BFI introduction: Captain Blood (1935)

Here's the transcript of my introduction to Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935), in the Art of Action season, which took place at the BFI Southbank in London on Wednesday 6 November:

"Hi,

I’m going to tell you a bit about the background to Captain Blood, its enduring significance and a few things to look out for while watching it.

There’s a line that the judge in the film speaks early on – “In heaven’s name, be brief, man” – and I’ve taken that to heart. I’ll talk for about nine minutes, and then I’ll let you watch the movie.

Can I just have a show of hands as to who’s seen Captain Blood before…?

It's about a third of you. Well, all of you are going to have a great time, but only about a third of you realise it yet.

Captain Blood is the film that made stars out of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and, with its release in 1935, launched a swashbuckler craze that lasted for five years, before exploding again in the early ‘50s.

Swashbucklers had been a key part of silent cinema: Douglas Fairbanks turned himself from a rom-com lead to an action hero with The Mark of Zorro in 1920 – and there’s a screening of that movie, with its astonishing final reel, at the BFI on Saturday 23rd. Fairbanks then made a string of huge hits in the same mould, including his 1922 Robin Hood, and The Black Pirate. But when he retired from swordfighting with the elegiac The Iron Mask in 1929, the genre went with him.

Swashbucklers were reborn in the sound era with The Count of Monte Cristo, an independent film made in 1934, and Warner Bros – wanting to get in on the action – hired the star of that movie, Robert Donat, to play Captain Blood, in its remake of an old silent.

At that time, Warner were still best known for fast-talking urban pictures aimed at an immigrant audience:

• gangster movies
• backstage musicals
• films about social justice

But America’s tastes were changing, and Hal Wallis, the studio’s new head of production, was particularly drawn to historical epics. Captain Blood’s script was by Casey Robinson, who became the studio’s expert at adapting novels. He kept the basis of the Rafael Sabatini book – about a physician who becomes a slave and later a pirate – but looked to “humanise” the story, in his words, getting inside the central character, and introducing a theme of man’s injustice to man. And in case that wouldn’t bring in the crowds, he also built up the love story, and introduced a couple of quack doctors for comic relief.

The studio put aside a million dollars for the film – the most they had spent on a picture since the debacle of Noah’s Ark in 1928, a movie that had lost Warner $2m, as well as drowning three extras. Incredibly, they hired the same director, Michael Curtiz, who after that disaster had been relegated to making programmers. While waiting for production to begin, he directed an entry in Warner’s mediocre Perry Mason series, called The Case of the Curious Bride. And, in that film, playing the part of a corpse, later seen in flashback being murdered, while speaking no lines of dialogue, was a 25-year-old Australian bit-part actor called Errol Flynn, making his Hollywood debut. Remember his name, because he’s coming back in a minute.

In the meantime, Warner were having serious problems casting Captain Blood. Robert Donat had dropped out, and the studio’s attempts to replace him with box-office names like Leslie Howard, Fredric March or Clark Gable all failed.

Head producer Hal Wallis had taken to screen-testing everyone in sight. An acerbic memo from studio chief Jack Warner to Wallis on the 16th of April 1935 read: “I noticed that there are 24 reels of tests for Captain Blood accumulated up here in the projection room. I would suggest that instead of you going to Palm Springs for the next weekend that you stay here and run [them].”

Eight weeks later, though, they were still testing. On the 11th of June, Wallis ordered tests of the abysmal George Brent and – fatefully – one Errol Flynn, who had previously read for the part of one of Blood’s crew. Jack Warner compared Flynn’s new test to seeing “a meteor stab the sky, or a bomb explode, or a fire sweep across a dry hillside”. Wallis said Flynn “leapt from the screen into the projection room with the impact of a bullet.”

Flynn got the gig. But being thrown into a starring role in Warner’s most expensive sound-era movie wasn’t, if you’ll excuse the pun, plain sailing. We have Wallis’s memos from during production, which make this clear. On 9 September, a month into filming, he wrote to Curtiz about Flynn: “The fellow looks like he is scared to death every time he goes into a scene. I don’t know what the hell is the matter.” The good news, though: once he was into a scene, “he plays it charmingly”.

“I worked as hard as I knew how,” Flynn remembered, though he was called onto the carpet once, after becoming drunk, waving his sword about “like a Cossack”, shouting lines that weren’t in the script, and proceeding to almost fall off the boat. For once, though, he may have been blameless. The star claimed that the crew had fed him brandy after he collapsed due to a recurrence of malaria – and, astonishingly, historians believe that he may have been telling the truth.

Flynn was acting opposite the 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who had also signed with Warner the previous year, abandoning her original dream of becoming a schoolteacher. She first met Flynn at their costume test. Her reaction: “Oh my! Oh my! Struck dumb. I knew it was what the French call a coup de foudre.”

Love at first sight. A lightning bolt.

“He is the handsomest, most charming, most magnetic, most virile young man in the entire world,” she elaborated.

But as well as being the most virile young man in the entire world, Flynn was also married, to French actor Lili Damita. While his professional partnership with de Havilland would endure for eight movies across six years, and although they had fallen in love, their relationship would never be consummated.

