Morrissey :: The O2, London, 29/11/14
Photo by Burak Cingi (click to see a gallery)
Morrissey must have big balls. Big brass northern balls. I grant you, this is a fairly odd way to start a review. My current slightly loopy demeanour is a result of sleep deprivation. I got home not particularly late after the show but just could not get off the high. I’m finding it increasingly tough to wind down after I get home late, and there’s a sliding scale. If I’m out for dinner I’ll get home early and usually I’m fine. If I’m at a gig and I get home by 11, which is fairly rare, that might be fine too. If I get home from a gig near midnight I might try and stay up for an hour but not go online so it gives me the best chance of dropping off. And then there’s Morrissey. I got home at a reasonable hour, just before midnight, but couldn’t resist spending an hour online, messaging and checking Twitter and watching clips and generally indulging my Moz glow. And it screwed me up for sleeping beyond words. My heart was pounding and wouldn’t slow down. I was humming with vibration. My mind had songs playing in it like a jukebox. Finally, at nearly 5am I passed out. I woke just before 10 and now here I sit, at 10.30, trying to find a way to describe what happened. This shouldn’t be new. I’ve seen Morrissey 14 (I think) times now. I’ve written about him before. And god knows I’ve heard better setlists, at least I think so, but I suppose it depends on your criteria and interest levels in the varying periods of his career. And yet somehow, somehow, somehow I have rarely seen him do a better show and never felt more in love with him than I do at this moment. How did he pull off this magic trick? To play his new album in near-entirety and still have the biggest audience he’s ever attracted in London in the palm of his hand?
I’ve spoken before about how, and this is not to cause offense or make musical comparisons, he has a surrogate Bowie effect on me and my fellow Moz traveller. We never saw Bowie live together and so somehow he has taken on this mythical quality as a performer, someone I speak about in both boastful and grateful tones, recognising how monumentally lucky I was to, as it were, follow him around Europe (and to New York) on the Reality Tour. I’m not comparing him to Morrissey as a performer – they are so very different. But that intangible quality, call it an aura if you like, is something both have a ton of (alright, Bowie has more, for the record). I can be front row, or in the swaying, violent semi-moshpit, or at the side craning my neck, or half way back so he’s nearly a dot, and the same thing will happen every time. You fear he’ll let you down and he doesn’t. And then, when he doesn’t, you think, well of course you wouldn’t let me down, let us down. You would never do that. It’s a complex relationship and it can’t be compared to anything I feel for anyone else now, not even Bowie. I have seen Morrissey deliver songs (never perform; he says: “if you have a true and physical need to sing a song then you are not performing. Performance is forced and artificial, and you are either a singer, or else you are... simply ... a costume”) from every album, band and solo, that he has in his arsenal. But last night he started and then ended with a pair of songs everyone knew, but somehow managed to make everyone embrace the fact that the songs between those four were largely unknown. And we loved him for it. And Twitter, the first place any complainer goes, you best believe it was unanimous in love (I said love L-U-V, as the Dolls go) for him. He played 20 songs (that’s a lot for him, he usually does a few less) and of the 16 in between the opening pairs he started with three from his new record in a row. Then I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris, a thoroughly average song from his last album. Then three more new songs, again in a row – I must confess to thinking that the lyrics are somewhat lacking on both World Peace… in general and on its adolescent title track (it’s the kind of impractical idealistic ‘don’t vote, viva la revolución!’ nonsense you hear from Russell Brand – this is not a compliment). He can do so much better. But just when you think ‘get on with it’ comes the extraordinary obscurity Trouble Loves Me, more of which later. And then, yes, another couple of new songs. At this point I’m amazed that he’s making no concessions to nearly 20,000 people, almost all of whom must be there to hear the hits. It’s nearly Dylan-esque in its contrariness! And what happens next? He goes into the dirge-like raw brutality of Meat Is Murder, a song still so shocking and powerful nearly 30 years after its release that has converted more humans to vegetarianism (myself included) than any other piece of art yet created. He prefaced it with: “I read the other day that 75% of chicken sold in the UK is contaminated, therefore poisonous - and I thought to myself ‘ha ha ha ha!’ (Not entirely true: there is a toxic bacteria in most chicken, true, but it gets destroyed during cooking, so unless you’re eating raw meat… never let the facts get in the way of a good story; as Tony Wilson said: print the legend). He accompanies the song with a video of vivisection, factory farming, caged animal slaughter and torture, which everyone is forced to watch, while bathed in red light, and it makes the entire audience feel sick and disgusted. And we love him for it. It’s a prestige the like of which Houdini would be proud. Also bear in mind that he had commanded the O2 to cease selling any meat products on the night of his show – an unprecedented request to which, incredibly, they agreed. They must have lost money but did it anyway. Incidentally, he’d also previously gotten the Staples Center in LA (where he’s a god, basically, and can sell out arenas with ease mostly due to his rabid Latino fanbase) to do the same. They had already said no to McCartney. These are more useful victories derived from the small amount of power he has than being snooty about the political process, if you ask me.
So then, yes, you guessed it, a trio more of new songs (and oh the irony, my favourite new song, Oboe Concerto, is not played). The main show ends with another wonderfully obscure non-hit, Speedway, the song from which I have taken my lyric tattoo design, and we’re finished. Encore. The end. And people are going absolutely mad. They’re throwing flowers they have brought at the stage. They are throwing themselves at the stage, just trying to touch him. This is normal gig behaviour at his shows and nowhere else in music have I seen it – weeping humans of all shapes and sizes and genders and ages and sexualities simply prostrating their bodies to him to touch and, one imagines, be healed. Each touch of hands provokes a roar. You’re cheering for each human who needs, just needs desperately, to feel his touch because they are you.
The setlist and its 11 new songs are a marvel, a miracle (with I’m Not A Man and Istanbul working particularly well). I’ve heard him perform everything you could imagine, from How Soon Is Now? to This Charming Man. From Death Of A Disco Dancer to Last Of The Famous International Playboys. From There Is A Light That Never Goes Out to Please Please Please (Let Me Get What I Want). From Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me to Panic to Girlfriend In A Coma and so on and so on and so on. This man has 100 songs to spare. He could perform any of his albums in entirety. Until last night I had heard 72 different songs – it’s now 84. And in researching my own Moz history just now I realised I’ve seen him 15, not 14, times (not counting that Roundhouse one where his voice gave out after three songs and the gig was abandoned). I saw Bowie 16 times. He’s getting there. I’ve had to wait two years for this 15th show, mind you. I have to hope he has many more in him. Remarkably, I cannot remember his voice ever sounding this good. He seems to be either dreadfully unlucky or prone to health issues, which he has recently alluded to without properly discussing, and why should he, as his health, like world peace, is none of my business. And yet, he looks great, muscular and determined and ornery as ever. As one might expect, he’s lost none of his tendency to confront, which feels oddly comforting. Without perceived injustice (the charts, record labels, hunting, animal welfare, the Royals, celebrities) who would he even be?
We’d managed to engineer a pretty perfect show day, it must be said. This despite the fact that I’m suffering from a trapped sciatic nerve and can’t stand or walk for more than five minutes at a time. A lovely day in the pub, then a sobering-up dinner and then a spot by the mixing desk. My location on the arena floor was not at all how I planned it. Pre-nerve-injury I was so very up for being front and centre, right in the pit. I was pretty gutted, in all honesty, about having to abandon that plan, having waited two years to see him live again. I held up pretty well in the end, despite having to spend some time crouching on the ground or bent at the waist to stave off the pain. I didn’t care. He was singing to me, he was mine again. My love affair with this Mancunian hero had started eight years ago. I liked him fine before then, I knew what The Smiths meant, but he hadn’t found me as a solo artist. One night – May 1st 2006 – at Alexandra Palace changed all that and since then… god, he gets on my nerves sometimes, with some of the outlandish nonsense he says. But I always forgive him, why? I understand him, through all the madness and militancy and attention seeking and drama.
The show began (following a lengthy set of clips – the Dolls, Nico, drag legend Lypsinka etc.) as an image of a grumpy-looking Queen appeared on the big screen. She was giving the crowd the finger, with both hands. And then, yes, of course he did it: he played The Queen Is Dead, which I had never heard him do before. The lyrics, one of his finest, which I now realise I must put here, are as follows:
Farewell to this land's cheerless marshes
Hemmed in like a boar between arches
Her very Lowness with her head in a sling
I’m truly sorry - but it sounds like a wonderful thing
I said Charles, don't you ever crave
To appear on the front of the Daily Mail
Dressed in your mother’s bridal veil?
And so I checked all the registered historical facts
And I was shocked into shame to discover
How I'm the 18th pale descendant
Of some old queen or other
Oh has the world changed, or have I changed?
Oh has the world changed, or have I changed?
Some 9-year-old tough who peddles drugs
I swear to God, I swear: I never even knew what drugs were
So, I broke into the palace
With a sponge and a rusty spanner
She said: “Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing”
I said: "That’s nothing - you should hear me play piano"
We can go for a walk where it’s quiet and dry
And talk about precious things
But when you're tied to your mother's apron
No-one talks about castration
We can go for a walk where it’s quiet and dry
And talk about precious things
Like love and law and poverty
Oh, oh, these are the things that kill me
We can go for a walk where it’s quiet and dry
And talk about precious things
But the rain that flattens my hair...
Oh, these are the things that kill me
All their lies about make-up and long hair are still there…
Past the pub who saps your body
And the church who’ll snatch your money
The Queen is dead, boys
And it’s so lonely on a limb
Past the pub that wrecks your body
And the church - all it wants is your money
The Queen is dead, boys
And it’s so lonely on a limb
Life is very long, when you're lonely
People have been sent to the Tower, frankly, for less. The crowd roared every word and we jumped and danced and punched the air and the entire O2, filled to the brim, realised we were in the presence of perhaps the greatest living Englishman, certainly the greatest one currently touring! A sweet nostalgia blast, next up, was Suedehead, his first solo single, which was surely the moment post-Smiths breakup where everyone had gone, aha, he doesn’t need Johnny to write great songs. Of course, there are many arguments to be made about the relative quality, similarity and lack of adventurousness in some of his solo output. However, he’s a pop artist and he makes pop songs because that’s the music that mattered to him when he was growing up. The (older) lyrics may be sophisticated but the music is not – and who cares? He’s not avant-garde and nor does he care for it. He likes crooners and pop music and his subversion lies in the words and persona. It is telling that this morning’s reviews make reference to his attacks on the Royal family, the meat industry, the government and his own record label. The Telegraph even makes hay out of his recent health issues, which he hasn’t discussed at all coherently. Talking of Asleep, they went full on: “Dimly lit, face obscured, it felt like he was delivering his own eulogy, made even more poignant by his health problems.” Please. Really? As if any of this were newsworthy somehow – unusual proclamations and events are just par for the course at one of his shows. Rarely do artists say or do anything beyond what is expected of them at a performance, and certainly even fewer challenge their own crowd between songs to think about animal welfare (we sing happily: “Hooray, hooray, the bullfighter dies, and nobody cries”) or the nature of how record labels shaft artists or the love of hunting demonstrated constantly by a bunch of toffs we all pay for. That’s just him. He has said he is only controversial because it’s so easy to be controversial in pop music: nobody ever is. Most of the reviews I’ve read have called the show ‘emotional’ – to which I reply, when is he not? Seeing Morrissey live is always a moving experience, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.
So after Suedehead off we went for an hour of 11 new songs and an animal torture video. But in the middle of it all, as my pain kicked in and I started to flag, out came Trouble Loves Me. From 1997’s fairly forgotten Maladjusted, this one is an epic Bond theme of a record. I’d heard it live once before, the first time I saw him, and I didn’t know it then. But I can pinpoint it as the song that made me fall for him, this Hulmerist, flaws and all. And so we sang and swayed arm in arm and it was overwhelming. So, right now, I am exhausted and starting to feel emotional about the night. I must wrap up. I cannot imagine what life would be like if I didn’t get to be in a room with that man every so often. He has come to mean so much to me. In between the times when I get to see him live I’m challenged by much of what he says – his own sometimes-muddled naïve invective, the abuse for loving him that I receive from acquaintance and stranger alike… I sometimes forget why I like him at all. But seeing him live reminds me, so perfectly, why he’s worth every second of my time. It fills you up, somehow, until the next show. It always feels like a re-acquaintance – never a goodbye.
