Playing to a sparse crowd in Belgrave Music Hall, Girl Ray’s undercooked hour of straightforward disco-pop had highlights but suffered from a muddy mix and was ultimately upstaged by their support act.
To be fair to me, the passage from the neon-lit buzz of Belgrave Canteen to the upstairs Belgrave Music Hall isn’t immediately obvious, particularly upon arriving relatively early on a Tuesday night. Not for the first time at this venue, I accidentally managed to skip the queue via a promising unmarked door next to the pizza stand, and located a toilet before approaching the security guards, receiving a slightly mean chuckle when they pointed out I had toilet roll stuck to the bottom of my shoe. Once in, I did at least have first dibs for the bar and for Belgrave’s limited seating, plus unfettered access to the merch stand. It wouldn’t be manned until after the gig three hours later, but I made sure to leave the venue sporting a bright red Girl Ray tee nonetheless.
Twenty minutes later came that sinking feeling that comes with watching a support act take to the stage to a nearly empty room, and tonight was a particularly tough draw for Kuntessa, whose audience numbered around 20 for her opener. She did at least seem to have three dedicated fans supportively bobbing up and down to the beat near the front, until I realised these were of course the Girl Ray trio willing on their friend. Astonishingly, the Italian electronica songwriter seemed unfazed, posing and preening joyfully across the stage and hilariously introducing zany songs that ranged from rants about her time as a bartender, her love of Kylie Minogue prosecco and a showstopper about wanting to become her crush’s bike saddle – all from her recent Pussy Pitstop EP, as she was at pains to remind us. It was a showing easily profane enough to prove the crudeness of her stage name is no mistranslated coincidence.
Support act Kuntessa played to an almost empty room. I positioned myself at the front during the final build up to Girl Ray’s set and had expected the wide empty space behind me to fill up with latecomers. Instead, there remained a six-feet radius around me and I ended up uncomfortably feeling like part of the show, feeling too exposed to slip back into the crowd; I was closer to frontwoman Poppy Hankin than any other audience member. It was perfect for dancing, yes (and it had been no problem when a similar thing happened for Los Bitchos last year), but also mildly embarrassing.
It was a shame, because this has been a big year for Girl Ray. Mirroring Jessie Ware, although on a much smaller scale, the trio has pivoted from serviceable indie pop to energising disco through their rewarding recent album Prestige, which presented a sort of raffish charm that suited a genre accustomed to not taking itself too seriously. Faultless pop tunes like Everybody’s Saying That and True Love have no doubt already fueled wild nights in Girl Ray’s familiar North London haunts but, like a hungry young football team contemplating an away day to Stoke, could they deliver the goods on a drab night in Leeds?
The answer was, sadly, not really. Opener True Love immediately fell flat when Hankin’s crucial rhythm guitar was rendered inaudible by a messy mix, and over the course of the next few songs the balance hardly improved even when Hankin repeatedly asked the sound engineer to turn her up. Unlike Kuntessa, Girl Ray seemed understandably a little deflated by the poor turnout on this, the penultimate night of a sizeable UK tour. The gave it an admirable good effort, but lyrics like “baby, get down with me,” simply don’t work without maximum gusto.
In the end, that was what condemned this brief gig: Girl Ray’s performance was never simply bad, just consistently unremarkable. Solos were unambitious, never venturing far from the original recording and lacking any sort of technical dazzle needed to wake up a tepid crowd. Hankin’s vocals sound endearingly rough and ready on the record, but here they just sounded ordinary and slightly held back, like a shy friend delivering a relatively impressive showing at karaoke, good enough for a few raised eyebrows, if not quite a free drink.
Nonetheless, there were highlights to be found once the worst of the mixing issues had been resolved. Tell Me was easily the band’s most exciting song and provided a workout for Sophie Moss on bass plus Girl Ray’s most pleasingly silly couplet: “baby, we were hot like a cigar / but here I am crying in the back of my car”. Hold Tight arrived with a bouncy electronic drum beat from Iris McConnell at the back of the stage and Hankin’s acoustic guitar strumming was buoyant and peppy, even if it seemed to take perhaps a little too much inspiration from George Michael’s Faith.
