Review of 2023: Part 2 – Movies

Here's part two of my review of the year, focusing on FILMS. The format: 20 'discoveries', seven old favourites, six stinkers, six movies re-appraised, and five areas of obsession.

20 DISCOVERIES

or 'premieres', or 'first watches', or whatever you call films that you saw for the first time this year. Here are the 20 that had the biggest effect on me.

1. Geronimo: An American Legend (Walter Hill, 1993) – An astonishing Western that's at once poetic and authentic as it unspools the untold story of the Geronimo wars. It's full of extraordinary language (much of it in a richly rewarding Matt Damon voiceover, Stand by Me via the real West), sudden action sequences and quiet fury, augmented by perhaps Ry Cooder's greatest score. On any terms, a masterpiece – and utterly unique.

2. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023) – If you lost a parent young, this is about as emotional an experience as film can give you. If you didn’t, I wonder how you even make sense of it. Regret and pain and absence and longing and Scott’s inky eyes endlessly shining with tears. It's exactly as brutal and as gentle as it needs to be, excavating how our relationships with those we've lost can be easier than with those still living, but what you’re forever missing in return. It's funny in places; profoundly gay; wryly modern; but principally it's a ghost story about grief. It's certainly the most overwhelmed and unanchored I've ever felt in a cinema. It didn't feel much like watching a film at all, really.

3. The Reckoning (Jack Gold, 1970) – Oof. A film that fastens your jaw to the floor, as Nicol Williamson's alpha businessman returns to his roots, and begins to question whether he's lost sight of himself. Not that the alternate version of him is much easier to take. Amid seductions, drunken ranting and bingo, he's pondering whether to beat a teddy boy to death with whatever tools he may have to hand. It's an immaculately-constructed, blackly comic film, with a dazzling performance at its centre, but it's also a howl of despair: unstintintingly fascinating – and provocative – on the subjects of class, immigrant experience, and masculine pain. It does ‘⬆️ The North for revenge’ better – and earlier – than Get Carter, and marries sad songs to Scouse visuals a half-decade prior to Terence Davies's Children, while satirising Thatcherism before that term had even been coined. Along with Mike Leigh's Naked, it's one of the few films that permits a northerner to be smarter (and not merely jollier) than his southern counterparts. A stunning experience, swerving cliché right up to its subversive and chilling and perfect ending.

4. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) – Finding a shorthand for this film is difficult. Saying it’s “about a father-daughter relationship” offers no clue as to its poetic instincts; calling it “a film about memory, mental illness and loss” carries the latent (and erroneous) threat that it is wanky, or unstintingly hard work. Instead, it is an intensely moving movie that in its rawness, naturalism and emotional honesty – smuggled in via fond joshing and moments of musical and visual inspiration – hits every audience it finds, about as hard as possible. It has some of Morvern Callar’s strobing and sun-bleached stylistics, some of Half Nelson’s grinning sadness. But its greatness is all Wells’s own, the dialogue, performance and camera all doing different things that together form a perfect truth. She fixes our eyes on a Polaroid as it reveals itself, on a TV recycling the recent past, on a man’s back as he comes apart at the seams. She wields the song score like a weapon, distorting it to meet her demands, the familiarity disfigured like our memories after trauma. As Mescal and Corio love and joke and hurt. I can’t get over that single fleeting shot of young Sophie’s face before she starts to dance: the filmmaker’s innate and crucial understanding that joy doesn’t undermine tragedy, it augments it.

5. The Mark of Zorro (Rouben Mamoulian, 1940) – Fox crashes the swashbuckler craze with this exuberant, precision-tooled crowdpleaser. Ty Power is perfect as the dashing masked avenger posing as a cowardly fop (the sole drawback being that, unlike Doug, he wasn’t permitted to do all his own stunts). It’s curiously-paced here and there, but also impeccably cast and superbly conceived, with ingeniously-devised dramatic sequences and a scintillating climactic duel. Mamoulian’s style is, unless you’re looking for it, close to invisible: you only know you’re entirely enveloped in the film. In short: irresistible.

6. The Intern (Nancy Meyers, 2015) – While clad in the garb of Meyers’ unquestioning capitalist conformity: a humanist masterwork. De Niro’s modest, earnest performance is pitch-perfect.

7. Café Metropole (Edward H. Griffith, 1937) – An utterly charming confection, with Ty Power’s dissolute gambler blackmailed into romancing heiress Loretta Young by bankrupt hotel owner Adolphe Menjou. It’s a magical, very funny and consistently surprising rom-com, with a touch of The Thin Man’s airy irreverence: Young is remarkably modern as the knowing, offhand love interest who resolutely refuses to engage with each threat of melodrama. Her scene with Power’s head in her lap is just beautiful. And so is Helen Westley’s gangster-talk. The abrupt opening, which works brilliantly in itself, was shamefully the result of studio head Darryl F. Zanuck excising Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson's entire performance due to worries that southern audiences wouldn't stand for a black guy in tails. The complicated, enduringly contentious super-producer did go on to make several sincere if compromised pictures about racism, including Gentleman's Agreement, Pinky and No Way Out.

8. Black Sheep (Allan Dwan, 1935) – A wonderful B movie from Sol Wurtzel’s unit at Fox, which deals – as ever – with jewel thieves on an ocean liner. But what lifts it way out of the ordinary is the central relationship between embittered, alcoholic gambler Edmund Lowe, and the bored, failing actress who joins him in intrigue (Claire Trevor). Their characters are real, their badinage (except for one slightly weak recurring affectation) zingy, and their chemistry off the charts. There’s a small moment where Trevor stops just short of embracing Lowe (“… that’s all I wanted to know,” she says instead) that must be among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on screen. Around them, there’s Lowe’s father-son relationship with a wayward rich boy, some rather tiresome drunk comedy, and Eugene Pallette releasing a clockwork mouse onto a dance floor, but we’re here for the heart-mending central couple. Just lovely.

9. Fifty Roads to Town (Norman Taurog, 1937) – “I hope you’re not one of those whimsical gangsters.” What an absolute delight this is, containing an epic meet-cute (the longest set-up in an early Zanuck film!?), glorious William Conselman/George Marion dialogue, and the only Stepin Fetchit performance I’ve seen where he is being slyly (and hilariously) subversive rather than a racist fantasy. Don Ameche and Ann Sothern are each on the lam from the law, and wind up in a mountain cabin, off-season. He’s sort of holding her hostage, but he’s not what she thinks he is, and she’s not that fussed about leaving. This sleeper is smart, sexy and surprising: full of neat reversals and funny lines. The best old rom-com I’ve seen in quite a while.

10. Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996) sets itself up as nihilistic and sneeringly classist but stick with it: that’s all part of the game. It’s an adolescent, smugly dark and secretly soft minor masterpiece: Little Red Riding Hood as exploitation flick, with Witherspoon’s incredible performance as a white-trash teenager trolling a serial killer (Kiefer Sutherland). Like DiCaprio, she was most interesting before she became acclaimed, and as the perma-swearing, borderline-illiterate, hotheaded anti-heroine, she’s this movie’s heart and soul. Sutherland, too, was never half as good as he is here, and now and then a riotous Danny Elfman score gets involved, as disorientating as the rest of it. Bright's aim is to shock and surprise and confound, with whiplash turns of both story and tone, and his aim is true.

11. Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995) – A post-Rodney King nightmare (and box-office calamity) that’s like Blow Out for the ‘90s: a paranoid, sumptuously-shot state-of-the-nation thriller, only this time spiked with exhilarating action. Ralph Fiennes is the complete fucking loser who unwittingly uncovers police malfeasance while doing a roaring trade in the black market of illicit POV memories. The use of subjective camera here honestly feels as revolutionary as anything done by Hollywood since it brought in the talkies. Perhaps this was the Jim Cameron-adjacent innovation that cinema should have followed? Launching with an incredible botched-robbery sequence shot with that subjective camera, Bigelow and screenwriter Cameron deliver an intoxicating fusion of frenzied pursuit, pointed (if compromised) social comment and rulebook-shredding technical wizardry, aided by a couple of fine performances (Fiennes, Angela Bassett) and a memorable one of fragile or possibly malevolent horniness from Juliette Lewis. There is at least one passage here that is virtually unwatchable, and difficult to defend on moral grounds, alongside less complicated shortcomings: a crashingly obvious twist, and Cameron dialogue that, as usual, employs alliteration at the expense of specificity. But the film still feels like a complete one-off, and a triumphant one at that: heady, desperate and, yes, strange, while positing a technical direction that cinema might have engaged with more often, had the movie not lost 34 million dollars.

12. Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949) – My new favourite genre: French Revolution noir, a world of Wellesian angles and huge looming heads. The paranoiac plot, about Robespierre’s missing hitlist, can barely withstand a moment’s scrutiny, and I was having far too much fun to care. It’s riotous pulp mayhem, with incredible photography from the inimitable John Alton, a fabulously seedy performance from Arnold Moss as the duplicitous Fouché, and every noir trope vividly reimagined for the setting. A horse-and-cart chase? Why not indeed. The scene in which Moss and Robert Cummings claw disfiguringly at one another’s faces gives Cloak and Dagger a run for its money in the Genuinely Disquieting Fight Scene stakes. This 35mm screening was a real highlight of the BFI's fabulous 'Film on Film' festival.

13. The Contender (Rod Lurie, 2000) – An unbelievably entertaining political drama, with a strong script that mixes insider talk and Hollywood thrills, and an exemplary ensemble. Jeff Bridges is particularly good; along with Cutter’s Way, this is surely his best performance, embodying a president whose wiles are so well-honed and well-worn that they crouch effortlessly beneath that pomaded exterior. Allen too is memorable as the vice-presidential contender at the film’s centre, whose sexual past may be about to torpedo her nomination (though I have never seen anyone run or play basketball in such a physically comic way, she looks like a Muppet). The last reel is a bit too much like wish-fulfilment (though so was Mr. Smith, so was The American President), and occasionally you catch Gary Oldman doing his Acting, but it’s a great ride all the same.

14. Absolution (Anthony Page, 1978) – Richard Burton, Billy Connolly and the lad from Kes, together at last. Thanks to Indicator for excavating another sleeper from the bin of history, in this case a film that has been underrated, vilified, overlooked and then, worst of all, forgotten. Written by Anthony Shaffer, who subsequently disowned the movie after having his work rewritten, it’s essentially Sleuth filtered through Hitchcock’s I Confess, with an ageing Burton as a priest and schoolteacher who becomes engaged in a twisted battle with pretty protégé, Dominic Guard. It’s beautifully acted by the leads, atmospherically directed, and perpetually surprising. The only shortcomings are Connolly’s glib, surface-level performance as a drifter, and one twist too many.

15. Bartleby (Anthony Friedman, 1970) – An enjoyably weird film about one of society's dead letters, a possibly depressed, possibly autistic, definitely disconnected accountant who one day decides that he would simply "prefer not to". A little too repetitive, perhaps – Melville's premise stretched to breaking point before snapping into paternalistic sentiment – but superb on loneliness, non-conformity, and the assumptions of capitalism. It's very funny too. "I would not like to kill two birds with one stone" is my new motto. Bartleby's passion for walking and looking provides a feast for vintage-London-location pervs, many of its bleakly seductive monuments to modernism since demolished.

16. High Tension (Allan Dwan, 1936) – A fast-paced B movie, with Brian Donlevy as a wisecracking deep-sea diver continually letting down his short-tempered, hilarious, pulp-fiction-writer girlfriend, Glenda Farrell – and as much fun as that sounds. Former silent film pioneer Dwan is slumming here, making a movie for Sol Wurtzel’s B-unit at Fox, but his comic timing is spot on, and that one meticulously-plotted establishing shot in Honolulu is a beaut. This one’s just highly entertaining throughout, with spectacular leads and a good balance between comedy, story and off-kilter romance; as Farrell’s love rival, Helen Wood has almost as good chemistry with Donlevy as Glenda does. Only complaint: the wrap-up is too abrupt. Norman Foster, who plays the second lead, soon became a B-movie director at Fox, and later collaborated with Orson Welles on the ‘My Friend Bonito’ chapter of the unfinished It’s All True, Journey Into Fear and, as an actor, The Other Side of the Wind.

17. Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000) – A vivid retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, though I’d have hated to be in that emergency control room, what with everyone smoking. Costner’s version of advisor Ken O’Donnell has been ridiculed in some quarters for being too good to be true (often a problem with works based on memoir), and I can see that – especially when he seems both omniscient yet intellectually inferior to the Kennedys who are flailing – but his emotional reticence is a moving counterpoint to his moral rectitude. As a piece of cinema, it’s first-rate in almost all quarters: well-cast (both Kennedys are superb), making inspired use of the real meeting transcripts, and somehow interposing neat action sequences into a film about the avoidance of war. Only the occasional bum note – courtesy of Costner's wandering accent, scene-chewing from supporting cast members like Len Cariou (as Dean Acheson), and a periodic pomposity – keeps it short of greatness. The Lyndon Johnson really looks like him. Christopher Lawford, playing Cmdr William B. Ecker, is JFK’s nephew.

18. The Gay Deception (William Wyler, 1935) – Frances Dee is a sweepstakes winner masquerading as an heiress in a New York hotel, where European prince (Francis Lederer) has gone incognito as a bellboy. It’s a charming romantic confection, stylishly handled by Wyler, and filled with familiar faces. Paul Hurst is particularly funny as Lederer’s irascible line manager, who introduces another patronising maxim every day. Lederer’s accent makes him unintelligible at times, but visually he’s just right as both intrusive admirer and dignified royal, and Dee’s eccentric performance refuses to make even a passing acquaintance of sentimentality. (Also: she's allowed to have big sticky-out ears, a novelty in this period.) The film isn’t consistently hilarious or unfalteringly affecting, but it's still a little gem.

19. Holy Matrimony (John M. Stahl, 1943) – A truly lovely rom-com with two unusually mature leads. Monty Woolley (55) is a legendary British painter who fakes his own death so he can live in peace, and falls hopelessly in love with plain-spoken Gracie Fields (45). But their Putney idyll is threatened by his secret, especially when his work becomes the subject of a court case. Nunnally Johnson’s script is warm and appealing rather than terribly funny (do you think a debate in court about two neck moles is instinctively hilarious? So does Nunnally), but Fields is appealing, Woolley can wring laughs out of anything, and there are nice bits for Laird Cregar and Eric Blore. A courtroom climax where the hero dislikes both sides is also a notable novelty, and there’s a neat ending in a very mid-‘40s style.

