Amanda Palmer live at Heaven, 02.09.11
Posted: October 17, 2011 Filed under: Reviews (live) | Tags: amanda palmer, bitter ruin, dresden dolls, gigs, grand theft orchestra, neil gaiman, Rhian E Jones, tim minchin, tom robinson Leave a comment »Written for Wears the Trousers 08.09.11
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I’m loath to compare anything to a box of chocolates, but Amanda Palmer gigs do come close. The choice as to what you might get ranges from the likelihood of a soft-centred collaboration with her husband Neil Gaiman, to the slightly bitter aftertaste of something from 2010’s ill-advised Evelyn Evelyn project. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted: September 5, 2011 Filed under: how i was made, Rambling | Tags: amanda palmer, gigs, lupen crook, manic street preachers, martina topley-bird, music as politics, politics, self indulgence, singles, the kent delta, tricky 1 Comment »*
Yeah, I’m still here, although increasingly writing elsewhere. Notably I wrote for BadRep on Why ‘Chav’ is a Feminist Issue.
Have some more songs.
Lupen Crook, Junk n Jubilee
This from oh, such a while back now. Seems like a whole other London. A cut-off video, which is all I could find, but do hear the proper version, which still makes me tense with the urge to put my fist through the window of the Hawley Arms:
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Manic Street Preachers, A Design For Life
This from the band too weird to talk about when you talk about the 90s. Included half because I’ve just been back to the place I grew up (and for ‘grew up’, read ‘grew up a Manics fan’) and half because the song resonates with me right now, with reality topping dystopian visions at every turn almost faster than one can think them up:
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Oh, and I went to an Amanda Palmer gig last Friday. Not to damn with faint praise or anything, but I liked her more than I did when I wrote this.
Patti Smith, ‘Because the Night’ (live)
Posted: March 24, 2010 Filed under: how i was made, Raves | Tags: albums, gigs, patti smith, Rhian E Jones 2 Comments »Like a certain kind of Dad tends to ruin Bob Dylan, Julie Burchill almost ruined Patti Smith for me. I only really trust Julie Burchill’s opinion on the need to outlaw asbestos, and my early-teenage reading of her enthusing over Smith made my eyes roll like a pill dropped on the floor of Soho House. A year or so later, I listened to Horses and kicked myself. Her stark and disdainful image on the record sleeve left me as amazed as the music. To realise that not only was it okay to be female, to be queer, to be ungroomed, to read, to write, to have ambition, to want to get out, to let yourself go – it could actually be brilliant.
On Saturday I went to her book-signing at the South Bank. The book itself is interesting, not least for its function as a kind of anti-confessional, a memoir shrouded not in prudishness or desperate self-mythology but content, affectionate dignity. She also played three songs, the second of which was her cover of ‘Because the Night’. She asked the crowd to join in to cover her nerves, and we did, hesitantly and subdued, nearly reverent:
There is something in her recasting of Springsteen’s song, the swooping and quavery way she delivers ‘they can’t hurt you now…’, that perfectly captures for me the certainty of protection afforded by music and its sharing, the sense of at once standing recklessly, defiantly before the world and taking refuge from it with another who understands. Making it so by proclaiming that it is so. On Saturday, collectively participating in its singing felt like something primitive, a basic ward against the elemental world outside my head. (It’s the chorus that does it. Not that the security, trust and defiant resolve embedded in its primal thump is peculiar to this song; I’d think, and frequently have thought, the same when singing drunkenly along to Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’.)
Did you know Patti Smith used to work as a bookseller? She talked a bit about that, about having the permanent mark of the bookseller that means that, when in bookshops these days, she still occasionally gets asked for directions, and about the pre-fame certainty of failure and unappreciation. This led on to her method of getting over this by recalling that William Blake was an unappreciated and ridiculed failure for his entire life. I must admit, my optimism worn down to a stump, that whenever I hear variations on this theme I find it trite at best and depressing at worst, rather than comforting, but I managed to avoid thinking so for the duration of her saying so. It helped that her speaking voice is gorgeous: low, hypnotic, sleepy, vaguely like Dylan’s, chopping off the ends of words and pronouncing ‘cigarette’ without its middle syllable so it sounds like ‘secret’.