The two-song encore began with a fairly obscure Smiths B-side, Asleep. It reminded me of an old bedtime rhyme my great-grandma, Rose, used to sing to me when I was little: “show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed…” Maybe his gran sang it to him a few miles (and a couple of decades) away from where my great-gran sang it to me… he stole the second line straight out:
Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I'm tired and I
I want to go to bed
Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
And then leave me alone
Don't try to wake me in the morning
'Cause I will be gone
Don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I will feel so glad to go
Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I don't want to wake up
On my own anymore
You could feel the emotion coursing through the venue. You could hear a pin drop. He won over every person there, with a couple of old songs and a ton of new ones. His first words to the crowd were “I am privileged beyond my wildest dreams.” His last, delivered with a dramatic flourish, as ever, were “Remember me. Forget my fate” (a quote from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas). And then, the last song was with us, the ubiquitous Everyday Is Like Sunday, greeted like an old friend. The lights came up and Klaus Nomi’s aria Death (from Dido’s Lament, also, of course, from Dido and Aeneas) ushered us out into the cold night. People sang his songs as we made our way to the Tube, joined forever by this unique human being.
The Queen Is Dead / Suedehead / Staircase At The University / World Peace Is None Of Your Business / Kiss Me A Lot / I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris / Istanbul / Smiler With Knife / The Bullfighter Dies / Trouble Loves Me / Earth Is The Loneliest Planet / Neal Cassady Drops Dead / Meat Is Murder / Scandinavia / Kick The Bride Down The Aisle / I'm Not A Man / Speedway // Asleep / Everyday Is Like Sunday
Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters :: The Roundhouse, Camden, 12-11-14
Startraks Photo/REX
Robert Plant, possibly the greatest rock singer of all time, and I go way back. I wish I could remember the exact moment I fell for him, like I can with Bowie, but in the mists of time I can only recall that it happened when he released Manic Nirvana in early 1990. In my evenings, after school, I was listening, on cassette, to New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough. I was still in the grip of that perfectly normal teen phase, which had started in early 1988, of liking the pretty boys and the pop music designed just for me. However, I was already a fan of more substantial music, due to my parents, by then. I was surely the only 13-year-old who could name 10 Dylan albums, watched Doors VHS tapes every weekend, rented Bowie’s movies obsessively (I had Glass Spider but it was the films that made me swoon) and knew who Robert Johnson was. And yet… and yet, I was in the grip of wanting to be some sort of normal teenager and the boybands had their hooks in. 1990 was the year it all changed. Manic Nirvana was the album that stole me away and set me on a path of seeing gigs that continues to this day. It grabbed hold of my NKOTB and Bros cassettes and threw them away because I was ready to move on.
Up to that point, Plant’s solo albums hadn’t quite registered in the old-fashioned rock world, which seems remarkable when you consider what a respected (and Album Of The Year Grammy-winning) solo performer he is today. Back then, everyone was just waiting around for him to reunite his old band; mind you, looking at the landscape of the questions he is still being asked, following the 2007 O2 reunion, you can see how little things have changed. Every week, it seems, there’s a story about how he’s turned down a truckload of cash to play soulless arenas and I love him a little more each time he talks about how little it interests him and then brushes it off with that West Bromwich charm. The man is just not bothered. He’s got a life to get on with and it doesn’t involve doing what everyone else craves so greatly.
When Manic Nirvana came out people were, frankly, surprised it was any good, as his solo output had been pretty average until then. He’d had a big solo hit with the of-its-time brilliantly awful, and comically named, Big Log (too many jokes to make) in 1983 and a trio of thoroughly average albums followed. In 1988 he released Now and Zen (as a pun connoisseur, that is a shocker) which was notable only for the excellent, and now dated, Heaven Knows, replete with overblown backing vocals and a brilliant solo (in the era of guitar solos) by Jimmy Page, the very same. But still, no cohesive whole album had made a dent. Manic Nirvana, at the time, was deemed to be a very good record, though when you listen now only a handful of tracks stand the test of time. What the album accomplished was to signal the beginning of a new career as a creditable solo artist, finally, a decade after LZ ended in a blaze of Bonzo’s alcoholism. My mum loved the album, so I did too. She must have suggested we go see him live; he was playing the Manchester Apollo that December, a few months after I’d started to wake up out of my boyband stupor (in August 1990 I saw Prince, Bowie and the Stones live in 23 life-changing days). She handed out homework to prepare me – don’t ask me why, but she put the vinyl of LZII into my hands. I can’t imagine why she picked that particular album to tell me to listen to, out of them all, but listen incessantly I did. When we saw him he actually did two songs from it; did she know that Ramble On and Living Loving Maid were coming? Impossible. I remember asking her: “Ma, do you think he’ll play Stairway?” I snort now with the notion. I didn’t know then about the two Plants. I call them pre and post the discovery of irony. (A digression: he’s had the nickname Percy since the 70s and my mum would never tell me why! As an adult, I found out that Percy was a movie starring Hywel Bennett about a man who gets a (huge) penis transplant! A rock magazine had run a pic of him in particularly snug and revealing trousers and captioned it ‘Robert “Percy” Plant’ and it stuck; always makes me smile now to think of it.)
You see, at some point between 1976’s Presence and 1979’s In Through The Out Door, Robert Plant realised he was ridiculous. He realised his band was ridiculous. And that travelling around in a private jet with mountains of coke, groupies, roadies getting favours for passes, endless thugs in security and smashed up hotel rooms were all ridiculous. Hammer Of The Gods and all that. The reasons why he woke up and saw the madness of the clichéd rock life that surrounded him are numerous, most likely derived from a combination of the loss of his son, the after effects of a bad car accident and the arrival of punk. That perfect storm of tragedy and the changing musical landscape had a marked effect on him and you can see it clearly in later LZ footage. The rock god poses struck came to be accompanied by smirks and winks; he’d clearly just become much more self-aware, self-knowing. By the time Zep were on their death knell, though they didn’t know it, at Knebworth in 1979, he was mentally out. He had been a Golden God, with his bare chest stuck out, circulation-cutting jeans and blond locks flowing, as he rescued a maiden from a castle. But he was done. A very smart man, he stopped wanting to play that part long before the hair metal understudies took over. So into the 80s he went, perm resplendent, and tried to escape the weight of being ¼ of a colossus that bestrode the planet. The 80s was a tough time generally for the old guard; Dylan, Bowie, Neil Young and many others all found themselves adrift. Manic Nirvana was the first sign of him finding his feet.
I love Led Zeppelin. Even though I don’t know what a single one of their songs are about (does anyone?) they are without doubt the most powerful and perfect rock band that has ever been. But, like Bowie, Plant had a bit of trouble in the 90s coming to terms with his legacy; he largely refused to play the so-called big songs (LZ released few singles so technically didn’t have many hits). And like Bowie, he got over it. What he does now is really what Dylan should be doing, instead of unintelligible, unrecognisable renditions coming at you via his cat-like nasal delivery (it’s just about charming, but only when you're at the front or in a small venue; seeing Bob in an arena with no screens – he refuses to have them – is frankly a shitty experience). Plant leaves the odd motif in and rewrites some of the song structure, but largely keeps the lyrical melody line intact. It makes for some nice surprises. So a song will begin and it’s familiar but you can’t put your finger on why and then he’ll start singing and this pure rush of joy will spread through the audience when everyone realises it’s Going To California.
As it happens, his new album …Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar is very good indeed, for my money the best solo record he’s ever put out. So I was very much looking forward to hearing it performed live; anything else that came along would simply be a nice little bonus. Having watched his highly enjoyable Glastonbury performance (on telly, am too old for that tent shit now) in July I knew that I was going to get Whole Lotta Love. I was ready for it. A song like that is sewn into the fabric of being English and loving music. It exists like any Beatles song or Satisfaction or Life On Mars or Won’t Get Fooled Again (speaking of, they’re the only big rock band of that era I’ve never seen live: must fix that). So I’ve done ok with gigs, let’s face it. In nearly 300 shows, and counting, I’ve seen the Stones and CSN thrice, Macca twice, Bowie has passed my eyeballs and earholes 16 times, and I’ve even seen Ian Astbury fronting The Doors; a roster of everyone who’s been anyone in popular music of the last 50 years. When I saw Plant in 1990 he performed those two Zep songs but I don’t remember any further ones; history shows the night before in Newcastle he did Immigrant Song and Nobody’s Fault But Mine so it’s very possible I heard four but it was a long time ago. When I saw him at the Freddie Mercury tribute he did Queen songs (he did Innuendo like it was Kashmir (even sneaking in a couplet from that song to make the association clear) and Crazy Little Thing Called Love like the Elvis pastiche it is) and snuck in a little bit of Thank You (said to be Freddie’s favourite Zep song). I saw him again in 2000 in a small club in Manchester but he was on a covers tour, so did no original material at all. I didn’t care: I was on the front row. Last night, well, that was my first time really hearing Zeppelin songs and it was just as monumental, adrenalin-fuelled and emotional as you imagine.
I think my highlight of hearing him delve into that particular part of his history was What Is And What Should Never Be, which blew my mind. His voice is still powerful, strong and all that, but now because it’s lost range there’s much more emotion and nuance to it. He’s using it as a greater, but more careful, instrument than he has before, is learning more about his ability to interpret than ever before, and has certainly been finding new ways to convey his own musical loves. There’s a touch of Ralph Stanley here, a bit of Appalachian folk there, and a big slice of north west African rhythms, which go back a long way. His passion for Moroccan music and culture goes back to the 60s and he he performed at Mali’s Festival in the Desert in 2003. His fascination with Indian music is also well known – his and Page’s 1994 collaboration with Najma Akhtar (replacing the late Sandy Denny) on the Battle of Evermore is a joy to hear. His vocal style of the past couple of decades also undoubtedly owes a lot to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (who Jeff Buckley was famously obsessed with; his #2 obsession after, of course, Zeppelin). Then there’s his background as, frankly, a blues scholar; he knows his stuff and leads his brilliant band around a rip-roaring, heavy version of Bukka White’s Fixin’ To Die. Mention must go to the companions he uses to get the job done: what a fantastic collective they are, the Sensational Space Shifters. Playing a synthesis of African-influenced Celtic bluegrass folk blues, they’re partly made up of members of a former backing band of his, Strange Sensation. Liam Tyson from Britpop legends Cast and world music luminary Justin Adams lead the show on guitars. John Baggott on keyboards, Dave Smith on drums, Billy Fuller on bass and, perhaps the star of the show, Juldeh Camara complete the line-up. From the Gambia, Camara is known as a griot, a storyteller, and plays the riti, a one-stringed fiddle. You would not believe the range of noise and melody he coaxes from this deceptively simple instrument.
Plant acknowledges his past, takes the bits he wants, leaves the rest, and escapes from its weight with ease. I love him so very much for having less than zero interest in schlepping around some shitty arena in the Midwest playing Black Dog for the millionth time. You want to hear him sing a famous old rock tune? Go ahead. He ended the show with a drastically reworked version of Rock And Roll. It’s on his terms, take it or leave it.