20. The Road to Glory (Howard Hawks, 1936) – “Anything to get out of this grave.” A near-classic Hawks picture, devised by Fox to recycle footage they owned from the French war movie, Wooden Crosses. Somehow that lead to something halfway extraordinary, written by Nunnally Johnson, Joel Sayre and William Faulkner (!), shot by Gregg Toland, and featuring one of the best performances you’ll ever see, Fredric March underplaying unforgettably as a womanising lieutenant with magic in his fingers. He joins a memorable love triangle, fighting battle-hardened captain Warner Baxter for the affections of nurse June Lang. The film is ironic, cynical and witty, with Lang the most surprisingly effective of Hawksian women – she soon became a bright, blonde second lead, before her reputation suffered from marrying a literal gangster – but is sadly somewhat derailed halfway through by a lousy subplot featuring Lionel Barrymore as Baxter’s father, a character supposedly torn from life, but not remotely believable.

***

SEVEN OLD FAVOURITES

1. Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940) – The small details, the wild counter-intiition of its courtroom climax, and Stanwyck’s story playing out on her face. The way Sturges and Leisen use comedy to segue into, or offer relief from, deep emotion (the cross-eyed grandfather after the homecoming heartbreak; Sterling Holloway’s ballad after he’s been put in his place). The use of snatches of everyday language to represent epiphanies. Bondi as conscience and heavy. My favourite film. And at the Christmas screening I just went to, the programme notes were from my Blu-ray essay!

2. Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) – One of Old Hollywood’s true miracles. So sweet and cynical and clever and true and modern and timeless and of-its-time. Andrews as a slick shitheel, Cooper at peak bashful, Stanwyck at peak everything. Then there's Wilder’s dialogue, Hawks peppering his background with old professors, and Toland, fresh from The Little Foxes, throwing in those two wild and moody deep-focus close-ups. The ‘Richard ill’ scene robs me of my breath.

3. Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937) – A crackling feminist masterpiece that passes the Bechdel Test 90 times a minute, and hits me harder than any other film. Aside perhaps from Holiday, it has the Kate Hepburn performance.

4. Libeled Lady (Jack Conway, 1936) – The great unheralded screwball comedy, and the ultimate comfort movie, with scintillating dialogue, that incomparable Loy-Powell chemistry, and Jean Harlow showing that in just seven years she had transformed herself from a plank of wood with large breasts into the best comedian in Hollywood.

5. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) – A captivating, emotionally overwhelming Ophüls masterpiece, with director and star (Joan Fontaine) working perfectly in tandem. She’s simply astonishing, playing a waif/model/socialite in turn-of-the-century Vienna, who is slung around by her secret, lifelong love of older neighbour/musician/womanising wastrel Louis Jourdan. Based on a Stefan Zweig story, the film is ingeniously structured, perfectly played and sumptuously filmed (Ophüls rolling out his trademark tracking shots, within the confines of Hollywood convention), as every choice amps up its unique atmosphere: both richly romantic and utterly bereft. Fontaine says in her autobiography that she always knew what effect this director wanted, and it's the one truly transcendent performance of her career, animated by such extraordinary inner life, her character's thoughts dancing across her face, obvious to everyone but the dissolute fuckboy she adores.

6. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) – The plan-view photography during the sword vs whatever's-on-the-wall fight. The way every character has untold and epic depths. Michelle Yeoh's cheekbones. CINEMA!

7. 17 Again (Burr Steers, 2009) – “I grew up, and I lost my way. And I blamed you for my failures.” A melancholic masterpiece. There’s some goofy second-lead comedy and fleeting noughties nastiness in there, sure, but the film’s treatment of lost love, lost dreams, lost men is profoundly affecting – and never more so than when Efron says his piece in the divorce court, improvising an honest, last-ditch letter to the woman he both saved and failed. His delivery; Mann’s expression; Steers’ use of subjective camera and a Cat Power needle-drop. It is a remarkable sequence. The film's circular structure works superbly too, launched by the perfect mini-film that is its bleached-out 1989 opening, aided by rapid-fire cuts in that inescapable climax. Efron is just sensationally good throughout, though a mention too for Sterling Knight’s impeccable comic smarts.

***

SIX STINKERS

1. The Holiday (Nancy Meyers, 2006) – The only film I started and didn’t finish (which tells its own story), since one day I will die, and I think at that point I would have regretted it. It's surely the worst Christmas movie ever made: a chance to spend the festive season with a bunch of charmless pricks, and just unremittingly awful, exhibiting none of Meyers’ virtues and all of her flaws in their purest and most alarming form. A movie that begins by misunderstanding newspapers and goes on to misunderstand such concepts as ‘England’, ‘sex’ and ‘people’.

2. No Orchids for Miss Blandish (St. John Legh Clowes, 1948) – A notoriously and mesmerisingly terrible New York-set noir, shot in England, and populated predominantly by homegrown actors doing dreadful American accents in front of woefully unconvincing backdrops. Sid James is the wise, archetypically American barman, which goes about as well as you’d expect. It is marginally more nasty, violent and sexually provocative than was generally permitted by the Hollywood censor (though the outcry in the UK was largely fuelled by latent fears of cultural colonisation), but such licence can only take you so far when the story is this tedious, the characters are so colourless and similar, and no-one can act. The source novel was a blatant rip off of William Faulkner's (dire) 'Sanctuary', and Jack La Rue effectively reprises his analogous role from the Pre-Code adaptation of that book, The Story of Temple Drake (1933). Times had changed, though, and the part here was transformed, with the sanction of the BBFC, from that of a sadistic sex criminal to a doomed romantic.

3. Paddy O’Day (Lewis Seiler, 1936) – When Rick's Deep-Dive Into the History of 20th Century-Fox (see above, and also below) Goes Bad. An eye-wateringly dreadful Jane Withers vehicle, with the lunatic’s Shirley Temple doing an Irish accent so bad that it technically counts as race hate. Rita Hayworth’s in this too, when she was still called Cansino, and was still half-Spanish, and still had her original hairline. After a terrible opening, the film briefly becomes bearable with the intrusion of three members of John Ford’s stock company, before promptly disappearing off a cliff. I must say that I preferred (real-life bandleader) Pinky Tomlin at the start of the film, when he was an absent-minded bookworm rather than an arrogant prick. I don’t understand what was ever supposed to be entertaining about this film. Its songs are quite remarkably bad, and the slapdash production extends to Tomlin’s character being billed as ‘Ray’; he’s called Roy.

4. Hot Pursuit (Anne Fletcher, 2015) – A pissweak action-comedy featuring perhaps the single most irritating performance in cinema history, as Sofia Vergara yells virtually every line with the exact same grating intonation. The film’s principal jokes are that (a) she is vain and (b) Reese Witherspoon is small, though there’s also much spirited punching down, none of it funny (the opening scene has two jokes, one about transvestites and the other taking the side of a controlling father). This is basically The Heat if it was no good – comedically or morally – with even Witherspoon unable to make it work, though it is marginally more watchable than, say, This Means War. The movie's brief diversion into romance is a bit less shit than the rest of it. I like it when Reese sings ‘(I Never Promised You) A Rose Garden’. It lasts about 15 seconds and is easily the best bit of the film.

