“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.

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

Big Thief on tour

BIG THIEF at
Hammersmith Apollo, London (27 Feb)
Rock City, Nottingham (29 Feb)
Albert Hall, Manchester (1 Mar)
Ancienne Belgique, Brussels (5 Mar)
Paradiso, Amsterdam (6 Mar)

Every time you see Adrianne Lenker, she’s three different people. This month I’ve seen her five times.

It started like this. Last year I watched her enchant Union Chapel, picking at an outsized acoustic guitar, tooth missing, hiding behind a thatched fringe, whispering whimsical self-penned songs that seemed to be about potatoes but were suddenly about the cosmos. Four months later (two of which I’d spent in hospital), she played the Roundhouse with her band Big Thief, four disparate, perfectly and weirdly simpatico Brooklyn alt-folk scenesters.

She’d shaved her head and she was just screaming. Swaggering and screaming, guitar like a machine gun.

Later in 2019, her band played Bush Hall in one of those small miracles that London serves up now and again: announcement on Thursday, on sale Friday, gig on Monday, previewing their second album of the year, Two Hands, doing it in full for the-first-and-only-time, figuring out how to play these songs live, before our eyes, something between a workshop and a front seat to history. Since then they’ve been lauded by Pitchfork, the Guardian, and Barack Obama(‘s PR consultants), but it was how the shows made me feel. After Suede and the Manics gave way to The Strokes and The White Stripes, I thought I was through with bands – that really bands were the kind of thing you grow out of, like Ricicles or the Socialist Workers’ Party. Then The National came along and asked if that was in any way a tenable position. Big Thief set fire to it.

I had tickets to the London show, had the flyer magnet-pinned to my fringe for close to a year, but Big Thief aren’t a one-evening proposition. They’re mercurial and explosive, allergic to convention and setlists – to having a set list for more than one night in a row, even to sticking to the one drummer James Krivchenia has written – and seeing them just once suddenly seemed perverse. Like listening to Mahler’s Ninth once, enjoying it and then smashing the vinyl on the sideboard. Instead I could spend all my money going to Nottingham. And Manchester. And Brussels. And Amsterdam. Anywhere there were sympathetic Burins with fold-out sofas and an accepting attitude to turning up two hours early for gigs.

OK, I missed Glasgow and Paris somewhere in there, but the five shows were like a suite, or a Gus Van Sant film from back when he was great, and I’m left with this: a series of impressions, a juggling of snapshots, a succession of reinventions: the same but different, different but the same.



Hammersmith is first and it’s your erratic epic – their biggest gig ever, perhaps their longest. Big Thief are the only band whose singer’s hair is a continuing psychodrama of its own, and she turns up looking like Henry V. “He that outlives this day, and comes safe home/Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named/And rouse him at the name of Crispian,” says the grown Hal, and Lenker is a soul obsessed with home: the “good home” of ‘Parallels’, the home that everyone deserves in ‘Forgotten Eyes’, the home confused for a refuge in ‘Rock and Sing’. And this few, this happy few, this band of brothers so fierce in their gentle, sporadic, lolloping way: three men and this androgynous tour-de-force, Lenker unshaven and muscular and suited, spinning tortured love songs that are, upon inspection, not love songs at all but explorations of the male selves that at times flicker to her forefront. “Oh, the last time I saw Paul,” she breathes in one of their debut album’s heartstopping moments, “I was horrible and almost let him in.”



There are concessions to commercialism, or at least pragmatism, in London, but Big Thief are still just so irregular and counter-intuitive, and weird, and heavy, and fey. Which other band would kick off a landmark show with a new song called ‘Zombie Girl’, played acoustic and solo? Which band would meet every ovation with a wistfully abstruse deep cut? Or consent to an encore (by no means a given) from a pissed-up crowd of 5,000, do only a subdued ‘Rock and Sing’ and then leave. They quietly reinvent the Spotify Top Songs stuff – angular guitars, drum-and-vocal bridges, rolling rhythms – but at that stage I’m just getting attuned to it. I leave muttering something about Lenker being the only New Dylan since Dylan. You know in ‘Love Minus Zero’ when he sings, “My love, she speaks like silence”, or ‘Visions of Johanna – “The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face” – well no-one writes like that. But Lenker does. Not like Dylan, exactly – because what’s special about that? – but prolifically singular, with his perfect abstract specificity. “Your eyes were like machinery,” she sings in ‘Mary’. “Your hands were making artefacts in the corner of my mind.”



