Raphael Saadiq – review
O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London
The sharply dressed man finger-snapping onstage toured with Prince as a teenager, became a pop star in the US in his 20s, produced a handful of classic records in his 30s and is now settling smoothly into his role of urbane soul-pop auteur. Raphael Saadiq stands on the edge of the stage, cupping his ear for more applause; he shakes hands with the entire front row, twice; he even filches someone’s mobile phone and fiddles with it, every inch the star.
Saadiq is not exactly a household name in the UK, but his latest records – last month’s Stone Rollin’ album, and its predecessor, 2008′s The Way I See It – crown a Zelig-like career rich in the pleasures of vintage rhythm and blues. He is the kind of guy who can get Stevie Wonder out of bed in the dead of night to lay down a track in the studio. Saadiq’s last big gig before this tour was leading the band at the Grammies in February, when Mick Jagger performed his Solomon Burke tribute. Wielding his guitar, the exuberant Saadiq bounded most undeferentially around Jagger at the very front of the stage as though to say, “this is my music, buddy”.
Tonight, Saadiq leads a seven-strong outfit that might have been lifted straight out of a 60s soul revue – men in berets, a backing singer in white go-go boots and matching hairband – armed with tunes that all sound like forgotten classics. “Sure hope you mean it, sure hope you love me girl,” Saadiq sings doo-woppishly. Is it the Temptations? No, it’s just a flashback to “Sure Hope You Mean It” from his last album, a record steeped in Motown and Philly soul.
“Don’t mess with my man, don’t mess with my boy,” glowers Saadiq’s go-go girl. It sounds like another canonical work, but it’s the catchy and assured single by Saadiq’s old band, Lucy Pearl. “Don’t Mess With My Man” made it into the UK top 20 in 2000, and it is greeted with a roar of recognition. The gig is bookended by two bouts of “Staying in Love”, the knock-down, standout track from The Way I See It, a fabulous song about how easy it is to fall in love, and how tricky it is to stay that way.
It could almost be a metaphor for Saadiq’s set tonight. The vintage authenticity of Saadiq’s works is never in question. His easygoing sound is so very easy to fall for. Saadiq is a master of the old arts, having assiduously tended the flame of vintage soul well before it was fashionable to do so. When Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black (2006) unleashed the floodgates on retro, the Oakland-born, LA-based Saadiq had already been at it for years. His late-80s multi-platinum R&B group, Tony! Toni! Toné!, featured real instruments and a throwback song-and-dance feel. Saadiq went on to lend various clients his skills in the 90s, culminating with troubled neo-soul pin-up D’Angelo, who released two classic albums and then plunged into drug-related obscurity. Saadiq co-authored D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)“, which won a Grammy in 2001. As Saadiq tells it, he cheekily popped into the studio to cadge a spliff off D’Angelo, and ended up penning neo-soul’s minimal masterwork.
Over the course of a two-hour performance, however, Saadiq’s relentless perkiness can flatline a little; so much un-embellished nostalgia can seem a little trite. Stone Rollin’ – Saadiq’s latest album – offers up a take on black pop and rock’n'roll, which is the next logical place for Saadiq the revivalist to go. But the Beatles-y “Radio” feels slight, like a less interesting rerun of OutKast’s “Hey Ya”. You yearn for a little of the mischief that Saadiq displayed at the Grammies. It is the eve of the royal wedding, and it can occasionally feel like we are witnessing the slickest wedding band on earth.
And then, suddenly, a switch is pulled, and Saadiq’s set comes alive again. “Good Man” is one of the new album’s outstanding tracks, a meditation on lost love and doing right whose excellent video, incidentally, features Cutty from The Wire. The drama tonight is compromised only slightly by an extended guitar solo whose attempt to invoke Prince doesn’t succeed.
Saadiq returns for the encore a changed man. He has swapped his wedding band threads for jeans, a red T-shirt, a natty hat, and more of Stone Rollin’s compelling dark side. “Over You” is a fantastic psychedelic soul track. It all ends with “Go to Hell”, a rousing tune in which Marvin Gaye looms large. It lays bare a little of the inner workings of a man whose smoothness might otherwise feel just a little plastic.
Metronomy – review
Digital, Brighton
Outside, at the end of a sizzling April day, the horizon has vanished – the sea is exactly the same deep ozone blue as the sky. Inside this sweltering, sold-out beachfront venue, Metronomy are playing their lustrous new album, one inspired by the British seaside.
As homecoming shows go, this one is touched with a glorious serendipity. You have to practically crunch shingle to get here. Metronomy’s main-man, Joseph Mount, used to live in Brighton, and his keyboard player, saxophonist and cousin Oscar Cash, still does. Some of the crowd have clearly been sipping cider on the beach all afternoon.
