“It is His office to save us”: Susanne Sundfør at Palmehaven, Trondheim

28 February 2026 (evening)

We are, somewhat incongruously, in a hotel restaurant when Susanne Sundfør makes another dart towards the eternal.

Norwegian pop music’s errant genius has done many confounding – and utterly apposite – things since swerving away from the fame game in 2018: going back to school to study psychology, performing behind her audience during the now near-mythic ‘church shows’ of 2024, and treating Oslo’s sunny Piknik i Parken festival as the ideal setting in which to reintroduce us to the malevolent throbbing of her song, ‘Insects’. But a forthcoming album in which she sets the 14th century religious writings of Julian of Norwich to music is, I think we can safely say, not what many of the other leading figures of the 2010s electro-pop scene are currently working on.

It gives us five minutes of breathtaking beauty at the heart of this show, in the shape of ‘Blessed Wounds’.

For me, hearing – and listening to – Sundfør’s voice is a religious experience. I don’t mean in the evasive secular sense, whereby art and human beauty are meant to replace God. I mean that I find her voice and the idea of God indivisible. I feel God’s hand in her music, glimpse him in the places she goes. Her voice does many things during this show, but ‘Blessed Wounds’, adapted from Revelations of Divine Love, finds her miraculous gift at its clearest and most simply beautiful. “It is His office to save us,” she sings, lifting you way above. Then her voice starts to soar too.

I work in a venue and see quite a lot of shows. Last year I bopped to Annie Lennox, shadow-boxed to Public Enemy, grooved to BANKS. But for me, while the effect of most gigs is pleasant, even rousing, it's also on some level superficial. The two artists who bless me with transcendence, who drag me out of the mire and drop me onto some higher plane, like an eagle nicking a baby in an early silent film, are Susanne Sundfør and Adrianne Lenker. They don’t actually have much in common, aside from an initial acquaintance with the folk milieu, and a quicksilver connection to the vastness of existence. But one has a turn of phrase akin to having the back of your head unscrewed. The other can do things with her voice that make Roy Orbison sound like Damon Albarn.

Today that voice is filling Palmehaven, which is as handsome as a hotel restaurant is ever likely to get. It has a sunken floor with a central fountain, a mock skylight filled with glittering stars, and palms that appear to be getting in some people’s way. For this show, an obligatory three-course meal is provided with every ticket (I was granted an alternative to the reindeer main). I can, with force of will and a favourable wind, zone into an experience and live there, but the bass pulsing through to the venue from the hotel bar next door, and the occasional clatter of crockery being collected, still seems an odd way for the world to interact with incalculable beauty. It’s like if Robert Kennedy’s Aeschylus peroration upon the death of Martin Luther King had been interrupted by someone playing Mambo No. 5 on their phone.

For this show, the final one of a short run of four dine-then-listen concerts, Sundfør is joined by her husband, jazz musician André Roligheten, who will play around her melodies in apparently semi-improvised style, slipping into keys and flights of avant garde fancy that I can enjoy without even beginning to understand them on anything but an emotional level.

Sundfør starts the concert, appropriately enough, with the words, “Holy, holy, holy one”, the opening salvo of ‘ashera’s song’, from 2023, which she wrote for their young daughter. Along with ‘When the Lord’ – the only song proper that Sundfør released during her five-year hiatus from 2018 – it seemed to point to a new spirituality, and the flowering of another side of her artistry, and person. She writes in her hymn to Roligheten (‘alyosha’) that he is “a man of faith”, and of quiet prayers. I wouldn’t presume to know, and actually don’t think it’s important, whether her devotional music is underpinned by specific religious convictions of her own. What’s critical is the questing sincerity that flows through it like a river.

For its part, ‘ashera’s song’ gives a lie to the (awful! Sexist! Kid-phobic! ‘70s-coded! Farcically still expressed today!) idea that parental odes are a baneful chore for the listener. This one is an elusive slip of a song that snakes past, showering you with sparks. Sundfør’s shows always have a narrative built into their setlist and heightened by performance, often travelling (as single songs like ‘Mountaineers’ and ‘Trust Me’ do) from something unresolved in theme and tune to a place of escape. At sit-down, scaled-down, stripped-down shows like this one, she always loves playing ‘Bedtime Story’ from Music for People in Trouble (2017). Synths are for summer festivals. Here the business is to rip away everything, to the point of purity, then complicate what remains with free jazz flourishes. Starting the show at the grand piano, dressed comfortably all in black, her hair back to its natural dusty brown, Sundfør's latest reading of the song hurls its dynamics in wild new directions. Her voice is climbing in a way it never previously has while telling this bedtime story, rendering its tale misleading, and its narrator lofty and cunning. She lollops languidly into a postmodern playfulness on “You know the chord before it’s played”, before signing off in wearily philosophical style. That’s the cue for Roligheten to break into a clarinet solo with shades of the 2018 full-album tour, where such semi-improvised pieces linked the songs, and turned the record into a suite.

That tour was also a memorable showcase for ‘The Sound of War’, which comes next in Trondheim. Sundfør wrote it after watching a BBC documentary on Gaza, and of late has been programming the song relentlessly, and performing it with startling urgency. As in 2018, she accompanies herself solo on guitar, but here the inflections flirt with Flamenco. It is such a formally clever song, especially in this detailed arrangement (necessarily absent the sonic explosions punctuating the full-band version). Her vocal trills oscillate between notes that call to mind the ‘red blinking Zion’ of its climax, yet that later part is built instead around a drone sound – emitted in Palmehaven by her collaborator – unlike the section that deals explicitly with drone warfare. It is a showcase for almost every part and virtue of her voice. She falls onto a blue note on “the snow… falls down”, pins you back with slow-mounting power, then flies into her head voice.

One miraculous thing about Sundfør as an artist is that restless imagination and invention: that sheer reluctance to ever sing a line the same way twice (something she has in common with the great jazz and soul vocalists, and in the folk world with Sandy Denny). That comes to mind especially in the case of ‘Can You Feel the Thunder’ (always just ‘Thunder’, on her printed setlist). This portrait of a matador was a decent album track in 2012 that in its recent live iterations ranks with the greatest songs ever written. You could argue that her performance at the Drammen church show was definitive, but the more profound joy lies in the fact that, like any Sundfør gig, each one is the greatest in a different way. Built here around insistent, driving piano arpeggios, it spotlights The Silicone Veil’s smirking refusal to simplify any tune into the straightforwardly pretty, yet its jagged magnificence gets its estoque into you. It is a stunning version: her voice at its most metallic, the aural equivalent of licking aluminium, before it flashes silver and morphs into gold.

She follows it with ‘blómi’, the title track of her last record, and a song of which she’s clearly proud, performing it at climactic moments in each of the six shows I’ve seen her play since she released the album. Each time she teases out different inflections, different meanings from now familiar lines. How many different ways can a woman sing the words “in love”, which here are flushed with warmth? She wrings such emotion from the cryptic promise “that the ladies in black will wear white again”, by first landing on and then tossing off this outrageously unexpected succession of notes. Yes, as an audience member you are an emotional wreck, but also sit slack-jawed in amazement. Now she’s scatting, and clearly in the moment, dancing in and out of her accompaniest’s melody. The audience reaction is explosive, and she closes the song with a satisfied and knowing smile.