At Nottingham’s Rock City, bathed in blue, they manufacture atmosphere, then feed off it, swelling to twice their size (I’m on the front row now), pressing inexorably forward. “I love you, Adriana,” yells a male voice from the back of the room. Lenker scowls, says nothing. He says it once, twice, half-a-dozen times. She looks at her feet. It’s when two teenage girls begin to speak, freaking out at being in the same room with her that she engages. “I just love these songs so much,” says one, pushing her way forward, beginning to cry. Lenker, who’s crouching down over her guitar to fiddle with the amps, smiles, contorts her fingers into a thin and sturdy heart.

The show is intense, and in its intensity the tour’s themes start to reveal and congeal. You realise what a political record Two Hands is, with a directness that can only be communicated in person. ‘Not’ is an explosion of cathartic anguish, with something of Sleep Well Beast’s state-of-the-nation remit, a list song that exalts through endless negation, like Cole Porter just went fucking mental. Seen through the squall are Bible-old traumas and rampaging ills: climate emergency, consumerism, mortality, listlessness, loneliness. And at some point words are no longer enough, no matter how perfect the words, like when the harmonica comes in at the end of Dylan’s Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, and then ‘Not’ spirals into horror, madness, purposeful fury, and finally release; a howl, a blast of noise, a guitar solo that’s half-rehearsed, half-improvised, and by Amsterdam will be refined, Lenker no longer on her haunches, twiddling amp dials, but trading sonic perfection for picturesque rage, because the display, the physicality is part of the thing, if not the whole thing.



‘Forgotten Eyes’ is empathetic: a big hug, a socialist manifesto viewed through a hippy aesthetic. But ‘Shoulders’? That’s merely harrowing: domestic violence in primary colours, the sins of the father as anthem; at one point I turn half-around to see the whole crowd chanting in unison; it’s a definite moment, but it isn’t comfortable. In Manchester, Lenker will turn ‘The Toy’ into a stylised pantomime, her right hand a gun firing skywards as childhood play turns into misadventure, love transmogrifies into murder, and the horror of sudden, eyes-wide realisation twists America into an apocalyptic hellscape. But that’s not yet: here it’s just fraught and ugly. As these new songs flex their muscles, others are dragged into the present: the political present; the musical now – dragged upwards as the band degenerate into grunge. And then when it’s over, there’s just ‘Magic Dealer’, gentle as a sparrow in the dawn.

Manchester, though, is about those gestures. Lenker stretches out a hand towards the child by her side, before ‘Capacity’ turns introspective. She tracks a tear down her cheek. She fires the finger-gun. Birds fly away. And in ‘Masterpiece’s new, stompy segue, she clomps across the stage in black boots, facing away, the song as funky as it can ever get and still stab you in the heart. Because when she’s stopped playing at being the rockabilly George Clinton, she’s still got to go back to the mic, got to tell us that there’s only so much letting go you can ask someone to do.



She is avian. High cheekbones and a hooked nose. The wild, ethereal twitter of her head voice. And when she nods to a fast, burgeoning riff, ‘Shark Smile’ coming to life, her heads bobs and juts like a pigeon’s. Yes, she’s birdlike. Almost brittle. But her middle-range is powerful and her lower-range is brutal, and there’s such strength in this band. They’re pastoral and sensitive, but if you pollute that lake, they are going to fucking kill you. She handles her guitar like a feminist manifesto, and though it’s hard to find a new way of playing guitar live, rock clichés sit lightly on you when you’re a genius. Lenker moshes with a Beatle cut, backpedals as she thrashes out chords, delicately stamps her feet and shakes her head as ‘Forgotten Eyes’ takes shape, and screams as ‘Contact’ is made: the long, slow prelude, then skin touches skin, or metal touches brain, or a mind lurches awake, or somewhere in that vast empty blackness, something responds.