Give Me Your Love, Prestige’s 7 minutes, 43 seconds closer and arguably the only song in Girl Ray’s catalogue to show some genuine creative ambition, closed the set. I had found it underwhelming on the record but was hopeful it would come alive in person. The entry of a severely overblown kick drum, engulfing all other instruments with every beat, put a swift end to those hopes. It was so deafening it even seemed to startle the three band members at first – good for clearing out my sinuses, less good for closing out a pop concert. It was fitting for this gig that a final, potentially interesting crack at the vocoder from Hankin was almost entirely lost to the din.
I had hoped to meet one of the band at the merch stand afterwards, but having lingered for ten minutes I settled on telling Kuntessa how much I admired her confidence before attempting my exit, trying a door I’d been through on previous visits to Belgrave for investigative purposes. I quickly turned around when the same security guard as earlier told me in no uncertain terms that I had to leave the same way I came in. Feeling sheepish, I decided a bus home would be a solo adventure too far this time and called an Uber. For me as for Girl Ray, sometimes it’s just not your night.
Playing to a half-capacity Glasshouse, Sunwook Kim’s admirable account of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto was technically dazzling if lacking in nuance before the RNS found lift off with an invigorating Schumann symphony.
The receptionist at the box office of Gateshead’s newly renamed Glasshouse seemed puzzled when I arrived shortly before a concert on this frigid late November night. The concession ticket I was after wasn’t in her pile, and she looked worried before exclaiming “ah, under 30!” before apologetically asking for my ID. Looking around, it seemed perfectly possible that I was the only concertgoer this staff member had encountered that was eligible for the Glasshouse’s generous under-30s discount. It’s a fabulous, futuristic, indulgent venue and easily the finest concert hall in Tyne & Wear; schemes like these should in theory attract more youngsters, but their effects are yet to be felt.
Tonight, there doesn’t seem to many over 30, either. Perhaps there was an iota of disappointment detectable in pianist Sunwook Kim’s eyes as he took his initial bows to a half-empty seated section and muted applause. What’s more, something in the way he threw his hands down by his sides at one point during the opening exchanges of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 worryingly suggested tiredness. This was only the second night of a two night tour, but Kim has an excuse – this concerto is a unique symphonic undertaking. Running at around 50 minutes, the work is the Hamlet of classical music and ranks amongst the longest and most complex piano concertos in history, demanding big, flexible hands and serious stamina. Brahms famously insisted on calling it “a tiny, tiny concerto”, perhaps to downplay its significance as successor of his disastrously received First Piano Concerto and the 22 year long build-up for its follow-up. In fact, nothing about this work is tiny. Instead, it is often viciously loud and fast and even includes an extra, fourth movement in a break from the three-movement concerto tradition. It seemed to take a few minutes for Sunwook Kim to fully settle himself into the first movement (no bother, since that movement alone is nearly 20 minutes long), but the time we reached the staccato pounding at the piece’s heart both Kim and the audience seemed enthralled.
Pieces as bold as this one call for some showmanship from the pianist – an irate shake of the head, a flick of the hands skyward with every sharp chord – which Kim delivered on, but there was also plenty of humility on show too. He was more than happy to stoop to some thoughtful call and response with the orchestra, his phrasing meticulously matched with the strings’. Dinis Sousa was on vivacious form, barely visible from behind the piano save for his restless, often airborne feet. He proved an expert navigator of the third movement’s meanders in which the piano concerto briefly becomes a cello concerto, and Kate Gould’s lyrical cello solo came across strikingly heartfelt and human. Here too, for an all too brief moment, Kim found some calm in the eye of the storm, patiently teasing out a quiet melody as if beckoning a kitten into his arms.