It's at this moment that Sundfør invites Julian of Norwich up onto the stage, in a manner of speaking. Hearing a new Sundfør composition for the first time is such a special feeling, and ‘What Are We’ – the title track of her upcoming record, and the first of the night's two new songs – shows the extraordinary potential in marrying these words to this artist. It is also the first number of the night to combine only clarinet and voice, the arrangement seeming to resemble the mic stand in front of Sundfør, with her vocal strong and straight, and the brass notes twining around it like a cord. The music industry is calculating and money-minded at the best of times, and one gets the impression that after the gold records and domestic awards of Sundfør's early years, it had a path all mapped out for her. She has followed her instincts instead; one is tempted to say her heart.

'What Are We's glimpse of a shimmering future is followed by the first two songs from Sundfør's 2017 album (in the end, nine of the night’s 11 songs come from her last two records or her next one). ‘Mantra’, also performed to clarinet accompaniment, has swelled over time to become one of my favourite Sundfør songs, her increasingly esoteric line readings pulling a simple folk song of crows and meadows into this surreal and irregular jazz world populated by weird pauses and melodic leaps into the unknown. She sings it with her eyes closed, in a version that seems to levitate. (See opening image above.)

As on the album, ‘Reincarnation’ comes next. “'K,” says Sundfør with an audial shrug, after retuning, before casually casting off a heartstopping version. “Oh I’m a bad girl,” she unforgettably intones, “’cause I turned the bad world into a crystal pearl”, a piece of deadpan sensuality that identifies her artistic virtue, having elliptically misstated the conclusion. Her fingerpicking accompaniment has these sixth-string bass notes that roll in with the inevitability of a punchline, though it’s the final verse that takes the song somewhere new: a reimagined melodic line in which she proves that she can hum twice as well as anyone else can sing. I’ve tried to express this in more high-minded ways so far, but it’s worth saying it plainly: imagine being this talented, what the fuck.

This feeling is further compounded by the introduction of ‘Blessed Wounds’, an astonishing new song. Sundfør introduces it by squinting at the handwritten lyrics on the piano rack and explaining that without them she’ll risk having to break into “la la la”s and “yeah yeah”s (famously not canon for Julian of Norwich). Such music-hall business gives way to a performance of virtuosic ambition. A showstopper that is also church music. A song of wonder and profound spiritual clarity, two pianos beneath a hand that is reaching across centuries. I feel my soul ascend. It seems wholly inappropriate to holler loutishly in response, so I refrain, but the applause is endless.

Once it finally abates, Sundfør closes the main set with ‘fare thee well’, which took years to get how she wanted it, before premiering in 2023. It is perhaps the most conventional singer-songwriter material in her oeuvre, nodding to the Roud folk ballad, but in the clothes of a ‘70s West Coast anthem. Again, she has her eyes shut tight. It can be hard for nosy journalists to penetrate Sundfør’s armour of self-deprecation and resistance to easy sentiment (she has previously framed music as variously a scientific experiment and a type of play), yet it is just as hard for me at moments like this to believe that she does not feel to her very bones the emotions that she is raising in us.

Since there is no natural backstage area in what is, and I can’t stress this enough, a hotel restaurant, our performers thank the audience and then loiter in a corner for a few moments, before coming back.

Their encore is ‘Trust Me’, the final ballad on Sundfør’s greatest record (and one of my two favourite albums of all time, along with Suede’s Dog Man Star): 2015’s Ten Love Songs. As ‘Mountaineers’ would later, it rises from squalor to catharsis, fearlessness and release. “Nothing’s ever easy when you take ecstasy,” Sundfør opens conversationally this evening, before moving through defiance (“You cannot erase me … like they do in the movies”) to profundity: “Baby you can trust me/Send for the saint/Send for the doctor/And save yourself.” At Union Chapel in 2017, when the song was also her encore, she proceeded to head for the heavens. This time she gives us that incomparable head-voice before sliding back down into chest to tease out the strangeness of the song’s climactic offer. Throughout, she sits with her eyes closed, and the hands in her lap shaping the words: fashioning the complexity of the emotion, or else being buffeted by it. They spasm in tandem with the delicate frenzy of performance… perhaps. But I think the purpose is to lift her voice. The one that lifts us way above.

***

SETLIST:

ashera's song
Bedtime Story
The Sound of War
Can You Feel the Thunder
blómi
What Are We
Mantra
Reincarnation
Blessed Wounds
fare thee well

Encore:
Trust Me

***

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.

Bob Dylan at Hyde Park, London

Friday 12 July, 2019



They came, they drank, they talked. And off in the distance, the other side of a 'Golden Circle' sparsely populated with affluent boomers, Bob Dylan delivered what must be the best performance I've seen him give in 10 years*. At a time when seeing Bob had begun to feel more like a duty than a treat, he came roaring back.

Dylan doesn't really do crowdpleasing shows: at least, not for the casual gig-goer ticking another legend off their bucket list. It may be that he simply won't − after all, such popular staples as 'saying hello to the audience' are relatively easy to execute − but I've begun to think that he simply doesn't know how.

Seeing Dylan is purely about the music, those songs are in permanent flux ("It used to go like that and now it goes like this," he barks on Live 1966, before launching into a paranoid, gasping 'I Don't Believe You'), and such personality as you can glean and harvest comes from his treatment of five decades of material, some increasingly peculiar physical posturing − is he a self-satisfied cowboy courting adulation or a man with a bad back? − and the intrusion of his crooked grin, which on bad nights is kept within the crusty exterior, but flashed across Hyde Park for half the damn show.

That approach has its virtues and its vices. His shows are erratic: I've seen great ones, weak ones, and everything in between. And there's something to be said for an artist who can turn up on time, display a certain basic level of gratitude towards their fans, and play what the masses want to hear. But there's also something cheering, and instinctively hilarious, about a performer who is ornery enough to neglect the pallid norms of stadium rock − be it punctuality, platitudes or sing-along set-pieces − and charged with the creative inspiration to make every night different, even if sometimes that appears to be merely because he's in a bad mood.

I'll tell you something, though. For those leaving the fields of South Kensington uttering those tritest of generalities, now worn so threadbare they're practically transparent − "His voice has gone", "You can't tell which song it is till halfway through", "He could at least speak to the crowd" − know this: Friday night was the closest to a straight hits show that I've ever seen Dylan play. Who knows why, I can offer only tinpot psychology: he wanted to best Neil Young, he wants to impress Neil Young, he was just in the right mood… whatever, he kicked off with three cast-iron '60s behemoths, and seemed almost eager to please, committed to every last song, though with that indelible caveat that he's Bob Dylan and if we're going to do this, we're still going to do it his way.

---

Before we get onto the main business, here's a quick word on the support:


A picture of Cat Power owned by a fairly non-litigious photographer.

I was most excited about seeing Cat Power, the scuzzily brilliant vocalist whose unhappy, often half-murmured laments seem almost singularly ill-suited to a big field in which people won't shut up. Time and again, she got the techs to turn up her mic, but despite throwing in a Dylan cover ('He Was a Friend of Mine', a fantastically if self-sabotagingly abstruse choice), it was only during a clutch of grungier numbers that her spellbinding set cut through to an audience waiting − for reasons unknown − for Neil Young. The songs from her current record, Wanderer, had a sensitive, beguiling if sometimes inaudible quality, coupled to a strutting stage style I hadn't anticipated, though the knock-out highlight was the title track from The Greatest, half-shorn of the anomalous shoo-wop style that defined that extraordinary record. It was weird, and oddly moving, to watch such life-stopping brilliance in a vacuum of complete disinterest.