So often, her eyes are closed, and they flicker open to gaze into yours or just into the middle distance. She breaks sparingly but completely into a smile, into nervous laughter. There are thank yous, at times that feeling of being quietly overwhelmed that a band get when they’re suddenly big, but that comes only when they speak, and the spell of impetus slackens. In Brussels there’s a soliloquy about Europe. The cobbled streets… the beauty… wanting to go there, but feeling afraid. It’s not scary, though, it’s people, says Lenker – and stone. In Minnesota, everything was thin, but… no… there’s beauty there too, and she’s into ‘Cattails’, which rocks, but like a hand on a cradle, a part-cryptic bucolic lullaby, a deceptive 12-string dance track about the natural world, full-to-choking with beauty, in its imagery, its sounds, its meter. “And the clusters fell, like an empty bell,” sings Lenker, the rhythm so infectious that she’s proto-rapping. “Meteor shower at the motel.” It makes my throat swell.



She plays around with those rhythms, always. In ‘Mary’, her hypnotic, lulling fast-talking can either speed or drag, make the song lost and dreamlike, or else relentless and pretty; she injects urgency, uncertainty, certainty into ‘Not’. The freakout jams are different every night.

The setlist changes every night too, but there are runs of songs, and you get to know them. ‘Masterpiece’ into ‘Capacity’ – sad and sensual, spinning the heartbroken lover trope into bisexual erotica – then ‘Shark Smile’ and sometimes ‘Real Love’, that exquisitely painful smash-and-grab that takes one look at songs that glorify abusive relationships and decides that actually I’ll probably be alright, thanks – and suddenly you’re the kid watching his alcoholic mum get the shit beaten out of her by its dad. In Brussels, the poignancy almost drowns you, the “hummingbird” passage offbeat, strange and haunting, like it’s broken out of The Innocents: a quiet, haunting new song, the child’s song, suddenly growing out of this old one. In Amsterdam that’s gone forever, but the song is a monster, stretched out and violent. That show is the heaviest of the lot, ‘Shark Smile’ sped up, aggressive but still insouciant, its lust barely dampened by its auto-wreck tragedy.



Then there’s the acoustic stretch: for some of it the band take a back seat and, in bassist Max Oleartchik’s case, a literal one. ‘Orange’ is one of the loveliest, most straightforward songs Lenker has ever written – that’s played in London, then comes back for the Benelux gigs. There are new tracks: the conventionally attractive ‘Zombie Girl’; ‘Dried Roses’, premiered in Nottingham, which takes Lenker’s whimsical-metaphysical thing near to the point of parody but damn-near breaks you anyway; and ‘Time Escaping’, which eludes me still; I don’t remember it, nor how it goes. Maybe one day. She’s backed by the band for ‘Happiness’ – another list song, Lenker-style – for the rocky ‘Bruiser’, for the gorgeous ‘Two Rivers’, which meanders through familiar territory with an iridescent beauty. She picks a repetitive pattern over Krivchenia’s brushwork, voice scaling mountains of arpeggios, checking out the scenery, until finally she gets to the crux of it, words trembling: “Is it a crime to do what you ask me to?”

Krivchenia is a superb drummer, and his languorous expression – leaning forward, mouth lolling open – sets some sort of tone. He cracks one smile in five nights. Oleartchik – feet bare, clad in a pink onesie or a dress, often-times perched on a stack of amps – is unaffected, unobtrusive and unfussy, as if he’s scarcely realised he’s playing bass. And Buck Meek, extreme left of the stage, as Lenker is centre-right, has his knee eternally bent, slim shoes that feel like they should be winkle pickers, leaning towards her, towards Krivchenia, looming almost, lurching with those thin legs as he issues spare notes and shimmering soundscapes, but his talent sublimated to his group, with just the odd lead guitar part. And sometimes he’s scarcely playing at all, but fuck me those vocal harmonies, lifting ‘Mary’ and ‘Masterpiece’ still higher – and it’s only when he comes in, adding to Lenker’s voice, to Krivchenia’s, to Oleartchik’s, that you realise those sharply uptilted Texan vowels were what was missing. High forehead, hair like corn drifting back in a stack at the back of his head; guileless, polite, deceptively brilliant; when Lenker goes off, and yes she goes off, he instinctively complements her crackling invention, their chemistry absolute, and you think of that photo of them in front of the camper van on the front of ‘A Sides’, when they were a couple, perhaps halfway to getting married. In Amsterdam there’s even a rare concession to practicality, as he gets a solo spot, because he’s back later in the month as a solo supporting act, and he has tickets to sell.