“This is the closest this song has ever been played to the sea,” notes Mount cheerfully, introducing “The Bay”, a song from The English Riviera, Metronomy’s third and definitive album. Gilded with falsettos, it’s a winning baroque disco track that couples a sense of yearning with a defiant sense of place. “This isn’t Paris,” Mount sings chippily, “This isn’t London, and it’s not Berlin, and it’s not Hong Kong.” Perhaps in tribute to the flashing lights that draw you to the end of the pier, his band – Cash, drummer Anna Prior, and bassist Gbenga Adelekan, who has a parallel career as a DJ – all wear oversized white badges that light up in synch with the beat. There are shout-outs to various Brighton neighborhoods, lived in by students and bohemians.
Mount grew up along the coast in Totnes, far from any cogent musical scene, fashioning his own tastes from what was available on the radio, and yearning for a terrific time that he always felt was just out of reach. He left, of course – for Brighton, and a spell as a jobbing drummer while he got his bedroom recording project off the ground. Metronomy’s name reflects Mount’s enduring tendency towards the tick, tick, tick of a perpetual motion machine. Although Mount’s pop instincts are strong, and getting more irresistible by the album, this is very much a club show, with the band playing a tireless mix of popping beats and bright synths, virtually unlit except for those flashing white badges. It may not be the reference point Mount would choose, but Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” repeatedly springs to mind.
Metronomy’s breakout second album, Nights Out (2008), was heavily in thrall to the sounds of the early 80s and firmly wedded to the idea of a good time; it moved Mount to London, earned him critical acclaim, a brace of remix credits and – unexpectedly – the admiration of Girl Aloud Nicola Roberts, who sought him out as a writing partner for her debut solo album.
Its follow-up is miles better. An early candidate for album of the summer, The English Riviera reimagines Mount’s native Devon coast as a nippier version of California, a place of saturated colours and ease, undercut with a very English sense of the bittersweet. Like Steely Dan played on Fisher-Price instruments, it also recalls, in part, the sour club-pop of LCD Soundsystem, early Depeche Mode and the warm soft-rock of cult French heroes Phoenix. The album’s cover image is by obscure British graphic artist John Gorham, featuring a stylised palm against a background of azure and yellow stripes. It was previously used to advertise Torquay, Paignton and Brixham. Perhaps Metronomy are waiting for the budget to incorporate the album’s strong visual sense and seductive mystique into their set-dressing. As it is, their performance remains a little ragged around the edges, quirky and cute with hand gestures and banter, but not quite the equal of their album’s considerable allure. It’s a crying shame, too, that because Mount’s duetting partner, Roxanne Clifford of the band Veronica Falls, is absent, Metronomy don’t play one of The English Riviera‘s soon-to-be-ubiquitous tracks, “Everything Goes My Way” – a song about falling in love again, against the odds.
They do, however, do justice to their other putative summer hit. Tense and fidgety, “The Look” captures the claustrophobia of a small town, where everyone moves in the same ever-decreasing circles. Among a multitude of nagging keyboard hooks its theme proves especially difficult to dislodge. Finally, a heroic Moog keyboard solo that wafts in from a kinder, warmer, distant place, ready to whisk Mount’s troubled protagonists away.
Lykke Li – review
O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London
The fearsome woman who takes to the stage at this sold-out show is clad boot-to-cape in black, like a high art reading of a Scottish Widows advert. Surrounded by billowing black drapes, Lykke Li is lit by strobing searchlights; her five-strong band are arrayed around her like a hand of poker.
As the lights synch up with a barrage of percussion, it’s as though Phil Spector were sound-tracking a tribal coven disco. “Jerome” is a troubled love song from Li’s masterful second album, Wounded Rhymes, and it sets the tone for what is to come: a dramatic reinvention, electrified with sensuality and pain. The xx are here, looking on in approval.
What has happened to Lykke Li? The Swedish singer announced herself back in 2007 with a left-of-centre pop gem called “Little Bit“. Its melodicism and melancholy were overshadowed by Li’s voice – a cracked girlish coo that, you suspect, brought out the Lolita response in a certain tranche of her fanbase.
Her rise to the status of bloggers’ darling continued with 2008′s “Dance Dance Dance“, a bereft ode to the boogie that fit deliciously into the lineage of tear-stained Scandinavian pop pioneered by Abba. She was good – if, perhaps, celebrated for the wrong reasons.
Now she is even better. Wounded Rhymes trounces its charming predecessor, 2008′s Youth Novels. Although Li reserves that old parched soprano for the odd song – like her shivery cover of the Big Pink’s “Velvet” – her voice is now a masterful, stentorian instrument, like Dusty Springfield studded with nails.Written in Los Angeles, her new songs take their heightened sense of drama from the American chanson of the 60s – the reverberating drums, the shoo-wop harmonies, and plenty of Hammond organ, all delivered with a European shiver of froideur. It is all immensely grownup. “Youth knows no pain,” she spits, near the start. Li’s first album was laced with a sense of heartbreak too, but this time around the anguish is deeper, and punctuated with anger.
At her wildest – on the full-blooded “Rich Kids Blues“, conveyed in a blur of red lights and punishing percussion – this new, carnivorous Li sounds as though she’d happily eat her old breathy self for breakfast. Were Nick Cave not happily married, he might be considering a new muse. At the end, the vintage workout takes an abrupt turn, breaking down into a delirious rave interlude, with Lykke Li lying prone on the floor.