The second movement sees the concerto at its fiercest and most expansive, although Brahms was nonetheless at pains to call it a “tiny wisp of a scherzo”. It was here where Kim’s playing showed a few blemishes. The wistful melody struggled under a heavy-handed treatment, played with a blunt-force violence particularly in the upper registers; there’s a thin line between a rich, full-sounding forte and reckless jabbing at the keys. Meanwhile, the movement’s quieter passages, including a few enchanting moments of solo piano, were demoted to pretty interstitials between the ‘real’ action, Kim apparently not seeing their relevance in the grand scheme of this epic concerto.
After Kim’s otherwise impressive Brahms, the second half of this concert was something of a curiosity. This was especially true for a rendition of chamber piece Elongation of Nights, written by Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė in 2009. It’s an intensely Baltic piece, almost to a fault. Dissonant, icy strings swelled and fell away in an intriguingly ambient ten minutes that might have set the mind wandering to tomorrow’s breakfast or my route home had it lasted much longer. Nonetheless, it was an effective conveyance of the long and lonely winter nights that envelop northern Europe every year – like a spooky, skeletal Baltic forest, Dinis Sousa remarked beforehand – if little else. Most impressive in the RNS’s performance was the extreme quietness that bookended the piece, Sousa letting a slender sheen of strings melt into silence like frost at dawn.
Robert Schumann’s exciting Fourth Symphony, a relatively compact work at 29 minutes, closed the concert. It’s a restless work – no theme or motif sticks around for long, and moments of respite from the torrent of notes are few and far between – but this seemed to suit the RNS, not least Sousa, who seemed in his element firing off an exciting new entry from a section of his orchestra virtually every bar. The RNS gained momentum alongside Schumann’s magnificently detailed score and were light on their feet for the electrifying scherzo as well as the blistering final presto, which had the strings operating at peak velocity.
I made sure to say goodbye to the couple sat next to me before leaving, who had asked me what I’d thought of Kim’s Brahms during the interval. I’d tried to talk intelligently about the piece but felt like I was unconvincingly rolling out all the fail-safe lines to get by in a conversation with an avid football fan; “Brahms was also overshadowed by Beethoven, wasn’t he?” was a bit like “Arsenal always try to walk it in, don’t they?”. Still, he seemed to believe I knew more than I truthfully do about classical music and appeared somewhat confused by my attendance, alone and conspicuously young-looking amongst the best seats in the house. It was understandable. Despite the Glasshouse’s £5 scheme for under-30s, people my age are sadly still an oddity in these sorts of venues. I left them with a promise I’d be back soon – perhaps Isata Kanneh-Mason doing Eroica in February. After Kim’s brilliant rendition of Brahms it wasn’t clear why more aren’t hooked on the genre. For me, visiting the Glasshouse for a pleasant evening is a no-brainer. Concerts of this calibre are simply too good to miss.
This seasoned popstar knows what she’s doing when it comes to delivering a night out for the ages. This deeply uplifting evening came replete with flawless disco sing-alongs, nut-tight choreography and even a stellar Cher cover to boot.
Jessie Ware doesn’t do halves. She tackles the pulsating dance number What’s Your Pleasure? sparkling in a pearl-studded bralette – her fourth outfit of the night and by no means her last – and clutches a microphone attached to a thick white whip instead of a stand, which she duly twirls around her head and lashes theatrically towards her backing dancers. It’s a rendition that leans into the kinky side of the title track of Ware’s career-defining lockdown album, which had many critics grasping for the appropriate superlative to convey its rush of steamy, exquisitely produced disco that caught the zeitgeist in a society clamouring for a return to the dance floor. What’s more, Ware has already told us her mother Lennie is in attendance tonight (beloved by the crowd as co-host of their hit mother-daughter podcast Table Manners), plus Auntie Monica. When the two male dancers, wearing tight shirts and even tighter unflinching smiles, gracefully bend over and present their backsides to the audience, a line seems to have been crossed. “Sorry, Monica!” Ware manages to blurt out between lyrics, doling out a pair of hearty spankings all the same. The choreography has been rehearsed for a reason, after all.