Face to face, she was astonishingly old, I thought: nerve-thin, tightly strung, beatific. Smile. Clasp of the hand. I skipped off down the South Bank in the spring drizzle, the book clutched to me like it could stop bullets.
The Empress of I Scream: Amanda Palmer, Islington Union Chapel, 12.09.09
Posted: September 16, 2009 Filed under: Raves, Reviews (live) | Tags: amanda palmer, dresden dolls, gigs, Rhian E Jones 1 Comment »In an Islington pub for pre-gig drinks, I order that unpretentious student/goth classic, a snakebite-and-black. Because this pub has delusions of grandeur, the drink comes served in a goblet of engraved glass, an elegant setting belying the cheap and giddy good time that swirls in its velvety depths. As a stylish repackaging of the marginal and derided, it’s quite an Amanda Palmer way of doing things.
Across the street on the forecourt of the Union Chapel, a man with the dress and demeanour of a Victorian undertaker is peddling on a contraption of polished wood that might be a piano, might be a hearse. Slightly too-large-for-comfort sockpuppets are carried by men in black. The circus is in town, gloriously, and chancing across a beauty parlour full of sailors wouldn’t come as any great surprise. On the rows of wooden pews inside the venue, clusters of Palmerettes bloom like a thousand flowers: dark-eyed, candyfloss-haired, irrepressible and remarkably dressed. Amanda Palmer gigs are no bad place for the self-conscious, though; from the moment our hostess takes to the stage, resplendent this evening in a full-length swathe of black and white stripes, you can be fairly confident that no one’s looking at you. Although the evening features question-and-answer sessions and the auctioning of a painting completed during the show, this is less the Amanda and Friends Musical Cabaret that other of her gigs are more accurately billed as. Both the setting and her performance tonight ensure that the spotlight can barely drag itself away from her.
I often forget that the piano is a percussion instrument. In this respect Palmer’s playing is a revelation, a hammering out of powerful, authoritative notes that drill her words into your hindbrain. As a vocalist, she deserves superlatives that haven’t been invented yet; ‘Brechtian’ doesn’t come close, and neither does ‘punk’ or ‘cabaret’. Her voice tolls like a church bell, its dramatic depth and texture punctuated by the lightning-quick criss-cross of her hands on the keys. Her delivery of the songs tonight veers between imperious intensity (the stabbing staccato of ‘Runs in the Family’, or her nigh-on terrifying, breakneck cover of Jason Webley’s ‘Icarus’), and a yearning vocal caress which lights up ‘Boston’ and contrasts with the lyrical violence of ‘Delilah’. And then there are extraordinary, almost uncapturable moments, like her Struwwelpeter cover or the piece of Bach she plays after a typically nervy and self-effacing introduction. Her revelling in music is infectious and, like all too few artists, she concentrates on giving back as much enjoyment and enthusiasm as she inspires.
(There’s a lot to be said about whether it matters, and how much and why, that Palmer is a female artist. Talking before, during and afterwards with starry-eyed provincial girls who’ve made a pilgrimage to London for this gig, hearing them freestyle her Palin-baiting lyrics and indulging in unashamed pansexuality – of course it matters. When I was the age and in the dire smalltown straits of some of this crowd, there was no one comparable in the public eye to entertain, affirm or inspire. I had no one to nail the absurdity of street harassment with the crucifying accuracy of ‘Ampersand’, and nothing approaching ‘Bank of Boston Beauty Queen’ and its wry dissection of the rewards of self-actualisation. And so, as a female and a music fan, I’m grateful for her. But in many other ways, Palmer is a transcendent, liberatory force of nature, and the media she chooses matter less than the message.)
