Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh,
30 August 2010
[Martin Donnelly of The Savings And Loan reviews one of the flagship events from this year's Edge Festival]
“Listen,” she says, “have you gone to any concerts lately?”
“No,” I say, wishing she hadn’t brought this, of all topics, up. “I don’t like live music.”
“Live music?” she asks, intrigued, sipping San Pellegrino water.
“Yeah. You know. Like a band,” I explain, sensing from her expression that I’m saying totally the wrong things. “Oh, I forgot. I did see U2.”
“How were they?” she asks. “I liked the new CD a lot.”
“They were great, just totally great. Just totally . . . ” I pause, unsure of what to say. Bethany raises her eyebrows quizzically, wanting to know more. “Just totally . . . Irish.”
“I’ve heard they’re quite good live,” she says, and her own voice has a light, musical lilt to it. “Who else do you like?”
“Oh you know,” I say, completely stuck. “The Kingsmen. ‘Louie, Louie.’ That sort of stuff.
- Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, p. 236
Here’s a confession: I don’t really like live music; never have. When I was younger and the world was new, the gig represented a perfect excuse to go out drinking and meet my friends, but I’ve found that when you get old and get married those appeals start to wane, and all too often you’re left with unsatisfactory renditions of songs you’d prefer to have heard from the comfort of your own couch, glass of Lagavulin in hand and not another soul in sight. Broadly speaking, when I listen to music I want no interruptions; I want, in the spirit of Greta Garbo, to be alone.
So the essential live experience itself (“two-three-FOUR”) has seldom done much for me, especially when I’m intimate with the band in question. Despite this lack of love for the live thing, I’ve seen more or less all my favourites in concert – Waits, Cohen, Dylan, Eitzel, Wilson, The National, Afghan Whigs – resulting in almost uniform disappointment.
Better by far to go in with no expectations. One of the best gigs I can think of was Yo La Tengo at King Tut’s in Glasgow, probably around 1997. I hadn’t heard anything by them beyond a clutch of tracks on complication albums, and went along, well, to drink with my friends.
I was blown away. Not knowing any of the songs made every moment new, and I was forced to engage with the band on their terms, at face value and without the shadow of preconception. It was a rare encounter; the songs warm and fuzzy, the crowd beatific and beholden.
I had a similar experience with My Bloody Valentine at the Barrowlands in 2008. I know Isn’t Anything and Loveless well, and like them both a lot, but for various reasons I didn’t bother to get a ticket when the shows were announced. Long story short, I got offered one the day beforehand, and for want of anything better to do went along. Again, I was blown away, almost literally this time. My own physical experience existed in stark contrast to the personality vacuum onstage, the sheer sound filling inner and outer space alike. And me, I stood on the sprung dancefloor of the ballroom, eyes closed tight like a goddamn hippy, swaying to the twenty-minute apocalyptic freakout of “You Made Me Realise,” lost for a spell, in music, in the moment.
This, of course, is the exception and not the rule. But on the rare occasions when it occurs, it makes me think about the nature of the beats.
Sonic Youth’s Confusion is Sex has as its sleevenote an essay written by Kim Gordon for Artforum in 1983, called “I’m Really Scared When I Kill in my Dreams.” In it, Gordon analyses the relationship between the actors in the live rock experience, concluding that “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” I first read that essay about 10 years after it was written, at an impressionable age, and I’ve never forgotten it. People pay to see others believe in themselves, so there’s a weight of obligation on the performer to believe, or to give the illusion of believing…
[P]eople come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment. As a performer you sacrifice yourself, you go through the motions and emotions of sexuality for all the people who pay to see it, to believe that it exists. The better and more convincing the performance, the more an audience can identify with the exterior involved in such an expenditure of energy. Performers appear to be submitting to the audience, but in the process they gain control of the audience’s emotions. They begin to dominate the situation through the awe inspired by their total submission to it.
- Gordon, ibid.
So that, in a nutshell, is what I always think live music ought to be, an intensity it seldom attains.
Anyway, to the matter at hand. My friend Noel from the Attic Lights phoned me on Monday afternoon, saying he had a spare ticket for the Low Anthem, and did I want it. The Low Anthem are the Yo La Tengo de ces jours, in that I’ve liked whatever I’ve heard, but not enough to get anything close to excited about it, excitement becoming a rarer commodity with age. I’d listened (once) to Oh My God Charlie Darwin a few months ago, and thought it pleasant enough stuff. But I call a lot of records that, and I forgot about them. But then I saw a song on TV at the weekend, all huddled around a single microphone in the old-time style, and found it quite, you know, quaint. Appealing, even.
So I took fate at face value, went along to the gig with Noel and the wife, and found myself enjoying it a fair bit. A fair chunk of the crowd, Noel included, were primarily there to see the support act, Avi Buffalo, who are evidently setting the modems alight just now. They turned in a decent half hour of Dinosaur Jr meets Television, with a few Angus Young-esque rock shapes for good measure. Before that we had some mainly unaccompanied harmonising from all-girl trio Mountain Man, which was pleasant enough in a Fleet Foxes vein but nothing to yodel home about.
And so, the Low Anthem. When it comes to this alt-folk business I worry a bit about preciousness – as Kim Gordon notes, the crowd’s attention isn’t something the performer has a right to, it has to be earned – but I needn’t have worried tonight, as the headliners interposed a few bluesy screamers amidst the general downhome prairie balladeering, making them an attractive halfway house between the two support bands, and pleasing both camps.
I also worried a little about the deerstalker and ‘tache that their singer sported on the TV, which was present and correct here as well. Angela Carter wrote that clothes are our visible insults, and the sartorial set-up matched the atmosphere and instrumentation. Electric guitars were in short supply, with a battery of musical saws, bowed cymbals, harmonium, stand-up bass and all the rest taking precedence for the bulk of the set. It was interesting watching the band wander round the stage to swap instruments between songs, and while there wasn’t a drummer among them on that stage, they all had a game crack at the kit. Their soft harmony singing was a touching, puritanical thrill in the way that, say, Midlake’s is not. Mountain Man joined in for a gang harmony attack towards the end.
While I’d love to be able to tell you what songs they played, I can’t, but they ended the set proper with “Charlie Darwin” and then for an encore did a rollicking version of “There’s a Hole in my Bucket” that left swathes of punters bemused, but others – myself included – headed out onto South Clerk Street with a genuine smile for once. Godspeed you mischievous tinkers.
[The Savings And Loan release their début album on Song, By Toad Records later this year]
Ruth and I were back on Fresh Air Radio last night, but due to all sorts of massively annoying database problems with the site, I couldn’t put up one of those live playlist updatey things like I usually do, which was really kind of frustrating.