It’s a moment of hilarity that nicely sums up what makes a Jessie Ware gig such a unique hoot. Five albums and 13 years into her career, the 39-year-old is entering pop veteran territory, and there’s a wizened confidence in the way she effortlessly endears herself with organic chat between songs, speaking in the loving tone of an old friend. It seems over the years Ware has learned to drop her guard and never take herself too seriously. “When I first played in Manchester I just stood still, sang my songs and that was it,” she admits to us at one point, in between chatting to a couple celebrating their wedding anniversary and gushing about how she met Marcus Rashford yesterday (“I invited him to come but I think it might not be his kind of thing”). That said, Ware knows when to assume a more formidable posture when required of her, like when whipping her bandmates on What’s Your Pleasure? or on the opening number That! Feels Good! during which, after introducing monikers for her bandmates – Steady Eddy on bass, Sweet Pea on backing vocals, The Oyster for one unlucky dancer – she pronounces herself as Mother, arms spread wide and head held high. Make no mistake, for tonight this venue is not just Victoria Warehouse, but Victoria Ware-house.
A tightly choreographed What’s Your Pleasure? was one of the many highlights.
Mother may have been a reference to the recent Gen Z trend of giddily calling any vaguely authoritative female figure on a stage “mother”, but it was literally true, too. Ware is at an age at which women in the music industry are encouraged to gradually recede from the limelight and into the afterlife of Radio 2 to make way for the next cohort of trendy twenty-somethings. A mother of three isn’t supposed to bring in the numbers Ware is pulling today, let alone with unequivocally erotic songs about sexual empowerment and dancing. Instead, 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? turned Ware from a faltering M.O.R. popstar into a household name, and it’s that album which forms the bulk of the set list tonight, along with if-it-ain’t-broke follow-up record That! Feels Good!. In fact, the only pre-2020 song that gets more than an allusion is Say You Love Me, a poignant remnant of a past era for Ware, delivered with a sombre piano accompaniment to contrast the bombast elsewhere in the show. It’s a touching singalong with a fine vocal performance, but even this ballad has been bettered in recent years, namely by the gorgeous Remember Where You Are, which soon follows and provides necessary respite from all the feather boas and glitter. A song title to live by, Remember Where You Are’s message of bittersweet hope hits even harder in the flesh, a relatively calmed group of swaying backing vocalists delivering the chilling line “the heart of the city is on fire” as Ware begs for someone, anyone, to “take me home”. It’s her most profound song and perhaps greatest artistic achievement.
That song formed the end of a run of Ware’s slowest, sweetest ballads, which were all lumped together for an obvious reason: to leave a second half bursting with non-stop dance crowd-pleasers. The uber camp showstoppers soon piled up: Ooh La La’s bass line alone could have torn the roof off; Begin Again built spectacularly towards a thrillingly belted high note; Bananarama-referencing Mirage (Don’t Stop) was hypnotic and impulsive, the only flaw being that it had to come to an end. When the source material gave an opportunity for some fun onstage amateur dramatics, Ware went all in. Shake the Bottle, for instance, features plenty of coy interactions with the two backing dancers, who hysterically played the roles of Ware’s former love exploits, making absolutely sure the audience missed none of the many cheeky double entendres sprinkled throughout the lyrics. She hardly stopped moving during up-tempo dance banger Freak Me Now, her drummer delivering a thrilling performance at a DJ station at the front of the stage. Beautiful People provided a ready-made slice of crowd choreography in the lines “Stand up / Turn around / Take a bow / Because you look so good right now”. It could have been corny had the music itself been lazy, but instead we got a cracking bass riff, punchy horns and an all-out vocal performance from Ware, gleeful architect of the ensuing chaos. We were all, as Ware insisted, “beautiful people” and as the few thousand punters crammed into Victoria Warehouse spun around and jumped up and down to the beat, it was impossible not to agree.
Say You Love Me provided the night’s only acoustic moment.