He had opened the show with Friends from LZIII and I was knocked off my feet. The crowd, hoary old rock blokes mixed with old school rock chicks and, of course, some hipsters and students, loved every second of it. And by that I mean not just the old stuff but they were clearly familiar with the new album as well, and I find that to be quite something. How many heritage acts (ugh, horrible term, let’s think of something else) are releasing new material that’s resonating with audiences who look forward to hearing it live? Yes, Dylan and Cohen are putting out great albums but nobody (hardcore fans aside) wants to hear them live. They know what they want to hear and it ain’t Tempest. Plant still has priapic charisma to burn as well, and doesn’t mind at all being a bit of a crowd-pleaser. He’s relatable, seems down to earth and has shed his rock god aura. Mostly. There are moments when you do see the flash of it, the flash of former self, and you realise exactly who he is and what stages he has stood upon. And that only makes it all the more remarkable. It would be very easy to crave stadia adulation; frankly, most rock stars on his level do. I just paid £141 for a ticket to see Fleetwood Mac churn out Rumours at the O2: the ticket to see Plant was £43. He’s come from an era where albums were sold, meaning he’s got enough money, and he doesn’t seem to feel that need at all, which is hugely refreshing. He wants to play new songs to 3000 people. He doesn’t want to be a human jukebox for 150 quid a head. He played the Roundhouse 46 years ago, almost exactly. And back there again, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be, singing and banging a bendir drum during the interludes. Except perhaps Molineux on a cold Saturday afternoon.
Friends
Spoonful (Howlin’ Wolf)
Turn It Up
Going to California
Embrace Another Fall
Rainbow
What Is and What Should Never Be
No Place to Go (Howlin’ Wolf )
Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You (Anne Bredon)
Little Maggie
Fixin' to Die (Bukka White)
I Just Want to Make Love to You (Willie Dixon)/Whole Lotta Love/ Who Do You Love (Bo Diddley)
Encore:
A Stolen Kiss
Rock and Roll
Kate Bush :: Before The Dawn :: Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, 17-9-14
Who knows who wrote that song of summer
That blackbirds sing at dusk
This is a song of colour
Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust
Then climb into bed and turn to dust
Here I sit. Staring at an unforgiving blank page. It’s so white, it’s so empty. In the past, when I’ve seen a consciousness-altering gig I’ve come here, to trusty old Word, and the text has just flowed. From where, I do not know. It all just tumbles out, and then I leave it alone. I go back later (1-3 hours typically), and rewrite perhaps half of it (and I’m doing that right now, and right now, get your head around that…). And it’s at that point where I’ve largely figured out what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to get the constituent parts to hang together. I’m trying to collate words that illustrate the pictures and sounds in my mind. My retinas have let my brain collect images, stored into my mind bank forever. My ears have let sound slip in and swirl around, resonances which can be recalled forever, like a jukebox inside my head. The next stage, the third draft, and I know this might make me sound crazy, is to read what I’ve written out loud once or even twice, at which point I then rewrite about 10%. Somehow, my own voice, and my own ‘acting’, as it were, of the writing manages to show up the bits that don’t work, that I’m not explaining well, that don’t read well. Because really, it’s my voice that people hear (whether they want to or not!) when they read something I’ve written. People I know, anyway. Strangers can’t hear me but I hope to convey a bit of myself in reviews like this. I will then read it once more aloud to my dad, over the phone, tweak it a little more and finally send it off to the ether. That is the process. Even this paragraph explaining how I write will get rewritten; how meta, how postmodern!
Kate Bush was once asked who her favourite singer was. She said: the blackbird, then the thrush. She is an ordinary, extraordinary human being. Her level of creative control over her career has not come easy; it is something she has insisted upon, and fought for, and been bullied over, and people have tried to take it away from her. In the concert programme, a beautifully printed annual-type book (with some pages that don’t quite open, though you can see inside them, just because), the following exchange describes a meeting with Adrian Noble, the former head of the RSC who co-directs the show:
He was charm personified and was really, really enthusiastic about being involved in the show. He loved the idea of working on something that could integrate contemporary music with theatre.
But would we get on? Still a little nervous of him taking over, we met and I gave him the full blown lecture: “I’ve had to fight all my career to be heard… people always think I’m talking out of my arse… I don’t want you to just walk in and take over.” He sat very politely while I ranted and gave me the look I know so well: “We’ve got a right one ‘ere”.
This is, I think, hugely illuminating. Of course, as the world knows, a man would never have to fight and battle and be sublimated into a passive role in his own music career. But behind that warm, genuine, gentle persona she is a formidable opponent. So here she is, as ever doing what she wants in her own time and offering us all a look inside her head with Before The Dawn. And what lives in there? Birdsong, it turns out. Nature. The calmness of a single day, from dawn to dusk, to moonlight, to dawn again. This is the story of the second half of the concert. We’ve all been pounded and hammered and, frankly, a bit disturbed by the bleak tale of the first half. Battered around the head by more emotions than you’d think possible. The second half is where she attempts to take you by the metaphorical hand into a comedown room, one of those soft chill-out spaces found (when we were all younger) in clubs and festivals. That room where you need to go to breathe, because everything has become too much, you crave human contact and just want a nice cuddle. The sounds are temperate, the surroundings are welcoming, there is nothing to be afraid of, and you get into a corner, in your own space, in your own head, and everything is alright again. That’s what the second half was like. Having Kate Bush be your mum and make everything ok. I didn’t think of this at all last night, the maternal wave that envelopes the second half, but I’m thinking of it now, which is making me think of my own mother. She was so many things, too numerous to even begin to talk about here, but the one thing she was, above everything, was kind. She never thought of herself before me. She was interested and engaged and passionate about everything I did. Though not really, in any way, a traditional Jewish mother type, in her own way she made me the centre of her universe. And that, again, was what the second half felt like: to be spoken to, and have the thoughts in another person’s head directed at you. It was so light and positive and charming and, I keep saying this, warm. She was our mum, and she held us. And above all, throughout the whole night, you got this sense that she is just a good person. She thanked everyone, multiple times; the band, the cast, the audience. It was sincere and genuine. You could feel it, in your heart.
She goes for that same kind of state of human existence in the universe connection that Björk does. That sense of: marvel at the solar system, nature, animals, birds, the earth, the sky, the sun, the moon, it is all here, for you, and in the pinprick millisecond you live on this rotating blue rock it is a miracle that you are alive. You’re only here once, so you take her hand and walk through a single day by her side. Most crucially, though, the second half is really about light. How it gives life and how it wakes birds up to let them sing their songs; and then it goes away at night and the birds go to sleep. Light is what controls nature. The soundtrack to this reverie is the second half of Aerial, my favourite album of hers. The way it was built, block-by-block, going from a lazy morning to the blasted freak out of the title track was an hour I would like to relive every day. A trilogy of its songs were worth the price of admission: the Balearic, flamenco tour de force of Sunset, the driving, spectacular Nocturn and then the sonic frenzy of Aerial itself. It felt like something just for me; many of the reviews have focused on The Ninth Wave. Is that because perhaps 75% of the audience simply don’t know Aerial that well? If this concert series accomplishes anything, it’s that everyone should realise now what a brilliant album it is.
So, as I thought it would be, it was all too much. But ‘too much’ is why we came, it’s what we knew would happen. The second half’s Sky Of Honey, as she calls it, is remarkable. As a musical, visual, auditory, theatrical experience, she has raised the bar beyond what anyone (yes, this includes Bowie) could reach, today, tomorrow, or ever again. She’s set a new level, a new benchmark for how music and visuals can be matched together in a live context. And that’s not bad at all considering that she herself had almost no live context three weeks ago. A solitary, exhausting 1979 tour, some TV appearances, a few one-off-one-song live performances, and that’s your lot. It started thus:
In March of 2013, I said to Bertie, “Shall we do some live shows?” He said, “Yes. Absolutely!” I really wanted to do something different from working on another album and felt a real desire to have contact with the audience that still liked my work.
First, praise that sweet boy, Bertie. His support seems to have made the whole thing possible. For all of her feminine credentials, incidentally, she most often surrounds herself with men as collaborators. From these live musicians to her studio bands to the creative team, the only women present are a couple of backing singers and the hair/make-up/wardrobe team. It’s interesting in itself that she relies so heavily on male energy yet creates music that is so very female; perhaps she brings the feminine side out of her musicians, as there is nothing macho about the intuitive band around her.
During the whole show, nobody looked at their phone, incidentally, and what a pleasure that was. But here’s the thing about the show, aside from all the majesty and creativity and musicianship and theatrics and performance. The thing is this: you’ve never heard this stuff live before because none of these songs have ever been played live before. Not ever! Well, ok, you can watch, if you wish, a couple of performances of Hounds of Love (mimed) and Running Up That Hill but that’s two songs, out of the 26 performed, that have been played before. The unique part, and what sets her apart from anyone else, is that you have no relationship to these tracks outside of their album context. Nobody does. The only songs her fans have a relationship to are the songs played in 1979 – and she plays precisely zero songs from that tour, from her first four albums or, for that matter, from The Sensual World (imagine if she’d done This Woman’s Work… talk about too much!). And that, for a living artist, is unprecedented. I’ve got plenty of albums, hundreds, by people who I’ve never seen live but they’ve all passed on, pining for the fjords, as it goes. Apart from Joni and Tom Waits, that is – sure, they don’t play live now but, like Bowie, they certainly have and live footage is easy to find (of the three, Tom does the odd gig so I live in hope). But even in the cases of artists long gone, if I didn’t see them live, they did of course play concerts (again, an exception: Nick Drake, no live footage of any kind exists) and you can get hold of recordings, easily. With Kate Bush, this is all new territory. Your whole life, you’ve been listening to her music as a recorded document, exactly as she wanted you to hear it, and it is your only source. And now, as if by magic, decades after her career started, she’s standing RIGHT THERE in front of you, singing at you, singing these songs and giving them a new, brand new, brand shiny and new, context. You have never laid eyes on her in person and you may never again. As Caitlin Moran said in her review, it is unquantifiably too much.
I was happy with the way the show was going even before the theatrical part began. It was a perfectly normal, perfectly brilliant rock show. The first half dozen songs were simply, powerfully, emotionally rendered, a little walk around Aerial and Hounds of Love and The Red Shoes. Lily, from that album (gave me a little smile: it’s my gran’s name), opened the show, and was later joined by Top Of The City, from the same record; the delivery on that song knocked me back in my seat. I’ve rarely heard a live vocal sound better. An Aerial track, Joanni, was sandwiched between the opener and a good old-fashioned crowd pleaser, Hounds Of Love itself. I mean, this is not up for argument: that is one of the great pop songs of the last century. As is Running Up That Hill, of course it is, which followed shortly after. What a pleasure, hearing those two songs was. But in that opening six-song salvo, which works as a sort of warm-up for The Ninth Wave, which I’m going to get to shortly, finally, the track that fucking KILLED was Aerial’s King Of the Mountain. I just can’t… there’s just no way… you’ll have to wait to hear it. It built and built (like Aerial’s title track did later on) to this sturm und drang turmoil and the backline core of the band, led by drumming legend Omar Hakim (what a privilege to see this guy play), just completely owned it.
Interlude:: my bootleg has just finished downloading. How nice. This may help with the rest of the review ::
I looked around the venue (recently refurbished and looking lovely, I’m glad to say, no longer the dump it latterly became) after it was all over and considered its history for both Kate Bush and myself. Epiphanies abounded. She sat in a seat not dissimilar to mine a few weeks before her 15th birthday on July 3rd 1973 and saw Bowie’s ‘final’ show there, then sought out his mime teacher (to have such a thing, how very 70s) and took herself forward. (Sidebar: by then she had already written The Man With The Child In His Eyes, when she was 13; she recorded the album version when she was 16). In 1979 her tour ended in Hammersmith. In 2002 I saw Bowie there, and that was a landmark night. I’m not interested particularly in ranking and lists, but I can’t deny that last night was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen, or likely ever will see. The love in the room was unlike anything I’ve experienced at a live show. At the end of Aerial, she sprouted a blackbird’s wing and flew away. Of course she did, because it was a remarkable and unforgettable night where anything was possible.