Up next was Laura Marling, who has junked her treading-on-eggshells style for a more Carly Simon-ish approach (or was it just the wind buffeting her hair, like in that 'You're So Vain' video?). I have infinitesimal amounts of patience for British folkies who go all American, but Marling has some nice hooks and a flair for digging out a killingly sad line just when you think she's slipping into broad-brush mundanity.


Kermit the Frog's let himself go.

And then there was Neil Young. Imagine Neil Young being your favourite artist, it's like your favourite food being a packet of ham. There's a bit in Peep Show where Jez tells Mark that he loves Nancy, and Mark says: "You love her? What do you love about her?" That's me trying to understood people who love Neil Young. What do you love about him? His guitar? Still, the first CD we had in my house growing up was Live Rust and I seem to have absorbed most of his other stuff through cultural osmosis. Either way, I didn't expect to enjoy his set half as much as I did. A blistering 'Over and Over' was squeezed between the woozy 'Mansion on the Hill' and the appealingly corny 'Country Home' at the start of the set, and that was the perfect beginning, with what on record becomes an interminable jam session working just right in a live situation. And for an hour Young struck just the right balance, the set reaching its climax with a lovely 'Heart of Gold'.

Then his self-indulgence fuse blew, and every song started going on for four minutes too long, following the same format: song, jam, attempted audience ovation, Young fiddling frantically with the tremolo, drum solo, another jam, more tremolo... The apparent aim was to continue the song until everybody had stopped clapping. As a final insult, he then broke into 'Rockin' in the Free World', which is fun but also highly embarrassing, the Kissification of Neil Young. Is there anything more excruciating than saying 'rockin''? Except, that is, for the song's muscular Reaganism. Twice we thought the track was over, only for Young and co to burst into another chorus, which is a great idea for a comedy sketch, if not for a set of live guitar music.

I'd hoped for 'Like a Hurricane', but by the time it came along, I'd had about enough Neil Young for one year. This was partly due to him and partly due to me, as I'd been stood in one place for over four hours and was anxious to set off for my wee so I'd be back in time for Bob.

---

The screens were blank. And for a moment, it seemed like Dylan's recent but noted aversion to having anybody see his face close-up (at Hop Farm he was shown from a distance; his stage lights have been getting dimmer; in the recent Rolling Thunder Revue doc, he is painted a most curious shade of auburn) was going to result in the funniest audience-baiting of modern times**, but as he wandered on stage in a muted fit of anti-climax, the vast panels crackled into life. Young had shared screen-time with his band, but there was no such egality here: the camera fixed on Dylan's small, stooping frame for the next 105 minutes.


'Ballad of a Thin Man', 1966.

With a justifiably self-satisfied grin, Dylan launched into 'Ballad of a Thin Man', the 1965 track irrevocably associated with his reinvention as a braying individualist with great hair who was enthusiastically kicking apart his legacy as a protest singer, and sneering at anybody who asked him not to. It's an absolute monster of a song, with a fantastically snide and direct central refrain: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is/Do you, Mr Jones?", the name typically squawked amid a squall of noise as "Jooooahhhhhrrrrnnnns". It's a perfect choice to kick off this type of show, as at this point several members of the audience who've never seen Dylan before, and are confronted with a jowly, wire-haired, tactiturn little man in a rhinestone jacket jabbering 54-year-old words in a half-swallowed 80-a-day rasp as he happily plinky-plonks on his piano will indeed be wondering what is happening here. Perhaps you have to have Dylan in your blood to react to this with a rush of utter euphoria, but I don't know any other way. Dylan will spend the rest of the evening reshaping his songs in the most exhilarating manner, but with this one, it's enough to just deliver your statement of intent, and give it both fucking barrels.

'It Ain't Me, Babe' is up second, and one of the highlights of the night, its hero now not so much nobly apologetic as cheekily elusive, a quality one more associates with the fantastically unfaithful 20-something Bob. The word "babe" is intoned with such gleefully dismissive malevolence that you really do begin to suspect the protagonist is avoiding this lovesick woman more for his own sake than hers. James Taylor may appear to genuinely like his own audience, and Paul Simon's voice may be in better nick, but no-one but Dylan would excavate a song from 1964 and then warp it out of all recognition: not just its tune or its style, but its actual theme.

He follows that with an explosive 'Highway 61 Revisited', the closest you'll get to him acknowledging that now and then people would like to hear the hits, perhaps with one of them sounding similar to the record. This song's a great gauge, incidentally, for how good a Dylan show is going to be (though unfortunately by the time this litmus test can be performed, you have bought your ticket, train pass and accommodation, and are midway through the show): whenever I've seen Dylan at his best, he has spent it grooving, grinning and very occasionally (Sheffield 2009) genuinely dancing. And it's such a great song: the best organ-driven Biblical comedy record of psychedelic '60s rock. After that 'Simple Twist of Fate', from 1975's Blood on the Tracks, feels slightly bland: it's a wonderful song: small, sad, wry and lyrical, but it feels swallowed up in this space, the reading almost perfunctory.


1974.

I've written about Dylan before and said in 2013 that, while you rarely get unequivocally great Dylan shows any more, you can usually rely on a run of three or four songs where he's really cooking, where he cares enough to make it count. I did wonder, as 'Simple Twist of Fate' meandered meekly out from the vast speakers strapped around Hyde Park, whether perhaps we might have had our three-song run.

So sometimes you worry. And then sometimes you can only laugh, in slack-jawed amazement, at this maddening, occasionally ridiculous genius, who takes absurd risks with his material, even in front of 70,000 people. On record, 'Can't Wait' is a stinging, ominous, Tom Waits-ish lament, a hymn to utter isolation, a paean to pain near the close of Dylan's saddest album, Time Out of Mind, recorded as his health dwindled, en route to a brush with death. On Friday, it's not. On Friday, it's a fantastically funky James Brown number, with Dylan a white-suited ringmaster, holding the mic-stand at a jaunty angle as he defiantly raps the lyrics from out front, turning one of his most heartbreaking lyrics ("It doesn't matter where I go anymore, I just go") into nothing short of a punchline.

'When I Paint My Masterpiece', which follows, is fine, but the song's main virtue is how its rapturous but yearning melody lends harmony and power to some rather trite lyrics, so when you junk that tune in favour of something pleasant but basically unmemorable, you're neutering it. And then we're into a stompy, somewhat impenetrable 'Honest with Me', from 2001's Love and Theft, which I'm sure Dylan would be proud to learn (and I'm only mildly ashamed to confess) I didn't recognise until at least two minutes in, and I know that album back-to-front.


1997.

We get four from Time Out of Mind in total, and the second is the best of the lot. The album is, I think, and after everything, my favourite of all Dylan's records: a wintry, introspective retrospective. It sounds like the last testament of a dying man, and it nearly was. 'Trying to Get to Heaven' is probably the single greatest thing on it: essentially an update of 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door', his earlier defiance and desperation replaced by a wry and weary yearning pockmarked with pain ("You broke a heart that loved you/Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore"). Dylan is never content to trade on 22-year-old emotions, though, and last night the song became more like a whimsical quest, lines of alienation rendered playful, until the hammer-blow of its protagonist's essential pointlessness. "I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down," he sighs, "now I'm trying to get to heaven before they close the door."