Back to tonight. The incongruous candlelit venue is ripe for subversion, and she takes great pleasure in having her charming companion deliver Derek and Clive’s profanity-ridden parody hymn. Later, the magnificent ‘Oasis’ becomes a sacrilegious sing-along, complete with happy-clapping and exuberant shouts of ‘CRACKWHORE’ from the congregation. The encore, however, sees her stand stock-still, hands clasped before her like she’s ready to recite at Sunday-school, and perform an astonishing unaccompanied cover of Tori Amos’ ‘Me and a Gun’. Clear-eyed and spine-chilling, it’s a no-but-seriously flipside to ‘Oasis’ that makes the crowd collectively catch our breath. The crystalline version of ‘The Point of it All’ which follows, heartwrenching enough on its own terms, seems more affecting for being something of a conduit for the emotions held in check throughout the previous song. A subdued but stunningly powerful final note, it sends me back onto the still-unreclaimed street rejoicing in faith reaffirmed. Praise be.
Hopelessly Devoto’d: Magazine, Royal Festival Hall, 1.09.09
Posted: September 2, 2009 Filed under: how i was made, Raves, Reviews (live) | Tags: buzzcocks, gigs, howard devoto, magazine, morrissey, radiohead, Rhian E Jones 8 Comments »The debt that’s owed to Magazine and Howard Devoto, both musically and stylistically, is massive, from Radiohead’s paranoid melancholy to Joy Division’s jumpy genius. Morrissey, a fanboy from early on, would never have made his career complete without summing himself up to the point of self-parody in Devoto’s line I know the meaning of life / It doesn’t help me a bit. And on a Tuesday night in the twenty-first century, after the end of office hours, with London’s South Bank still marinading in post-Bank Holiday blues, peerless post-punk outfit Magazine are ‘reconvening’. The future ain’t what it was, alright.
This is my first gig at the Royal Festival Hall, and it feels about as incongruous as you’d imagine. Most of the glass-and-air-and-exhibition-space complex has the feel of an aircraft hangar, and waiting for the gig to start is akin to sitting around, sipping from plastic glasses of overpriced drink, in the hours before your flight is called. The bar urges you to order your interval drinks in advance to avoid the rush.
At a respectable hour we’re ushered to the fifth floor and out into seats in a box to the right of the stage. The whole venue is odd from up here. The boxes jut like cars on the slope of a rollercoaster and the crowd, spread out below us, is balding and bare-armed in the anticipatory heat. Magazine have always attracted the self-styled intelligentsia and that part of their fanbase appears to have grown in the thirty years they’ve been away. It is, as my companion observes, a very paunchy audience. There are children, there are mums and dads, there are ageing Camden casualties with their hair still – or perhaps, once more – an ill-judged peroxide. It feels very much like we’ve taken a night out from the present day and our current personae to not so much step back in time as step outside it.
The lights dim. Showtime. Projected onto the back of the stage is The Soap Show: Episode 2009. The spotlight glints off a glistening pate. It’s Devoto, dull-suited and scarlet-shirted, glaring round and holding the eye of the crowd like a ringmaster. He’s very far from his Bambi-eyed boyhood, but then aren’t we all. He’s aged with all the advantages of a teenager who started out looking fiftysomething, and he moves like a cross between Dr Evil and Nijinsky.
For the first hour or so the band run through third album The Correct Use of Soap, all the songs in order, including their bizarre and broken cover of Sly Stone’s ‘Thank You’. In between songs, Devoto deadpans quotes from the anonymous writer of Caring For Your Record Collection, a pamphlet which must be older than the thirty years the band are making up for. Its pay-off line is ‘Try to avoid, ever, lending records to your friends’.
‘Turn the guitar up!’ shouts a voice from the back, several times. The band pay no attention at all.
The album’s highlight as played tonight is ‘You Never Knew Me’, a swirling, tauntingly tender glimpse of the Buzzcocks roots which otherwise stay as well-hidden as a teenage tattoo at a job interview. They close the first half with ‘A Song from Under the Floorboards’, which Devoto introduces as a song detailing ‘what happens when you don’t manage your coping mechanisms properly’. Like Radiohead’s indebted ‘Let Down’, the song pulls you down with it, spreading its hands to show you Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmare extended to a world glimpsed only through the cracks. Devoto nails the chorus, snatching an imaginary insect from the air with precision so pinpoint that I flinch.