5. My Lucky Star (Roy Del Ruth, 1938) – An absolutely wretched Fox film, in which studio head Zanuck splices together three of the studio's cash shows – the Sonja Henie ice-skating vehicle, the college musical, and the putting-on-a-show film – to create something unspeakable. Shagger Cesar Romero sends employee Henie to university on the proviso that she change her clothes every few hours to advertise his store's fashions. So she does, while braving the taunts of the campus mean girls, and falling in love with some charmless prick (Richard Greene). Terrible story, banal performances, cheap production and awful songs (as far as I can tell, Henie is briefly permitted to sing, dreadfully, before being dubbed by a professional for her second burst). Even the skating scenes are sub-par, though I'm giving the film a full star for some fleeting moments of ice-borne transcendence. The less said about the hysterically ill-conceived 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' finale, however, the better. Henie, often accused of being a Nazi, has one coat that appears to incorporate a Klan hood. Elisha Cook, Jr. appears in his nerdy student era. There’s this weird thing in Fox films of the '30s where the stars are forever being terrorised by cafe owners trying to foist the special on them. These allegedly comic sequences can last for up to three minutes. Just very odd. Crucially, Henie is the worst fucking actor of all time. Zanuck had told his writers to never give her speeches. Here she gets speeches.

6. Traveller’s Joy (Ralph Thomas, 1950) – An often painfully unfunny farce inspired by postwar currency restrictions (yes really), with Googie and McCallum as a divorced couple who get stranded, broke, in Stockholm, a city that’s vividly brought to life, if indeed Stockholm is a drab, poorly-filmed hotel room. The film was based on a hit West End play but the material was dated by the time the movie was released. That’s the problem with signing a deal to hold your film until the source play has folded; it tends to fold because no-one cares anymore. The movie proved an incongruous closing chapter to the story of the near-legendary, borderline-notorious studio, Gainsborough Pictures, best-known for its flushed, sadistic mid-‘40s melodramas. In 1949, it merged with Rank. The man behind the camera is Rank (in both senses of the word) director Ralph Thomas, exhibiting his usual absence of style... and subtlety... and timing… though he does, in one fascinating moment, wring a proto-Sid-James bit of leering from Maurice Denham, who in reference to a potential sexual encounter genuinely utters the phrase, “Oi oi”. Thomas later directed the vaguely underrated Doctor series, while his brother Gerald was responsible for the Carry On films. Responsible in the sense that he should have been tried in the Hague. The film’s most interesting elements are Yolande Donlan’s part as a deceptively smart blonde – she’s very appealing, but also entirely ripping off Judy Holliday’s Billie Dawn, a part she had played in the West End – and the ration-induced gluttony of the script, a charge that Evelyn Waugh later levelled at his own Brideshead. There are, at most, three jokes that halfway land. I only watched Traveller’s Joy because I like Googie Withers but she’s largely bland here, and so is the film. Dora Bryan plays a Swedish maid (?).

***

SIX RE-APPRAISALS

... being, naturally, movies I revisited, and changed my mind about.

THREE UP

I actually saw this first one on New Year's Eve 2022, but this is my blog and I can do what I want.

1. Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) – What’s the wrongest you’ve ever been about a film? I think for me it’s Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. I saw it when it came out on DVD, and regarded it as a time-passing piece of nothing, a vapid cartoon that regurgitated an over-familiar origins story while periodically breaking out into CGI action that – as Mark Kermode kept saying on the radio, and I was only too happy to parrot – had no “weight”. Without bothering to rewatch it, in 2017 I described the film, on Letterboxd, as “rubbish”. The problem with this opinion is that the film is fucking amazing: a stunning, vibrant, deeply moving movie beautifully balanced between mythmaking, comedy, action and emotion. As for the lack of ‘weight’ – he’s not supposed to be weighty, he’s the fucking Spider-Man! It plays exactly as it is intended to: the springiness is the point. If I wanted to pretend I was right first time, I could point to the mediocrity of James Franco, the hideous product placement, the distracting immobility of the Goblin’s face (and Spidey’s for that matter; when you have two masks talking to one another, it’s particularly undramatic), and the occasional intrusion of what we will come to recognise as The Marvel Style (or lack thereof). But as Twitter's @mildperil has said, the film is just so much more distinctive and unusual and affecting and thrilling than anything the MCU has ever done. It’s the sensitivity of Maguire’s performance – a pair of sad red eyes with a superhero attached. It’s Raimi injecting horror stylistics into the mix as he tussles for supremacy with the studio – and usually wins. It’s his innate understanding of iconography (Maguire ripping open his shirt while on the run, as Danny Elfman triumphantly blares), and the space he affords Dafoe to give a huge – but narrow – performance mixing pathos, menace and horror-ish ham. It's the way that the script plays around with expectation through its jokey cuts and delicate subversion – but never too much. It’s the relatively intimate scale of the story, which keeps it personal and human and direct, aided by Dunst’s perfect love interest. And it’s the fact that the action climax is done in 10 minutes, without the need to open a wormhole to another galaxy or destroy two-thirds of New York City. What a movie. Like I said, it’s rubbish.

2. The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016), which I liked on release, but thought outstayed its welcome. Not this time. It's Shane Black’s phenomenally entertaining buddy movie, with hired thug Russell Crowe and PI Ryan Gosling teaming up to search for a missing porn star in smog-filled late-‘70s LA. Occasionally too meta, with an overlong action climax and a plot that I still don’t understand, but honestly, who gives a shit? About as much fun as the movies have given us in the past decade. Now please make The Nicer Guys (2025) and The Nicest Guys (2028).

3. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) seemed thin and dated when I saw it as a teenager, but it was on pan-and-scan ex-rental VHS, and perhaps I was in the wrong mood too. It is, of course, your lean-and-mean sci-fi actioner, with its perfect premise, inspired use of Arnie, and Biehn’s frenzied B-movie intensity: so integral to the film, and so often overlooked. Cameron, then a veteran of just one film – Piranha II: The Spawning, from which he was fired – knits together the action in his instinctive and inimitable style. The rough edges, like Arnie’s rubber head, only add to the fun, though once the star finally exits to be replaced by a relatively scrawny metal skeleton, the film is conspicuously less scary, despite the shimmering imagination of that climactic crawl: its relentless grasping and panting evasion. The panicked synths, ominous drums and atonal honks of Brad Fiedel’s score are the coup de grâce.

THREE DOWN

1. The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953) – I hadn't seen this since I was a teenager. It was one of my favourite films back then, which makes me both fond of and appalled by my 14-year-old self. It is an exceptionally silly bikesploitation film, with Brando playing an alarmingly overage young hellraiser who leads his gang of hoodlums on a theoretical path of destruction, though their activities are for the most part hilariously anodyne. Like the Dead End Kids, their terrifying debauchery extends largely to repeating everything that the townsfolk say, in high-pitched voices, or pretending that a mop is some hair. Surely the only real threat here is that the people of small-town America might be irritated to death. Brando (demurring to do his own fights or riding) is anticipating Elvis a little, and providing plenty for James Dean to steal, but his particular genius almost entirely deserts him. It’s only in the closing 15 minutes – and especially that deeply touching final scene – that his brooding Johnny is anything more than a tedious, preening twat. The problem, partly, is that the film around him ties itself in knots, trying to appease every conceivable audience. Producer Stanley Kramer’s stock-in-trade was a shallow liberalism, but here he flirts with fascism – contrasting it only with vigilantism – by suggesting in the opening sequences that the only way to truly deter cowards like Johnny from causing mayhem is through a show of unwavering force. If the film later embraces some small degree of understanding, it's essentially posited as a next-best option, and even then only really applicable to special cases touched by the redemptive power of love. In support, a loud Lee Marvin gives perhaps the worst performance of his career, during that period where his principal role was to engage in informal sporting contests against Method actors (boxing Brando here; sprinting against Clift in the appalling Raintree County). There are a handful of neat shots employing chiaroscuro, Brando does his “Whaddaya got?” line (immediately ruined by a pointless, on-screen recap of what’s just happened), and Timothy Carey turns up to pull faces. But it is rarely other than an inescapably daft movie, and about as dangerous as dinner with your nan.

2. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939) – A folksy Fordian fantasy, with the Master printing the legend about the Great Emancipator’s formative years. Ford, and writer Lamar Trotti, are essentially revisiting – and reworking – their 1934 film, Judge Priest: both are movies about a lawyer, haunted by grief, who masks his wisdom and skill with eccentricity and stand-up comedy. Priest even faced down a lynch mob, as Abe does here, though the scene was cut from the earlier film for being too contentious, before being reinstated in Ford’s 1953 remake, The Sun Shines Bright. If I’m honest, Young Mr Lincoln didn’t strike me the same way at 38 as it did when I last saw it aged 21. In the interim, I’ve always thought of it rosily as one of Ford’s unassailable classics, but it isn’t quite that. The soundtrack is too busy, too noisy and ultimately too much (while Ford usually used music brilliantly, his producer Darryl F. Zanuck tended to over-score, leading to a notable battle over My Darling Clementine) and Trotti simply isn’t as good a writer as Frank Nugent. If in doubt he tends to lean towards corn, and the climax to his courtroom drama here simply isn’t convincing – or even plausible. But the film is inferior to the following year’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, based on Robert Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, not because the latter is more faithful to the facts – thought it’s certainly that – but because Ford’s film is flawed in conception and construction, centring on one semi-interesting court case, and too often taking its focus off Abe. The times when it does work, in fact, are when it focuses tightly on its mythologised central figure, generally analogous in this director’s work to an American Jesus, and on the image and nascent iconography of this jacklegged, tufty-haired, big-hatted future president. Henry Fonda, wearing three hours’ worth of make-up including a false nose that makes him look like Gary Neville, hadn’t quite become Henry Fonda, but he makes a fair stab of inhabiting an Abe who was already in some integral way Lincoln. The film's three great moments all belong to him and Ford: a brilliant segue to winter (unfortunately accompanied by a cacophonous, doom-laden score) that finds Fonda, like so many of the director’s heroes, chatting quietly at a graveside; Abe’s silence as he stares at the river in the company of flutey socialite Mary Todd; and the final passage, in which he walks off alone, into a thunderstorm that represents the future.

3. Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007) – You win some, you lose some: just a couple of minutes ago, Raimi was buzzing; now he's crying. More's the point, I spent more than a decade claiming this was a better film than the original. I'm lucky someone didn't punch me in the face. The first thing to say is: "Three villains, Avi? Three? That’s insane." Fuck me, this is such a mess. A shallow, unnecessary, bloated, almost unremittingly sour sequel that trashes the first two films, systematically sullying their every perfect moment. If that makes it sound potentially intriguing – a darker, more mature work, perhaps: something akin to Return to Oz, which inverted the iconography of the beloved 1939 musical – then rest assured: it’s not. Because it’s also stupid. The film finds Peter ruined by fame: now an insufferably smug Spidey whose worst traits are about to be amplified by an alien symbiote. Meanwhile, an escaped murderer (Thomas Haden Church), a vengeful paparazzo ((chris)Topher Grace) and a resentful old friend (James Franco) brood and plot, encouraged by their new superpowers. Church’s Sandman is a handy example of exactly what has gone wrong here. While Dafoe and Molina’s villains could have been taken from old horror films – perhaps Karloff vehicles at Columbia – this storyline about a doting father trying to get the money for his daughter’s operation might have been lifted from a cloying Wallace Beery film made in the early days of the talkies. The Sandman is an impressive visual creation but we neither care about Church’s plight nor enjoy his villainy: his dialogue is the most functional and tedious imaginable, and there’s no fun in his malevolence. There’s the odd sequence in Spider-Man 3 that is really special: most notably a restaurant scene between a desperate Mary-Jane and an oblivious, supercilious Peter that plays like a Before Midnight outtake, if bafflingly spliced with 'Allo 'Allo-ish comedy from Bruce Campbell. And there are a few that are really fun: Raimi having a laugh as Peter struts down the street ogling appalled women; the JK Simmons bits; every action sequence until the final one. But they’re in the service of a film that is cloyingly sentimental, crashingly pointless and apparently endless, the action climax anticipating the MCU both in its self-satisfied, bromantic asides and the fact that it goes on for fucking ever. Directors are not necessarily the last word on their own work, but when Sam Raimi said in 2014 that this film was "awful", he was not wrong. Most damagingly, it threatens to cloud our memories of those earlier films. I’m going to just start pretending it doesn’t exist. “Spider-Man 3? Yeah, it was a shame that never got made.”

***

OBSESSIONS

1. 20th Century-Fox (1935-40) – Between its birth in May 1935 and the point in 1940 by which it had fully found its feet – with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck (pictured above) realising what Ty Power did best (buckling swashes in The Mark of Zorro), discovering Betty Grable (Down Argentine Way), and rediscovering his social conscience (The Grapes of Wrath) – Fox was a studio in a fascinating state of flux. This year, as research for a writing project, I've watched around 80 of these transitional films, and it has been such a rewarding, exciting, eye-opening, exhilarating, maddening, and occasionally slightly boring ride. What did we learn? That the mid-period Loretta Young could be superb on screen (and was ravishing in colour); that Zanuck's short rein on his writers produced a startling uniformity of worldview and story structure across Fox's films; and that the Ritz Brothers remain the single worst comic troupe ever inflicted on a barely-prepared populace. But those were only the first discoveries from this deepest of dives. Seeing the star-making machine in full effect; beginning to comprehend Hollywood as a factory town: these were privileges I didn't expect. People online refer to anything they are even mildly distracted by with the words, "i am obsessed!!", but in this instance I actually am obsessed.

2. Ty Power – As an offshoot from the above project, I have spent several pleasant evenings gazing at Tyrone Power's pretty face, sometimes in colour.

3. Kung fu films on the Eureka label – You keep releasing them, I'll keep buying them. Often this proves to be wise (Royal Warriors) and at other times I feel like I've been robbed (Burning Paradise). But on those evenings when the switch marked 'brain' needs to be flicked to 'off', they're frequently a godsend.

4. Noir – That world of shadows, shady dames, and wry PIs who are the wittiest guys in the room, but with no concept of the frame closing around them. Throw in bluff cops, returning soldiers, corporate slimeballs, drunken floozies and homoerotic heavies, and you have the makings of a good evening in. Criterion Channel's 'Holiday Noir' season has been a treat (including an offering from the cheapo Monogram studio in which a man ends up being sentenced to death after throwing his shoes at a cat), while Indicator are doing the Lord's work with their Columbia Noir and Universal Noir sets.

5. Movies about politics – Completing this year's genre triumvirate: give me a set-piece gently stylising the to-and-fro of a congressional hearing, or an ob-doc about political corruption in a senatorial race, and you can burn down my house in the next 100 minutes and I won't notice.

***

Thanks for reading.

Susanne Sundfør at Røkeriet, USF Verflet, Bergen

Friday 29 and Saturday 30 May 2023

Among the things we were least expecting from Susanne Sundfør’s new live show, Rebirth of the Electro Diva must have been pretty high on the list.

First of all, she is touring a new album, blómi, and the last time she toured a new album, she played the-new-album-and-nothing-else, unless you counted the improvised, double-bass-led improvisations linking each song to the next.

Secondly, she has characterised herself as a folk artist whose flirtations with electro-pop were little more than a mathematical digression: the solving of a series of sonic puzzles ultimately pleasing to the human brain.