Introduction
Lily
Hounds of Love
Joanni
Top of the City
Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)
King of the Mountain
The Ninth Wave
Video Interlude - And Dream of Sheep
Under Ice
Waking the Witch
Watching You Without Me
Little Light
Jig of Life
Hello Earth
The Morning Fog
A Sky of Honey
Prelude
Prologue
An Architect's Dream
The Painter's Link
Sunset
Aerial Tal
Somewhere in Between
Tawny Moon (performed by Albert McIntosh)
Nocturn
Aerial
Encore
Among Angels
Cloudbusting
Before The Dawn – A Prologue (with setlist spoilers) :: 13-9-14
A first. This is a first. I’ve never written a preview of a gig before. The closest I’ve ever come was writing the opening two paragraphs of my Poughkeepsie review before I saw the show. Reading now, it’s presumptuous; it predicts being changed (even though I was) by something I hadn’t yet experienced. Is it possible to know that something will change you before you are present? Or is it just something you feel, like a premonition? I’ve never felt pressure to love or hate something based on what other people, friends or strangers, have said. And I don’t feel it this time, but I do seem to instinctively somehow just know that I am about to see something special.
It’s not rare, in any event, to have prior information about a pop concert. When you go to see the Stones you know what songs you’ll get. In fact, when you see most artists – Arcade Fire, Morrissey, McCartney, even Björk – you know what you’re going to hear and see, largely. There are certain songs you know will be played, the performer/s will move and sing in familiar poses and tones and, on a good night for you and them, will reach you in a certain, visceral, emotional way. Surprises may come to meet you, but we go to see pop or rock shows precisely because of those degrees of comfort, nostalgia and familiarity. At jazz concerts, the pieces you know from the albums probably aren’t going to be played note for note (it’s unlikely but can happen), so you’re most likely going to spend your evening in sonic surprise. At classical recitals, improvisation is surely unlikely (I could be wrong, I’m a beginner at classical, at best), so unless you know the music back to front it’ll be a new exploration. But even then, of course, you know how those instruments in those combinations sound, even if some of the specifics are unknown to you. In the case of popular music, if you know the songs as part of your muscle memory, you might hope for something visually arresting to accompany them. Something, anything, as an unexpected flourish of sound or vision makes the eyes sparkle and the synapses fire. However, It’s rare to get everything in combination: songs you know + something you’ve never seen before + the feeling that you’re seeing something unprecedented. This gold dust formula can and should all = a unique night. It might not be the music itself that’s going to be a surprise: you’re excited because you have the sense of being present at an event.
Even allowing for the fact that I’ve seen hundreds of gigs, the mere act of going to a performance of any kind fills me with anticipatory excitement. Whether I’ve seen the artist a dozen times or never before, I have a bit of a sleepless night, as I fantasise about what the show’s going to be like. It’s a bit like going on holiday – having something, whether big or small, to look forward to… isn’t that what makes life worth living?
Having said all of that, even if you (think you) fundamentally know what a concert will contain, once in a blue moon you’ll be confronted with something so completely unexpected that you have no idea how to process it. While this usually happens at the gig, not before it, this is where I am, today, thinking about Kate Bush’s run of concerts in Hammersmith and what on earth it’s going to be like to see, pretty much, the only pop artist (of this size, certainly) who has never established herself as a live performer. The reasons for her absence from the stage are storied and varied and irrelevant to me (as in, none of my business). Did she feel her songs could live only as products of studio creativity that passed through listeners’ ears in private? Was stage fright a factor? What about the understandable trauma at the death of her lighting engineer on her sole outing, 1979’s Tour Of Life? A desire to simply retreat from the burdens placed on her, perhaps, as a female in pop music operating in a sexist industry atmosphere? (We think misogyny lurks around every corner today, and we’re right; but try it in the 1970s for size.) I don’t suppose the reasons matter, though the latter point does bring to mind a recent set of thoughts (and an online exchange) I had about music and femininity.
BBC4 screened a new documentary recently, no doubt made to cash in on these Hammersmith shows. It was very enjoyable and part of it illuminated views on the essentially feminine qualities of her music and persona. This, inevitably, elicited some unpleasantness on Twitter, the world’s toilet wall, and even on friends’ Facebook pages, with one person saying that she (yes she, incredibly) didn’t like female singers – a generalisation that I could barely believe I was reading. Back on Twitter, female creative expression was being roundly scoffed at, in this case in particular as the proponent is attractive but deemed to be strange. During this depressing stream of Tweets, I had a quite brilliant email thread going with my frequent gig companion. Back and forth we went, on the subject of what exactly it is that bothers men so much about women like Kate Bush. And yes, predictably, it was almost entirely men decrying her as a weirdo. They don’t really know what to do with women like her – who appear on the surface demure and slight, but are suspected of being like sirens drawing you onto the rocks; they are suspicious and find it easier to dismiss Bush and her musical contemporaries and descendants as crazy or kooky.
We’ve all grown up with male voices in music, male bands, so where is the coping framework for someone as original as Kate Bush? Oh, the male Bowie, they say, because it’s easier to place her in that box (she stole plenty from him, of course, as he stole plenty from others). Music can be, but does not have to be, gendered. Music made by men isn’t always exclusively masculine, nor does music made by women have to be feminine. And certainly, you don’t have to be female to understand the music made by females. Yet here we are, talking about female musicians and female composers and female singers. When have you ever seen a man be asked what it’s like to be a man navigating his music career? When has a man ever been asked how he juggles his fatherhood with his job? When have you ever seen a man described as bossy, feisty or pushy? These are questions and terms directed exclusively at women and, while we have to tolerate it before we can change it, we are at least starting to talk about it and call it out for the misogynist rhetoric it is.
Music is so much about emotion and how comfortable you are able to feel when a song has that alchemy, that combination of notes that causes your eyes to get wet, in a song like This Woman’s Work. If men don’t feel comfortable with that level of emotion (or her total creative control of her own career) they can dismiss her by calling her kooky, then decry that emotional relationship to music that most people crave and respond to, and push anything that resembles real connection away. She can make that response easy, in some ways, because so much of her music, let’s face it, is pretty odd! A song like Wuthering Heights is so accepted now as a classic pop single. But listen to it, I mean, really listen. It is incredibly bizarre! Everything about it, the lyrics, the arrangement, orchestration and composition, the vocal… even today it seems shocking somehow; now imagine it in the 1978 world of felt-up and frightened girls in BBC dressing rooms and lumpen coked-up Eagles road crew favours.
Freed from the yoke of live performance, and how songs must be rendered with live bands, her music is imbued with this quite incredible, otherworldly quality, and perhaps nobody has embodied or employed the concept of using the studio as a musical instrument quite as well, or as opulently. Albums like The Dreaming and Never For Ever are strange, bewitching, wonderful and even surreal records. Incidentally, and perhaps it’s a combination of a high register and the sheer scale of those recordings, but she performs nothing from her first four albums at these shows.
Consumers of pop music are comfortable with outright sexuality, Rihanna et al., but women who confront, like PJ Harvey and Tori Amos, are ‘scary’ and even marketed as such. Strong men are adored, yet strong women are feared and shut down, worldwide, every day. Even now, in the gushing reviews of Before The Dawn (the title she’s given to this set of shows), she is fitted neatly into the last of the three categories women are allowed to occupy (virgin, whore, mother). This has come to pass because she’s now 56, and not as svelte (another word used only to describe women’s bodies) as she once was. It seems fair game for the nastier sections of the press to call her ‘matronly’ and remark on how much she must have eaten, how she has ‘let herself go’. Some of the tabloid reviews are filled with euphemisms commenting on her weight, which is as predictable as it is depressing and tedious.
So, second only to seeing Bowie live again, this gig next week is a special one. It’s a bucket list chance to see a performer who doesn’t perform. It’s up there with somehow getting to see Joni (who has retired from live performance) and Tom Waits (one show in England a decade ago, and in 1987 before that). In addition, in quite a staggering development, I’m actually going to see her twice, entirely by accident. On the morning of the sale, in the same frenzy as everyone else, I loaded up 22 pages (one for each date) and reloaded them all to the point of insanity, looking for a pair of tickets. I failed. And then, after nearly two hours of trying, I was barely concentrating between the incessant reloading and my own madness when I accidentally clicked on one ticket and a screen telling me I had five minutes to buy it appeared. I panicked. I bought it. Ok, so I had one. But this was no good, and I was a little upset about it. I told Leah and she was, of course, very happy that I had gotten a ticket. But, I didn’t feel good about it, as you’d imagine, and I went back in to try and get another for the same night. Another hour passed and, dejected, I had to admit defeat. I spent the day not talking to anyone – I wasn’t happy that I was going, I know what kind of a night it’s going to be and the idea of her not getting to see it was… well, we never got to see Bowie together, not that I’m trying to make a comparison, but there’s similar dash of magic about the pair of them. However, on the next day I was coming round a little to the idea because I had little choice but to. And then I got a message from my old friend Joe Wakeling. I’d completely forgotten that we’d had a conversation a few days earlier about the shows. He lives in Berlin and had said he was going to try for tickets too. I said, rather airily I recall, as even my ticket karma shouldn’t stretch all the way to Germany, that if he got in to try and get four, as we would happily take those two spares off his hands. You guessed the end of the story, right?
So we got two and I was bouncingly happy. And now I get to go twice! And how perfect it is to go with the very person who actually got me properly into Kate Bush in the first place. I only knew the hits. I thought she was fantastic but I didn’t understand her. I love whole albums, and prefer listening to song cycle concepts rather than singles collections, but I had no place to start. So on a particular day, some years ago, she says, this is the one, this is the album, listen to this and it’ll blow your mind: Aerial. Good lord, AERIAL. Released twelve years after her last album The Red Shoes, 2005’s Aerial is an utterly epic 80-minute double album and, to this day, if people tell me they don’t get Kate Bush I never send them running to singles or even, arguably, to her most complete album, Hounds Of Love. I send them to songs about nature, Pi, summer days, the sky, the sea, birdsong, contentment, childhood, motherhood and her washing machine. It was a revelation to me. I own all of her albums now, and it is still my favourite (not even Rolf can ruin it). However, it seems that Hounds Of Love is recognised as her most realised work – the first half has three big hits, the second half is a concept piece about a woman lost at sea, which she calls The Ninth Wave, as it is partially based on Tennyson’s The Coming Of Arthur:
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame
Ivan Aivazovsky
That excerpt, printed on yellow-aged paper, lands like confetti on the heads of the audience at these Hammersmith shows during the first half. I know, a spoiler. But they have been, even with warnings, unavoidable. I read with abandon the myriad reviews of the first night. Respected and august journalists wiping tears from their eyes and falling over themselves to claim it the greatest concert spectacle of all. My hope for the show before it began was that some of Aerial would be played, this being the reason I fell for her. My second hope was to hear some of Hounds Of Love, of course. Typically, I’m not a person who cares much about setlists. I have no time for that. I’ve never exited a gig complaining about anything the artist played (ok, once: Primus, they played two hours of B sides and rarities, it was interminable). I’ve also avoided the very few sneaked audio/video clips on You Tube; I’ve seen almost no photos of the stage set, even. Remarkably, in our digital age, 99% of the photos I’ve seen are of fans beaming outside the venue, as people are really letting their phones drop and putting themselves in the moment, incredible in itself! As a result of the reviews, I do know the seemingly unchanging setlist, but my excitement has not been dimmed remotely even though I know she performs the entire hour-long second half of Aerial and virtually all of Hounds Of Love. On Wednesday I’ll go to Hammersmith, fall asleep and wake up in a dream. Caitlin Moran’s Times review describes the show as being simply too much. As it’s subscriber-only, I’ll print some of it here (and I’ll finish with my three favourite reviews):
“Foyer, ticket, seat, waiting, lights down, roaring – a sound of love I have never heard before. Kate Bush walks on stage, a tangle of black hair and a pale face like the Moon, but beaming, like the Moon never did. We expected drama, or fear, or perhaps a ghost, but not someone beatific in a state of simultaneous calm and joy that you see in yogis and lamas, and very old couples holding hands on park benches, still in love.
Bush opens fire on the audience with Hounds of Love, which is like having every emotion you’ve ever experienced in your life all turn up at once, unannounced, as you’re leaving the house at 8am. It’s quantifiably too much. “Take my shoes off/ And THRRRROW them in the lake … Oh, here I go!”
… Interval. Foyer. The darker and deeper neurones have been fired up. Everyone here feels as if they are part of something on-rushing and huge. People touch more, use words that they never usually use in the supermarket queue or, tired, in the bathroom: “euphoric”, “astonishing”, “voltaic” (it means electric).