Production on Captain Blood took around 11 weeks. Wallis later called Curtiz, “my favourite director, then and always”, but, during filming, his barrage of complaints, in memo form, was incessant:

• there were too many candlesticks and bowls of fruit in the foreground of shots
• there were too few people in the hold of the slave ship
• the movement of the camera to simulate a rocking boat made him dizzy
• Curtiz kept filming shirtless older pirates with hairy potbellies

The film’s composer was secured at the 11th hour: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who had done A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the film in which de Havilland had made her debut. He wrote his extraordinary score for Captain Blood in three weeks, despite only being able to work on it at night. You’ll notice in the credits that his reads, “Musical arrangements by”, even though 98 per cent of the score is original. He’d insisted on that wording, after lifting a short extract from a piece by Liszt for the duel between Flynn and Basil Rathbone – the film’s action highlight.

Keep an eye out too, in the credits, for the name of co-cinematographer Hal Mohr: he’s a good pub-quiz answer, as the only person to ever win an Oscar without being nominated, having received a deluge of write-in votes for his work on, again, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Captain Blood came out in Christmas week, 1935, grossing almost $3m and being nominated for five Oscars, including Picture and Score. It made stars of Flynn and de Havilland, and created a new template for swashbucklers, inspiring

• MGM’s The Prisoner of Zenda
• countless imitations at Fox, including The Mark of Zorro
• and Warner’s own 1940 film, The Sea Hawk

After Captain Blood, Flynn and de Havilland were regularly reteamed. Reflecting decades later, she said: “Errol was a strange mixture. A great athlete of immense charm and evident physical beauty, he stood, legs apart, arms folded defiantly and crowing lustily atop the Hollywood dung heap, but he treated women like toys to be discarded without warning … He was not a kind man, but in those careless days he was fun to be with.”

Though his marriage had been one obstacle to their getting together, there were others: Flynn tended to express his affection through the medium of distressing pranks – putting a dead snake in de Havilland’s underpants during the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade – and, certainly, the two looked at the world in different ways.

During rehearsals for Captain Blood, they had found themselves alone on a soundstage. De Havilland recalled: “He sat down and he said to me, ‘What do you want out of life?’ And so I said, ‘Well I want respect for difficult work well done.’ And then I said to him, ‘What do you want out of life?’ And he said, ‘I want success.’ And by that he meant fame and riches, and I thought, ‘That’s not enough.’”

Flynn’s fixation on material treasures is echoed in a key scene in the film, and the real-life dissipation that would prove his downfall is foreshadowed by de Havilland’s line in Captain Blood that the hero has “destroyed himself”. While she would go on to become one of the most respected and powerful actors in Hollywood, he would be dead at 50, something between a legend, a self-parody and a cautionary tale. Flynn called Captain Blood the film that “started me on that road which has so often made the public acquainted with my wicked ways”.

Viewed today – starting in about one minute’s time, in fact – Captain Blood remains rousing entertainment. Flynn is so dashing and commanding in the lead, and Curtiz’s direction is consistently striking, with that roaming camera, his vivid use of shadow, and the artful compositions that drove Wallis up the wall.

And while the film’s excessive sadism panicked supervisor Robert Lord, who worried that women and children would be warned to stay away, the movie also has three unequivocally beautiful scenes, all of which I hope have made the cut in this re-edit:

• the “sail on, little ship” sequence, which even Wallis admired
• the would-be mutiny
• and a glorious moment of romantic revelation, invented by screenwriter Casey Robinson

It has, in addition, more derring-do than you can shake a cutlass at.

So sit back and enjoy the star-making turns of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in… Captain Blood."

What a dream that was: Adrianne Lenker on tour

Black Box, Galway, Ireland – 19 April 2024
St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, Ireland – 20 April 2024
Vicar Street, Dublin, Ireland – 21 April 2024
The Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, Scotland – 24 April 2024
The Hall @ Aviva Studios, Manchester, England – 25 April 2024
Barbican Centre, London, England – 27, 28 (matinee) and 28 (evening) April 2024
Bristol Beacon, England – 29 April 2024

She is a label PR's darkest nightmare, and we love her for it.

Four shows into Adrianne Lenker's 'Bright Future tour', promoting the biggest album of her career so far, our generation's greatest songwriter has got around to performing fewer than half the tracks on the record. In that time, she has played 30 other things instead, including a cover of a Chris Smither blues number, most of her previous album, and 'Oldest', which was cut from Bright Future, but which she appears to prefer to many of the songs on it. The opening, solo, portion of her climactic concert at the Barbican, arguably the most important date of her career so far, will consist, in its entirety, of the following: two tracks from 2014, one of which she has relearnt while on tour, and four unreleased songs, including a reworking of 'Evol' so new that it doesn't appear to have a name. "If love is simple, can you please explain this?", it begins. I can't explain much of this at all, if I'm honest, but I'll try.

A précis for the until-now-uninitiated: Lenker is a 32-year-old¹ singer-songwriter from Indianapolis, via Minneapolis, Boston and Brooklyn, who for close to a decade has carried on a dual existence as a solo artist – playing what we can broadly term ‘alt. folk’ – and as the frontwoman and major creative force behind Big Thief, a band of Berklee music graduates whose approach to genre is largely summarised by the phrase “go on then”, and whose most recent shows have oscillated thrillingly between country and metal. While Lenker doesn’t do any Pantera covers on this latest tour, the country influence on her solo material is becoming ever more apparent: during an afternoon off, she pitches up at an open-mic in a Dublin pub and performs ‘I Don't Love You Much Do I’ by Guy Clark, off the cuff; her new record has both a yearning fiddle and a cover photo of her in a cowboy hat. (The hat makes it onto the tour: she premieres it in Glasgow, never takes it off on the Sunday in London.) That she is wrangling with this supposedly reactionary genre while exploring the tender intricacies of queer experience does seem more interesting than whatever Beyonce is trying to do over there.