So yes it’s a band, and if they ever split up, I will cry, but for all that it’s Lenker’s band. Walking on stage with wet hair, in high-waisted trousers, stripping off her suit jacket to unmask a sleeveless top – white or blue or khaki – after a frenetic guitar solo, an illegible tattoo snaking down her arm, she holds you for 90, 100 minutes in her thrall. She comes face-on to the audience just once, as ‘Masterpiece’ reaches its zenith; otherwise she’s off to one side, one of four points, but the driving force, content in her endless capacity. With three people, and three people herself.

***

Setlists:

Review of 2019: Part 2 – Live

Part 1 was about books. Part 2 is about events and tbh it never gets as many hits, as you can famously read a book that someone read last year, but you cannot attend a gig in the past.



Gigs of the year:

When I wasn't reading, writing, working or being stabbed in the kidney by that surgeon I mentioned, I've mostly been at gigs. I've seen Knopfler, Clapton, Mariah Carey, the Lake Poets, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Michael Giacchino and three nights of film scores at the Royal Albert Hall, old favourites David Ford, June Tabor (with Oyster Band), Bjӧrk and Kate Rusby, thrilled to Topic Records' 80th Anniversary show – which introduced me to Emily Portman and Lisa Knapp – and celebrated the long-awaited return of folk hero Ruth Notman, who's been busy in the interim training to become a nurse. And then there was that weird event where I went to an 'immersive screening' of Ghost World, and found myself watching more than an hour of ragtime jazz performed by director Terry Zwigoff and mad sexist Robert Crumb, punctuated by rants about political correctness. Yay!

But here are the 10 gigs that meant the most to me in 2019:



10. The Milk Carton Kids (Barbican) – I’ve got a bit of a thing about Inside Llewyn Davis, the wintry film in which the Coens brothers shrug off their arch, aloof smugness, and burrow into the psyche of their sullen anti-hero, a titular traditional singer wandering freezing Greenwich Village as the folk revival approaches. I can only play four songs on the guitar and three of them are from this film. So when I heard there was a spin-off concert film, Another Day, Another Time, I thought I better see it. And that's how I discovered The Milk Carton Kids, and a lot more besides. The duo's deceptively complex songs at first seemed frozen in time and genre – almost a pastiche of early Simon and Garfunkel – but over time they've diversified and gone deeper, pain and fear bringing not weariness but grace. Their biggest show so far, at London's Barbican, was a fast-paced treat mixing frenetic flatpicking, heartbreaking close harmony and the best between-songs badinage since the Manics stopped saying awful things for attention.


Yes she was, and yes I did.

9. Ariana Grande (The O2) – I liked Ariana Grande, the gay-friendly feminist who became a hero to my home city of Manchester, but I can’t say I liked her music. Then a friend played me ‘Into You’, that intoxicating blast of dance-y horniness, followed by ‘thank u, next’, the sad, wise title-track of her fifth album, and I stopped being a stupid dick who doesn’t know anything. A lot of rubbish gets talked about middle-aged men who spend more than a hundred pounds to go and see Ariana Grande live by themselves, but to me I am a legend. While the O2 isn’t the best place to see any kind of show – it’s essentially a warehouse in which the atmosphere simply evaporates, and everything is just too far away – Grande is a great performer, and when she isn’t also dancing (which takes the edge off the majesty), she has an insane set of pipes. Some songs I loved already (‘Into You’ was spectacular, ‘Fake Smile’ exuberantly misanthropic), and others came to life in concert: the knockabout ‘Be Alright’, the desperate ‘Breathin’’, though the numbers utilising the walkway that looped towards our section of the arena both raised the spirits and underlined just how good it would be to see Grande in a smaller and less antiseptic space. As she ripped through ‘thank u, next’ for the climax, she and the dancers skipped around it, waving Pride flags.



Lily! Martha! Certainly-one-of-the-Thompsons,-not-sure-which-one!