Every song was a winner, but Ware had one more surprise up her sleeve. After a suspiciously long costume change, we might not have figured out the source of Ware’s disembodied vocals had one of the dancers not gestured to the back of the room. A disbelieving cheer rippled through the crowd as it transpired that Ware was perched in a corner of the mezzanine floor at the back of the room, now wearing a riot of pink that dazzled under the spotlight. What’s more, she was getting stuck into the verse of Cher’s cheese-smothered classic Believe, which the audience duly belted along to. She proceeded to weave through the standing audience Jesus-like, blowing kisses and holding hands of devotees all whilst belting out the chorus in full voice like the rest of us.
She was ushered back onto stage just in time for a final rendition of Free Yourself, a riotous ode to self-acceptance and perhaps Ware’s quintessential song. The track was one of the highlights of the lavish opening sequence to last year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool and in Manchester it was no less extravagant, the sashaying dancers visibly perspiring under many layers of sequins. It was silly and unedifying but in an honest, unapologetic way; Ware understood that you don’t need a reason to have a good time – just wanting to dance is enough. The extended cut of the track was glorious, Ware never losing an ounce of enthusiasm even as the final chorus looped back into another repeat. All around me, the ecstatic crowd lapped up every last note.
The sad truth was that Ware had to leave the stage eventually, prompting boos which briefly switched her into stern mother mode (“we don’t boo in this house!”). When she left the stage victoriously to the strains of Candi Staton’s Young Hearts Run Free the crowd simply kept dancing, oblivious to the stewards who were rapidly trying to cordon off sections of the standing area for cleaning. I would soon regret not joining in. Instead I watched and took a moment to appreciate how far I’ve come and how special this moment was; or, as Ware would put it, remember where I am. Jessie Ware had been the figurehead for tonight’s fabulous celebration of life, but as I watched punters twirl one another around and laugh uncontrollably, it seemed clear that this gig belonged to all of us.
Eclectic was the word for this remarkable new project from Manchester Collective’s Rakhi Singh and Alan Keary. Singh’s Bach and Keary’s Reich were each fantastic in their own ways, but it was a chilling closing piece that had audience members either enthralled or clamouring for the exit.
Alan Keary is a man who knows his way around a loop pedal. Watching him construct a dense soundscape with only his voice at the start of haunting original composition Shattered Creek felt a bit like watching a passionate painter get lost in their work, each vocal loop a delicately judged brushstroke that contributed to an emerging whole. He told us in advance the song had been written in response to the news story of a man finding himself stranded in a deep Peruvian cave system for three days, and Keary was adept at recreating that lonely, echoey environment with eerie rumbles of bass and floods of reverb. Then, a new sound: two alternating tones, harsh and loud in the mix, apparently cued by Keary with one of the dozens of electronic buttons and knobs at his fingertips. For a moment, it seems like an odd addition to the mix, perhaps a misguided attempt to take things in an unexpected direction. Then Keary looks up to the back of the room, smiles and takes his hands off his electronics. It is, of course, just the Star and Shadow’s pesky fire alarm; the plumes of stage smoke had been atmospheric but evidently a bit over the top. Refreshingly humble despite the seriousness of his composition, Keary simply abandons Shattered Creek and starts harmonising with the alarm. Rakhi Singh promptly joins in with him on violin in a moment of improvisation that hints at the immense musical nous these two possess. When the alarm persists Keary even throws in some lyrics (“Fire alarm / You’re my best friend”) and the place erupts in laughter.
