(no subject)

Oct 12, 2008 15:44

Friday I went to see Amanda Palmer at Koko with my lovely friend Tom, whom you may remember from when I saw MIA.  I ended up being stupidly late and missing the support act whilst Tom huddled in Sainsburys waiting for me.

Because of this I could only get half-way through the crowd, meaning most of my experience consisted of watching the top of Amanda's head.

Oh, and NEIL FUCKING GAIMAN WAS THERE.

Mr Neil Gaiman was there introducing the show, reading the liner notes he wrote for her album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer? It takes the form of an article written for BEAT AND POP MAGAZINE, June 1965, about the aftermath of Amanda's death.  This was one moment of excellence amongst many.

Amanda has been touring with two other musicians; Zoe, a cellist who was also supporting,  NOT THAT I WOULD KNOW, and a rather comely violinist named Lyndon. She is also accompanied by a group of Australian actors called the Danger Ensemble, who added some theatricality to the proceedings, some of which was very good (Coin-Operated Boy) and some not so much.

I sang along to practically every song, so sorry to anyone recording in my vicinity, because you've probably picked me up, and overall spent the majority of the night clapping like a seal.

Following Mr Gaiman's introduction Amanda herself arrived, in a suitably dramatic re-birth, with the assistance of the Danger Ensemble.

I am loving the amount of youtube clips for this gig, because there are so many parts which I just plain couldn't see. And respect to Amanda for continuing on with this amount of theatricality whilst having a big old cast on her foot.

She jumped right into Astronaut, my personal favourite track on her album, which again you can find on YouTube.  She also played a couple of Dresden Dolls songs - Bad Habit, Coin-Operated Boy, Mrs O and Half-Jack, I recall.

But there are times that the theatricality of performance doesn't quite fit with the songs. Before Strength in Music , Amanda talked about writing the song after a school shooting and later when she recorded it there was another the same week.  The beginning of the song was changed from the monologue on the album (which I was certain was from somewhere else, but googling only brings up references to that song) to Linton the violinist reading out a list of names ages and injuries from a school shooting (not sure which one, but the victims were young). This combined with the music was rather moving; Strength in Music is about blaming music, etc for school shootings. Following this they segued directly into Guitar Hero, a somewhat more irreverent track about a school shooter with lots of blurring of the bounds between reality and fiction. The two songs are so irrecovably linked that I only realised they were two separate songs this morning when I was checking the lyrics. So we move from reciting a list of victims to a strobe-lit dance routine which ends with people dying. A shift in tone, to be sure.

(also there was a wardrobe malfunction, but that clearly wasn't intentional)

Another example of the theatricality distracting from the music was in Blake Says, where the two Danger Ensemble women stood on the balcony and ... pointed at things? A bit? And then realised some confetti, clearly meant to be snow. It seemed only tangentially related to the song.

However there were also excellent moments, such as Coin-Operated Boy, with the two women chasing after the Coin-Operated Boys, stuffing money in their mouths etc. And that isn't even counting Umbrella! The final song (pre-encore) did away with all notions of musicality and consisted of Amanda miming to Umbrella whilst the Danger Ensemble did some excellent stuff. It was worth the price of admission alone. Two clips on youtube, both of which don't quite capture the whole thing. nor the wonderfulness of it.

Highlights included

-the string instrument play-off at the beginning of Half-Jack (tragically this part is not on YouTube)

-Neil (fucking) Gaiman playing tambourine on Oasis

- the dancing girls at the encore of Leeds United (which included the depressing fact that Amanda's record label wanted her to re-do parts of that video because she looked too fat)

-OMG! I nearly forgot one amazing moment where Amanda sang a song Neil Gaiman had written for her!

Picture of Lindon from diamondgeyser's flickr stream. , copyright Isabelle Adams. Shamefully I do not have a digital camera. They would only have been pictures of people's heads anyway.
Previous post Next post
Up