Increasingly, she has looked to distance herself from that record, 2015’s Ten Love Songs, in which the sorrow is swamped by triumphal dance hooks, and apparently from the life that created it: living in Dalston, smoking and drinking too much, wrecking her voice, close to breaking point.

When she has played songs from the album on recent tours, it has tended to be the eerie or spectral ones – ‘Silence’ and ‘Trust Me’ – rather than the shimmering art-pop of ‘Fade Away’, or her femme fatale monsterpiece, ‘Delirious’.

And yet here she is, on stage at USF Verflet in Bergen – a former sardine factory repurposed as the city’s coolest venue – dancing sensually to four of Ten Love Songs’s floor-filling bangers, as the synths climb a stairway to paradise.

Perhaps that’s what happens when you ask a born contrarian to headline a jazz festival.

This is the kind of love that never goes out of style

As I wrote in this recent interview piece: in spring 2018, Sundfør seemed on the cusp of a commercial breakthrough. Then she effectively disappeared. In the intervening years, she has found love, started a family, struggled with anxiety, gone back to high school, and become enormously interested in regenerative farming. Now, finally, she has returned to music. Her first album in six years, blómi was released at the end of April, and she is toying with the idea of a European tour in 2024.

In the meantime, she is playing across her native Norway all summer. The first two shows were in Bergen, headlining the city’s Natt Jazz season just metres from the riverside studio where she recorded her debut album in 2007.

When Sundfør last performed in the UK, she wore a hooded black cloak, and had apparently smeared soot around her eyes, like a Scandi druid, or an urchin Zorro. This time she has newly bleached her hair, and is clad entirely in white, down to the high-heeled PVC boots she kicks off off-stage at the midway point, so as to dance barefoot.

Her mesmerising 2017 show at Union Chapel was a spare affair, featuring just one introverted co-conspirator. For these extravagant, joyous Bergen shows, her on-stage ensemble has swelled to 15, including a pedal steel guitarist, two synth players, five backing singers, and a multi-instrumentalist husband on sax-solo-and-choral-conductor duties.

Open your eyes and begin again

The first night is an invigorating work-in-progress: the thrill of the new, and the old made new, and just the old uncovered and embraced after years in hiding. The second show, which adds a single song – a new opener; Sundfør at the centre of a crescent of 12 vocalists for the handclaps and harmonies of leikara ljóð – is the actualisation of ambition: the art, with most of the wrinkles ironed out.

In common with another legendary vocalist, Sandy Denny, what’s most exciting about Sundfør is the questing restlessness of her invention. Every version of every song she sings is given some new inflection, some new paraphrasing or twisting or variation of melody that changes its feeling and meaning. If neither rendering of ‘Turkish Delight’ here sweeps you up in the same way as the studio version – the blissful simplicity of its third act replaced by something that in its sheer jazziness sounds depressed – the trade-off is in the way that so many other songs are transfigured live. Performing the title track of ‘blómi’, Sundfør chucks in vocal trills, unexpected pauses and head-voice ad-libs that stop you in your tracks. With ‘alyosha’ – the lead single off the album – she knows what she’s got, a vehicle for the sheer scope and power of that God-given instrument, but even then she can’t resist a few experimental flourishes, while gazing across the stage, perhaps just at someone needing a musical cue, or perhaps at the guy who inspired this love song.

She does all three sitting behind her keyboard, along with ‘White Foxes’ (formerly her encore, now a first night statement-of-intent, with deafening percussion intro); a countrified version of ‘I Resign’ from her debut record; the deep cut, ‘Lilith’; and her gospel-inflected encore, ‘fare thee well’, with a glorious extra verse. For the rest, she’s at the main mic, a place she has barely ventured since 2016.

Do you believe in reincarnation?

And that’s where we find the electro-pop diva reborn. First up, she does ‘Kamikaze’, and if you’re wondering whether I’m overhyping the ‘she hasn’t done this for a while’ angle, well: she forgets the second line, consults a band mate, apologises with the words, ‘It’s been a while’, and then launches into the song again. It is one of those tracks that, to paraphrase John Peel talking about the Bluetones’ ‘Slight Return’, “as soon as you hear it, you feel you’ve known it all your life”, but now it comes with a gently wandering opening melody and added blue notes that give the song an emotional punch to go with its sonic one.

Later, she drops in ‘Fade Away’ – by far her most popular song, sporadically drowned out by the spirited singing of first-night die-hards – before returning to ‘Ten Love Songs’ for the final two tracks of the main set, ‘Slowly’ and ‘Delirious’. The latter now has a pleading pedal steel, and rap-adjacent vocals breaking off into clubby exhortations. The former is, simply, one of the best things I’ve ever heard live, especially in its second night iteration. It is notable on record for having at least four separate, irresistible hooks, each more exalting than the last (scroll to 3:08 to be lifted into the clouds). And now it has five. “It’s in the way. You. Hold. Me,” Sundfør sings, in a cascading, staccato arpeggio, as the song reaches its zenith. “Baby. I. Know. You’re. Lonely.”

The other songs she sings at centre stage are a playful ‘Reincarnation’, and ‘rūnā’, in which she seems to be conjuring the music through the contortions of her body, like Judy singing ‘The Man That Got Away’ in A Star Is Born. And between the notes she finds new ones, more beautiful than those on record, before riding the climactic harmonies, swaying, her arms spread wide.

A couple of times during the show, she leaves the stage, firstly for the synth transition between ‘Kamikaze’ and ‘rūnā’, and later to let the rest of the cast perform an a capella version of ‘ashera’s song’, reimagined as an old American spiritual, the original number spliced with fragments of atonal bluegrass, ‘Peace in the Valley’ and ‘Let Your People Go’. While both numbers are interesting, neither are quite what drew us to Bergen tonight.

Take me high to the depths of your soul

On the first night, I made a new friend called Thomas, and when we talked about what had drawn us to Sundfør’s music, we were of one mind: once that voice grabs you, there’s no going back.

These songs are beautifully written, the sprawling arrangements are often inspired, there’s space for limited musical improvisation, and the band are talented and charismatic, with the backing singers allowed to cut free and even encroach on some signature Sundfør lines.

But we are here, and will always be here, for That Voice. That it is now allied to the whole of her canon, even the emotionally tricky, musically mathematic bits, is a cause for dancing, in Bergen and far beyond.

***

SETLIST:

leikara ljóð [second night only]
White Foxes
Turkish Delight
Kamikaze
rūnā (with synth transition intro)
Reincarnation
I Resign
blómi
Fade Away
Lilith
alyosha
ashera's song (new version, choir only)
Slowly
Delirious

Encore:
fare thee well

***

Thanks for reading.

Effortless audacity: Big Thief on tour

Sage Gateshead – 05/04/23
Usher Hall, Edinburgh – 06/04/23
Manchester Apollo – 07/04/23
The Great Hall, Cardiff – 08/04/23
Hammersmith Apollo, London – 11 and 12/04/23
Chalk Brighton – 13/04/23

There is a song that Big Thief have recently started playing called ‘Born for Loving You’.

If you want to understand it, there is a simple, biographical way. And then there is another way.

The simple way first: when the band’s frontwoman, Adrianne Lenker, was a student at Berklee, her music showcase betrayed the powerful influence of the husky, highway-fixated alt-country chanteuse, Lucinda Williams, right down to the very voice she was affecting. That influence hasn’t been as pronounced since (manifesting merely in the odd cover, with Lenker slipping back into Lucinda-voice), but as the band prepares to tour with Williams this summer, here’s a song – co-written with drummer James Krivchenia – that in its feel and its hook could be seamlessly snuck into Williams’ setlist. It may also be the straight-up sexiest thing that Lenker has ever sung (“Take me to the back of your pick-up truck,” she implores at one point, “show me a thing or two.”).