On the show’s second half the record is flipped. They open with Dave Formula playing the RFH organ halfway up the wall at the back of the stage, while behind a lectern at the stage’s lip Devoto intones his spoken-word piece ‘The Book’, the story of an entrance into hell, and for the rest of the set Noko’s guitar licks and Barry Adamson’s basslines come boiling, scourging, coruscating across the stage like something tangible.
As I’ve often said to emo kids in love with the validity of unconventional attraction: if you must form emotional attachments to the tubby and balding and call it cool, then Devoto’s your man. Like Morrissey these days, he’s got an odd balletic grace that transcends his age and stockiness. He slips the microphone out of its stand like he’s unsheathing a dagger, legs twisted and spine crooked like Steerpike, and his control of the stage tonight is something to behold: not a movement or a moment wasted. He doesn’t touch an instrument all night, but he’s dead-on in touch with the music: fingers snap, wrists flick, arms windmill, imaginary whips are cracked over the rhythm section. More than once he leaps, both feet off the ground, and brings his hands down flat at the split second the music stops dead. It’s something beyond dancing, something short of conducting: a blindingly obvious and perfect balance between controlled and controller.
In this mood, when he gives the off-the-cuff command that we don’t have to stay seated, within seconds there’s a rush for the space in front of the stage. The back rows and balconies rise and from there on in the set is thrown at us head-on, ‘Permafrost’ snarling unsettlingly out of the speakers with Devoto transformed from avuncular maitre d’ into something darker that holds the eye and ear transfixed. At the song’s apocalyptic apex, with the presence and possession of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Devoto sneers ‘I will / drug you / and fuck you / on the remains of the permafrost’ and the possibility that the little freak won’t doesn’t even cross the mind. (And with manual dexterity like tonight’s? Bring it on.)
Straight on into ‘The Light Pours out of Me’. Songs this good should be strictly rationed. Even – or especially – in the mouths of fiftysomethings, nothing sums up bored adolescence like the listlessly buzzing, chopped-out lines ‘Time flies / time crawls / like an insect / up and down the walls’. Always a band ahead of their time, post-punk while punk proper was still revving up and sounding no less undateable thirty years on, Magazine have achieved something like timelessness. There’s no ‘Shot By Both Sides’ tonight, due one suspects to their pioneering contrariness as much anything else, but the whole of the set has been a reminder that the best a band can offer is the chance of losing yourself in the crowd.
When they pin me to the wall: The Indelicates, the Metro, 18.10.08
Posted: October 23, 2008 Filed under: Raves, Reviews (live) | Tags: gigs, the indelicates Leave a comment »Last night’s Indelicates gig was a welcome confirmation of their place in my heart. I was closer to the front than I’ve been for a while – front row in front of Julia, where a baffling amount of space had been left, possibly by her sheer force of charisma or possibly due to fear of incurring her imperious wrath by getting too close while being clearly inferior. Essentially I fell in love with this band the first time I saw them, and they’ve never really deviated from the impression I was left with then. As a five-piece they were interacting far more emphatically and playfully than I’ve seen before. The playing’s more tight these days and as a function of their confidence, precision and bottomless rage, the songs sometimes feel deliberately deployed like gunshots.
Something it’s taken me some time to appreciate is the band’s impressiveness in aesthetic terms. Both female Indelicates have a unique sartorial elegance and poise; where Kate remains serenely unruffled throughout, cool and almost detached in her own bass-heroic world, Julia throws herself into her role, singing with eyes-screwed-shut concentration and finishing songs with icy precision collapsing into uncomprehending, self-effacing smiles, looking half-embarrassed by her degree of accomplishment and its reception. Simon, dressed brilliantly bizarrely (cf last night’s t-shirt featuring Cher as Che Guevara), just stares and sneers and seethes. And then there’s their rhythm guitarist, bless him. A shining example of the lengths one must go to for attention when your bandmates have the stage presence of Simon and Julia, his services to swivel-eyed, spittle-flecked stagecraft reminded me of nothing so much as Steerpike playing Sid Vicious.