The second half takes us from the sea to the land and the sky. This is the second half of Aerial, and if we didn’t know what it was about then, we do now. Just: a day. A beautiful day. And how one might go wild trying to pin it down. For, in your younger years, you live for moments – a kiss, a song, the email that changes everything.
But as you move into your thirties and forties, your moment-hunger becomes longer, and you shift your obsession to whole days, instead – vexed with the inability of a photo, or a single song, to capture the amazing ones, the ones that truly grieve you to know you can never live again. Just to have, and keep, a whole day – that is the greatest magic you can imagine. It is all you wish, as you rush towards death. Where can we live but days?
In A Sea of Honey’s long day, nothing particularly remarkable happens, just as nothing really remarkable happens in Ulysses. The sun comes up, and “the sky is filled with birds”, and the Moon rises, and the protagonists swim in the sea, at night. But some people are just more alive than others, all eyes and mouth, and overloading senses – and that’s what Joyce was, and that’s what Kate Bush is. They appear in your life to remind you that to watch a sunrise is to watch a burning star, and that pollen is sperm, and summer is fleeting, and everything on Earth is so unlikely – so improbable – that we might as well live somewhere where Kate Bush can end a concert by turning into a one-winged bird and flying out into the auditorium, as 4,000 people roar for her return.
So what is it that you know, as you stagger out into Hammersmith – rattled, high and newborn again? This: that you have patiently waited 35 years to be reminded that you are alive.”
To write like that, what a gift… so, as she says, it’s all going to be too much. Every emotion happens to you all at once simply because you’re in a room with a person you never thought you’d be in a room with. I’ve read a hundred accounts from attendees on Twitter: to a human, everyone says they wept. These are not only reports from people who went to the first night, when it was utterly new: this is every night. The mornings after each show Twitter is filled with changed, emotional wrecks warning everyone to be prepared; one woman saying today her life has been leading up to the concert. Everyone is meeting their childhood memories face-on all at once. I don’t even have a childhood attachment to her and I don’t feel ready, not even close. But as sure as the days roll into night, Wednesday will come, and I will sit in a venue I saw Bowie in, and I expect it to be just as transformative. In this case, I don’t feel cowed or frightened of what I expect from her. I trust her to deliver, more than I’ve trusted anyone.
http://thequietus.com/articles/16098-kate-bush-live-review
perhaps the best review I’ve read, by Simon Price in The Quietus
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/26/kate-bush-before-the-dawn-eventim-apollo-review
Alexis Petridis in The Guardian
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/09/tracey-thorn-kate-bush-hammersmith-apollo-ecstatic-triumph-life-s-work
pop star turned author Tracey Thorn writes brilliantly; worth reading for the subhead alone: “If we still ask, where has Kate Bush been all these years and why has she not done this before, my answer would be that I think she has been living the life that made this show possible.”
1. photo credit John Carder Bush
2. photo credit Ken McKay/Rex Features...
Kevin Spacey – Clarence Darrow :: Old Vic Theatre, London :: 4-6-2014
Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan for The Guardian
“I am pleading for the future… when hatred and cruelty will not control our hearts, when we can learn that all life is worth saving; that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”
For an actor, assuming you’re not one of the out-of-work ones (rare itself), there’s a certain career path that has been well-trodden over the last half century, since the end of the studio system and the exclusivity contracts given to their stables of stars. The early fight for supporting roles, the toil through endless auditions, catching the eye in average movies, which lets you move onto the next rung, then perhaps getting a decent agent, and then even more supporting roles but maybe in better movies. Depending on what you look like, you could make it to the part of the best friend or love interest, though it would actually be better to be unusual or even average looking, because only then might the parts get interesting. Perhaps you’ll pull the supporting role of a lifetime, the unlikely hero or the revealed villain, and steal the movie. You can succeed because it’s been pre-decided, due to your non-Jackman/Pitt/Cruise level looks, that you’re not the leading man, but you’re eye-catching enough to form important connections with people who’ll stand up for you when the studio wants someone more traditionally handsome for their next Oscar-bait drama: the kind that Hollywood used to make, until fairly recently. This path was largely unaltered until around fifteen years ago, when a shift started to happen in the mainstream movie business. The Hollywood paymasters shoved real creatives toward the margins and even the smaller movies started to be made by committee. The approach itself wasn’t new but the players were. Marketing executives with an eye on toy markets, merchandising, one-sheets, TV spots and sequels were now sending notes back on scripts – these people had not a clue on earth what components a film needed to be good. They used to come in after a movie was made, with no part played in the creative process, but it all changed and getting great writing onto the big screen suddenly became as easy as pushing water up a hill.
Disillusioned creatives saw this commerce, rather than arts, driven approach becoming the new normal and started to do something drastic and unprecedented – they moved to TV. Before, TV had been the last refuge of the failed movie actor. There’s a lot to be said for a steady paycheck. The first stirrings were seen as the century ended, with the 1999 premieres of both The West Wing on broadcast (the channels everyone gets) and The Sopranos on cable, (which you pay for, in the US model). Bit by bit, the best actors started dropping out of movies and into TV, because that’s where the great dramas were now being made. They ran away from the comic book adaptations, the tent-pole summer blockbusters and the sequels, perhaps indulging in a little voice acting for animations to top up the bank balance. Some rushed straight into TV, while others rushed straight to the stage. A few were clever enough to do everything: take a good part in a small movie for a nice wage when the script was good enough, focus on theatre and help to get plays on not just by starring in them but by producing them, and finally, only when the absolutely perfect part came along, created by none of the established cable networks (operating outside even HBO/AMC/Showtime et al. without any constraints, the newest players are Netflix, Hulu and Amazon: with no track record comes no fear, nor limits on adventure or investment), jump on it and create a career where half the year is spent doing a remarkable TV show and the other half is spent with theatre sawdust in the nostrils. This is how to conduct a career, be in charge of it, while taking or creating the best opportunities. And thus, we come to Kevin Spacey.
Put simply, eleven years ago he opted out of Hollywood, at a time when his star was sky high and $10m a movie was on the table. He saw that great movie drama was in trouble but wasn’t quite ready to be on the small screen. So he moved to London and became the artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre in Waterloo. Many thought this was some vanity project. A chance to use his name to act in a series of revivals and just get as many eyeballs on him as possible. That may be the perception, but the facts don’t bear it out: since 2003, he has directed only two plays and starred in seven (his last being 2011’s acclaimed Richard III, which saw a reunion with Sam Mendes), but has shepherded over forty onto the stage, by focusing his not inconsiderable reserves of personal charm onto fundraising and creative partnerships. While the Old Vic, at nearly 200 years of age, wasn’t quite the busted flush that some of the media suggested pre-Spacey’s arrival, he has turned it into a theatre that can attract the newest and most exciting plays, to rival the National Theatre (which once controlled it). His aim was not just to reinvigorate the place, but also to create a structure and innovative ethos that would allow it to continue long after he abdicated. Next year he will hand over to Matthew Warchus, whose credentials catch the eye; most recently, he directed the magical Matilda musical, which won seven Oliviers and five Tonys last year.
Darrow has been called a civil rights lawyer, but this is an oversimplification. He defended murderers threatened with the death penalty to prevent the state from committing another display of dehumanising horror themselves, arguing that mercy is what makes society better, and how revenge will only make us harder people. He proudly saved 102 people from death row. Humanity’s good aims interested him more than America’s often Biblically inspired desire for revenge; he believed in trying to pry out people’s innate goodness. But more than this, his philosophy was to fight for the common man and woman. A full forty years before the turning point of the civil rights battle he lined up behind black defendants faced with all-white juries. The most celebrated case of this type was that of Ossian Sweet, a black doctor who had the temerity to move into a white neighbourhood. His home was surrounded by an angry mob and, as they advanced to his door, a shot was fired that killed one of the invaders. In many US states this would be allowed under the so-called ‘stand your ground’ law, sadly now used to free killers like George Zimmerman. Darrow defended Sweet and, in a landmark case, he was acquitted of murder.
The text of the play itself, written by David W. Rintels (based on the biography Clarence Darrow For The Defense by Irving Stone, who also wrote the famed van Gogh bio Lust For Life) and first performed by Henry Fonda in 1974, is fairly straightforward. It’s an autobiographical run through of Darrow’s most famed cases, after first illuminating his Ohio upbringing, to freethinking parents: his mother talked of suffrage in 1840, no less than 80 years before women gained countrywide voting rights. It briefly covers his move to Chicago, his first marriage, and even a little of the unfounded jury bribery allegations that beset him during the case of the McNamara brothers, who had planted a bomb in the offices of the Los Angeles Times during a labour union dispute: not intending to harm anyone, they had killed 21 newspaper employees; Darrow saved them from the noose. He defended Pennsylvania miners, who were working fourteen hours a day, 365 days a year, against their bosses, arguing for better pay and working conditions. Spacey made the audience gasp with a tale of an 11-year-old child miner who had a leg amputated due to employer negligence: he was manipulative in the way that all great arguers are. A champion of the unions, no doubt the right-wing would today call him a Communist. He never even claimed to be a socialist; he was simply a man who wanted to use his intellect and talents to stand up for the underdog. He was an inspiration to anyone who wants to speak for the vulnerable. He didn’t mind a bit of media-bait either, perhaps best encapsulated in the Scopes ‘monkey’ trial, following a schoolteacher’s prosecution for teaching evolution in the Bible Belt. The play finishes, inevitably, to a coruscating powerhouse denouement on perhaps Darrow’s most famous case, that of Leopold and Loeb, two rich teenagers who killed a 14-year-old boy merely for the experience and excitement, the challenge of getting away with it. This is where the concept of mercy came in, as Darrow fervently believed that we can only move forward as a collective culture when we reject the baser instincts of our human nature. He believed without pause in rehabilitation over retribution as a model for how a civilised society should behave.
Spacey had played Darrow no less than twice before. When pressed, he has said that the first occasion, a 1991 low budget PBS movie, was his favourite filming experience. The second time was in a 2009 Old Vic production of Inherit The Wind, (with the Darrow character alternately named Henry Drummond). He is the fourth fine actor to play the role: after Fonda, Orson Welles took him on in 1959’s Compulsion, a thinly fictionalised account of the Leopold and Loeb trial; perhaps the most famous incarnation was in the film adaptation of Inherit The Wind, with Spencer Tracy’s Oscar nominated version taking the plaudits.
A one-man (or woman) show is not to be trifled with, and few actors on earth could hold the rapt attention of a thousand people the way Spacey does. Once I got over the initial thrill of seeing such a renowned actor in person, and only a few feet away, it was an easy pleasure to get swept away in the invective and the complete command and control he has over an audience. It’s not just his level of stagecraft and experience, which is considerable (I’d seen him once before, unashamedly scene-stealing in The Philadelphia Story in this same venue) – it’s the sheer force of his charismatic presence. This is an actor at his absolute career peak, both in person and on screen. In his other job, House of Cards, he gives you barely a drip of humanity, and yet still you root for his Machiavellian politician. Such is his skill that he can strip away any remaining vestige of humanity, as in Se7en, and leave you disgusted but in awe. He can project a seductive quality, as in LA Confidential, or pathetic desperation, as in American Beauty. He can scenery-chew for a giggle, as in the otherwise unwatchable Superman Returns, or con you completely, in The Usual Suspects. He even stood up to his mentor Jack Lemmon, perhaps the actor he resembles the most in the cinema canon, in Glengarry Glen Ross. During the second half, I heard an anachronistic noise: it became clear that a mobile phone was going off (idiots are present everywhere) and, in character, without breaking a beat, he said ‘If you don’t answer that, I will.’ Everything appears to be effortless, which is as it should be when you work as hard as Spacey does.