8. Rufus and Martha Wainwright: A Not So Silent Night (Southbank Centre) – The siblings in London together at Christmas for the first time in a decade. The older generation may no longer want to travel, but their own was out in force, including half-sister Lucy Wainwright Roche and their cousin (and personal favourite), the marvellously-monikered Lily Lanken. This all used to be about roots music and family, but Rufus is now the artistic brains behind these jamborees, and he’s made the whole thing so incredibly gay. It’s delightful. Among the guests were Dan Gillespie Sells, Neil Tennant and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, alongside various members of the inter-connected Thompson clan, Guy Garvey and Jenni Muldaur. The show was intended to celebrate the festive season but also the work of Kate McGarrigle, the matriarch who made her last public appearance at the previous London show in 2009. Being in a packed house watching Ellis-Bextor act her way through Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s ‘First Born’, a deep cut from their second record and a song that’s very personal to me, was a surreal experience – as was hearing a second live version of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ this year; that’s the signature song of my musical idol, Sandy Denny. Lucy Wainwright Roche’s vocal here was better than Olivia Chaney’s, but she didn’t have half of Fairport behind her. Chrissie Hynde’s contributions may have been tuneless, but the rest of the show was scintillating, especially Martha’s Janis Joplin-esque ‘Mary Had a Baby’, her duet with Lanken on Jackson Browne’s left-wing atheist carol, ‘Rebel Jesus’, and Rufus’s ‘O Holy Night’, sung a capella and in French. I went in as a Rufus agnostic, but left as a fan. My affection for Martha Wainwright, you can take as a given. This was just about the perfect Christmas evening.



7. Rhiannon Giddens (Southbank Centre) – An extravagantly gifted performer, whose vocal texture, range, expression and timing is of the sort that most people can only dream about. This show saw her collaborating with Sicilian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, his self-deprecating patter and exceptional tambourine solos providing the perfect counterpoint to her spiky lectures on African-American experience and full-lunged outpourings of empathy and collective grief. The shade is balanced by the light. When you know what it’s about, ‘At the Purchaser’s Option’ is as gruelling as beautiful music can ever get, but her uproarious cover of Ethel Waters’ ‘Underneath Our Harlem Moon’, which reinstates the author’s original, unsanitised lyrics, is an uproarious, swinging showstopper, and the Celtic folk of ‘Molly Brannigan’ showcases the facility with a quickening vocal line that made me fall in love with her in the first place.



6. Johnny Marr (Southbank Centre) – I grew up as a huge Smiths fan (thanks Dad), but it had never really occurred to me that I might go to see Johnny Marr live. Then I heard him on the Adam Buxton podcast, asked for his book for Christmas, and ended up buying a ticket to his Meltdown show on the night itself. An encore of ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ and ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ will do me, though I was surprised how much I liked his solo stuff – especially the obscenely catchy ‘Easy Money’. I think this show gave me more simple pleasure than any other this year. And Marr himself is so easy to like, which isn’t something one can necessarily say about all the members of the Morrissey-Marr songwriting partnership.



5. 33 Revolutions Per Minute (JW3) – This was such a magical night: an event inspired by Dorian Lynskey’s history of protest songs (which I wrote about here), featuring a gallery of gargantuan contemporary talents. Ayanna Witter-Johnson got the biggest ovation of the evening for her captivating ‘Redemption Song’ – accompanying herself on stand-up cello – but it was one of a string of highlights, from Kathryn Williams’ clear-throated cover of ‘American Tune’, to David Ford’s explosive takes on ‘John Walker’s Blues’ and the ‘Fixin’-to-Die Rag’, and a climactic, unexpected and thoroughly incongruous ‘Up the Junction’ from a very late Chris Difford. It was that kind of night. A few months later, I saw Williams hosting a Daylight Music show at Union Chapel, she and Ford doing a few numbers of their own, and spotlighting various protégés, including Phil Langran, whose ‘Time’s Dark Wing’ is simply one of the finest songs I’ve ever heard.



4. Richard Thompson: 70th birthday party (Royal Albert Hall) – A once-in-a-lifetime show, for those who incline towards folk, with virtually every existing luminary of the British scene coming to pay homage. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and an eclectic one, with guests typically doing one song of theirs and then one song of his. Surprises include Bob Mould’s chugging, punkish ‘Turning of the Tide’ (above), Thompson, his son Teddy and Maddy Prior duetting on a heightened ‘Grey Funnel Line’, and Loudon Wainwright’s ebullient ‘Swimming Song’, alongside more expected treats, like the birthday boy’s own ‘Beeswing’, delivered with a delicacy befitting its title. There’s also Kate Rusby returning to ‘Withered and Died’, half of Fairport Convention’s classic Liege & Lief line-up backing Olivia Chaney on ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, and Harry Shearer alienating the half of the audience who clearly haven’t seen Spinal Tap with an in-character (and interminable), ‘She Puts the Bitch in Obituary’.