At the end of the song, as at the end of many of these songs, he stands up for the final few bars, then begins to wander off, as if he's remembered that the remote is in the other room, and the screens cut to black.

'Make You Feel My Love' is a song that was stolen from us by Adele, and some absolute roasters near us insisted on singing her version over the top of it, but just as Dylan never wrote sadder, starker words than on Time Out of My Mind, he never wrote a more direct love song than this one***. At Hyde Park, it's an effectively conventional reading, and while we'll never get a better reading of the unexpectedly and breathtakingly seductive line that closes the penultimate verse ("You ain’t seen nothing like me yet") than the one on the album, I suppose he can keep trying.

You can certainly never accuse Dylan of not backing himself, and he continues to display a vaguely misguided loyalty to 'Pay In Blood' and 'Early Roman Kings', two of the more didactic tracks from his last album of original songs, Tempest, Both are rather long-winded, both benefit from his full-blooded investment in their mixture of threats and fantasy, and both are barked in the same unflinching but essentially unchanging tone. Unfortunately, both are also heard in direct comparison to 'Like a Rolling Stone', which he stretches out languorously between them.


2012, the time of Tempest.

The first seven or eight times I saw Dylan, he played 'Like a Rolling Stone' fairly straight, usually as an encore with a familiarly cacophonous organ part. He's stopped doing that now. If you want to sing along, you really have to be on your toes. At first, it seemed like Bob was actively trying to prevent this, then you realised it was more like delayed gratification: a piano-led rap; a jazzy, dialled-down and almost painfully slow lead-in to the chorus; then this ferocious burst of rock; and finally the potential for a fists-in-the-air resolution with the beats of a football chant. By the final two choruses, he was almost egging the audience on, through some flamboyant embellishments to the words.

After 'Early Roman Kings' comes the best five minutes of the whole show: a heartstoppingly beautiful version of 'Girl from the North Country', with Bob singing: like, really singing, exposing himself not just through the emotional vulnerability of his performance, but the vulnerability of his voice. It's not what it was in 1963, it's not even what it was in 2005, and for the most part his live vocals are nowadays snapped out or throatily hollered. So a stripped-down country-folk ballad, accompanied only by a piano line and the aching strains of a pedal steel, is a hell of a thing to try. What results is simply one of the most moving experiences I've had at a concert. Incredibly, Dylan wrote the song at 21, but it is an old man's song: reflective, regretful, nostalgic in the most acutely painful way. He sings it here with his heart on display; the vocal wistful, even desolate, negotiating the loss of innocence, love and youth. He sings it like it has only just become true. And like telling someone may make it hurt a little less.

That he can mine such pathos from a simple old song, then continue hammering his most elegiac record, Time Out of Mind into baffling new shapes is the mark of a man for whom reinvention is everything. Isn't that better than a greatest hits show? The fourth and final track from his 1997 record is 'Love Sick', which Dylan famously leased to Victoria's Secret, due to his long and enduring commitment to underpants. It's an enduringly fascinating collision of dystopian imagery coupled to a doth-protest-too-much renunciation of love itself, all because some bird has apparently put him through the wringer. Live, it runs the gamut from unrepentant to vulnerable, needy and ultimately knowing.


Alicia Keys (more of whom below).

For the best part of 10 years, 'Thunder on the Mountain' was one of the two main blues jams in Dylan's set, along with 'Summer Days', which I don't like nearly as much, though it's more interesting live than listening to it in your front room. Both dropped out for a while, but now 'Thunder on the Mountain' is back. The album it opens − Modern Times, the final part of a loose career-revival trilogy − came out during a happy period of my life, and Dylan did it at the two best shows I've seen him play: in Sheffield in 2007 and 2009, so it means a lot to me for those reasons. Having said that, I think he mostly wrote it to try to get Alicia Keys to kiss him, an endeavour that I believe was unfortunately unsuccessful. He has recently changed the wording around her birthplace on the track, though whether this will do the trick, I'm not sure. It's a rumbling, suitably thundering blues adventure that runs appropriately up and down the scales as Dylan mixes the unapologetic doom-mongering of Time Out of Mind with the absurdism and cheery punning of Love and Theft, and while it lacks the emotional sensitivity, freewheelin' poetry or acidic, steel-shelled mythology-shredding that constitutes Dylan's most enduring work, it's a lot of fun.

'Soon After Midnight' is something else entirely: Dylan's stab at a Great American Songbook standard, before he decided to go and record a load of fucking terrible versions of other people's. It has a lovely, yearning feel to it, half-familiar, as if overheard from someone else's wood-fronted '30s radio unit, and it has some of those wonderful pay-offs that mark Dylan's best work post-Time Out of Mind: when he sings, "I'm in no great hurry/I'm not afraid of your fury", you doubt his resilience, then he nails your fucking feet to the floor with the saddest of clinchers: "I've faced stronger walls than yours." And you wonder whether fighting the expectations of the 1960s almost broke him in two, and doubt that anything else would be half as hard. With all due respect (which actually isn't all that much), if you think Neil Young doing 18 songs that sound broadly the same is as interesting as Dylan segueing from heartbroken country to epic blues and then what appears to be a depressive Bing Crosby record, I think it unlikely that we will ultimately get on.

The main set ends with 'Gotta Serve Somebody', one of the handful of great songs to come out of Dylan's dalliance with evangelical Christianity. I've been going to see Dylan as regularly as money and geography can permit since 2002, and this is the first time I've seen him play it. The lead single from his first Christian album, 1979's Slow Train Coming, it's essentially a strident list song about people who are, at some stage, gonna have to serve somebody. I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that he means God. The studio version (a favourite of Sinéad O'Connor) is funky as hell − a bass-driven track that neatly mixes simple encouragement, finger-wagging and what sounds suspiciously like a series of threats − but since Dylan had already given us our serving of funk in the singularly improbably shape of 'Can't Wait', he does this as a simple rock number, one of the most confounding creative decisions of the night. I say 'one of', as at the end of the song he comes and stands at the front of the stage with his hand in one pocket, and just sort of lightly sways, in what I presume is his weird attempt at some straightforward rock-star posturing.


Would you trust this man with your revolution?

The encore begins in familiar fashion: 'Blowin' in the Wind' as it's generally played nowadays, its polemical power lost somewhere between now and then, presumably because its author doesn't seem to care about its questions, only the cynicism that greets them. He follows that in the only way a committed crowdpleasing people person can: with 1965 album track, 'It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry', an emblematic 'thin wild mercury sound'-era song, that period when genres seemed to be flowing through Dylan like water, and everything that came out of his pen and gob was effortlessly sublime. There are two moments in Dylan's career that will never be unsurpassed in terms of effortless cool. One is when Al Kooper rang Dylan (ultimately to resign from his touring band) and asked what he was up to. "I'm eating toast and listening to Smokey Robinson," replied Dylan. The other is in this song, when Bob's voice first casually joins the jaunty tune: "Well, I ride on a mail train, baby, can't buy a thrill," he offers, in a purposefully dismissive rejection of regressive folk norms. "Well, I been up all night, leanin' on the windowsill."