'Someday I'm gon' be a steamboat, baby'

Though Lenker played one date at EartH in London two years ago, she hadn’t toured solo in the UK since 2019. Back then, she seemed paralysingly shy and uncomfortably exposed – hiding behind a thatched fringe in front of the Union Chapel's organ – though that impression would evaporate every time she started to play. When she returned, to EartH, it was off the back of four sold-out nights with Big Thief at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and with her bleached buzz cut and swish jacket, she seemed to have segued into a rock star. Then she picked up her guitar, and began to cycle through songs, and it was like you’d dropped in on a mutual mate, only to find a genius in their front room.

That’s the feeling you get again in Dublin on this tour: that night is an extraordinarily intimate experience, Adrianne in cowboy boots on a fittingly carpeted stage, tossing off definitive versions as easily as falling off a log. But almost every show is special in its own way. The only exception is Galway, unspecial in its own way, with the crowd breaking various cardinal rules of gig-going, and seeming half-set on breaking the artist with it.² After the show, I considered with a chill whether our musical hero might be passing into the realm of Mitski or Phoebe Bridgers, turned into a living meme by the most irritating people on earth, but no: it turns out that’s just Galway…

Because Kilkenny, the next night, is an incalculably special evening: Adrianne on a black platform within a startlingly beautiful 13th-century cathedral; fuchsia lights; the audience seated and hushed in reverence. “You’re so quiet and respectful,” she says at one point, and you think she’s referring bleakly – obliquely – to the previous rowdiness, but then you see how much fun she has in Dublin, and wonder if she just meant we’d been a little quiet. The atmosphere at those two shows fits each venue perfectly, though – and fits each set. They're the two stand-out dates of the tour. The St Canice concert ends with Lenker singing ‘Real House’, a song about her mum, with tears running down her face.

'I'm happy with you – why do I need to explain myself?'

She’s at her most transparently happy in Ireland’s capital (at ease before an audience who offer a saintly spin on Galway, their backing vocals swelling, apposite and perfectly-timed), save perhaps for the second night at the Barbican, when the joy of collaboration is followed by the scale of the send-off. Every seated show ends with the audience on its feet, but that clamour in London hits another level. Between those shows, Glasgow is an over-amplified but good-natured gig in the Dublin vein: an art student called Amy is sketching Adrianne on the front row, someone has brought a monkey on a stick, a requester shouts “my angel!”, followed a few seconds later by the clarification, “…the song”, while Manchester is St Canice’s revisited, just with a touch more singing and a lot less stained glass. The swansong of this leg of the ‘Bright Future’ tour, in Bristol, features a cheery but less obviously obsessive crowd, mildly befuddled by the deep-cutting of the mammoth setlist (the number of unreleased songs tie with those off the new album, 4-4; in an early fit of whimsy, Lenker plays her two John Prine-iest songs, ‘Cactus Practice’ and ‘Once a Bunch’³ back to back).

By then, you feel like you’ve got to know her a little, not simply as an artist, but as a person. In Kilkenny, Lenker talks openly about her nerves, saying she’s just taken the longest break from touring of her life – which turns out to be just eight months – but she otherwise gives the impression of being quite uncannily relaxed. Now at ease in a way she never quite was before, she begins to open up…

'Please, cut my hair'

While the psychodrama of Adrianne's ever-changing hairstyle is a compelling subplot of any tour (the tousled 2014 shoulder-bob is back, baybee), here we get backstory. In Manchester, she punctures the delicate illusion of between-songs badinage by quipping, “It's good to be in Manchester, I always love coming through… I’m trying to small talk with you while I tune, so it's smooth.” But it's also true, she says: she used to use her friend Bernie's house here as a base, and it was in Manchester that a 24-year-old Lenker first lopped off her hair (me too – we have so much in common, we should hang out some time?). She shares one of her favourite semi-jokes – someone replying to “I’ve had a haircut” with “Which one?” – exhibiting the delight in wordplay and the guileless goofiness as crucial to the Lenker persona as her pained earnestness, before grinningly challenging the audience to identify various baffling chords. When she loses her thread during 'Sadness As a Gift, she spends five minutes telling us about her day (radio session, nap, dilemma over how quickly to eat chicken soup).

It is in Manchester too, and most memorably of all, that the ever-changing ‘Vampire Empire’ is welded to a snatch of Lucinda Williams’ ‘Like a Rose’. Lenker’s song, premiered on Colbert, exploding on TikTok, was essentially a recruiting tool that hoovered up young lesbians, but the first recording of the track (by Big Thief while on tour last year) was savaged online by entitled pricks. Perhaps as a result (though hopefully not), Adrianne re-recorded it for Bright Future, and she plays it six different ways during this tour, from a ‘Spud Infinity’-style⁴ parade of silliness in Dublin ("OK, freestyle solo,” she tells the audience near the end, "everyone do something different") to a blisteringly-paced honkytonk in Bristol. The great version, though, is Manchester’s, the medley rounding out the song, bringing together the various Lenker identities by spotlighting her open-hearted, open-armed sincerity. In London, she does something striking if less transcendent, adding an extra chorus, her voice plummeting through the octaves in tandem with the word ‘falling’, a vocal risk that replaces the physical jeopardy of last year’s performance in Hammersmith, during which she tipped over backwards, and dropped, laughing, to the floor.