The rest of the time she is a brooding, restless presence, half crone, half bombshell; an alternating current of ferocity and vulnerability. For every man-eating song such as “Get Some” – Wounded Rhymes‘s introductory single – there is a haunting torch song in which Li’s defences come down. Like a girl group in therapy, “Sadness is a Blessing” (the next single) is a vision of light and shade. “Sadness is my boyfriend,” Li sings, “Will sorrow be the only lover I can call my own?”
The old songs are in great part reworked. “Dance Dance Dance” is especially riveting, relying mostly on a clatter of percussion and Li’s voice. Near the end she honks a solo on a kazoo, throws it behind her, and coils her gauzy wrap around her neck like a scarf. The massed harmonies of her band recall the sweet warmth of the first-album Fleet Foxes, while the jungle drums suggest a new kinship with Karin Dreijer Andersson of Fever Ray and the Knife. On “Youth Knows No Pain”, meanwhile, there is another surprise: she interpolates a segment of “Never Gonna Cry Again“, a terrific early Eurythmics song released in 1981, five years before she was born.
Just as Scandinavian thriller writers took over their genre a few years ago, there was a time in the mid-00s when it appeared that a new breed of Nordic pop sirens – Robyn, Annie and Lykke Li – might refashion dance-pop. It never quite happened. Robyn has had the most success, with Grammy nominations and solid sales of her acclaimed Body Talk series of albums. Poor Annie, whose Anniemal album of 2004 promised so much, has been virtually forgotten.
In the event, there was a Scandinavian takeover of pop – it just happened behind the mixing desk, with producers such as Max Martin, RedOne, Bloodshy & Avant and a slew of others setting the template for American chart pop.
Meanwhile, Lykke Li has forsaken pop, and cutesiness, altogether for a gutsier, classic sound. Commercially, the year already belongs to Adele, but in Lykke Li we just might have an intriguing new Scandinavian auteur.
Iolanthe; Angela Hewitt/Britten Sinfonia – review
Wilton’s Music Hall; Queen Elizabeth Hall, both London
Torches flash in the darkness as a party of naughty schoolboys discovers the magical interior of Wilton’s Music Hall, that secret palace of varieties hidden away down an alley in London’s East End. Amid all the backstage paraphernalia they find a Narnia-like wardrobe and a dusty copy of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, and in a “let’s do the show right here” moment they are neatly into the opening chorus – with an all-male cast.
“We are dainty little fairies,” sing the boys to audience guffaws, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is no mere Carry on Camping; this cast is regenerating G&S in front of our eyes. If you remember the impact of Joe Papp’s ground-breaking Pirates of Penzance 30 years ago then this is a similar moment: a tired operetta kicked into new, fizzing and funny life.
Papp’s Pirates overturned the deadening D’Oyly Carte tradition that had preserved the operettas in aspic; Sasha Regan and her rip-roaring team tried the same with an all-male Pirates last year, but that had too much of the “Hello sailor” about it really to float my boat. This Iolanthe is altogether more successful, full of imaginative direction, inventive ideas and moments of truly affecting pathos. Of all the iconoclastic operettas, Iolanthe has the most bizarre plot, so it doesn’t really matter what you do with it; when half the cast are away with the fairies and the others are dotty peers of the realm, casting men in all the female roles seems perfectly logical.
Iolanthe has been banished to the bottom of a lake for marrying a mortal, but not before she gave birth to a son, Strephon, who is in love with Phyllis, a ward in Chancery. The Lord Chancellor must decide if she is free to marry – but he loves her himself, so asks for help from his fellow peers, all of whom fall for her, too. I think I’ll stop there; I can feel your eyes glazing over.
Presenting the whole thing as an improvised school play allows endless possibilities for designer Stewart Charlesworth and his costume team: the fairies go tripping hither and thither in a crazy combination of suspenders and table-tennis nets; when the same singers become the peers (“Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes”) they don their school dressing gowns with mad hats and chains of office fashioned from stringed conkers. The Fairy Queen, splendidly sung by countertenor Alex Weatherill, is decked out in furs, knickerbockers and a corset; Matthew James Willis, a fine-voiced Lord Tolloller, in wing collar, top hat and huge specs, looks like a cross between Lord Snooty and Harry Potter. And while the ability to sing in the soprano register doesn’t make you a soprano, Christopher Finn as Iolanthe and Alan Richardson as Phyllis find some impressive top notes, even if the strain of it all must surely tell one day.
The whole thing races along at hilarious breakneck speed, with some nifty knockabout choreography from Mark Smith and excellent playing from musical director Christopher Mundy. It’s the perfect antidote to these austere times – and how pertinent it is: Tolloller and his political opposite sport blue and yellow rosettes; half-man, half-fairy Strephon is “a Tory down to my waist, but my legs are a couple of radicals” which is useful when he finally makes it into Parliament and is made leader of both parties. And Gilbert foresaw today’s coalition 130 years ago when he made Private Willis (wonderfully deadpanned by Raymond Tait) sing that everyone is either “a little Liberal or a little Conservative”. You can laugh at this timeless tale of political pomposity until 7 May. Go or I’ll send the census people round.