In Hyde Park, the song becomes the night's second legit blues jam, not as expansive (or lengthy) as 'Thunder on the Mountain', but with a relentless, lolloping beat that meshes astonishingly well with the song's hip, flip pronouncements: the mythos of Depression-era train-hopping filtered through the wired mind of a man busily shedding his hairshirt. In this bluesy guise, you could imagine it nestling between 'Workingman's Blues #2' and 'Beyond the Horizon' on Modern Times.

And that's your lot. It's the best I've seen Dylan for a decade. If you disagree, then I can only chastise you for your rank ingratitude.

Thanks for reading.

---

Footnotes:

* "I dread to think what the others must be like, then!" is not good banter.
** pun intended
*** I suppose a rival would be the (somewhat risible and madly popular) 'Lay Lady Lay', the hit single from 1969's Nashville Skyline

---



Setlist:

Ballad of a Thin Man
It Ain't Me, Babe
Highway 61 Revisited
Simple Twist of Fate
Can't Wait
When I Paint My Masterpiece
Honest With Me
Tryin' to Get to Heaven
Make You Feel My Love
Pay in Blood
Like a Rolling Stone
Early Roman Kings
Girl From the North Country
Love Sick
Thunder on the Mountain
Soon After Midnight
Gotta Serve Somebody

Encore:
Blowin' in the Wind
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry

REVIEW: Father John Misty at the Hammersmith Apollo

Tuesday 7 November 2017

I’d listened to Father John Misty a little and dismissed him as “not really for me” (I reasoned that I didn't have room for a whiny, self-obsessed white man in my life aside from myself), but my brother and my friend Katie wanted to go, so I took the plunge. In revising for the gig, my Last FM (helloooo, 2003) tells me that I’ve listened to his songs 151 times in the past week, and by the end I was brainwashed. Sorry, ‘a fan’. And even his proselytising about the evils of religion, which seemed to be operating at the level of a GCSE textbook, began to make sense to me (a Catholic) when I read about his background, and understood the writing to be more about white-hot anger, lived experience, existential desperation and the repugnant hypocrisy of evangelist America than in-depth theological debate.

From interviews – and reputation – though, I was still expecting the morose, meandering, confessional Misty who turned up to a gig the day after Trump’s inauguration, did a rambling 15-minute speech, played a 13-minute song and then went home. Instead, we got a proper pop show: a sensational pop show – 24 songs across two hours, with confetti cannons, a band and a string and brass ensemble, a dazzling light display and Tillman’s full repertoire of struts, poses and guitar moves (and when I say ‘guitar moves’, I don’t mean his guitar-playing, I mean him taking his guitar off and flinging it halfway across the stage to a roadie, mid-song), but with enough room for the sincerity, the lamentations, the howls of protest and shards of bitter wit that make him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music.

There's almost no between-songs chat (a few 'thank you's and 'good to see yer's), it's just the music: the bearded Tillman, his hair slicked back, in a flowery shirt and black suit, his drainpipe trousers accentuating his slender legs, and the heeled boots just right for cutting a dashing silhouette as he's frequently backlit in a mist of pink or codeine white.

We kick off with 'Pure Comedy', climaxing with that explosive realisation that religion is "the kind of thing a madman would conceive!”, complete with panto-esque ‘loony’ gesture, 'Total Entertainment Forever' – an irresistible, rockabilly paean to just how fucked we are – and 'Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution', most people’s favourite on the album. I’m still wrestling with the song’s philosophy (is he foggily denouncing leftism or acerbically critiquing the comfort of capitalist conformity?), but it’s a definite Tune, and when the confetti cannon explodes on “Industry and commerce: toppled to their knees”, creating a red, mirrored supernova, everybody loses their shit. After a somewhat muted 'Ballad of the Dying Man' (and so the first four songs from the current record), we dip into the old stuff, including a plaintive, insistent, seductively reimagined 'Nancy From Now On', a lovestruck, crowdpleasing 'Chateau Lobby #4' (“You left a note in your perfect script/’Stay as long as you want’/And I haven’t left your bed since”) with Tillman striding around the stage like a Butlins redcoat, and a conversational 'When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay', as he has a few choice words with his maker. The pay off, “Oh, my Lord/We just want light in the dark/Some warmth in the cold/And to make something out of nothing sounds like someone else I know” sounds like vintage Vonnegut in the land of Steinbeck, and I don’t have higher praise than that.


I didn't spend much of the gig taking pictures. Will this do?

There are Misty songs I don’t like much, and if a couple of them are banal live – ‘A Bigger Paper Bag’ and the interminable ‘So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain’ – others are given an individuality missing on record, and extraordinary life. ‘Only Son of the Ladiesman’ is chokingly broken amidst the country-rock sound, ‘This Is Sally Hatchet’ becomes a great lost Beatles song, ‘When You’re Smiling and Astride Me’ so fragilely self-mocking, and ‘Strange Encounter’ sensitive and vulnerable as it moves from Misty’s familiar boasting that he has sex with a lot of women to something like tentatively self-justifying self-realisation ("Yeah, I'm a decent person/Little aimless"), the perfect counterpoint to the disposable fun of, say, ‘I’m Writing a Novel’. 'Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow', by contrast, is an absolute bastard live: a sleazy love poem that turns increasingly belligerent and violent, with Tillman spitting its bitter denouement, "Why the long face, jerkoff? Your chance has been taken," into the crowd.

And then there are the songs I can never get enough of, like ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt’ – basically his ‘Idiot Wind’, a character assassination of a woman he’s just slept with, which would be completely indefensible if it wasn’t so beautifully, rhythmically sung, and so incredibly funny:

She says, like literally
Music is the air she breathes
And the malaprops make me want to fucking scream
I wonder if she even knows what that word means
Well, it's literally not that

And ‘Bored in the USA’, a chronicle of depression, a portrait of a wasteland of a homeland: America’s culture reimagined alternately as The Road, or as a tacky, narcotised, identikit, subprime, debt-ridden monument to nothing, guarded over by white president Jesus – the whole song springing from a profound pun for the ages. Tonight, though, the “white Jesus” that he pleads to becomes “honky-tonk Jesus’”, and the President Jesus just “President Anyone”. ‘The Memo’, one of the best songs on his current record, Pure Comedy, is mostly more pointed than despairing, and its targets are more specific and less existential, though its conclusion is similarly bleak, depicting a world in which people “won't just sell themselves into slavery/They'll get on their knees and pay you to believe”. Live, it comes with its wild card intact: a voice generator increasingly barking out mundanities and platitutdes: “This is totally the song of my summer,” “This guy just gets me” and “Music is my life”, as Tillman himself asks: “Just quickly, how would you rate yourself in terms of sex appeal and cultural significance?” “Do you usually listen to music like this?” and finally “Can we recommend some similar artists?” All three songs are just wonderful live – faithful but raw and immediate – though screening the video for ‘The Night…’ was kind of pointlessly distracting.

The main set ends with ‘Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings’ and then a climactic ‘I Love You, Honeybear’, a rousing, glorious version that catapults it high into my favourite Misty songs, with Tillman making his second foray into the crowd, playing both the woodland indie messiah and the pop god, as the confetti flies and the singer performs the laying on of hands, as he pleads: “Don’t give into despair/Cause I love you, honeybear.”