One new song: ‘I Am Koresh’, murky and militaristic, which in sound and concept reminded me of ‘Personal Jesus’ and is apparently from their upcoming second LP, ‘a concept album about Waco’. (Hmm.) ‘America’ was brilliantly done, dedicated to John McCain and with a crowd-baiting namecheck for Sarah Palin in place of Bill O’Reilly. (Hmm, again. As Sinead said afterwards, there’s layers-of-irony and then there’s just losing your mind. I have steadfastly avoided comparing my favourite bands to my previous favourite band, but part of ‘America’s dodginess for me is the same unsettled well yes, but - that bothered me (and them, to be fair) about ’Archives of Pain’ – by all means be blazingly angry about your conception of the vagaries of bleeding-heart liberals, but don’t let the finished article read like the Daily Mail. Not that ‘America’ isn’t vastly more subtle and superior.) At least there was no ‘Better to Know’, ‘America’s drippy cardigan-wearing cousin.
As for ‘Our Daughters Will Never Be Free’, I wish everyone with a progressive, performative bone in their body could have crammed in to see it. Julia, abandoning the keyboard, sang the first verse a capella to crowd handclaps before the band slammed in and she took entire control of the stage, tiny and piercing and wound-up with churning uberfeminist rage, disgust and despair. She concluded, slumping back down with her hair all over her face, howling pro-choice invective and the final ad-lib ‘You can be that girl or you can be my kind of girl…’ I can’t imagine it done better.
Best band around.
I will forget my dying king: The Indelicates, Dublin Castle, 19.06.07
Posted: June 23, 2007 Filed under: Raves, Reviews (live) | Tags: gigs, the indelicates Leave a comment »Camden, that boil on the neck of North London, was briefly brightened up last night by an Indelicates gig. They were the best I’ve seen them so far. Arrogant as fuck, opening with ‘The Last Significant Statement to be Made in Rock’n’Roll’ and in content and form embodying the line Anger is an energy.
The more I hear them live, the less satisfied I am with the demos and downloads I have. I like their clever-cleverness and their occasional prissiness of delivery – the concept behind a song like the girls-school madrigal version of ‘Our Daughters Will Never be Free’ makes it a practical requirement – but I can see why they attract criticism on grounds of being twee or self-satisfied or, apparently, too ‘drama-studenty’. (Sorry, she went to Goldsmiths; objectionable drama-student tendencies spread there with the virulence of memes or STDs).
But the demos lack the seeming desperation and spat-out contempt that drives the songs when live. On record, only ‘Fun is for the Feeble-Minded’ and maybe ‘Julia We Don’t Live in the Sixties’ come close to reflecting the urgency and vitriol of their onstage selves. ‘Sixteen’ is glorious live, skipping along giddy with laughing in the face of scenesterettes. ‘Heroin’ (which I was astonished to learn is not a Suede pisstake, but should be), is a perfectly sustained and poker-faced lament that pulls the carpet out from under the past decade’s eulogising of crap towns, pointless lives and pale thin girls with eyes forlorn. ‘We Hate the Kids’ is already one of our great lost singles, simplistic enough but delivered compulsively vicious with a beautifully executed swagger that renders it anthemic. Live, they mean it even more.
Lyrics like ‘Rebellion shores up the market / Rebellion keeps the nation healthy’ have been done, of course (’Turning rebellion into money’, ‘Rebellion it always sells at a profit’), but when they’re done it’s generally a sign of self-awareness rather than empty sloganeering. Being conscious of and informed by your own ultimate futility and counterproductiveness – the knowledge that your kicking against the whole corrupt edifice does nothing so much as tire you out and keep it standing – is preferable to trading on the idea that popular music currently has any great capacity for danger, subversion or originality, that the revolution is only a sponsored arena tour away. The scene has (once more) become sufficiently smug, bloated and prickable as to call into existence fierce quick creatures with sharp teeth. They are a necessary band. Best song titles since Doherty/Barat, too.
I’m quite aware that people dislike The Indelicates. Alright. It’s rare for me to find a band I’m happy to love. It’s rare that a band inspire me, and this band does. This band also make me want a badge that says ‘They don’t hate the kids as much as I do.’