3. Bob Dylan; support: Neil Young, Laura Marling and Cat Power (Hyde Park) – At a time when seeing Bob had begun to feel more like a duty than a treat, he came roaring back. Full review here.



2. Big Thief (The Roundhouse) – In January, I saw Adrianne Lenker on-stage in a church (London’s Union Chapel), performing wistful acoustic folk ballads behind a thatch of fringe, murmuring awkwardly through the void in her teeth. Three months later, she’s had a buzzcut, got a replacement tooth and is just screaming, amid a maelstrom of noise in a beer-soaked Roundhouse. This has been a big year for Big Thief, the most exciting band on the planet, ending with two albums in most ‘best of’ lists, and this was their biggest show to date. They can do it all, and at the Roundhouse they did: the hush and whimsy of ‘Spud Infinity’, the apocalyptic squall of ‘Not’ (the year’s best song?), the pure release of ‘Masterpiece’. No-one is writing more interesting material than Lenker’s tortured, introspective, pastoral alt-folk, nor delivering it with such exquisite abandon. The band, though, are not merely a vehicle for one woman’s genius, there’s a chemistry there: the fleet-fingered flat-picking of crooked-grinned Buck Meek, James Krivchenia’s lolloping, long-armed beats, Max Oleartchik... playing the bass (look, I don’t know much about music). I saw them again at Bush Hall in October, premiering new record Two Hands, and it was another experience entirely: every bit as vital, the band still figuring out the songs, groping towards greatness and frequently finding it. Next year I’m going to follow them on tour.



1. Robyn (Alexandra Palace) – Total catharsis, Robyn-style: the sexiest, saddest songs in the pop canon, battered across with the ultimate in quicksilver charisma, clad in white knee-length boots. I’ve never seen a performer with greater stage presence, a firmer grasp of a show’s necessary theatricality, or better dance moves. During ‘Dancing on My Own’, a celebration of jealous, heartbroken melancholia that represents some kind of peak, 10,000 voices join hers, and Robyn bursts into tears. Then it’s a wall of noise – an outpouring of love, and gratitude, for the returning queen of chilly Swedish electro-pop, doing her first UK shows in nine years – that goes on and on and on.

***

Theatre of the year...

... is probably a stretch, as I only saw 10 plays, and there were definitely more than 10 plays out there. Because I'm extremely clever, I didn't end up seeing anything I didn't broadly enjoy, though my tolerance for the annoying affectations of musical theatre (as opposed to the most naturalistic and intimate musical film) seems to be shrinking. While Come From Away (Phoenix Theatre) built to a rather lovely climax, fashioning something largely feelgood out of 9/11, Dear Evan Hansen (Noel Coward Theatre) dealt with its own subject – teen suicide – in a less than humane, intelligent way, though it had some fine moments. Hansard (National Theatre) broke no new ground, and largely recycled its audience's own liberal prejudices, though it was highly entertaining and extremely well-acted by Alex Jennings and Lindsay Duncan. The Lehman Trilogy (Piccadilly Theatre) went the other way, struggling to get ahold of its themes across three theatrically inventive but rather exhausting hours.

These were my favourites:



6. Anna (National Theatre) – Ella Hickson, who wrote the best play of 2018, returned with this gimmicky thriller, which was about itself and not much else. The audience was complicit in the surveillance state of East Germany, strapping on headphones and hearing only what the heroine heard, as she tried to survive in an atmosphere of spiralling paranoia (and, if we're being very literal about it, in a soundproof box with the rest of the cast). After The Writer, it felt like a slight comedown, but it was neatly conceived and made the most of its quirk, with some neat twists and a couple of great jump scares.



5. Present Laughter (The Old Vic) – Simply Noel Coward done well, with Andrew Scott having the time of his life as a vain, selfish, philandering actor who's making his entourage's life hell in '30s London. It wasn't deep, but it was riotously funny.