What I loved – and what most surprised me – about the show was how much thought, effort and enthusiasm had clearly gone into it: into the choreographed stage moves (though never so choreographed that there's no room for him to extemporise as he's swept away by emotion), the lighting that creates an icon out of his silhouette, the reshapings of older songs. Tillman’s distaste for the entertainment industry doesn’t translate into a contempt for his fans, as it does with so many artists. As a mentally ill bloke myself, I can understand that sometimes his interviews are car-crashes, and that he has good gigs and bad gigs. I know too, of course, that it need not necessarily constitute an enormous challenge for a man to behave nicely towards a roomful of people who adore him and his art. But I’d thought of him as probably being a bit of a dick, and that didn’t come across at all. He even did an extended encore: ‘Real Love Baby’ – which is pleasant, but could have been written by anybody – and the tedious ‘Magic Mountain’ followed by something extraordinary: his shopping list of contemporary ills (some real, some imagined), ‘Holy Shit' incorporating a mid-song freak-out and seguing straight into an explosive, furious grunge version of the waspish, self-annihilating character study, ‘The Ideal Husband’, which ends with him lying on his back on the stage, writhing around on the floor as he screams: “Wouldn’t I make the ideal husband?” Yes, Josh, you probably would.

One of the gigs of the year. I’m a fan now. A convert. I left the Apollo moved and exhilarated. Speechless. I’m glad I took up that ticket offer.

SETLIST:

Pure Comedy
Total Entertainment Forever
Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution
Ballad of the Dying Man
Nancy From Now On
Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)
Strange Encounter
Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow
Only Son of the Ladiesman
When the God of Love Returns There'll Be Hell to Pay
A Bigger Paper Bag
When You're Smiling and Astride Me
True Affection
This is Sally Hatchet
The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.
Bored in the USA
The Memo
I'm Writing a Novel
Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings
I Love You, Honeybear

Encore:
Real Love Baby
So I'm Growing Old on Magic Mountain
Holy Shit
The Ideal Husband

(Source, as ever, setlist.fm)

***

I'm only really reviewing movies now (and only here), but last night had such an impact on me that I thought I'd write a little about it. Thanks for reading.

David Ford + Michele Stodart & JP Ruggieri at Islington Assembly Hall

Friday 2 June, 2017


(L-R) JP Ruggieri, David Ford and Michele Stodart.

It took seeing David Ford live to turn me into a fan. That was in 2015 when he played a one-man-band show at Soho’s underground Borderline club, looping his multi-instrumentalism in a sweaty, intense show that revealed the unusual potency of both his performance style and his protest-songwriting. Watching him is like witnessing Tom Waits’ soul trapped in the body of Dermot O’Leary. I haven’t seen Ford since, though I’ve listened to him a lot. His new thing is a three-hour, 30-song ‘roadshow’ tour featuring two support acts, a drummer and himself, accompanying one another throughout all three sets. I found JP Ruggieri’s the least compelling: he’s a fine guitarist whose technical prowess perfectly complemented the later two performances, but his own songs are a little pedestrian, and he’s a pleasant rather than dynamic vocalist. Dynamic, though, is the perfect word to describe Magic Numbers alumnus Michele Stodart, whose magnetic presence, arresting mid-Atlantic twang and slew of singular mannerisms – from singing out of the side of her mouth to marching on the spot like a turbo-charged Jona Lewie – lit up the place. There were real echoes of Janis Joplin in her performance, and comparing someone to perhaps the most mesmeric live performer of all time is not something I do lightly.

At around 9:30, Ford takes centre-stage to play “a lot of new songs and a few old ones”, kicking off with a thrilling take on the sub-Waitsian ‘Let It Burn’ and torturing his fretboard for the benefit of the photographers in the pit. The new songs, from ‘Animal Spirits’ – a forthcoming ‘concept album about macro-economics’ – are a mixed bag, with the sleazy, somewhat platitudinal funk-rock outweighing the thoughtful ballads, and the oldies aren’t all his best, but ‘Pour a Little Poison’ (containing perhaps his signature line, “I’m just a whiny little English boy singing the blues”) is raucous, ‘I Don’t Care What You Call Me’ desperately sad, and ‘Waiting for the Storm’ blessed with an eerie foreshadowing and a weary poignancy. The audience misunderstands his desire to ‘not do an encore’ (meaning that he’ll do the songs without pretending to go home), leading to a delightfully silly bit where we have to stay as quiet as possible while he’s off stage in order to coax another song. He does an exuberant 'My Sharona'* with a full band ("Playing this has been a dream of mine for years"), then comes out – unplanned – for another by himself, as a result of the cacophony, breaking his pledge not to play a song with swearing in it as he blasts out ‘Every Time’, his unexpected, unapologetic, counter-intuitive anthem, which seems conventional in its sound and language, but almost revolutionary in its theme and ideas: that fame isn’t for him, and he doesn’t want your pity, that in order to get it he’d ruin the present and break up his happy life. It gets faster and faster, Ford spitting out the vituperative, sincere, self-justifying words as he cranks up the atmosphere and the angst.



It’s what’s been missing during his enjoyable but faintly pallid set: the singer-songwriter having traded the taciturn mystery of 2015 for a languid, appealing but less explosive approach, which befits the roomy, high-ceilinged venue with its proscenium arch, but perhaps isn’t what David Ford is for. It does, though, mean that we get some of his insights on current affairs: I thought I was bored of people just calling Donald Trump names now, but he really is “a fucking toilet with hair”, so thank you to David for that. I imagine that this show will get better and it better as it progresses, since the band had had just a day and a half to rehearse, but this second date was good enough: occasionally slightly scrappy and rushed, but also affable, great fun and with some truly special moments, thanks to Ford and particularly Stodart. (3.5)

*'My Sharona' by The Knack was a post-punk single by The Knack that got a second wind from its inclusion in the glossy, Hollywoodised but near-iconic Gen X film, Reality Bites. Tarantino had been about to include it in Pulp Fiction, but frustratedly dropped the idea as it no longer seemed fresh.

***

Thanks for reading.

REVIEWS: Yasmine Hamdan at Scala; John Grant at Union Chapel

Sometimes my life is really nice.



Yasmine Hamdan at Scala
Monday 15 May, 2017

One of the world's most singular, sensual and explosive performers is back in London, turning the sweaty, claustrophobic Scala near King's Cross from a dive into a dive faintly reminiscent of a bazaar, as she performs before a backdrop of white linen, and shifts between Lebanese metal, suggestive, seductive and erotic bedouin songs, and the kind of spellbinding electronica with which she made her name in cult band SoapKills, taking in both pulse-driven dance music and wails of futuristic despond.

Yasmine's presence – and sound – simply grabbed me by the throat when I first saw her live in 2014, though she delivered a different sort of show the following year: more muted and relaxed, the last of her lengthy Ya Nass tour. Here she's rediscovered her range – a range that simply doesn't transmit on her records, which are exotic and evocative but hardly arresting – the grungier sections rising into a cacophonous racket topped by her overpowering, startlingly committed vocals. At other times she's flirtatious, plaintive, erotic. "You didn't tell me she was sexy," challenged my friend Jess, when Yasmine walked on barefoot and launched into the first number, breaking into a slow grind.