That was only one of the incidents in a rocky start to this memorable concert; Keary had to stop the previous song twice and apologise when he miscued his loop pedal during a particularly fiendish rhythmic passage. But, if any performers are up to the challenge of overcoming song-ruining technical difficulties and mistakes, its these two. Both Keary and violinist Rakhi Singh, two members of the sprawling Manchester Collective (of which Singh is Musical Director and Fergus McCreadie one of this season’s pianists) are immense professionals, more than self-assured enough to not let a few slip-ups disrupt their mojo. Their willingness to laugh rather than sulk or attempt to hide the errors is typical of a group in which the stuffy old world of classical music increasingly struggles to contain them. Their releases never fail to surprise, offering daring, fascinating and often challenging sounds that sit right on the modern extremes of what classical can be. Forget the well-documented styles of 20th century classical music – Manchester Collective explore the unchartered territory of 21st century classical. It is groups like these that will define how our era of the genre is remembers in the decades and centuries to come.
Alan Keary was an impressive multi-instrumentalist, playing bass, guitar, violin and electronics.
That’s not to say Manchester Collective shun music of centuries gone by in favour of more fashionable sounds. This gig started with the distinctly unfashionable music of Hildegard von Bingen, an 11th century philosopher and mystic as well as composer of deeply religious medieval music (remarkable not least because she was an exceedingly rare female academic) whose potent, deeply spiritual compositions were centuries ahead of their time. An opening rendition of O virtus Sapiente is given life by a Shruti box, a simple wooden box containing bellows that emit a constant, hypnotic drone, tonight powered by Singh gently stepping on an attached foot pedal. The one note instrument is traditionally used in music from the Indian subcontinent, but in Newcastle it made von Bingen’s ancient melodies sound strikingly alive, the hinge of the box softly opening and closing as if breathing, the drone fading gradually into nothing in the seconds after Singh stopped pumping the instrument.
That enchanting opener was only the beginning of this duo’s eclecticism. Von Bingen was followed by two Bulgarian folk songs in unusual time signatures, Keary offering nimble bass lines under Singh’s sprightly violin playing. The challenge was to make these strange rhythms feel natural and danceable rather than needlessly intellectual and complicated, a task which Singh and Keary’s vivacious playing mostly succeeded in (at least when Keary wasn’t missing his cues on the loop pedal). A pre-recorded percussion track was a good idea to elevate the particularly bouncy tune of Buchimish, even though the drumming came across as a little underpowered in comparison to the two outstanding players giving it their all in front of us.
The real meat of the programme came with solo turns from each performer in the middle of the concert. First, there was Singh performing J.S. Bach’s Chaconne, a notorious piece due to its demand for both the melody and bass line to be played simultaneously on a single violin. Singh made a point of prefacing her performance with the bass line played in isolation, explaining how Bach simply repeats it, only with a multitude of creative variations. Her care towards bringing out that bass line was clear throughout the subsequent rendition, the piece crucially never losing its musical guiding star. Chaconne is a fierce piece of music and Singh was its equal, striking her bow across the strings in those famously ferocious opening notes as if wielding a sword. It was an unremitting intensity that occasionally came at the expense of a handful of subtler moments in the piece, but when Bach’s melodies rose to their most stormy Singh’s playing was a tour de force. Such was Singh’s immense passion for the piece it was easy to miss the vast technical ability and extraordinary feat of memorisation on show – Chaconne may be 16 minutes long, but Singh is not the sort to seek comfort from sheet music.
Rakhi Singh played violin whilst pumping a Shruti box with her right foot.
Similarly engrossing was Keary’s moment in the spotlight, a movement from Electric Counterpoint by 20th century composer and defining figure of minimalist music Steve Reich. Unshaken by his earlier slip-ups, this was a masterclass in loop pedal skills. One by one, Keary stacked dozens of intricately plucked guitar melodies on top of one another, creating a musical house of cards that could have easily tumbled down had one addition been played ever so slightly too fast or two slow. Instead, he was metronomic, impressively able to apply exactly the same tone to every melody, resulting in a fascinatingly balanced tapestry of interlocking twangs. It may have been less emotionally compelling than Singh’s Chaconne, but Reich’s music doesn’t call for individualism but rather rigid discipline in pursuit of a mathematical sort of beauty. Keary was less a musician, more a machine-like music generator, and the brilliance of Electric Counterpoint shone as a result.