In London, too, she tells us she could never be a stand-up comedian because she laughs at all her own jokes, and indeed she spends a lot of these shows laughing, the fragile music interspersed with sips of water, lengthy retuning and those dorky, squeaky giggles. Conspicuously, she doesn’t go near the two truly desolate songs on her recent heartbreak/heart-reclaiming record: ‘Evol’ and ‘Ruined’. She played one verse of ‘Evol’ as an encore back in March, and whether that was always the whole plan, she never went further: just sat stone still and silent, said brightly, “That’s all”, and went home.

'I see God here and there'

Instead, she plays a joyous ‘Born for Loving You’, which is introduced with a disarming simplicity: “Here’s a song I wrote for my girlfriend, it’s nice to sing it in a church.” When I interviewed Lenker’s Big Thief co-conspirator and ex-husband, Buck Meek, last year, he said that the one thing he admired about Lenker more than any other was her honesty. At greater ease between songs, that has manifested itself in her being utterly candid; with her latest writing, it has resulted in a startling new literalism. If you think ‘Real House’ is brutishly direct, wait until you hear ‘Before You’ (which is what we’re calling her as-yet-unnamed song, premiered in Galway). Here’s how she describes that marriage and its aftermath, her life folded into a standard folk-country frame:

New York City
‘fell in love with a man
He asked me to marry
and I gave him my hand

So simple
I’ve lived a whole life through
But I don’t remember nothin’
Before you

I ended my marriage
‘went back home
I needed to scatter
Those ashes alone

'A convulsion of honesty brought me to life'

“You know, honesty can be brutal,” Meek said to me, “but it’s always the right way.” ‘Before You’ is like In My Life if Lennon’s song had zoned in on the detail, before breaking both your heart and your legs. Seeing Lenker in love is quite something, though: ‘Born for Loving You’ (which I’ve written about here) is one of the great modern love songs, while ‘Baby, Honey, Sweetheart, Darlin'’, played for the second time ever at the first Barbican show, evokes McCartney’s ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, fitting Lenker’s crooked-hanging sentimentality into an ingenious pop-folk template. There is no feeling in modern music even remotely akin to the exhilaration of hearing Lenker unspool some new masterpiece for the first time, each line that she drops into the air somehow better than the one before. We felt it with the instantly immortal ‘Wait a While’ in Bristol in 2020, and with ‘Already Lost’ in Edinburgh last year. We’ve felt it more often than any audience would have any right to expect. Here, shaking her head, hair flicking, one eye on her left hand, she sings:

Honey
Whatcha smilin’ at, what’s funny?
Is it how I am with money?
Now my nose is gettin’ runny
You hold me when I cry
And make it sunny

When people smugly traduce pop lyrics committed to paper, what they miss are the intricacies: here, with Adrianne, it’s the effortless evocation of the fondness of her relationship, the specificity of her imperfection, the intentional lapse into quirky bathos, immediately spun on its head by the revelation of sorrow, and then the sun blasting through like in a ‘60s soul record. It is, too, the imploring quality of her voice, so affectionate and assured: comfortable in love. After she plays ‘I Don’t Love You Much Do I’ in a pub (and how I wish I’d been in The Cobblestone for those three minutes), she shares Guy Clark’s original on Instagram, together with a photo taken by her girlfriend.

'Men are baptized in their anger and fighting'

That song is one of many she’s been voraciously learning during an extended period of musical autodidacticism. In Kilkenny, after covering ‘Leave the Light On’ by Chris Smither, she says guilelessly: “I didn’t grow up learning songs, I just learned guitar by writing songs. So learning other people’s songs is this new thing I’m really into: it’s amazing. There are so many good songs in the world!” The Smither number showcases her extraordinary guitar-playing⁵ and is, as my friend Peter observed, closer to her own style of writing than anything else she’s ever covered, both cosmic and intimate in the vein of ‘Spud Infinity’. She plays slide guitar too on her own ‘half return’, a throwaway, faintly Gothic ditty enlivened by that flitting finger. At other times she is the consummate country artist, a cowgirl picking, Travis-style, with a hint of a swagger. A music writer once said of cult folkie Nic Jones that he had an orchestra in his right hand. Well, that’s Lenker too.

The only thing she struggles with is telling people off – or telling them to sing (well, that and the fact that she can’t quite whistle). In Dublin, she gently quietens the hum of chatter by saying, “You guys are missing the tuning… it’s the best part,” before pointedly adding, “‘kind of serious, though… it does help to hear when you’re tuning.” In Manchester, she tells the crowd that it’s “a rare treat to hear you sing”, before an encouraging, “Alright, last chance to sing, guys” as she embarks on the final stretch of her signature solo song, ‘anything’. During the matinee in London, when the phrase, “If anyone happens to know any words on any of these songs, you are invited to sing along... formally” fails to elicit the desired response, she ‘forgets’ the words to the song’s second verse, prompting the first communal crooning of the afternoon. The crowd in Glasgow is so good-humoured that she's able to risk one of her drier jokes, mock-apologetically responding to audience requests at the start of the encore by smiling a touch, and saying, “We have such a specific plan. I like these songs, so…” It's clear that Lenker is unusually – indeed, universally – beloved by her collaborators and crew, but it's also true that you don't scale the heights she has without being able to occasionally flash the steel on behalf of your art.

'Places you have been that I needed'

That’s the only night where she plays ‘Already Lost’, one of 17 numbers that receive just a single airing across these nine shows. In total, she plays 50 different songs. Two are covers. The other 48 are her own, and they break down something like this: great (42), good (six). Given that she doesn’t dip into most of the heavier Big Thief material (there’s no acoustic rendering on this tour of ‘Not’ or ‘Masterpiece’ or ‘Real Love’ or ‘Black Diamonds’ or 'Contact' or 'Flower of Blood', or even songs she's played solo at Big Thief shows, like 'Change', though she does do the gentler version of ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain’), it’s an astonishing testament to her micro-consistency, prolificity and, yes, now you happen to mention it, genius.