Most of the dozen or so songs (she doesn't play long shows) are from her new record, Al Jamirat, which isn't the departure from Ya Nass she had promised or envisaged, at least musically (as she sings in Arabic, doesn't publish her lyrics and has dispensed with contextualising her songs live at all, themes are harder to discern), but then I don't think it needs to be. She has already cut out a unique place for herself, and exploring it gradually: brushing away the sand and gently splitting the concrete, sounds as worthwhile as just wandering off elsewhere. She does do two numbers from that 2013 record, though: 'Hal' (her best-known song in the West, due to its appearance in Jim Jarmusch's risible vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive) and the beautiful 'Beirut', that breathtaking paean to her home city. The other old track is one I can't find on any record, but which she's done live each time I've seen her: Hamdan toying with the audience, and her own persona, as she plays both a lustful scoundrel and the nervous young virgin he's trying to bring back to his tent.

The night wasn't a total success, Yasmine has forgotten who I am, an annoying adorable new couple kept getting in the way, and we suffered the worst audience farts since the Manics at the Roundhouse in 2014, but Hamdan can't be held accountable for any of that (except the first bit, which is dreadful – I am highly memorable, if only memorably irritating), and in this spellbinding show she showed why she's one of the best live acts on the planet, intoxicating us with her mega-watt charisma, and drowning us in that extraordinary sound. (4)

***



John Grant at Union Chapel
Tuesday 2 May, 2017

A mesmeric evening in the company of electro-balladeer John Grant, who staged this one-off show in one of Britain’s most distinctive, beautiful venues to raise money for his Russian mate Oleg’s kidney transplant.

It was a proper fans’ gig, with no sign of his signature tune, 'GMF', but rare airings of 'Magma Arrives' (the first since 2015) and a pair of my favourites: the elegantly foul-mouthed, cataclysmic slump into depression that is 'You Don’t Have To' – with Grant delivering a vocal that rendered him lost and bewildered, offset by sonic squalls and squelches via the synth – and 'Global Warming', a piece of subtly, seductively rhythmic self-mockery that moves like a rap record, its passages of blissful audial catharsis at odds with the alarm of approaching Armageddon papered over with lust and vanity.

Other highlights included the title track of his most recent album – 'Grey Tickles, Black Pressure' – now a reliable blast of baritone misery – a thawing then roaring 'Where Dreams Go to Die' (of the 16 songs he plays, half are from his first solo record), and the greatest 'Glacier' I’ve ever heard (and I’ve now heard it live three times, and perhaps a dozen times elsewhere), Grant swaggering with intent, coalescing and convalescing with saw-player Mara Carlyle, and then ripping the lid of that unmatchable voice. It is, simply, great. (4)

See also: I saw John Grant at Hammersmith Apollo in 2015 (my second favourite show of the year), then at my office in 2016.

***

Thanks for reading.

REVIEW: Martha Wainwright and Ed Harcourt at the Roundhouse

Thursday 2 February, 2017



This was an often brilliant evening in the company of one of the 21st century’s most compelling performers, ably supported and assisted by multi-instrumentalist Ed Harcourt, who has never quite done what I fervently wished he might, but does what he can quite brilliantly. He was on the expansive, semi-circular stage first, for an hour-long set based around the David Ford one-man-band model of building a looped backing track on drums, guitar, and sometimes bass and keyboards, and then finally coming to the mic, when the music and expectation hit fever pitch. On paper it threatens to be a laborious, potentially tedious way of playing live, but in practice it rarely is, especially with a musician of Harcourt's prodigious talents.

I bought his first two records, Maplewood and Here Be Monsters, all those years ago, when he was tipped alongside Ryan Adams as the Next Huge Thing. He’s never quite become that, perhaps because his lyrics aren’t good enough and his worldview isn’t very interesting – which is odd, given he's the son of a diplomat, and spent his formative years travelling the world – the between-songs banter suggesting a certain poverty of insight and incisiveness, straining constantly for a humour that he doesn’t really possess (in one early interview he speculated about two bands he’d made up: ‘Limp Wristed’ (“don’t print that, the PC brigade will lynch me”) and ‘Rage Against the Washing Machine; give me strength). He's undeniably a special musician, though, and seems to have acquired a shabby cool as he’s aged: coming on stage in a half-buttoned blackshirt and white suit jacket, his greying hair and thick beard making him look like a hybrid of Jeff Bridges and the young Tom Waits. Then opening his mouth to reveal a plummy middle-England accent.

Interest ebbs and flows during his set, which kicks off with Antarctica – as good an advert as any for his lyrical poverty – but there are fine moments, Harcourt enthusiastically ripping up the received wisdom about how these songs go, with a tightly-packed Apple of My Eye (debuted on Maplewood, perfected on Here Be Monsters), and a climactic Crimson Tears, expanded and turned into a languidly lost jazz track. Loup Garou, his werewolf song, is a simple, sexy rocker, the lovely, Waits-ish Until Tomorrow Then reveals unexpected depths, and new song Velvet and Gold finds him in atypically political mode – bluntly if powerfully taking aim at Tony Blair’s life and legacy – though it’s his tender list song about love, Murmur in My Heart, that sticks in the memory the longest, his guitar whining and throbbing as he moves from the offbeat poetry of “She’s the buzz from my guitar” to the plaintive, desperate “She’s the murmur in my heart.”

***



Like her backing band, Martha’s wearing a grey-blue jumpsuit, a large autumn leaf necklace in Native American style hanging over her chest, her hair half-up, that imperious nose and wicked mouth wrapping around scaling melodies, turning warm when she sings of her children, barking in that way she does when she’s mad. She plays a few from her new record, including a charming Francie – shades of Kate Bush’s glorious, transcendent Bertie – and a playful, old-fashioned version of Francis (written for the same son), composed by her brother Rufus, and surely the best Cole Porter song he didn’t actually write since Tom Waits’ A Foreign Affair. Not all of the new material is so persuasive. Her new record is patchy – procreation and motherhood taking rather up her time and talents – and Window, which was written for her elder child and sounds on the record like it is being made up on the spot, has neither a proper tune nor any good words, and ideally you’d want both.

She is such a mesmerising performer, though, that she can wring brilliance from almost anything, her hips rotating sensually, her foot coming off the floor and her knee up towards her chest again and again in a mannerism that seems both inexplicable and inevitable, as much a part of her act as her easy humour, constant between-songs swearing and that unapproachable voice, racing over the octaves, blasting the roof off the Roundhouse or staying husky, deep and disgruntled somewhere in her larynx. The response from a sold-out crowd in an all-seated Roundhouse? Almost nothing, the audience bafflingly muted and inert, feeding off Martha, perhaps, but feeding nothing back.

She barely seems to notice. Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel #2 is the highlight: among the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen or heard, at a gig or anywhere else (even after a false start in which she leaps straight into the second verse). At one point she’s crouched on the floor, her voice somewhere in the rafters, her heart somewhere in Hell. There are versions of it on YouTube, one from 10 years ago, another when she started doing it again live in December – clutching a lyric sheet, skitting around the tune – but nothing will ever come close to the way she sang it last night. It was revelatory.

She's backed by Bernice, a Canadian band who've also been touring with her as support act, and whose singer, Robin Dann, looks – in the words of my concert buddy – "like she is about to do science": thick glasses, tied-back hair, and overalls with sensible shoes. The rest of the band also seem to have been allowed out of the lab at short notice to create an unsatisfyingly muddy, murky sound, but there's clearly talent in there, especially from guitarist and keyboardist Thom Gill. It's he alone who accompanies Martha on Chelsea Hotel, switching to piano and offering a blissful counterpoint to the fuzzy swampiness that dominates. At one point Martha breaks out a cheap electric guitar she got from her first boyfriend, and it makes a little more sense.