There can be no greater contrast between all that high-octane buffoonery at raffish Wilton’s and the cool, controlled calm of the Queen Elizabeth Hall when pianist Angela Hewitt is on the platform, though not, last week, in her more familiar role as a solo recitalist but as director of the Britten Sinfonia in scintillating Bach and Mozart keyboard concertos.
She’s such a great communicator that her renowned sense of line found its way through to the players immediately, making the first and second movements of Bach’s keyboard concerto No 5 (BWV 1056) sound like long, delicious single phrases. And no wonder: she is a violinist, too, and explained in the programme that all the articulation she chooses at the piano imitates string bowing. That sense of line appeared again in Mozart’s piano concerto No 9 in E flat major, played with the utmost delicacy and finesse, with her poised and intelligent direction from the keyboard wrapping the whole thing in an elegant sheen.
The Sinfonia’s leader Thomas Gould directed in Stravinsky’s concerto in D for string orchestra, his ravishing exploration of the tonal possibilities of a string ensemble played here with precision and panache, complete with fabulous eerie harmonics from the cellos and double basses. Section principals Miranda Dale, Martin Outram, Caroline Dearnley and Stephen Williams shone in what turned out to be the chief delight of the evening, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, arranged for strings by Dmitry Sitkovetsky. It’s a tightrope walk for the players – one weak link, one muffed entry and the whole thing would fall apart, but in these hands there was never any danger of disaster; a masterclass in ensemble sensibility.
Piccard in Space; Intermezzo; Fidelio – review
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London; Theatre Royal, Glasgow; Royal Opera House, London
Relativity: the opera? It’s been done. Philip Glass put Einstein on a beach, and a German opera, C – the speed of light (2005), swirled us around multimedia universes to mark his anniversary year. But there’s always another angle, especially when you cast the physicist not as the mad boffin of later years but as a hip-swivelling, woman-ogling celebrity scientist, as he became (a celebrity, that is; I can’t verify the hips) so spectacularly, overnight, in 1919.
Will Gregory, who as half of the duo Goldfrapp released a song called “Rocket“, of which the last line is “We have lift off”, has launched into relative space for his first opera, premiered at the QEH, commissioned by the BBC Concert Orchestra and directed by Jude Kelly. Some may think Piccard in Space remains grounded. One tweeter has called it “catastrophically dreadful” and the worst opera ever seen. To that I would say: you haven’t lived. A long list of contenders for this title is available on request.
Piccard relates the epic attempt of a Swiss-Belgian aeronaut-polymath, Auguste Piccard, to test Einstein’s theory by going up in a balloon through the earth’s atmosphere. Piccard inspired Hergé’s cartoon scientist Professor Calculus. He also has a Virgin train named after him – but as “Picard” (sic), presumably for reasons of C-economy. Once you treat the whole enterprise as surreal – think, staying Belgian, of the besuited men floating above rooftops in Magritte’s Golconda – it becomes bizarre and quirky, if also a good third too long and dramatically topsy-turvy. A short comic opera, with serious intent and much charm, is trying to get out.
The Newton-Einstein split which transformed physics is played out via a bewigged, arch countertenor – Nicholas Clapton as Newton – who mimics baroque recitative and haunts the action like Mozart’s Commendatore. We are given a pukka tutorial on relativity using the two-trains-struck-by-lightning example. We singalong-a-”Time dilation factor” – yes, we the audience; that should be scrapped instantly – and on video projections watch two fat putti write out Newton’s second law of motion up above the clouds.
Gregory, who was classically trained and whose mother, the dedicatee, was a Covent Garden opera chorus member, has a fluent style – luscious, tonal and Moog-rich – and a gentle wit about the tics and tropes of opera. A cosmic choir in white overalls (expertly sung) has some Eric Whitacre-like set pieces. Andrew Shore, Robin Tritschler, Leigh Melrose and Mary Plazas gave strong performances to an unexpectedly small audience. No Wainwright Prima Donna red carpet stuff here, though give me Piccard in Space any day. Charles Hazlewood conducted and Michael Vale set it all, simply and cleanly, in Piccard’s capsule, which eventually landed in Switzerland.
As a saxophonist, Gregory played in John Adams’s Nixon in China, and his score owes much to American minimalism. It’s in the Doctor Atomic- lite vein, though the physics (libretto by Hattie Naylor) is more accurate. Courtesy of an elite escort agency my companion was a top theoretical physicist who, as it were, danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with Albert Einstein. His verdict? Einstein, who had a sense of hilarity, would have loved it. Decide for yourself: it’s on Radio 3 on 13 April.