Cast our dreams in solid gold: Peter Doherty, the Rhythm Factory, 17.01.07
Posted: January 19, 2007 Filed under: Raves, Reviews (live) | Tags: gigs, how i was made, peter doherty, the libertines 1 Comment »A night of pluses and minuses.
+ I seem to make a habit of seeing him in the New Year: 2005 was spent hopping on and off the Oxford Tube for the George gigs, and in 2006 there was Jazz After Dark and the last time I saw Babyshambles, at Cambridge. The latter was an excellent, redeeming gig, but left me without much of a desire to see them again. Mostly it’s the feeling that you shouldn’t push your luck. Maybe it takes me a year to get over that.
+ Ohhh, Lefthand. I’d like to think my enjoyment of their set was some sort of Pavlovian response to how hard Alan Wass seems to be trying to channel Rolling Thunder Revue era Dylan – which let’s be fair, is a better generic look than drainpipes and a trilby.
+ Peter is due on at ten minutes past midnight. He turns up about thirty seconds early.
- I hate being short. There’s not even any point trying to defend your pitch, since the mass surge forward with which most gigs start off inevitably moves you to the side unless you’ve got something to hold onto. Why are so many fanboys the same ridiculous height as Pete? Also, bloke in front of me, when you’re that tall you really don’t need an Afro and a puffa jacket.
- So yeah, for the first half-hour or so all that can be seen of him is a trilby and a pair of eyebrows. In good voice though, especially for an early and endearing ‘At the Flophouse’.
+ ‘Don’t Look Back Into the Sun’ turns into ‘Don’t look Back In Anger’. I’ve been waiting years for that to happen. Oh, and George Michael’s ‘Faith’ (yep) turns into ‘Horrorshow’, which is less expected.
+ Uncanny Hand-Eye Coordination and Defiance of the Laws of Physics #6875: catching a (lit?) cigarette and making it balance up-ended on his palm. He is probably a footballer in some alternate universe.
+ It says something for his range and repertoire that at one point everyone in the place seems to be requesting a different song. I’d have liked ‘East of Eden’ just because it most clearly references a grand tradition of faux-naif acoustic minstrelsy that I like very much, and hearing it live amplifies that aspect. I can’t complain though, I did get ‘Vertigo’.
+ ‘Vertigo’. Yeah, that was weird.
- Oh, mate, you’re not the Specials. I can toast better than Purple. I can do without ‘Killamangiro’ as a pointless, bukakke’d shadow of its former self.
+ ‘The Delaney’ with the extra verse!
- His attempt to set fire to the ceiling doesn’t get far. I marvel at a) the Rhythm Factory’s flame-retardant properties and b) how few people were reaching for their coats.
- “Oh, Headlock, haven’t seen you since the ‘accidental death’.” Incidentally, as you might imagine, he’s capable of verbalising speech marks.
+ He’s either wearing two hats or I’m having an odd variant on double-vision. I think it’s the former.
+ There is, I realise, nothing equivalent to ‘Fuck Forever’ or ‘Gang of Gin’ tonight. It’s celebratory and cathartic in a more-or-less wholly positive way.
+ Bloody hell, he’s just not stopping.
- The place seemed to have cleared out considerably after the first ninety minutes. I guess there were last trains to catch etc, but still. Maybe people get bored.
- Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be me / Nor would you want the shame and the strain of my name… Listening makes me think of all that’s happened since I heard it first, and self-mythologising and self-fulfilling prophecies and I don’t really know what to think.
+ Sometimes I think boys Get It, in a way girls rarely do. (And then I usually reconsider.) There’s two boys weaving and staggering and sharing fags in front of me and yes, from one angle they’re just loud, plastered and obnoxious, but then you turn your head and there is genuine pleasure in being here, being here together, and genuine love of the music.
+ On that note: gigs with mass singing along are great enough, but when the words everyone’s singing are this good, it elevates everything. ‘Time for Heroes’ is the obvious example, I guess. Everyone needs someone they can sling their arms around and bawl We’ll die in the class we were born / But it’s a class of our own, my love…
+ ‘I Wish’. Okay alright, you are the Specials a bit.