Another new song, Look Into My Eyes, is based around a short keyboard riff and a snatch of lines written by Martha’s aunt, the legendary Anna McGarrigle, later worked into a song by the pair and Anna’s daughter Lily Lanken; played live, it’s somehow both luscious and haunting, like a newly-minted Kate and Anna song from the Matapedia era. She stretches back to her second record for a bracing, confessional Jimi, then invites Harcourt on for a half-hour jam that includes a duet at the piano on Gram Parsons’ heartbreaking A Song for You (Ed playing and singing, Martha straddled on the end of the stool, facing him, crooning quietly into the mic), a new co-written song that took Martha an hour to write and Harcourt two weeks to finish, and a rousing reading of one of my favourites: the proudly, coldly and euphorically alienated Factory, from her first record.

She finishes with the last song her mother ever wrote, Prosperina, a song of beguiling simplicity, like the saddest nursery rhyme ever written. When Martha sings it, she’s stripped down to skin-tight tartan trousers and an MW t-shirt that she’s customised with the words ‘Fuck the president’. It seems to say something profound about her resolve, her fearlessness, her duality, her complete and stark difference to just about anyone else around: her mother’s rich sense of musical heritage and profound spiritual innocence, her father’s foul-mouthed non-conformity, her own immutable beauty and singularity. She’s erratic and as much so in concert as on record, playing songs she’s barely rehearsed and others that sound like writer’s block, backed by a sterile, unsuitable ensemble, but just try to take your eyes off her, or think of anyone who’s a third as good as she is when she’s on song. Here that transcendence was periodic, most striking at the Chelsea Hotel, where:

You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception.

(3.5)

I pinched that shot at the top from these fellas. It's from her date at the Gateshead Sage.

REVIEW: Brian Wilson at the Royal Albert Hall

Friday 28 October 2016



Brian Wilson and his band, including Brian (at the piano), Darian Sahanaja (second from left), Al Jardine (white suit), Blondie Chaplin (blue suit) and Paul Von Mertens (front right).

Concerned that the frail, fragile Brian Wilson, the visionary behind the Beach Boys’ earth-shaking pop music, might struggle to put on a good show? Don’t worry baby...

You know the legend – and all of it true – of the landlubber who defined the surf sound, who perfected the art of pop with Pet Sounds, then pushed the boundaries of the medium with the LSD-fuelled Smile, which looked to build on the pioneering spirit of the sonically sublime single ‘Good Vibrations’, but instead exploded before lift-off, incapacitating Wilson in the process. His lost decades, his stalled comebacks under the malign eye of psychologist Eugene Landy, and then the immobile, lightly-jowled, fragile figure of the silver-haired sexagenarian embracing his legacy with new records, a re-recorded and now complete Smile and a decade of sold-out shows around the globe. This year, his 75th, he’s marked the 50th anniversary of his masterpiece, Pet Sounds by playing it in full at concert halls all over the world, bookended by two lengthy, exuberant sets of “rare cuts and greatest hits”, that gleeful embracing of the mythology of a needle dropping on a double-sided LP embraced as fully on stage as in the PR bumf around the shows.

Friday’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall (accompanied, incidentally by one of the most apposite, beautiful graphics I’ve seen for a show) was billed as the last time he’ll ever play Pet Sounds live, and so how could I miss it? Especially as I work there.

Surrounded by a band of uncommon quality, it takes Wilson a little while to warm up, his voice on the first three tracks a little metallic and out-of-step, but once he’s in the groove, the first half is a treat. He takes the low notes and Matt Jardine (son of founding Beach Boys member, Al Jardine, who’s also on stage) cuts in to take over when it’s a song defined by Wilson’s extraordinary ‘60s falsetto, except for on ‘Don’t Worry Baby’, a song that I love so dearly, and for which Jardine Jr is allowed to take centre-stage, delivering a mesmerising performance. The other highlights are ‘Surfer Girl’, a song lent an impossible poignancy by the announcement that it was Wilson’s first and the yearning way that he now sings it, ‘Darlin’’ – lent a shimmering Motown feel by guest vocalist Darian Sahanaja (more often seen on keyboards), and an outrageous 10-minute jam on ‘Wild Honey’. The latter is dominated by Blondie Chaplin, part of the Rolling Stones’ touring band for a decade, who turns up midway through the first half with a Gibson, weird white plimsolls and some weird, stutter dance moves, and proceeds to take over the show. His guitar licks and saxophonist Paul Von Mertens’ solos make this far more than a night of nostalgia, probing the material and dynamically reshaping it for 2016, while Al Jardine – who looks like Jimmy Carter playing Richard Widmark – repeatedly takes the burden of the show on his shoulders. He was never touched by God’s hand, as Wilson was, but he’s remarkably fresh, clear-voiced and charismatic, carrying chunks of the show with his charm and talent.

The second half begins with Pet Sounds in its entirety, from the staccato innocence of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ to a short, heartbreaking ‘Caroline No’, via the deft, subversive majesty of ‘God Only Knows’, the simple profundity of ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ and ‘Sloop John B’, transformed from the dirge of a thousand football chants back into one of the greatest pop songs ever written. I thought I could never hear it again as new, but this extraordinary night made it possible, its inclines steeper and more arresting, its foreshadowing of Wilson losing his mind ever more harrowing, and its repetition a mounting force that shook the walls of the Royal Albert Hall.

There’s a brief hiatus before we're treated to a tour of the band (who walk on one-by-one, each slightly increased ensemble playing a casual, well-oiled riff, like 'Smoke on the Water') then launched into the highlight of the night: Good Vibrations and then an incredible, incredibly fun run of early singles that’s like a medley in that they just don’t stop, but better still in that they’re all in full – and often fuller than on the record. A long, overpoweringly cheery ’Help Me Rhonda’ brings the Hall to its feet dancing, followed by a rambunctious ’Barbara Ann’, an escapist, relentless ’Surfin’ USA’ and then ‘Fun Fun Fun’, almost self-parodic in its naïvete and iconography (sun, surf and a T-Bird), and all the better for it. I’ve rarely experienced an atmosphere of such sheer, exultant joy: Wilson’s personal demons scuttling for cover in the midst of the celebratory atmosphere.



And then they’re back for a moment, as he closes the show by singing ‘Love & Mercy’ at his piano under a single spotlight, his fragility making it a little amateurish – as he coughs, misses a cue and then looks at his watch – but emotionally devastating. He wrote the song while trying to emerge from Eugene Landy’s shadow: it kicked off his first ever solo record, and gave a name to the recent Wilson biopic. He’s been back from the brink and he isn’t always all there, sometimes difficult to reconcile with the cocky, cherubic young genius who changed the world of popular music forever. Yet with the support of these cohorts and his old ones, who so transparently adore and revere him, he has wrestled control of his own legacy. As with Shane MacGowan and The Pogues, it was this mercurial songwriter – now broken – who made them anything at all, and now it’s the duty of the journeymen he catapulted into the stratosphere to carry him for a while. And they do.

It’s a deeply moving celebration of one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, but it’s more than that: it’s a show that’s vivid, alive and invigoratingly enjoyable: an exploration and reinvention of some of the finest songs ever written, with Wilson its centre and its beating heart, even if a part of him is still lost somewhere in the 1960s.

***

Thanks for reading.