Strauss’s Intermezzo (1924), in a new staging by Scottish Opera, brings us crashing back to earth. Its subject is a marital misunderstanding, based on an event in the composer’s own happy if tempestuous wedlock. His wife Pauline once opened a love letter sent by a young woman – some bimbo, she – to the wrong man. In the opera, “Christine” files for divorce, while enjoying her own minor dalliance. After detours to a toboggan run and other easy operatic venues, all is forgiven. Anita Bader was a nicely truculent if underpowered Christine, Roland Wood her convincingly dyspeptic husband. Sarah Redgwick’s Anna has charm and Nicky Spence shone as a louche young Baron. Wolfgang Quetes directed an amiable, Klimt-styled production. The orchestra, under Francesco Corti, had narrow escapes but saved their fire for the interludes, so turbulent and grand you wonder about Strauss’s odd intention. His wife knew nothing until first night. Dinner afterwards must have been memorable.
While Intermezzo rues the habits of marriage, Beethoven’s Fidelio celebrates fidelity in the face of peril. The Royal Opera House has revived Jürgen Flimm’s staging, not alas a good advert in a week when the company’s budget was cut 15%. It looks fine in a dour, rusty-iron way, but is lumbered by props and business, with an uneven cast. But there were glories: Endrik Wottrich’s Florestan mustered blood-curdling anguish for his Act 2 dungeon cry. Nina Stemme, not an ideal Leonora but compelling, sang with hallmark ardour. The orchestra, conducted with brisk momentum by Mark Elder, excelled. Beethoven’s bachelor dream of married love, squabble-free and transcendent, may contrast with Strauss’s brittle actuality. Both work, even if the pure flame only burns brightest when the husband is in solitary confinement.
Elbow – review
Cardiff International Arena
Tonight, Cardiff’s premier gig-shed has turned into a family parlour. Five picture frames hang from the stage, gold and old-fashioned, each of them holding a member of Elbow. Every now and then, each portrait breaks its composure – to scratch a nose, brush a sleeve, or, in Guy Garvey’s case, exhale like Henry VIII after a particularly heavy supper. Eventually the lights lower, the frames empty, and the band arrive for real, raising half-empty pint glasses like welcome flags. The gesture is returned by 7,500 people – and before a note has been played, the audience is theirs.
If any British band belongs to the people in 2011, it’s Elbow. By now, we all know their rags-to-riches story: forming in Bury 20 years ago, getting dropped twice, throwing everything into their fourth album, The Seldom Seen Kid (revived romances, personal bereavements and tons of orchestral experiment) before winning the 2008 Mercury prize. Their new album Build a Rocket Boys! is all about hearth and home – a canny move for a band that set life’s little intimacies to a stadium-sized soundtrack.
And in the middle of the mêlée we find renaissance man Garvey – 6 Music DJ, thinking woman’s crumpet, national treasure. Tonight he is dressed in a three-piece suit and black tie, like a local undertaker or hearty pub landlord. His presence on stage remains refreshingly unshowy, too – he rocks from heel to toe as if he’s trying to keep balance on starboard as the band open up with “The Birds”, their new album’s opening track. Then he realises he’s got a catwalk, which he starts pounding up and down like a bear, his voice switching from smoky growl to high tenor as he rambles – a voice that has never sounded better than it does tonight. The band beam at him broadly as he does so, happy to make honey, while they let their queen parade. “What we going to do with you?” go the backing vocals; we hear the warmth, and the years, in those words.
And then we’re off. Garvey gets a sweat on; his jacket comes off to womanly wolf-whistles. “Hardly, but thank you,” he deadpans. The gig becomes a mixture of proggy musical adventure and Phoenix Nights turn. “Join me in worshipping the orb,” says Garvey, introducing “Mirrorball”, as a glittery sphere descends from the ceiling. He asks if anyone is standing next to someone they love but haven’t told yet; later, he gets the crowd to applaud the audience member furthest from the stage. This is one of several antics tonight that veers dangerously towards excessive schmaltz. Elbow just about get away with it, as there is grit behind their pearls.
It helps that they have become a momentous live band, their rockier tracks sounding like juddering juggernauts. “Grounds for Divorce”, for example, keens, yearns and growls, Garvey smashing a snare drum as the crowd whoa-oh along. Recent single “Neat Little Rows” also gains extra backbone, the despair and death in its lyrics becoming much more apparent here (“lay my bones on cobblestones, lay my bones in neat little rows”). Even in Elbow’s softer songs, however, these shadows linger darkly, most impressively tonight in “The Loneliness of the Tower Crane Driver” – the song Elbow campaigned to play at the 2008 Mercury prize ceremony, a song about the crushed dreams of a manual worker, rather than one of their album’s more conventional ballads. “Send up a prayer in my name,” Garvey begs tonight, as the band build the song into a huge, drenching climax. “They say I’m on top of my game,” he exhales – and hands across the crowd rise to dab at eyelashes.
As the night draws on, Garvey returns to the catwalk, this time with a piano and his bandmate, Craig Potter, the man who also produced The Seldom Seen Kid. They play one of only three songs tonight from Elbow’s pre-Mercury days, 2005′s “Puncture Repair”, a song about leaning on a friend who “patches you up”, and the rest of the band join them soon after.
