we can't. We've got to head back to the boring old real world where there's music doesn't bubble up from everywhere around you and things don't randomly emit vast plumes of flame into the sky. After Glastonbury everything else feels desaturated and muted, the rest of the world a joyless, unfriendly place in comparison.
This was the best weekend I've ever had in my life. I've made new friends, discovered fresh music and raved harder than I've ever raved before. I only wish I could go back and do it all over again.
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