And now here’s the other way to think about ‘Born for Loving You’: no-one else on earth could have written this song.

‘After the dinos fell’: the world of Adrianne Lenker

In its first two lines, Lenker dispenses with the entire history of the universe up to her birth (“After the first stars formed, after the dinos fell/After the first light flickered out of this motel…”). That effortless audacity is characteristic. But the song’s conceit is not conceited: it is a way of understanding the magnitude of love. Everything that happened – to me, to us, to anyone – was just a prelude to this. From blood-soaked birth to teenage nightmare, via “waddling around, looking at birds”, well: “thank god we made it through.”

Dylan once said, “It isn’t me, it’s the songs. I’m just the postman, I deliver the songs.” And here is Lenker’s current online biography in full: “songs of all sorts from places unknown”.

The places are, admittedly, occasionally known. Across the seven shows on this UK tour, ‘Born for Loving You’ gets four airings: twice as a lush ‘70s California-style singalong, then as a plaintive solo ballad, and finally as a stripped-down full-band version with simple harmonies. For those last three, Lenker adds a coda: a falsetto snatch of ‘I Will Always Love You’ (Whitney version).

Yet even when the sources are, as she says, “unknown”, those songs come filtered through a unique sensibility: ideas are ingeniously inverted, images recur, motifs are endlessly shuffled. Her characters are gender-fluid, avian, feminist and quasi-biblical, traversing a world of blue skies, cluttered kitchens, bare plains and flat roads. Whether broken, fixed or flailing, they are loved.

And certainly she seems a conduit for whatever immortal music is floating in the ether right now, whether fragile or thundering. The most exhilarating part of following Big Thief on tour is the regularity with which miracles happen. “This is a new song,” Lenker will say, most nights, before playing the greatest fucking thing you’ve ever heard in your life. On the last tour, she composed ‘Wait a While’ on the ferry over from Dublin, performed it six times in concert, then retired it. It has never been released. Most musicians would kill to ever write a song just half as good.

But Lenker just keeps them coming. She begins the encore at Edinburgh with ‘Already Lost’, for which the word ‘timeless’ is barely sufficient (by the point she unspools the line, “How slow and how fast you are,” your soul has gone into spasm). She commences the second night at Hammersmith with ‘Sadness As a Gift’, which does for depression what ‘Change’ did for fear of death; turning your understanding inside out. She isn’t soothing you with song, she’s showing you another way of perceiving pain. While her between-songs badinage is regularly ridiculed by reviewers committed to the cheap shot, there’s something appealingly counter-intuitive about her worldview, about an artist who’ll tell a huge crowd that a mammoth show feels like a dream (so far, so banal), only to dazedly add: “I don’t really even mean career-wise, I just mean in general: it’s so bizarre to be a human being, and we all ended up here, right now.”

A live band who also make records

And here is where you want to be. You don’t know Big Thief if you haven’t seen them live. They are not a group you fall in love with at a distance: they are a live band who make records on the side; the intensity of their in-person performance rarely, if ever, transfers to your preferred streaming service.

Nor does its extremity. They continue to spread out in all directions, the quietest band on the circuit, and about the loudest. I saw them in Oslo last year during one of their particularly metal phases, an evening that did unspeakable things to my left ear. It is a decision I will never regret.

The live experience, gloriously, is never the same twice. That’s how I can justify seeing them seven times in nine days. Across those shows, they play 38 different songs, 14 of them just once. So if you want to hear their most popular song (‘Shark Smile’), a recent album track like ‘Blue Lightning’, or an unexpected cover of ‘Strangers’ by The Kinks, you’ll have to catch them in London, Manchester and Brighton. They start the second show of the tour, in Edinburgh, by playing four songs we haven’t heard the night before.

Every gig, too, has a different narrative, often built into the sweep of Krivchenia’s setlists. Edinburgh begins with that country-inflected singer-songwriter fare, before shifting into tortured rock, a sequence bookended by two absolute beasts: ‘Contact’ and ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain’. The former explodes into ugly metal screams; the latter continues to delight those who only know the gentle, balladic version that titled their last album.

That’s an emblematic number when talking about how their music continues to evolve, and how no Big Thief song is ever finished. At Gateshead – a curious, slightly muted show (presumably because it was largely seated) – ‘DNWM’ came galumphing out of the gate in a way that just made me think, “yeah OK, but we kind of did this last year”. The next night, it was reborn as a monster, and by Hammersmith, it had mutated into something unstoppable, the band adding more and more mad shit to it: a vocoder, a vocal-coda (Lenker’s drifting falsetto), and squalls of physically-induced feedback, Lenker turning her back on the crowd and throwing her torso at the amp. The song's opening line, "It's a little bit magic," is essentially now a public service announcement.

Not winning

Songs are in constant flux. While ‘Flower of Blood’ reaches its apogee on the first night – as if shoegaze died and went to Heaven, where the Shredding Festival was taking place – two of Lenker’s greatest songs don’t quite find their new place in the world until the final one.

‘Not’ often felt curiously tired, an incomparable song given oddly perfunctory treatment; and after glorious versions exhibiting the extroverted solo (2020) and the internalised one (2022), its climax here seemed technically impressive but hard to follow, either musically or emotionally. Manchester was an exception – Lenker beginning and ending the song on her knees, her guitar part suddenly pleading – while the first night in Hammersmith was an enjoyable anomaly in which she either forgot the words (not, ironically, for the first time) or just tried something new: a ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’-style semi-rap on the verses. It’s Brighton, though, where the song comes to life again in exhilarating fashion. It’s longer, unerring, precise in meaning, Lenker drawing a defining message of futility from its endless negation, as she circles back for a last chorus, screaming the words “not winning” over and again, like some apocalyptic benediction.

She ended both the last UK tour and this one with ‘Change’ – her song about life gaining its very meaning from the existence of death – and while the deeply moving solo version that closed the Shepherd’s Bush run remains the indelible one, her message best delivered by a single voice, the four-part harmony and falsetto ending of this new reading also reaches its full flower by the seaside.

Other songs have been completely reworked. ‘Spud Infinity’ continues its transformation from a wispy, metaphysical ballad to a showcase for a band at its happiest and silliest, complete with Jew’s harp, stomping and a sing-along. While ostensibly a country song, it’s also a jazz number in as much as it allows for showy improv, including guitarist Buck Meek’s characteristically weird anti-solos. ‘Zombie Girl’, another song that Lenker played as a haunting solo song at Union Chapel in 2019, is performed in Edinburgh as a seven-minute prog number with two guitar solos.

At other times, the emotions are simply dialled up. Lenker’s guitar-play is further spotlighted in a newly funky, swaggeringly cocky ‘Simulation Swarm’ that contains two killer – and subtly different – solos, while the cult favourite, ‘Sparrow’ (whose accompanying t-shirt has become practically a uniform for teen girls paying pilgrimage), escalates into tormented fretwork. Simply ditching her acoustic 12-string is enough to conjure up a different world of ‘Cattails’, as if rural America finally got electrified. And in ‘Certainty’, she effectively improves upon perfection by dropping onto a blue note on the pivotal word ‘wild’, an innovation that makes the song more – not less – certain; and irrevocable, without end.