The band finish with the expected flourish – “One Day Like This”, their perennial wave-a-lighter number, which will soundtrack emotional TV moments for ever more. As Garvey sings, however, we’re reminded it’s a song about being hung over, feeling desperate and clinging on to hope, and how we feel better when we pull together. It also becomes clear that Elbow are still part of the crowd’s real world, and not the world of rock worship – a real rarity on a stage of this size. Long may these five ordinary men keep on doing this extraordinary thing.
Justin Bieber; Katy Perry – review
O2 Arena; Hammersmith Apollo, both London
It’s been a strange week for pop music. The deeply unconvincing Ke$ha was reduced to drinking fake blood from a heart onstage in Australia in a bid for some edge. A 13-year-old girl called Rebecca Black became an ironic internet meme when “Friday”, her cheesy pop video made courtesy of a bespoke service called Ark Music Factory, went viral and clocked up 10m YouTube hits.
Meanwhile, Justin Bieber – the most followed pop pup de nos jours – wasn’t really the star of his own show. As the teen idol kicked off the first of three nights at London’s O2 Arena, the eye of at least one over-12 kept wandering to the majestic sight of umpteen coloured devices – glow sticks, mobile phones – lighting up the audience, like a mass of bioluminescent plankton moving on the night sea.
That’s not to suggest that Bieber is dreadful. Mostly he is just fine – all shiny himself in a series of blinged-out urban-lite tracksuits. He’s not a bad dancer either, even if he executes his moves with drilled skill rather than natural elan. It’s in contrast with his opening act, Willow “Daughter of Will” Smith, a gangling 11-year-old who resembles a streetwise string bean in bright green and black. She’s only on for 14 minutes – due, you suspect, as much to the UK’s strict child performance licence laws as her dearth of material thus far – but she fizzes with physicality. “Whip My Hair” – a sensational novelty single – is wonderfully manic; its overcooked sequel, “21st Century Girl“, less so.
The most whizz-bang thing about Bieber’s over-scripted and slightly workaday show is the hydraulics. A series of flying contraptions ensures that anyone here with even the most germinal of mothering instincts (and there are probably 23,000 of us, give or take a few dads and brothers) forgets to breathe as Bieber is repeatedly lofted high into the air and dangled over the crowd like bait. One contraption is a heart made of bits of scaffolding, in which Bieber plays surprisingly competent acoustic guitar for “Favorite Girl” – the kind of emotionally explicit swoon-fodder in which teen idols have long specialised. Bieber’s slightly punchier R&B numbers are a little more fun.
Throughout it all, Bieber remains stoic, gazing out at his public with a kind of neutral professionalism that could just be a suppressed fear of heights. Disappointingly, there is little mischief to Bieber, no spin, precious little flirtatiousness, and zero winks. Is he enjoying himself up there? It’s probably the only few minutes’ peace he gets on his own all day.
Smaller details of his performance intrigue. Who would have thought that Bieber’s backing singers would resemble a barbershop quartet recruited from the yakuza? The mystery of the finger-snapping far eastern hard men stage left is solved when Bieber reveals that he discovered Legaci – for that is their name – on YouTube. “Like I was discovered on YouTube!” he points out.
And what is Craig David doing here? The urban crooner comes on in the encore, introduced unenticingly by Bieber as “someone your parents might like”. He performs his hit “7 Days” –, the very first time the notion of sex is broached tonight. “We were making love by Wednesday/ And on Thursday and Friday and Saturday/ We chilled on Sunday,” it goes. Bieber eventually joins David, singing along to the chorus. If you watch his lips closely, though, he misses out the line about Wednesday entirely.
It all ends with the infernally catchy “Baby“, a song that takes the most clichéd romantic pop trope to the limits of sense. “Like baby, baby, baby, ohhh,” croon the Beliebers. There are those who would argue that tween girl fandom is active, creative and rewarding rather than passive and supine (all those hand-lettered posters, all that bonding). But you can’t help but wonder what a musical world would sound like, in which all the inchoate longing of preteen girl lust was channelled into learning how to play guitar.
Or, alternatively, into creating an alternative, blue-haired, sugar-crazed, proto-vegetarian Wonderland. Katy Perry‘s California Dreams world tour is everything that Bieber’s is not – silly, brightly coloured, theatrical, fun and very down on butchers. Even though her audience is only slightly older than Bieber’s, Perry’s Pierre et Gilles-in-a-sweet-shop theme has a lysergic edge to it, made plain when Perry bites into a “special” brownie proffered by a couple of mimes. She starts having funny dreams about following her Kitty (no relation) and fancying gingerbread men, all relayed on screens that progress the show’s notional plot during her frequent dazzling costume changes.
I’ve never been a fan of Katy Perry, balking at the shock-tactic fake queerness of “I Kissed a Girl” and seething at “Ur So Gay“. “California Gurls” remains a rotten song. But for all her gimlet-eyed calculation, Perry packs more wit and charisma into her eyelash extensions than most pop stars manage in a career. Tonight, “I Kissed a Girl” has a dramatic 60s torch song makeover; even “Ur So Gay” is forgiven.
Bieber’s broadcast home videos make it clear he was a born show-off; Perry is a born entertainer, gabbing lucidly all the way through a bravura two-hour performance. The beautifully-lit Beliebers were the real stars of Bieber’s show, but Katy Perry makes you actually believe in the ridiculous transformative spangle of pop music all over again.