Perhaps the only cautionary tale is that we should now be able to view Darrow’s humanitarianism as quaint, a relic of a more closed-minded century. Unfortunately, the world is no less right-wing (it just seems like it is because we talk more; activism is higher but pushback is greater) than it was during his heyday. While some progress has been made, governments are more secretive and still as keen to crush uprisings (for example, in the last year 40,000 protestors have been jailed in Egypt, with all forms of protest now banned by a government elected as a result of protests), while citizens are more suspicious, and rightly so given the inroads made on liberties and how much we are spied on daily. The game is rigged, with little advances made in social justice and minority interest groups dominating the conversation (belief in climate change is crazy and anti-business while belief in invisible gods is sky high). What is the internet itself, except a method from which data is collected on behaviours, and how long before it’s yanked under corporate control and net neutrality becomes a thing of the past? Most of the jail populations still come from backgrounds of poverty and poor education, while education funding itself is slashed and healthcare is sold to the highest bidder. He should be a winner on the right side of history, not an anomaly pushing against the tide. A century later, we need fighters like Darrow more than ever.
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Janelle Monáe :: Brixton Academy, London :: 9-5-14
photo by Jason Williamson
During a conversation about a hundred (ok, 5-10) years ago on BowieNet a friend of mine opined on Prince, exclaiming that he was like a walking Black History Month. He absorbed the best bits of those he had loved, watched and learned from. But while his influences were worn openly, he was completely himself. For the guitar, and the hotness which shouldn’t work but somehow does, he took plenty of Hendrix (though a much more conservative version). For the weirdness and sense of innovation he took some George Clinton. For the dictatorial bandleader, to channel the funk that poured out of him, he took so much from Sly Stone. For the overall king of everything, master of all, he stole liberally from James Brown. For the fuck you attitude it was all Miles Davis. And only recently, I realised, for the slices of sweeter soul he nicked a ton from Shuggie Otis. This is Prince. The parts that make him who he is. The people through which he is filtered. Everyone in music has this, the family tree that created them. But few are as blatant as Prince, and few have been so transparent, until I saw Janelle Monáe perform.
This is no bad thing, and I don’t wish to make it appear so. She does have a bit of an authenticity problem, because stealing without filtering and reimagining is just you doing an impersonation of someone else and I don’t think she needs to do that. This was never demonstrated better than during the two ‘tribute’ sections in the show. The second, during the encore, was a little much, a fairly karaoke-ish version of Let’s Go Crazy. It was perhaps only present as a nod because Prince appears briefly on Givin Em What They Love, from her most recent album, last year’s The Electric Lady, hands down my favourite pop record of 2013 (imagine a lost album located between Off The Wall and Lovesexy, you’re nearly there; in a pop-world of single digital downloads, she made a real no-filler long player). It was fine; it wasn’t bad, but the show just didn’t need it. She had half a dozen of her own songs she hadn’t played yet – like the remarkable Victory, which sadly wasn’t played at all. There’s really no need to do covers when you have the songs, though I understood why she felt the need to pay tribute.
Some time before that, and this one hit the sweet spot with me because he was my first childhood music love, she did a perfectly weighted Jackson Five homage (I Want You Back /ABC). If you shut your eyes, it was like listening to a note-perfect teenage Michael Jackson. No kidding, she nailed the shit out of a pair of songs she has obviously been singing all her life. So when I say that Prince synthesises all of his musical loves yet manages to create something wholly original, I don’t think Janelle Monáe is quite there yet. But, and this is the crucial part, because her songwriting is so fantastic and her songs are so incredibly perfect, none of her reliance on being derivative matters.
My best friend and gig-going companion suggested that her robotic persona is misdirection, as since the start she has adopted, Bowie-like, the persona of a character called Cindi Mayweather. Incidentally, she says that she hasn’t yet talked to Bowie but that he’s in her subconscious and they speak ‘on the same frequencies', which is a little bit nutty, a good sign (she also says there’s a time travel machine in Atlanta that both she and OutKast have been through, and I feel like I could believe her). We mused on whether she does the whole I’m-an-android thing because she’s a bit, how to put it, stiff? She can be a little halting in her performance, without the emotional warmth of other R&B divas, but that this is covered by the sheer amount of hard work she gets through onstage, dancing both brilliantly and a bit awkwardly without pause. I was exhausted just watching her. Or does she do it because she wants to put up a big wall and not convey any of the over-personal I’m-really-your-mate nonsense of the Rihannas and the Mileys? I actually love that about her, how little I know about her personally, in this age of over-sharing. I don’t know what she wears when she’s offstage. I don’t know where she lives or what her house looks like. I don’t know whether she drinks or smokes or takes drugs. I don’t know who she sleeps with or who she hangs out with. I know nothing about her at all, except that, somehow fittingly, as she does have a kind of Dorothy innocence, that she’s from Kansas, aka the Land of Oz (incidentally, someone should remake The Wiz: she could play all of the parts). She talks about being an android, though certainly, Data-like, she seems to be trying to be more human. It’s a clever and unique approach.
So for example, the android Janelle has spent years watching Michael Jackson on repeat and has synthesised and then replicated his moves, and the showman inside lets it out; to the delight of the audience she moonwalks several times. Not just Michael either, there was more than a little of Rhythm Nation Janet present in the room as well. How many members of the audience get all of these references? It doesn’t matter. Maybe the kids swooning over her will look something up on You Tube when they get home, find some old clips and see from whence it all came. I must admit, I couldn’t help but smile at the overwhelming amount of James Brown-isms on show: the boxing-style warm-up man, the announcer, reminiscent of Danny Ray, who stirred JB crowds into a frenzy for over 30 years. Then we had the foot-to-foot shuffle and the mic stand being flipped back and forth, which are now third generation moves. I am always reminded of that precocious MJ clip, recorded in July 1968 (a month before his 10th birthday, he’d already been performing on stage for 4 years), covering JB’s I Got The Feelin, for their Motown audition tape. And now she steals from MJ, who stole from JB, so she’s lauding both and those same moves are passed down across 50 years. And finally there was the announcer coming on to put a velvet robe around her shoulders, which she would then throw off, another JB steal. It was utterly shameless and I loved every second of it.
I have rarely heard such perfectly appointed pop music, conveyed so meticulously, both calculated and heartfelt. And she doesn’t have to do what all of the other female artists seem to think they need to do, or are told to do by fat white guys at their record labels. It’s a little sad that this must be stated as news but she doesn’t use sex to sell her music. Shocking! She has a simple but slick visual theme that doesn’t exploit anyone and she sticks to it to the last: enveloped in a big white backdrop, alongside her tight 7-piece band, who are dressed in black and white and play black or white instruments, and her two black and white stripe-clad backing singers, she wears a uniform of black and white – tight white trousers, white shirt, bolero jacket, black braces and with her hair in a high pompadour (this time, a steal from both JB and Little Richard). There’s no short skirts or cleavage or sliding down a pole happening. There are a few instances of crotch thrusting but it comes off in a non-sexual way, somehow (to be fair, it wasn’t exactly arousing when MJ did it either). She’s not Beyoncé, who with the raising of one eyebrow and the slight movement of one thigh can exude sex all day long, but she does have a Beyoncé-like control over her creative output (without, one hopes, the slightly creepy temperature-controlled digital storage facility recording her every move). She seems to be in complete control, without having to expose her flesh, and has surrounded herself with an intelligent, creative team – from her excellent band to OutKast’s Big Boi as producer to collaborators such as Erykah Badu, Solange and Esperanza Spalding, who are, in no coincidence, also powerful women in control of their careers.
But the songs, it’s all about those songs: Dance Apocalyptic, Q.U.E.E.N., Electric Lady, Come Alive and the big hit from the first record, Tightrope. In truth, the encore of Many Moons dragged a little, turning into a 10-minute band introduction song that descended into her lying on stage before being ‘revived’, Frankenstein-style, by bolts of lightning. It probably looked great from the front row, not least when she finished the show with a spot of crowd surfing, but at the back it caused people to start checking their phones. That minor quibble aside, from the second the gig started with her being carried on stage in a straitjacket, after no less than three men in white delivered and polished her black and white striped microphone stand, this was a devastating, energetic, brilliant pitch-perfect performance of flawless pop music in front of a baying, buzzing crowd. It was a thrill to be there.
A perfect storm: everyday sexism and females who like football :: 4-5-2014
Football is a game for men. They play it, they run it, they attend it. The few women working in football are often marginalised, patronised, ignored, abused and/or disrespected on a daily basis. Women do actually play football as well but nobody really cares. When the England team are on TV the BBC broadcast (it’s always the BBC – a commercial channel would never put it on because they can’t make money from women playing football) is treated with the same respect as men’s games but the stadium is usually half-empty, even for a World Cup qualifier. The attendees are families and local schoolchildren: the straight, white men with season tickets across the land, who turn out in their millions to watch the nation’s favourite sport every week, largely do not attend and are not interested in doing so. Before Hillsborough, women rarely attended football matches. The all-standing terraces were not a welcoming place, unless you wanted to be pressed up against male strangers. Children were taken, but only boys of course. After the Taylor Report was published, post-Hillsborough, which recommended all-seater stadia in order to avoid such a tragedy recurring, gradually women started to attend matches.
According to these 2009 figures, 19% of Premier League attendees are women. It feels like less when I go, I must say, perhaps because I mostly go to away games. It feels like a few dozen women and about 2000 men but being entirely outnumbered doesn’t remotely enter my head when I go to a match. It’s just the way it is when you’re female and you love football. However, a cursory Google search of women + football brings unsurprisingly depressing results – reams of articles, blogs and message board posts on why women don’t like it, don’t understand it, are not welcome at it and so on. Largely, football is something that men both watch and do. And they want to do it with each other, oblivious to its homoeroticism of course (oh the irony of worshipping its perfectly coiffed, manscaped, buffed, vain and sculpted players, who kiss and cuddle each other frequently), and they do not want women there. It used to be the one place where they could escape from the nagging shrews and harpies they married. The women who won’t shut up. The women who are interested only in shopping and spending the money their men earn. Yes, the universe of football still exists in the 1950s. The spouse of a football player who dares to publicly express her opinion about where he should live, who he should play for, what city they should live in and what schools they should send their children to are called gold-digging slags who should shut up and take their husband’s money. Sadly, most of the women that surround footballers, the famed WAGs, are perma-tanned, pneumatic airheads; though a few are the childhood sweetheart type, the girl next door who doesn’t like football anyway. Bagging a footballer – either as a husband so these women don’t have to work or so they can sell a tabloid tale – is a commonplace sport in itself in nightclubs up and down the land every weekend and women like that are not helping themselves or the rest of us. However, the notion that not all women are the same is an alien concept to men who resent having their personal football space invaded. Virgin, mother or whore: the three eternal categories into which we all fall, right? The spectre of women attending, watching or speaking about football is largely unwelcome and any woman who likes football has an endless supply of tales to tell about being disrespected by men.
My own experience of this, until yesterday, was rather typical. Before the days of watching online, I might have gone to pubs to watch my beloved Manchester City. I would chat happily with non-City supporters about the game. More often than not they would express surprise that I knew so much, or anything I suppose, about the sport, beyond liking fit players and their thighs, which is what women who like football are supposed to comment on or care about. Recently on holiday in Rome, a taxi driver expressed shocked bemusement that I knew anything about football or even liked it at all. Musings on what life is like for female football fans outside the UK are for another time. It’s difficult to be a black man playing football on the continent, so let’s not even wonder about what it might be like to be a female in football’s general area.
On non-football message boards I have over the years encountered fairly tame comments that men think are funny (sometimes they are, if from the right person) telling me to get back in the kitchen and stop watching the match because women don’t even understand the offside rule (that old chestnut), let alone the intricacies of tactics, team selection, transfer windows, zonal marking systems, high line defences and how goalkeepers should cover their angles. I’m used to being disrespected, constantly. However, I should mention that this treatment has never, not even once, been meted out to me by my own people, by other City fans, either in pubs or at our games. We’re all in it together and the men who have sat either side of me at the matches I’ve been attending for over 25 of my 37 years could not give any sort of shit about whether I’m female or not. I shout at an underperforming player the same as them. I cheer the same as them. I bite my nails just as much as them. We cry together and we celebrate together.