Real love: a horror show

Manchester, probably the best show of the tour, offers a first outing for ‘Real Love’ (Lenker memorably responded to audience cries for the song at Shepherd’s Bush by murmuring, “I know that one”, and mock-innocently singing a bit of the chorus). It’s a blistering rendition, with an extended solo, a huge riff and a similarly huge performance, Lenker grasping glorious, frenzied at the falsetto finale. It remains one of her greatest and most deceptively important love songs: a haunting and seductive marriage of adolescent goth imagery and childhood trauma. This is love as illness, incapacitation, sudden death; a life sentence; a horror show; a beating; a curse, endlessly repeating – and who doesn’t want love?

There are also the moments when Big Thief drag out a deep cut, and drag you around to their way of thinking. I didn’t get the fuss over ‘Change’ until the final moments of last year’s tour. Adrianne starts the first show here with a beautiful solo rendering of ‘UFOF’ – despite twice forgetting the words – a song I’d never cared about at all, before the band blasts out ‘Blurred View’ in a version that finally makes the song make sense: hypnotic and insistent. Other apparent filler from last year’s mammoth double-album grows in stature over the nine days, ‘Time Escaping’ in Cardiff emerging lopsidedly gorgeous from bizarre tuning and improvised wordless vocals; the yearning ’12,000 Lines’ rising to meet the majesty of its cosmic sentiments; a finger-picked ‘Dried Roses’ finally opening up in London, rather than repeatedly shutting its door in your face. In Brighton, the band turn the thin pastiche of ‘Red Moon’ into a total winner, the song racing past and carrying you with it.

And then there are those new songs. Alongside the ones already mentioned are ‘Horsepower’ – a groove-filled metaphor about fucking, via Top Gear Driving Classics, Vol. 5 – an amiable solo number called ‘Bright Future’, and a pair of instant classics. The sensual, longing ‘Ruined’ is one hell of a choice to kick off your biggest show in four years, while the raw and imploring ‘Free Treasure’ sounds like Springsteen’s more talented sister knocking about in the back yard. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more, I feel a little more,” Lenker sings, her voice breaking. Tell me about it.

Psycho-drama in Hammersmith

If the first Hammersmith show was, to me, the night she sang ‘Free Treasure’ solo (and the night I got to see my band with my best friend for the first time), then the second show felt more like a psycho-drama. In the 22 hours between, Adrianne had met up with her ex, and the band’s return to London had been damned with varying degrees of faint praise by the reviewers of two national papers. The armchair psychologist in me wonders whether that personal experience informed the quietly anguished elements of the show, while the professional brickbats inspired the setlist and the ferocious physicality. ‘Vampire Empire’ ended with Adrianne falling in tandem with the word itself, ending the song sprawled on her back; once up on her feet again, she took quite some time to compose herself for the repetitive, unrepentant, pseudo-cheery toxic ballad, ‘Happy with You’ (Krivchenia’s favourite Big Thief song). Incorporating ‘Masterpiece’ as recorded – rather than the conversational iteration performed the previous two nights – along with the only outings this tour of fan favourites ‘Shark Smile’ and ‘Mary’, this was the band’s version of a hits show, though they remain the only band whose hits show has four unreleased songs in it.

One of those is ‘Vampire Empire’, which – in typically offbeat fashion – Big Thief decided to showcase on prime-time TV, despite the fact it isn’t available to stream or buy. Whether that was 4D chess, agreeable iconoclasm or a mild form of commercial self-sabotage remains to be seen, but it’s looking increasingly like the former. Adopted as a Gen Z anthem, its spiky gender nonconformity (a preoccupation that found its most beautiful expression in Lenker’s 2016 song, ‘Paul’) might just boot them into the next level of rock stardom. Is it selfish to say that I hope not? I love this band, I don’t want to watch them in a large shipping container.

These spaces just feel right. In Cardiff, Lenker adapts her songs not just to her mood but to the acoustic peculiarities of the low-ceilinged Great Hall. After playing to 10,000 people across two nights at Hammersmith, the band could have treated the 800-capacity Chalk Brighton as a comedown; instead they embrace the intimacy.

Fashion rocks

When I wrote about the 2022 tour, I received two tweets that really stuck in my mind. One, from @roryisconfused, said: “I love that since I saw them 3 days ago, the bassist has dyed his hair pink.” Someone else, their name now sadly lost to history, wrote: “Each member looks like they’re in a different band.”

Last year, Lenker manfully continued with the solo to ‘Not’ despite the fact that what appeared to be a wedding dress was coming down around her. This time she has to negotiate the thrashing climax of ‘Contact’ with a green beenie having fallen down over her eyes. This band suffers for their art, but also occasionally for their fashion. In Gateshead, they are wearing: an untucked pink satin shirt and tall hair (Buck, guitar adornments); a silver jump suit and matching sandals (James, drums); a pale pink dress (Max, bass); a cut-off motorbike shop t-shirt, old black jeans and silver tooth (Adrianne).

Each has a stock expression on stage. Krivchenia’s mouth hangs open, as if in a drum-induced trance. Meek endlessly shakes his head, his front leg bent, a slim shoe pointing towards the crowd. Bassist Max Oleartchik greets regular deviations from formula by shrugging contentedly and giving it the big lower lip. And Lenker has three principal modes nowadays: eyes closed peacefully for a solo spot; eyes closed tormentedly for a howling guitar break; hopping from one foot to the other in a hoedown style when she feels the need to lighten up a little.

Her place on stage was always front right, but apparently a bad back has forced her inwards. Ironically, shifting to centre-stage makes her seem less like a solo act with some willing accomplices, and more like one of the band. She also seems younger on this tour, somehow. Maybe it’s the hair: a tomboyish tuft rather than the blonde buzzcut that made her look so otherworldly at Shepherd’s Bush. She was married to Meek, way back in the mists of 2015, and their dynamic remains hugely touching. For his part, he is possibly the most wholesome person on earth. In Edinburgh, he tells a story in his faltering southern twang about how as a child he stayed in a nearby castle where his grandfather – a dealer in antique coins – made the children a treasure hunt in which they had to find doubloons. Alright, Keith Moon.

Sadness as a gift

That gentleness extends to the whole band. Most nights, they spoil the big rock star reveal by shambling onto the stage an hour early to introduce the support act and ask the audience to be quiet and attentive. Lenker says in Hammersmith that it’s the part of the show that makes her most nervous. What I pretentiously took to be a delight in linguistic invention when she did it at EartH, may, instead, just be mere awkwardness.

But the vagueness that can beset that plea, or her chats between songs, vanishes when she sings, or writes, or plays. Her commitment to emotional truth habitually forces her to disrupt the band’s best laid plans by politely interpolating whatever song she suddenly feels like playing (you can think of their printed setlist as an interesting alternate reality). And it informs both the sincerity of her singing and the specificity of her songs. Even if the songs still come from ‘places unknown’.

In ‘Sadness as a Gift’, perhaps the most vivid example of Lenker’s ability to leap repeatedly between the everyday and the eternal, she addresses a lost lover. “You and I both know there is nothing more to say,” she begins, before saying it anyway, if only to herself. The song builds to a remembrance – or an offer? – of profound simplicity, as Lenker croons with a fractured strength: “You could hear the music inside my mind.”

I just feel privileged to live in a time when I can do the same.

***

With thanks to old friends and new on this tour: Paul, Jess, Jamie, Sorrel, Jordan, Chris and Orlando.

Setlists:

My pieces on previous Big Thief tours: 2020, 2022