4. All My Sons (The Old Vic) – Classy adaptation of the early Arthur Miller play, with – and please excuse the banality – one of the handsomest sets I've ever seen: a quietly idyllic back garden in a small American town. Jenna Coleman couldn't hold her own among a heavy-hitting cast, and Bill Pullman couldn't project to the cheap seats, but he, Sally Field and Colin Morgan captured Miller's anger and anguish – tragedy on an intimate but epic scale.



3. The Starry Messenger (Wyndham's Theatre) – Space, adultery and adult education: this was none-more-Lonergan, with an exceptional performance from Matthew Broderick as a frustrated science lecturer trapped by the quietly festering American Dream. How it can be that, and make me laugh as hard as it did, is some achievement. Elizabeth McGovern, also billed above the title, had little to do until the final act.



2. A Very Expensive Poison (The Old Vic) – Lucy Prebble returned with this freewheeling, meta-textual romp through the Litvinenko tragedy – where, as with Dylan's 'Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll', perhaps the greatest tragedy happened after the killing. The material positively swaggers, throwing everything into the mix, but the right everything, at the right time, and no-one I can think of, in any medium, writes better off-kilter one-liners. Reece Shearsmith is perfect as a supercilious, bombastic and seductive Putin, at one point hanging out of a box to tell everyone to go home, as the story is clearly over.



1. Rosmersholm (Duke of York's Theatre) – Ibsen at his bleakest and most pointed, as influential former cleric Rosmer (Tom Burke) strives to understand his relationship with free-spirited Rebecca (Hayley Atwell) – and reconcile his friendship with smooth-talking hatemonger Kroll (Giles Terera) – as an election approaches, and the vultures of the press circle. This electrifying, overpowering adaptation saw writer Duncan Macmillan tease out the parallels with our current national binfire, played out by a note-perfect cast amid the light shafts and dust motes of an ancestral home that boxes in its characters as vividly as their political and personal dilemmas.

***

Other live stuff/exhibitions:



My favourite comedy set of the year was Stewart Lee's new show: Snowflake/Tornado, a succession of inspired, airtight routines about liberalism, Alan Bennett, Netflix, Fleabag, anti-PC campaigners and 'saying the unsayable', the last of which consists of him gurning, spitting, sputtering and striving to make noises for literally ten minutes. This show might be the best thing he's ever done. It's certainly the hardest I've laughed this year. He is simply on a different level to almost any other political comic working today, and probably the second funniest person in his house.

James Acaster's Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999 was often brilliant, but genuinely required a better working knowledge of shit TV than I've got to hand. It was also great to see Bassem Youssef doing his first English-language show, and to watch Daniel Kitson confounding a good portion of his audience by pretending for quite some time that his set would consist of him reading out a cabinet's worth of index cards listing his possessions. It didn't. Discovery of the year was Sarah Keyworth, who somehow emerged triumphant from a showcase at Union Chapel also featuring Sara Pascoe, Rose Matafeo and Phil Wang (and Arthur Smith).



And at work I got to be involved with Letters Live, one of the best nights of the year (even when Rory Stewart resigned from the Tory Party on stage and I had to work until 1am). Louise Brealey, pictured, – who can pack so much emotion, so subtly, into any material – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and (much to my surprise) Alan Carr were the stand-out stars.

Across the road, Dr Matthew Sweet, Pamela Hutchinson and David Benedict probed the Warner Bros canon in a lovely Proms Plus talk, and at the BFI Malcolm McDowell provided some insights and lols that turned out to be rather well-rehearsed when I decided to venture onto YouTube in search of further #content.



My favourite exhibition of the year was also the smallest, and it was, of course, your penis, a tiny addendum to the Design Museum's gargantuan (and impressive) Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition, which collected some of his stunning news photography for Look Magazine. Visual art-themed jaunts spotlighted work by Matisse, William Blake, Abram Games and Eva Hesse – while the IWM's oddly disjointed Making a New World delved into WWI from a few odd and interesting angles – but Olafur Eliasson: In real life at the Tate Modern (above) was so great because it was so unlike anything else I'd been to, with a rainbow in one room and a world of coloured fog in another.

***

Thanks for reading. I'll chat about films a bit in the next (and final) part.

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.

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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

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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