About two weeks ago, I read this story. TalkSport is a radio station, fairly well respected, but its website is not something I have any knowledge of. If a rumour appears on a website I tend to pay no attention. If it appears on a broadsheet newspaper’s website I will certainly pay attention. And if it appears on the BBC it is true. That’s how it goes. So that story, about Manchester City’s brilliant keeper, England’s number 1, Joe Hart being swapped in the summer for Tottenham Hotspur’s French goalie Hugo Lloris received a little attention, though not as much as if it had been reported on a respected website. I don’t think Lloris is very good. At the Crystal Palace game last week, which I attended, the City fans made their feelings known about the article. It was good-natured, a tune of support to ‘super Joey Hart’ (comically, sung to the tune of Achy Breaky Heart!), with an ending salvo of ‘if you sell him you’ll have a fucking riot on your hands!’ The report seemed ridiculous. We have one of the best goalkeepers in Europe and if he ever did leave he’d go to a team in the Champions League anyway. Spurs aren’t a bad team at all, I should say. They’re top 6 and have their moments of brilliance. This season, however, they’ve had a bit of a disaster. They keep switching managers (in fact, they’ve had 6 in 10 years, an approach which my own club are also guilty of) and had to sell their best player for £100 million but then pissed away the money on seven very average players (far too many to integrate into a squad at once and only one, Eriksen, looks any good at all). Their last manager was fired partly because of those transfer failures but mostly for presiding over some poor results and their current manager has recently had to comment on the club talking to other managers behind his back. They’re not in great shape, but they’re still one of the best teams in the country.
City and Spurs have some previous, going back decades – football fans have long memories, as often that’s all we have. There’s no love lost between the clubs. And while this is technically off-topic, I find the section of their fans who revel in chanting anti-semitic hate speech to be worthy of only my contempt. If the few Jews at White Hart Lane want to chant Yid Army, incidentally, that’s fine by me. It’s the non-Jews chanting it that I object to. It ain’t their word to reclaim… imagine if I’d told the Twitter hordes I was an actual yid, as well as being a female with an opinion, yesterday. I shudder to think of what might have transpired. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We’ve played them twice this season. They came to our place in November and got pasted 6-0. Lloris was responsible, as you can see here, for two of the goals through egregious errors. We went to their place at the end of January, tore them to shreds and won 5-1. Just before then, on New Year’s Day, I sat with my uncle and dad and we watched Spurs play at Old Trafford. Incredibly, they won 2-1, but with no thanks to Lloris, whose blunders nearly cost them the game. The three of us laughed at him throughout, remarking on what a poor keeper he was. Since then, he’s improved and hasn’t made any really big mistakes for a couple of months. He is a truly fantastic shot-stopper and can make wonderful saves when called upon. But that is only a part of the goalkeeper’s job – he must anticipate attacking danger, be ready for it; he must come out to get high balls, or stay back if he can’t get there; he must come for corners if he can, or know when he can’t; he must give confidence to the defence in front of him and set them up correctly (following the manager’s instructions); he must make sure the wall in front of him for free kicks is exactly where it needs to be so they can cover one side of the goal while he covers the other. And so on and on. Simply stopping a fired shot is only one part of the job and Lloris is excellent at that, but he’s not that great at a fair amount of the other stuff. Of course, I do not watch Spurs every week. I only watch my own team every week. So I will defer to the knowledge of any fan over my own regarding their own team. While I only watch Spurs in highlights packages (though I have seen perhaps 10 of their games in entirety this season), I’ve not been very impressed with Lloris. He is not physically imposing, he comes off his line obsessively quickly and often wrongly, he parries shots in front and has let goals in because he failed to turn a shot around the post. For example, he failed to arrange his wall properly yesterday and caused Spurs to concede a second, crucial, goal away at West Ham, though arguably that’s the fault of the gutless Paulinho and (here’s a surprise) Adebayor.
During the game I posted, as I have done many times, a Tweet that I hashtagged to #bbcfootball. I’d never had a Tweet chosen before for their football updates page, which is viewed by millions of people. It said:
Lloris, like most keepers, is a good shot-stopper. But he's truly a dreadful all-round keeper! Worst in the PL by a long way. #bbcfootball
And then I went to make my lunch. Of course, he’s probably not the worst Premier League keeper. That was a bit of hyperbole! The rest is something I believe. I came back from the kitchen and that’s when it started. A Favourited Tweet. A Retweet. And then another, and then another. I thought, oh my, the Beeb must have put it up, how exciting! I checked the page and, sure enough, they had, with a live link to my Twitter page. My excitement was short-lived.
Soon a trickle of Retweets turned into a stream of profane and abusive replies, the like of which I’d only read about women receiving for suggesting, how dare they, that a woman should be on a £20 note or something. It soon overwhelmed my email and Twitter page. Comment after comment after comment. Here are the best ones (and you will notice the word yid in several of their usernames):
And here’s one apology from a sane person.
I replied to a few of the non-idiot respondents and we had a nice chat about football. I ignored the trolls (you can’t engage with crazy, nothing good ever comes of it). By the end I had 26 Retweets – all of which had been made by furious Spurs fans to other fans and forums so more people could see it and visit my page to abuse me. The respondents were 99% male. 95% of the comments were abusive. My heart was thumping as it was all happening. After two very long hours it had all calmed down and, fortunately, did not reach the levels of rape and/or death threats that so many women have had to tolerate.
So here’s the thing. Every week people say mean things about my team. Every single week, and often on that very BBC Football page. Awful things. I have never sought out anyone who has said terrible things about my club or my players. What would I do that for? What purpose would it serve to start an argument with a stranger? I love, I LOVE, a good argument and I’m pretty good at it. Perhaps when I was younger I was more likely to lose my temper (I do have a bit of a temper) at someone saying something stupid. But now… unless it’s something really out of order (like a racist attack on a player, a bigoted comment, that type of thing) I won’t weigh in. And I certainly wouldn’t have a go at a stranger on Twitter, the world’s toilet wall.
How can people be riled to the point where they felt they needed to click on my Twitter link and head over there to call me names? Would they do it in real life? If I’d been sitting in a pub and had said to a Spurs fan that Lloris was poor would they have smashed a glass in my face? Probably not. If I were male would that abuse have happened in that form anyway? Certainly not. A football fan can often be rational if engaged one-on-one. But en masse, it takes very little to turn what I hope are usually reasonable people into an incited, angry, hateful mob, either online or at a match. The power of numbers. And in this particular case, the power of numbers plus anonymity. There’s something about collective anger multiplied by mob mentality that allows the anonymous nature of the internet to amplify people’s darkest sides. I don’t mind Spurs fans telling me that I’m simply wrong and that Lloris is a great keeper, that’s fine (and when you’re told by 50+ people that you’re wrong about a player’s qualities you can’t help but doubt what you thought in the first place). He’s their keeper, not mine, I don’t have to like or care about him and how he plays. I’m glad they like him, good for them. But who am I to a Spurs fan? Absolutely nobody. Why does my opinion matter at all? Why take the time to come over to my Twitter page and its 116 followers and tell me that I should go back into the kitchen, where women belong? Why are men so obsessed with women being in kitchens anyway? If only they knew about my terrible cooking and lack of interest in anything remotely domestic.
To elicit such venom from strangers is a most bizarre thing to be on the receiving end of. I’m sure the BBC don’t care (but did know) that posting my comment would have caused angered responses. I don’t think my Tweet was incendiary; it’s not like I said he’s a dirty frog who fucks his sister or something, in which case any abuse coming my way would be justified. I would have been happy to further explain what I meant by the comment in calm tones, but the internet, and Twitter in particular, doesn’t work like that. I didn’t think the BBC would put my fairly flippant Tweet (all of my Tweets are frivolous really) on their page. I didn’t think much about it at all in fact when I posted it. I certainly didn’t think it’d cause me to become an online hate figure and punching bag during an afternoon that I wanted to go quickly while waiting for an important City game to start. While it was going on I called my dad and he unhelpfully said that I should stop Tweeting at all. He was supremely stressed about the Everton game and we’ve talked about it since, he realises now how upsetting it all was for me. But really, why would he understand? He has never been attacked or devalued or discriminated against because of his gender. He has never been told, nor will he ever be told, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he’s a man.
Incidentally, I have never been told that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m female on any subject other than football and nor would I be. Because if I express an opinion about, for example, a form of media – a book or film or piece of music or concert – or a thesis or a piece of marketing collateral I’m not responded to in that way. I’m actually paid every day (knock on wood) to give my opinions, it’s how I make a living, such as it is. This only happens in sport. And while I can only speak for football I’ll wager my music collection that the same shit happens to women who like American NFL or hockey or rugby or basketball or any other male-dominated sport where men are (straight) men and women are not welcome. And what we face in sport is, of course, just a sliver, a thimble, a tiny little almost non-existent fraction of the daily horror that men subject women to.
The people who abused me online yesterday will have forgotten about it almost instantly, I’m sure of that. Today they’ll forget that they called a complete stranger a fucking bitch and a mong and a retard. They’re just normal people, who love their team and go to work and make their dinner and live their lives and happened to take umbrage against something a girl said about a goalkeeper. The internet, as a mechanism of communication, goads people to behave like animals on a daily basis. They didn’t like what I said and they sought me out to tell me so, but not in normal terms like a person would if they knew me and disagreed with me (like the friends I have who support Spurs might) because they don’t know me at all. It was precisely because they didn’t know me that they lashed out.
This is where we are now; the facelessness of the online world has fostered a basic lack of humanity, whereby we’re all connected and yet we’re further away from kindness, understanding, respect for others’ opinions and acceptable social behaviour than ever. Where how much men truly hate women can be venomously expressed with a few typed words and a mouse click without anyone being identified or held to account. The internet is meant to connect us and often it does. It’s certainly changed my life for the better and continues to do so. It is a wondrous thing and I am not only grateful it exists but feel privileged to have witnessed it be created, adopted and affect worldwide change beyond estimation. Yet more often than not it creates worlds where, without face-to-face interaction, any remnant of humanity is absent. The world really is moving too fast for some people.
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What do you do when your club becomes the richest in the world?
The other week I went to Upton Park to see my beloved Manchester City play West Ham in the second leg of the Capital One Cup semi-final. I had asked for the ticket (I’m a member of the Supporters’ Club, a benefit is requesting tickets) before we won the first match 6-0 but I grab any chance I can to see my team – having moved to London in 2000, away games are pretty much my only chance to see us play. I average a home game a season (this time it’ll be Fulham in March) when I go home to visit but away matches are rather unique. It’s a constantly singing, buzzing, boiling cauldron of intensity. It’s not like that at home, where the size of the stadium dissipates the noise – away fans are the real deal, a devoted band of travellers who follow the team home and away, across not just England but Europe (to think of the days when we were a million miles away from even playing in the Europa, let alone the Champions League). It ain’t cheap (£50+ a ticket – when I moved here it was £35; better team now, they charge fans more: so the club is rich, we are too?) but I can’t complain as most of the away fans have come down from Manchester, and the costs in entirety must be astronomical. Mind you, there are a few ex-pats like me, and I even meet fans from London and the south who started supporting us decades ago (why, I wonder, what did we have to offer then?! I inherited City from my dad, and he from his, whereas they picked us quite randomly).
The vibe at Upton Park was unlike any I’d experienced because of the bizarre scoreline (already 6-0) before we even kicked off. It was an odd atmosphere, with us virtually certain of getting to the final. I’m usually a bag of nerves and stress, as you’d expect, but here we were, one professional display away from our first League Cup (as opposed to FA Cup) appearance since 1976, the year of my birth.
Near the end a bad tackle, ludicrously unpunished by the referee, brought down our new Spanish striker, a complete player if ever I saw one, Alvaro Negredo. He fell very awkwardly and grabbed his shoulder in agony. Anger at the non-award of the free kick fell away quickly, to be replaced with genuine concern, as fans held their heads and covered their mouths in hope that he’d be ok. At worst, it could be a dislocated shoulder, we all thought. The medical team attended to him and he went back on, holding his arm, refusing to go off the field for the last 5 minutes. Tough lad, that one (he left the stadium later with his arm in a sling). Then, the sound of what a TV audience must think is booing filled the night air. In fact, it was the low hum of the City fans chanting his nickname: Beast. In Spain he had come to be known as La fiera de Vallecas: the beast of Vallecas (a tough, working-class Madrid neighbourhood where he grew up). Certainly, some of the worry was about the possible loss of such a fantastic player to injury but mostly it was of simple concern that a person was hurt. It made me think about what these men mean to me, and it’s why I chose to write this blog.