Beady Eye – review
Troxy, London
Expectations surrounding the arrival of Beady Eye were low in one respect but mega in two others: forget their record, because any incarnation of latter-day Oasis minus their chief songwriter was scarcely likely to ring the sonic changes; rather, first, what about the interviews?
Noel Gallagher was the sharper wit, but there was always something irresistible about his younger brother’s outbursts: by turns caustic and surreal, Liam succeeded in emulating his idol John Lennon when it came to giving journalists memorable quotes just as much as in any other respect. So given the opportunity to set up the release of his new band’s record in the wake of Oasis’s ugly split in August 2009, Liam, you felt, would come out of his corner snarling.
Instead, he’s sounded just a bit defensive, and while scarcely conciliatory towards “our kid”, neither has the Pretty Green fashionista minted anything quite so damning as his famous description of Noel’s “old man vibe… big woolly jumpers and cardigans… Terry Wogan, Val Doonican shit”. Nor has he been mouthing off about contemporary bands who might be seen as real rivals to Beady Eye, whereas Oasis could dish it out without recourse – even if few could resist the pop he did have recently at Radiohead: “Them writing a song about a fucking tree? Give me a fucking break! A thousand-year-old tree? Go fuck yourself!”
None the less, any concerns that the fight has gone out of Liam are quickly assuaged when you see Beady Eye live, the second treat that the idea of the band promised – partly because any audience chanting Liam’s name was always going to be prone to feistiness itself. So it proves at the Troxy in east London on the last night of the group’s first short UK tour, with the lads rucking down the front and, up on the balcony, blood spurting from someone’s lip one minute, before he puts his arm round the mate who’s punched him the next. The appeal of Oasis from the off was in no little part located in the licence they gave a generation to, well, rock’n'roll, following the indie wallflower years, and it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t clever, but since they’ve been gone, no one – not Kasabian, not the Enemy, certainly not yet the Vaccines – has filled their boots. So why not Beady Eye, who, if you squint, look oh-so-very-much like Oasis?
One answer might be that the generation weaned on “Supersonic” and “Some Might Say” should surely have grown up by now, and mellowed. On “Lippy Kids” on Elbow’s new album, Guy Garvey sings of the charms of reckless youth; it’s a gentle, wistful song, in which he notes that he, for one, “never perfected the simian stroll”. But Liam is actually a year older at 38 than Guy, and he still walks that walk, exuding menace, leaning up and into his mic like he might butt it.
Nothing’s changed, except, and it’s in no way a reliable memory, when Oasis played Knebworth in 1996 and Liam wore a ridiculous chunky jumper very much in the style of T Wogan, I don’t remember seeing him from half a mile back sweat any then; too cool. But tonight, he refuses to take off his macintosh even as damp patches begin to spread across it. But that’s less a sign of his ageing than an indication that, once again, he really means it, maaan.
The wall of noise that the band produces is similarly both fierce and deeply comforting, constructed using some classic templates. Last year’s first single “Bring the Light” actually sounds quite novel, because it mines the barrelhouse boogie of Little Richard, rather than the fab sounds of the 1960s; they come, too, inevitably, and “The Roller” could scarcely be more Lennonesque, although they do a clever thing on “Beatles and Stones” – “I just want to rock’n'roll/I’m going to stand the test of time/Like Beatles and Stones” – because that one actually sounds just like the Who.
Subjected to this noise, faced with Liam as a frontman, that part of the brain that tells you that this is desperate stuff, devoid of originality (and just look at how the rest of the band are dressed, like they’re auditioning for a film of the Britpop years, a pastiche of a pastiche), shuts down, and “The Beat Goes On” actually does sound like the big Zippo lighter moment it so plainly wants to be. “Someday all the world will sing my song,” Liam sings, and heard live, it doesn’t sound a wholly absurd suggestion.
It’s not “Champagne Supernova”, never mind “Let It Be”; but there’s also the rather touching – from Liam! – acknowledgment that “I’m the last of a dying breed.” But then, back out on the streets afterwards, it turns out that it is still 2011 after all.
Justin Bieber – review
NIA, Birmingham
Justin Bieber fans will tell you there are two only kinds of people in the world: “Beliebers” and the rest of us. For those who beliebe, it scarcely matters that the record-breaking Canadian (he’s apparently the most Googled celebrity on earth) barely looks old enough to buy a shandy, or that his recently shorn hair was the only thing that differentiated him from a million other 17-year-old boys. What does matter tonight is that he’s cute, very fluffy and rocks a silver hoodie with cuddly swagger.
On his first UK tour, his support act is Willow Smith, daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett. She and Bieber have a combined age of 27, which must be a first for an arena-tour double-bill. As for her performance – “precocious” doesn’t begin to cover it. She may look like she should be out playing hopscotch, but so did Michael Jackson when he was 10. She dispatches three songs, including the hit Whip My Hair, with towering confidence, and departs through big silver doors that should have been labelled: “Be careful what you wish for, kid.”