The finest of the one-shot wonders is a desperately affecting version of the 2019 Big Thief title track, ‘Two Hands’, at the first Barbican show. “You somehow let me down,” she softly wails, the enduring ambiguity of that opening shooting a chill down the spine, the song breaking you and then putting you back together again, as most of her greatest ones do, from “the more that we try … to deny, deny…” to a wild recalibration of how we might see hand-kissing, and finally the guileless reassurance of, “New friends: you can make some too/I know.” In Dublin, there’s a stunning, slowed-down ‘Cattails’. It’s been more commonly a lolloping, propulsive 12-string stomper, but suddenly now it’s a slip of a song, distinct from the mumblecore of ‘half return’ or ‘heavy focus’, instead delicate and bucolic: the perennials don’t dance anymore, they sway. There's also ‘Jonathan’ (from her 2014 EP, a-sides, in Galway), ‘From’ (in Bristol), and Bright Future highlight, ‘Donut Seam’ (the last night at the Barbican). In terms of Lenker’s lyric-writing, it was the combination of the formative ‘Indiana’ (“…the talk that is told through the teeth of the mouth of the millions dyin’ to meet ya”) and ‘Mary’ (“your hands were making artefacts in the corner of my mind”) that first made me sit up and then slump back down again in amazement, and ‘Donut Seam’, from its pun title to its moth-Icarus motif, via climate dread and the confessional, is that talent seen a decade on. “Oh my heart has holes in it/And there you were exposing it” is the kind of rhyme that other artists spend a lifetime trying to find. ‘Candleflame’, meanwhile, is the current record’s secret weapon, and yet she doesn’t deploy it till the matinee in London. “I feel God here and there,” she murmurs, “people tell me he’s everywhere.” Well, he was definitely in the room during that song, so let's hope he doesn’t feel slighted. Hilariously, Adrianne also gives an airing to 'Bright Future', a song that gave its name to the album... but isn't on the album. And if it seems perverse that she repeatedly prioritises ‘No Machine’ over a song as remarkable as ‘Cell Phone Says’, the former does come to life in person. So does the woozy shoegaze of ‘heavy focus’, with its punchline of blissful release. So does ‘The Only Place’, its guitar part suddenly pulsating with purpose. I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it unto death – if you haven’t heard Lenker live, then you haven’t heard her at all.

'Wednesday in August, I was playing with my band'

Other new songs return time and again. ‘Sadness As a Gift’ might be the single best thing that Lenker has ever written, though like another masterwork, ‘Already Lost’, it works better as a solo number. The album versions may be lovely, but they’re not the equal of this ‘Sadness As a Gift’ or this ‘Already Lost’. What Adrianne does retain in the collaborative version of 'Sadness', though, even when it becomes a sing-along, is the stripped-back beauty of its seventh stanza. Her voice has never sounded lovelier, or more ethereal – strident then soft – than when it lands on “every second brimming with a majesty”, a time when time always stands still, and you are left immersed in that moment, wishing it wouldn’t ever pass.

My private theory has always been that the best version of any Adrianne Lenker song is done by her alone, as slowly as possible. However, the fleet-footed take on ‘Free Treasure’ that reaches its apogee in London – gorgeous three-part harmonies and an aching, climbing violin – makes me wonder if my take is watertight. She starts every show solo, but in Glasgow and Manchester is joined by the bear-like pianist (and support act) Nick Hakim, the developing threesome of ‘Bright Future’ alumni rounded out for the final four dates by be-fringed Swedish violinist Josefin Runsteen, whom Lenker met on a musical retreat in Italy.

I wrote after the 2022 shows that, like Dylan, Lenker’s songs are always in flux, and there are innumerable innovations on this tour. ‘Orange’ now has a gorgeous, a capella final verse, and, in Bristol, a busier picking style; ‘Simulation Swarm’ comes with a new staccato solo coda; and at the end of ‘symbol’, a hypnotic track from 2018’s abysskiss, Lenker dispenses a melodic, enormously satisfying ticking into her mic, her mouth sounding like a combination synth and Geiger counter. After a heartstopping version of ‘Born for Loving You’ at Hammersmith last year, she asked fans on Instagram if they could share their audio of the performance, so she could study how she’d done it; now she always sings it that way, save for an added country inflection in the chorus.

'I wanted so much for magic to be real'

‘Pretty Things’, meanwhile, the delicate opener from Big Thief’s Captivity (2017), has become a subtle sort of a monster, building to that devastating sting in its tail, and mounting in menace throughout the tour. ‘anything’, too, is a song that changes across eight shows, the frenzied intensity of the chorus in Galway junked in favour of a tenderness that escalates from each rendition to the next: in Glasgow and London, the people are around me in tears, though there’s a lighting-in-a-bottle feel to this version in Manchester, Lenker seguing straight from ‘Real House’ into a dazed and sibilant ecstasy.

If some people left the London matinee disappointed not to hear ‘anything’, and departed Bristol trying to work out what on earth they’d just heard, usually Lenker’s sweet eccentricity and her audience’s deepest desires collide. In Dublin, she gets off so much on the audience’s backing vocals that she throws an extra chorus into ‘not a lot just forever’. In Manchester, she takes things far further. After a moving piano-and-voice take on ‘zombie girl’, her guitar largely silent in her lap, Hakim on the keys, Lenker murmurs: “I just want to sing that one over and over: that one feels good.” Someone in the audience shouts out: “Play it again!” And so she does, the whole thing, just slower. In Bristol, when Runsteen nips off stage for a sneezing fit, Lenker picks up a guitar and plays ‘ingydar’ off the cuff. Her tours are full of such small, semi-improvised miracles.