During the match we pulled out our full repertoire of songs, this is my favourite:
‘Oh Pablo Zabaleta, he is the fuckin’ man, he plays for Argentina, he’s harder than Jaap Stam. He wears the blue and white, for Pellegrini’s men, and when we win the league we’ll sing this song again’.
A little hubris at the end, possibly, but rather said with a wink. We sang songs about Kompany, Touré, Silva, Aguero, all stars of this team that we’re lucky to have. There’s still a disbelief that such talent turns out in the blue shirt. We even found time to have a little chant about one of our only good players of the 1990s (Georgi Kinkladze and Ali Benarbia are the only other good players that spring to mind of that era) – a German called Uwe Rösler (now the Wigan manager; his 13-year-old son is named Colin, after City legend Colin Bell, and he’s at the City Academy). It ends with the line: ‘Uwe’s granddad bombed the Stretford End!’ Old Trafford, you see, was bombed during the Second World War and from 1941-49, if you can believe this, United shared our ground. It might be a bit of a sad testament to the nature of football now that that would seem so unbelievable but until a few decades ago many in Manchester supported both teams. My dad’s dad, Eli, was a diehard Blue but my mum’s dad, Cyril, went to City one week and United the next. In the end, though, I like to think that his heart lay with City, as he and dad went to matches together for over a decade until he passed in 1990. Dad marvels now how he dragged himself to watch terrible football on cold, wet Manchester nights when he had a season ticket (1977-1995). As we sang the Rösler song I thought back to what seemed like only a few years ago, and how we barely had any players worth composing a song about. How on earth did this happen to us?
For my own part, I moved to London the year after we were promoted out of the old Division Three in 1999 (now called League One, and just to confuse you it was called Division One then). At that time we were playing in our charming but crumbling home since 1923 – Maine Road. My grandfather Eli, who I sadly never knew, had been to the very first match there. My father’s first game was in 1960. Mine was in 1988. It has been a long family road. A story from the 1990s goes that the Maine Road groundsman wasn’t able to even paint the white lines on the pitch without handing over cash into the hand of the local paint suppliers. That’s how broke we were. Two decades of financial mismanagement had brought the club to its knees. When I was a kid in the 80s a local businessman called Peter Swales, a diehard Blue with a spectacular comb-over, was the chairman. He was a passionate man but an utterly hopeless businessman and we lurched from one crisis to another. The fans revolted and he was ousted in 1994 and replaced as chairman by Francis Lee, a legendary former player of ours. Unlike most players of that era, who were paid little and ended up getting real jobs after their playing days were over (very few went into management and punditry as it is now didn’t exist then), he had become a successful, wealthy businessman. He had made his fortune recycling paper, primarily toilet rolls. I, literally, shit you not.
He was another terrible choice, as it turned out. Ex-players put in charge at the higher levels always want to run the team and he undermined the many managers he hired and fired. His friend, the late great Alan Ball (brilliant player, World Cup winner) was a hopeless case and relegated us in 1995. And then the managerial merry-go-round started. Let me put this into perspective with a statistic: during Sir Alex Ferguson’s Old Trafford reign of 27 years, we had (excluding Cup and League-winning captain Tony Book’s brief caretaker manager reigns) 17 managers. From August to December 1996 we had 3 managers. In 5 months. That’s what it was like in those days. We were relegated 3 times, up and down, up and down. During our tenure in the 3rd tier in 1998/99 we lost 1-0 at home to Bury. A local team now in League Two (the 4th tier) who, on average, draw 3,500 fans a home game. Even in the 3rd tier we averaged 28,000, over twice as many fans as any other club. I have several friends who are Bury fans; I tell you, they’re real fans, schlepping to watch a team that will never win anything, home and away. I was at Bury College at the time of this defeat. You can imagine what Monday morning was like.
In 1998, finally, a good man took charge and, essentially, fixed everything. He is responsible for where we are now (as is Paul Dickov, but that’s another story: this goal changed the club forever). David Bernstein (a very clever and rich man, the then-CEO of fashion retailers French Connection and an accountant by trade) was a lifelong Blue and couldn’t bear the disaster any longer. He transformed the club from the ground up, securing financing and doing the deal that got us, at a nice price thank you very much, the 2002 Commonwealth Games stadium, which we moved into the year after. Later, Bernstein was appointed as FA Chairman (he just retired – you have to at 70 – and has been replaced by the very stupid TV mogul Greg Dyke) and he just received a CBE for services to football.
But still, even then, we stumbled around for a while, though we were now financially on better footing, and were unfortunately bought by a Thai crook (a former PM and oppressor of his people, a murderer, some say) called Thaksin Shinawatra. Like many fans, I was deeply unhappy with this ownership, and it enhanced the geographical distance somehow. I felt disconnected from the team for the first time in my life and I hated it. Then, the unimaginable happened. In 2008, thanks to the beauty of the stadium apparently, the ruler of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mansour, saw us as the perfect investment. A sleeping giant, as they say. Five years later he’s spent £1 billion and transformed us into a club that can compete at, we hope, the highest level. He has hired smart football people: our Spanish lynchpins, CEO Ferran Sorriano and Director of Football Txiki Begiristain, were both, essentially, poached from Barcelona. He installed our chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, his main connection to the team, who visits Manchester often. Khaldoon has an American accent thanks to his degree, in finance and economics, from Tufts in Boston and is a very clever, tough but likeable man doing a spectacular job – he is supportive and does not interfere in football matters, as so very many idiotic chairmen do (central casting Disney villain Vincent Tan at Cardiff and the moronic Assem Allam at Hull, I’m looking at you). Our manager, Manuel Pellegrini, another shrewd appointment, is now giving us the stable, drama-free, leadership we need. In personality, he is everything the over-emotional, difficult, passionate and impatient Roberto Mancini was not.
Only five years ago I was going through a period of feeling totally disconnected from my team. And now, that feeling is a world away. I still can’t quite believe what’s happened.
Those players are working for me. Yes, for themselves, for the manager, for their money, but when you’re there watching a game live, you can’t help but marvel at how they’re toiling in the cold, getting kicked all over the pitch, working their backsides off, for you. For all of us. There’s a giddy glee now to City fans, after years of longing and disappointment and being kicked in the teeth. Yes, there’s still a fear, which really is unfounded, that it may all end tomorrow… but it could go on forever, as the Smiths song goes.
Nothing stays with you for life like football does. You lose jobs or move houses, or cities, and your team is still there. You lose family members and your team is still there… in my case they were able to provide a distraction during unimaginably tough times last year. I know that these men are highly paid but none of that matters during a game, when you dream and fear and wish and want and they work to try and please you. To gain your love. These men are not machines, devoid of sentiment. They were kids once, who stood on a terrace like the one you’re standing on, cheering their team, worshipping their heroes. They get to do it, for real, they get to be the guy they dreamt of being. Most people have a rather craven view of money. That it fixes everything, that it’s all that matters. I know someone who loves his team but cannot stand any football players. He says they are all yobs. He constantly talks of how they’d rather be paid a ton and sit on the bench than earn less and play every week. He cannot see their humanity. He cannot see past the 5% who are pictured with women not their wives or get into nightclub brawls. I feel sorry for him. These are human beings, with families, and they work hard every day. If anyone doubts that take a look at a feature on our website called Tunnel Cam. We are, it would seem, the only club that does it.
As an example of anthropology it is fascinating. It shows in the clearest way I have ever seen the complete mental and tonal shift that the players experience and what happens before they go over the white line. We all know what happens after. But before, players greet each other as friends, as on each team there are connections: the same nationality, a player who used to play with you at a former club, a player who you play with for a national team. It’s all cordial reunions and hugs and European cheek-kissing and shirt-swapping. Lines of mascots (kids aged between 4 and about 10 who accompany the players onto the pitch) stand in the tunnel, holding their hands out to be high-fived by the players, who are charming and kind to them. Sometimes players will have their own children as mascots. These big, tough, tattooed men, gently picking up and kissing their tiny toddlers, who are wearing matching strips to them. You’d have to have a hard heart not to be touched. It’s important to humanise players, not least because it lets you feel connected to men who, in my case, play 200 miles away from where I live. Additionally, our dual fandom is one facet of my relationship with my dad; it’s an unbreakable bond with him as much as the team.
When I go to away games, I am consumed by joy, win or lose, in being able to be with my people, my fellow Mancs: in all their happy, sad, angry, thrilled, hilarious, nervous, anarchic, relieved, sometimes disappointed foul-mouthed glory. This is football. At its core, this is what it is. You belong, for life. You love them and they love you. They never leave you, and you never leave them, even if and when they let you down. At the end of the West Ham game, after 90 minutes of brilliant banter (We sang: ‘You’re getting Moyes in the morning!’ They sang: ‘We only need 10!’ (we were 3-0 up by this point, 9-0 on aggregate) and when Stevan Jovetic, a new player who has been unlucky with injury came on, we sang: ‘Who the fucking hell are you?!’) the Hammers fans did a little Poznan (our backs to the pitch, arm over arm, jumping goal celebration) and we did one back to them. Then we all did it together.
The brave, hardy Hammers were 9-0 down and those fans love their team as much today as they did yesterday, as they will tomorrow. That is football... and that used to be me. I remember one week in the early 2000s where we played Liverpool twice in a week, Cup and League. We lost 6-0 and 4-0. Times change but people do not. I’m stuck with this club for life.
When I was growing up, Manchester was a very tough place to be a City fan. In my school year, of 100+ girls, I was one of three Blues. Not everyone supported a team of course but there were probably 60 or 70 United fans. What will that number be in a decade? I see kids now at the matches who won’t remember how bad things were. Talking recently with a United fan friend, he told me I was willing to pay any price for success – meaning, in reference to our owners and where their largesse is derived from, I’m turning a blind eye to the terrible human rights conditions in Abu Dhabi in exchange for, one hopes, trophies. If I’d experienced 20+ years of unrivalled success, like he had, and my club was bought by people who treat their citizens like crap would I abandon the club? United may be owned by people sucking the financial life out of the place but at least they’re not human rights abusers. Do I turn a blind eye because I’ve toiled and loved and, through thin and thin, supported a club that let me down every week? Do I think I deserve some success now, at any cost? I wish I was stronger, and I admire people who have turned their backs on the club, in a way. They’re better people than I. Why do I continue to support a club run by people who treat women and gays and immigrant workers like shit in their own country? A regime that if City had a Jewish player he would not be allowed into the country. I cannot defend that, and thus I cannot defend myself. It’s a complicated issue and one I have no answer for. All I can say is that, in daily life, we are all complicit in demeaning others, whether we want or intend to or not. We all own clothing from sweatshops, we all buy computers (and TVs and DVD players) made by Chinese slave labour. I’m just trying to do my best, every day, like everyone else. Unless you live in a tree and wear clothes made of hemp and forage for food you’re complicit too. So I take a little bit of pleasure when I can from football, because it took and took from me for so many years and hardened me to misery and now finally I’m getting something back. What can I do about it except cut my nose off to spite my face? I’ve mostly, though not entirely, made my peace with it.
Some City fans take more pleasure in United losing than City winning. I never understood those people even when I was living in Manchester and taking shit from United fans every single day. They pitied, bullied, patronised and laughed at us. And we were pathetic – I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it does feel a little nice that they don’t get everything their way now. But, I always say to dad – I don’t care about what other clubs do, who they play, who they lose points to; we can only control what we do, how we play, and do our best. These players are the best that City have ever had. Sometimes I can’t believe what I’m watching. It’s like a gift. Like someone decided that we’d taken enough shit one day and said: it’s your turn. I’ll take it.