Infinity Goes Up On Trial: Bob Dylan, Brixton Academy, 21.11.05
Posted: November 22, 2005 Filed under: Raves, Reviews (live) | Tags: dylan, gigs 1 Comment »Dylan at Brixton was unreal. In retrospect, since the show opened with a tribute to Link Wray, I’d like to think it ended with a tribute to Joe Strummer. There was a solemnity to things, at times, but not in a way that brought things down at all.
Okay, of course he’s appallingly old now and looks it, but he doesn’t look bad on it at all. And as the bores complained, he’s out of tune, but a) when has he ever been in tune?; b) define ‘tune’; c) ‘Lay Lady Lay’; and d) since when was that the point?. It’s not that his voice is shot, it’s just a different voice. He’s had so many and this is the latest. When some songs used to skid gloriously all over the place, with the exuberance of a toddler knee-sliding on polished parquet at a wedding reception, his delivery now keeps them grounded and anchored, a lilt as light as an empty rocking-chair. There’s something solemn and stately about the way he performs now.
There’s also glimpses of his former selves, like, as Susie said, a Magic Eye puzzle. His early earnest folk persona and his Messianic speed-freak Blonde On Blonde persona and his almost unbearable god-bothering Eighties persona, they’re all still there. It happens when he turns his head and takes the crowd in and there’s a collective intake of breath. There’s still that swagger and cockiness that avoids being arrogance and instead is just absolute self-assurance. Just him knowing he’s been right all along.
There had been a bit of talk about him tailoring the recent sets to express a newfound/rediscovered anti-imperialism. Sunday he played ‘Tales of Yankee Power’, and okay, we had ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ (!!!) and ‘It’s Alright, Ma’, and arguably ‘Honest With Me’, but who knows the logic behind it. He’s had more than a moment of being atrociously right-wing and I think he even voted for Bush Senior. It doesn’t matter. Songs like ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Masters of War’ have been taken out of his hands and into common ownership. They’ve enriched and strengthened twentieth-century protest the way that only good music can.
The set still contained a few songs I didn’t recognise, which is another reason I love him: there is always more to discover. There was less tiresome bluesy fretwank from the band this time, although there was still a bit. There was, fantastically, ‘Cold Irons Bound’ which sounded about ten years ahead of its time. ‘Visions of Johanna’, bloody hell. Again, there was that swaying between wanting to cry at how fantastic it was both as song and performance, and wanting (only slightly) to laugh at the fact that individual lines were getting their own applause. But then, when you write stuff of startling pinpoint accuracy like We sit here stranded though we’re all doing our best to deny it or Little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously or Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial / Voices echo, this is what salvation must be like after a while (a line that I’m still not sure how to read), you deserve to be indulged.
‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was, yeah, stately and solemn, and somehow not missing the visceral, malicious quality of its early outings (the Manchester Free Trade Hall gig has the definitive version of it, after ‘JUDAS!’ and after his transcendentally sneering and defiant response of ‘I don’t believe you… you’re a liar… Play it fuckin’ loud!’ The version they play then is fucking scourging, the repetition of ‘How does it feel?! like a whip across the shoulders). But the time for that has passed. He knows he was right. There’s still him-against-the-world feel to things, but it’s not-quite-bitter, resignation rather than rage. He’s beyond and above it all: ‘Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust‘ might, for his younger self, have been slyly about his outlasting Lennon, but these days I wonder if he cares about competition or rivalry, or even recognises it.
Hanging around for the encore, I was expecting the same as the last two times (Like a Rolling Stone/Cat’s in the Well/All Along the Watchtower), but no. ‘Cat’s in the Well’ was cut (possibly there’d been enough apocalyptic visions for one set) and instead there was London fucking Calling. Forty years or so, bloody hell. He matters, the same way the Clash mattered, the Manics, the Libertines. In the way they embody their influences, they matter. Dylan is what music should be and what lyrics should be, how songs should change your life.