Other songs are excavated from her past. The first time she plays ‘Steamboat’, a decade-old highlight from her first album proper, she's yet to relearn its intro (a fact she realises while on stage in Kilkenny), but it's slotted back into the song in time for London. In Galway, someone in the crowd asks atypically sweetly for a deep cut – 2014’s ‘Angels’, with that insane guitar part – and Lenker says she can’t remember how to play it anymore, but is the audience member going to any later shows? "Yes, Chicago." It's all agreed: Adrianne writes that in her songbook⁶. A week later, she plays the song at two Barbican shows, her fingers flying over the fretboard. Just magic.

And then there are her standards, like 'not a lot just forever' (from 2020's modestly-titled, songs), which trades in Lenker-ish imagery (a dog, a wolf, a rock, a sweater) before trading that imagery in for a vulnerability that remains truly rare and daring, her vocal imploring and her heart wide open, stealing your breath as you stand:

And your dearest fantasy
Is to grow a baby in me
I could be a good mother
And I wanna be your wife

'Both arms cradle you now'

Though her usual dexterity with words fails her between songs in Galway – language an amorphous thing crumbling amid discomfort – her sense of playfulness quickly returns. In Glasgow, she trails ‘forwards beckon rebound’ with the Wodehouse-ish words, “This has always been one of my favourite songs to play, since I wrote it”, before revelling in the dual meaning of ‘since’, and setting the date of composition as “December 34th”. In London, when she invites the audience to sing, she does so first “formally” and then “casually” and in a handful of other ways, rifling through synonyms and variations. The most enjoyable linguistic experimentation, though, is in ‘Free Treasure’, her ode to unconditional love, in which she toys endlessly with the behaviour of “the guy at the nape of my neck who hangs out there all day”: sometimes on this tour, he tells her not to play, sometimes what to play, and, finally, in Bristol, not, what and how to play, these night-to-night changes subtly tinkering with the feel of the verse.

On that final night, she forgets a stanza of ‘Once a Bunch’ (“I might just have to skip to the best verse at the end”); in Dublin, she had aborted the opener, ‘two reverse’, before coming back to it later, because her energy had been too “up”. Her shows are like an art piece about the preparation and performance of a gig, in which the frequent retuning is part of the experience, turning the songs into a suite. And if she fluffs a line – or decides to change the key, or to interrupt with a brief anecdote⁷ – she doesn't restart the number, she just picks back up from where she was. That charming and scuzzy scrappiness throws her shimmering talent into thrilling relief – and makes it all seem even less explicable. In crudest terms: you see how the sausage is made, and you still haven't got a fucking clue.

I began the 2020 Big Thief tour piece by rather pretentiously suggesting that “every time you see Adrianne Lenker, she’s three different people”. Certainly there are several different Adriannes crammed into the one woman⁸: the millennial goof; the cosmic balladeer; the unshakably confident Travis-picking, throwback king of country; and the untrammeled soul who writes and sings those pained songs of unwanted experience, searching through the rubble for the glint of solace.

***

NOTES

¹In her song, ‘Simulation Swarm’, which is primarily about the brother she has never met, the 31-year-old Lenker describes herself as being “on the 31st floor of the simulation swarm”, if you wanted a cool way to refer to your age.
²It isn’t just the constant yelling of requests, but the tuneless chanting of the lyrics over her vocals, which smacks less of devotion than narcissism. "Such beautiful... singing," Adrianne says politely at one point, before immediately playing something (the new song, 'Before You') with which they can't join in. After she well-meaningly but unwisely refers to Galway as being “in the UK”, the crowd makes a distinctly ugly warning noise, and while Lenker clearly doesn’t quite grasp the nature of the gaffe, she refers endlessly back to her mistake in a kind of wounded panic, ruminating nervously and contradictorily on the pointlessness of borders and yet the importance of cultural pride. Some of the worst people on the internet had already taken to hectoring her online for being too pro-Israeli (Big Thief’s bassist is Israeli) or too pro-Palestinian (Lenker recently recorded a fundraising mini-album for Palestinian refugees), and in Galway, she is, for want of a better word (perhaps because this one is about right), bullied into addressing the conflict in Gaza by a between-songs cry of ‘Free Palestine!’ She immediately segues into a discussion of the charity record, to establish her bona fides, before, having not made a setlist, launching into a song off the mini-album, ‘fangs lungs ankles’. The earlier – standing – shows also feature an uncanny number of audience members halting the show by fainting, especially when caught in the secondary glow of the blazing blue stage lights. In Glasgow, this means we never do get the end of a Lenker story about her purchasing of a small antique chair.
³When Lenker was a child, she thought the words ‘Once upon a time…’ were ‘Once a buncha times’, which is how the song begins.
⁴‘Spud Infinity’ typically closes Big Thief shows and has become a cosmic country hoedown featuring improvised solos, including one by Adrianne’s brother Noah, on a jaw harp. He joins Adrianne on stage for an acoustic version at the Barbican’s matinee show, as well as shooting footage for a mini-documentary, which will focus mostly on the backstage experience of putting on a tour, with some bits of audience interaction and a few song clips.
⁵The best version is in Galway, but a decidedly more stop-start rendering, from Kilkenny, is up here. Apparently, the problems arose from the fact that Smither has, and here I defer to Lenker, “big hands”. After the performance breaks down, she says she’s going to play the song every night, and by the end it will be note-perfect. She plays it twice more. Both times it is.
⁶This is perhaps an innovation borrowed from one of her heroes, the folk songwriter, Tucker Zimmerman. There was one incredibly moving moment at Shepherd’s Bush in 2022, when the octogenarian Zimmerman, opening for Big Thief in front of 2,000 people, forgot to bring his cherished songbook out with him, and Lenker, who had walked him onto the stage, scooted off to fetch it.
⁷This sample from midway through the first chorus of ‘Steamboat’ at Kilkenny Cathedral: “I just realised I wrote this when I was 21, before I had ever gone overseas at all, or gone anywhere.” The post-song verdict: “Yeah, I still feel it. I still feel that sometimes.”
⁸You can even get a sense of this from her stage outfits, which sometimes inform the tenor of a show. The first night, she is sporting a green beanie, from which one of her ears obstinately peeks out. The next evening, in the cathedral, Lenker is a vision in white, resembling nothing so much as a heavenly painter-decorator, her hair tied back, and wearing make-up for the only time on the tour. In Dublin, she's the boy-next-door, in blue jeans and a tattered old motorcycle-shop sweater, but the next time we see her, she has gone Nashville, dressed in a plaid lumberjack shirt, a stetson and work boots. For London, she often seems to make a special effort (one of her few concessions to commercialism, along with exaggerating her mannerisms for show photographers, and thanking her manager from the stage), and though she's dressed for the opening night there in black jeans and boots, she's also wearing a see-through top, under a bralette embroidered with large red roses. She rolls up her sleeve, anyway, ready for action. "Gotta free the arm" for fingerpicking, she explains in Bristol, dressed down once more.