Bieber, whose recently broken voice isn’t dissimilar to Smith’s, is equally confident, though what boy wouldn’t be, knowing every girl in the place is yearning for him? Cannily, he makes each fan feel she’s got a chance: his dancers are male – no women on stage to provoke jealousy – and he consistently assures us that he’s rarely seen a prettier audience. Twice he straps himself into metal cages that levitate over the crowd, allowing him a better look at the roiling mass of screamers. And one fan gets the ultimate thrill – ushered on stage during One Less Lonely Girl, she receives flowers and a chaste hug. She quivers, hands pressed to her mouth.
“What I like most is to make you smile,” Bieber says, introducing U Smile. “Because when you smile, I smile.” You don’t say – last year he reportedly earned to 0m. If no pop puppy in the world deserves that kind of money, at least this one works his minuscule butt off for it. He puts on a fast-moving, brightly coloured show in which he never stands still. He’s so energetic that, along with dancing (less acrobatically than expected) and singing (more tunefully), he plays passable drums and piano, too. A childhood video montage shows the baby Bieber twanging a guitar, reinforcing the message that he’s a musician(ish) as well as a pretty face. When all this is over, he could develop into something more interesting, but for now, it’s his face that’s his fortune..
The X Factor live tour – review
O2, Dublin
Well, there’s no doubt that the machine works. The X Factor tour, robbed even of the dubious shocks and spontaneities of the televised competition, is as sleek and slick as an otter’s pocket. And someone’s doing something right to bring this much sugar-joy to so many people, even if the collective age of the – goodness, what, 100,000 wildly happy people – probably came to about the same as that of a night in Ronnie Scott’s.
Goodness, they were young. It’s an odd sight to watch a seven-year-old boy waving a big foam finger, in time to “She Bangs” or “Sex Up My Fire” or some such, towards a flaming stage full of illegally skimpy dancers while simultaneously rubbing his eyes with 10pm tiredness.
Is it a “nice” machine, though? Oh, I don’t think so. First, it’s in an O2 Dome, enough said. Second, there’s no host: just giant side-screens flashing on between acts to boom out the X Factor music with ripe bombast, show clips from the worst auditions so we can laugh all over again, and ask for answers to trivia questions (at £1.50 per text plus usual mobile charges, naturally). The whole thing reeked of micro-management, of course: and they must be aware that, for all the labelling of pretty much all the standards as “soul” or “rhythm and blues” there was as much genuine soul or blues in this cattle-herd of a night – and I mean herding of the acts as well as the audience – as in the average piece of office equipment. Get up, I feel like a fax machine.
But I can’t be too sneery because I am acutely aware I am so far from the target demographic. What then of the music? There was a lot of Cher Lloyd, now red of hair, stomping in trainers and tutu. She and Paije Richardson were popular openers, and have morphed (as have most) into true pros. Soon, it was time for Katie Waissel, and she impressed: coy, gentle, talented. As, hugely, did Rebecca Ferguson: my goodness that girl can sing, and actually did bring a little soul, along with some lovely black dresses, to proceedings. She will last, surely, longer than any of the others.
Despite their appearance sending the audience into meltdown, boyband One Direction were confusing, because, um, how do I put this, they can’t all sing very well. These guys are being touted as the next big thing, redolent with talent and charm. On this appearence, they make mid-period Boyzone look like the Rat Pack. And nice home lass Mary Byrne, despite a reception of the type that wouldn’t have disgraced Nuremberg, is, it has to be said, no Susan Boyle. Oh, the sentences you find yourself writing.
Part of the problem, oddly, is that I missed the catfighting, the tabloid exposés, the sulks and tantrums for which at least two of these acts are famous. It’s weird, this phenomenon: after decades in which TV stole the stars of music hall and theatre, leaving those venues struggling, now the well-watched travails of the contestants are filling these O2 cathedrals of popcorn greed, vast crowds traipsing through the rain to a real venue to see them because they’ve been on the telly. Well, bits of them. The telly competition was devised to make money by showing weaknesses, tears, personalities. The tour is designed to make money by precisely obliterating these and all other traits. Call me cynical, but I’ve got nothing on Cowell’s mob.
What must backstage here be like, I had earlier thought, given the infightings and jealousies of the competition, as they await their next solo turn – and I suddenly realised probably very dull: they’ll be being forced into knitting or spelling bees or something, made to behave, for money, which is OK as it goes, but one aspect was unforgiveable. Not even final act Matt Cardle – the third genuinely impressive singer after Katie and Rebecca – actually had the X-factor enough to break with orders and introduce even the dancers, let alone the four-strong band who had all night produced both good and bad songs with phenomenal skill. The lowliest rackety pub band knows to do this, to an audience of five damp drunks.
But an unmemorable night? Oh no. The memory of sitting, still damp from the Dublin smirr and aching from emergency dental work, behind many pairs of giant pink flashing rabbit ears, and a zillion tweenies filming from their videophones with the squint-eyed concentration of Antonioni, while watching Wagner murder the I had thought unmurderable “Love Shack”, will live a long day.