SUPPORT:

Queer Irish singer-songwriter Ellie O’Neill opens the first three dates, her voice racing around the octaves. She’s great, with killer melodies, and lyrics that slip between memoir and abstraction on standouts like ‘Song for Peter’ and ‘Anna with the Silver Arrow’. Nick Hakim, who’s known Adrianne since they were 17, and has often played on the same bill, is the support for the other six shows, singing slow, introspective indie ballads at the piano, including a touching cover of Chocolate Genius Incorporated's 'My Mom'.

SETLISTS:

Thanks to Peter, Fran, Paul, Sorrel, Jamie, Jordan and Jess for their company and friendship on the tour. And thanks to you for reading.

The abiding mental image from this tour is of Adrianne frowning with a kind of emotional concentration, head tilted to one side, eyes closed and lips pouting, words flowing out of the right side of her mouth.

Words and pictures by Rick Burin. Photos, in order, are: 'Real House' in Dublin; London (final night); 'Real House' in Kilkenny; Dublin; the main window at St Canice's, Kilkenny; Adrianne and Nick Hakim in Glasgow; Dublin; Glasgow; Adrianne and Josefin Runsteen at the Barbican (final night); Manchester; Galway; Ellie O'Neill in Dublin; Galway; Dublin (below).

Meditation in an emergency: Susanne Sundfør’s church shows

Tonsberg Domkirke, and Bragernes Kirke, Drammen, 23-24 March 2024

The conversational, or tabloid, or trivial version of the story is this: Susanne Sundfør is cool, and weird, and crucially a contrarian, the kind of contrarian who will invite fans to two intimate churches – and watch those fans scurry over from their remote outposts across the world, since she no longer plays outside Norway – and then spend the entire gig performing behind them; they in pews facing the altar, and she standing in the organ loft, emoting to their backs.

The longer and more honest version is that the Norwegian singer-songwriter is a restless and questing thinker – her Instagram stories an unstinting succession of photographs of paragraphs from dense and provocative non-fiction books – as well as an unapologetic gambler, a unique creative artist whose vision transcends expectations, outstrips her contemporaries, but carries her audience with her. She jumps, and the parachute opens. We’ve seen her do it so many times before.

‘Meditation in an Emergency’ (2012) was one of Sundfør’s most soothing instrumental works, and here, whatever the emergency – climate, though she says there’s much that can be done; cultural, though she treads a vertiginous path between its traps; social, which is what she stresses here, with the simple need to ‘be present’ – the escape route is the same.

“This concert is unusual, perhaps a little dogmatic,” she shrugs in her spoken introduction (in Norwegian the first night, in English the second). And so it is: a suite of six songs, dating from 2012 to present, re-arranged for organ and voice, and lasting an hour in total. Both musicians are unseen, the audience intended instead to meditate on the space and the sound that swells to fill it. Tonsberg Cathedral (accessible only be rail-replacement bus this weekend) is a small, beautiful, unpretentious church that seats around 250; Bragernes Kirke in Drammen can house a further 200, and comes with a more immersive AV experience, the lights dimmed, then cycling through the spectrum.

The results of all this are astounding: atavistic, exalting, eternal.

The first thing to say is simply that Sundfør has the single most beautiful voice I have ever heard – beyond Sandy, or Ferrier, or Sam Cooke, or Roy Orbison – and that to be in its presence, in its prime, feels like the most absurd privilege. More than that, though: she has an artistic restlessness exemplified by the way that, like Sandy, she sings every song differently every time, teasing out new intricacies, paraphrasing or ornamenting melodies, toying with meaning like a great Hamlet. On the first night, ‘Can You Feel the Thunder’, played for the first time in years, leaves you breathless and broken, its simple tale of a matador soaring in Tonsberg as it never did on record. The following evening, she tries something different with the song, injecting a panicked urgency, and the magic is partially lost, or else transferred to ‘When’ (also from The Silicone Veil (2012)), which climbs out of the setlist, having reached a skeletal and stripped-back perfection. “You take what you can,” she says, falling onto a blue note that was never there before. From now until the end of the time, that performance will lie among my favourite memories.

In Tonsberg, I was sat next to two men who’d come from Poland and Slovakia especially for the show. “We’re Susanne superfans,” one said proudly, the most relatable thing anyone’s said to me in quite some time. He responded to music in the same way I do, which augmented the experience. Whenever Sundfør tossed off some moment of instinctive vocal witchcraft, he chuckled to himself and shook his head in wonderment, which is exactly how I feel. My head is in almost perpetual motion throughout these shows: amused by the inspiration, embracing the sorrow, then the catharsis. My neighbour also occasionally, whisperingly, took the Lord’s name in vain, which is a bit disrespectful in a church, though since God gave Sundfør that voice, I suppose we can let him off.

“I never even knew you were a man of faith, till I heard you whisper it,” Sundfør sang in 'alyosha', the lead single off her last album, and a song about her husband. Previously a mildly outspoken atheist, she has since segued from a (to borrow one of her favourite words) dogmatic belief in science to a more profound search for spirituality and wonder in both music and life – something we chatted about when I interviewed her last year. That search has led her here, and the way her art interacts with faith and God in these shows throws all kinds of interesting new light on the material.

That is most literal, in all ways, when she closes the main set with ‘When the Lord’, a devastating song written for the documentary Self Portrait (the only song, as such, that she released during her near-total hiatus between 2017 and 2023). In Tonsberg, the song stretches her head voice to the limit; in Drammen it’s in a different register, and at a different speed – surely the slowest anyone has sung in a church since the Trinity Sessions. “When the Lord has descended,” she wails, and the light a soft red on the crucified Christ hanging above the altar.

In a Catholic moment, I wrote in last year’s interview piece that those moments when Sundfør rips the top off her voice are “the closest thing in music to glimpsing God”, and the self-deprecating contrarian responsible for such flights of beauty blithely dismissed them as “just screaming”. Here, there was no distance between God and voice at all. I suppose I can summarise my faith by saying that I see the hand of God in things (a sentiment only partially spoiled by Maradona); in these shows, it rests on every moment.

At the close of the first night’s organ-and-voice suite, the audience rises to its feet, and gives her a thunderous ovation (the following night, she characterises this response as people thinking the show was over, and attempting to leave, which is no more than half-true). She sweeps down the aisle, black-and-white dress and re-brunetted hair streaming, organist Kit Downes alongside her, and closes with a single number in front of the altar: the title track of her most recent record, blómi (2023), featuring the most (indeed, only) whimsical organ accompaniment of the evening. She plays just seven songs – When the Lord, plus two each from three of her last four records, Ten Love Songs skipped after its lively supporting role in Bergen – in a performance that runs a little under 70 minutes, and yet it is one of the half-dozen greatest shows I’ve ever heard (‘seen’ doesn’t quite seem appropriate here), and my favourite since the Before Times.

While Sundfør can be evasive off stage, and passionately, dismissively resistant to any external interpretations of her work, what remains most exciting about her art – along with its strangeness, aside from That Voice – is her clandestine sincerity. She wants to do things that are true and different and meaningful and interesting and glorious and special and unusual, dragging her music into places (and spaces) where others fear to tread.

On the first night, you can turn and gawp at her if you have the gall and curiosity and social chutzpah; on the next, she is entirely invisible. That second show is the same but different, in the classic Sundfør style: same concept, same setlist and in the cosmic sense the same result – but play me any song from the soundboard and I’ll tell you which night it’s from.

The surface feeling at these shows is that you’re in the presence of a genius, whose instinctive understanding of music and melody is intellectually exhilarating, but all of that is subservient to something more primeval and important. The experience is – beyond anything else – deeply, deeply moving, emotionally overwhelming, in fact, stirring you somewhere far beneath your critical faculties, music history books or Pitchfork star ratings.

During the first show, Sundfør wavers on ‘Mantra’, compressing the melody into monotony – a playful drone – then stretching it in the oddest places. ‘ashera’s song’ is starkly meditative at first, before it begins to build. When a bloke from Nashville who’s come over for the Drammen show enthuses to me about her voice control, this is what he means: that blast of power, Sundfør’s gift wandering around the octaves, and with anyone else it would feel like showboating, but you get the sense she’s just searching for the truth of the song.

The next night, ‘Mantra’ becomes a hymn, and ‘ashera’s song’ a portal into the artist’s soul, her vulnerability all the more touching because it isn’t glimpsed too often.

The organ plays – a 10-minute improvisation to open, then bridging the gaps between songs – and you remember how key instrumentals are to the Sundfør oeuvre: her wordless concert album, (A Night at Salle Pleyel), the showy, off-kilter solos that pepper Live at the Barbican, the extended diversions in Memorial and The Sound of War (which gets a dazzling airing here, hanging hauntingly on its climactic line, “A red blinking Zion”), and the harpsichord coda she threw onto the end of her floorfilling electro-pop banger, Kamikaze. But for me it’s the voice. Isn’t it always. It weaves in and out, climbing towards the heavens.

And when she sings, nothing else matters.

***

Setlist:

[extended organ intro]
Mantra
ashera's song
Can You Feel the Thunder
When
The Sound of War
When the Lord

ENCORE:
blómi