However, in the end Chaconne and Electric Counterpoint were really just preludes to the extraordinary work that closed this set. LAD, written by American composer Julia Wolfe in 2007, was originally written for nine bagpipes and, although there sadly wasn’t a band of pipers waiting behind the scenes at the Star and Shadow, Singh and Keary had plenty of tech to recreate an unassailable wall of sound with just two violins in Singh’s own arrangement of the piece. And what a sound; the blaring tones of LAD more closely resembled a spiritual out-of-body experience than a piece of music by any of the usual definitions. Singh herself prefers to talk of it as “an ancient cleansing ritual”. It was here that Singh’s fearlessness as a violinist really came into its own. Her opening notes – a lurching upwards slide, heavily thickened by effects and distortion – was followed by gaping silence, Singh pointedly glaring into the whites of the audience’s eyes, making a few seconds feel like minutes. Stood in the front row, I found myself averting her unflinching gaze, pulse quickening. She returned to those sliding notes, sounding somehow even more sickening than the first time, before staring in silence once more. Never before have I been so utterly floored by the opening to a piece of music. Soon a drone emerged and Keary joined in with the mounting cacophony, the excruciating tension rising impossibly via a particularly gut-churning use of the Shepard tone. Eventually, haunting folk tunes arose from the din like zombies from a grave, sounds of a past era back to haunt us. The noise became so horrific, so viscerally intense that not everyone in the room could handle it: two old ladies sat near me rather huffily gathered their things and left midway through, triggering a chuckle from Singh. Another couple near the front also vacated just as the piece was reaching its apex. A few minutes of chaos marked the finale, Singh and Keary playing a non-sensical tangle of notes that was so avant-garde it almost made this powerful work of art feel silly. Nonetheless, by the time they had finished (remarkably ending this rhythm-less piece perfectly in sync) it felt as something in the air had changed. The applause from those of us that remained was loud, long and deserved – I’ve never experienced anything quite like Manchester Collective’s LAD. This leg of their autumn tour may have had a shaky start, but it could hardly have ended more strongly: modern classical music at its enthralling, inspiring best.
No Bach Preludes were to be found here, just consistently thrilling African beats propelled by Selaocoe’s fierce bowing and awesome throat singing. In between show-stopping dance numbers and a spellbinding percussion solo, it was the audience participation that lifted this gig towards something spiritual.
Abel Selaocoe doesn’t just play the cello, he consumes it. At the start of what will be a special night in Newcastle he strikes an imposing figure, appearing in a huge rose red toga with gold patterns flowing all around him, somewhat upstaging his three plainly dressed bandmates who comprise the Bantu Ensemble, a group fashioned specifically for this tour. Stood up or sitting down, Selaocoe is a bear of a man, but the lovable, cuddly kind: he starts his show with a heartfelt thanks to the audience, his broad smile only encouraging lengthy cheers in response which he patiently waits to subside. Like most musicians, he writes his music about love, but a love deeper than the coffee shop crushes and sickly clichés that might take your average popstar to the top of the charts. Instead, Selaocoe speaks about love for one’s friends, love for humanity in general and, most importantly, love for one’s home. Indeed, this concert is devoted to his homeland of South Africa, with its hypnotic, percussive grooves and ingrained emphasis on the power of community. The cello is Selaocoe’s tool of choice for celebrating his culture, his playing zippy and playful, lending a new sense of soul to an instrument so often confined to the sanitised world of European concert halls. Perhaps Selaocoe is less consuming his cello, then, more giving it a much needed hug.
That’s not to say Selaocoe’s music is all sunshine and lollipops. He opens with an expansive reworking of his track Qhawe / Hero, launching boldly into a capella vocals, standing tall and closing his eyes so as to maximise the power of his bone rattling voice. Therein lies the first surprise of the night: Selaocoe is a great cellist, but his vocal abilities are just as remarkable. The several passages of a capella singing in this show have a primal quality, and despite being almost entirely sung in his native Sesotho, there’s something about his abrasive transitions from lion-like throat singing to shamanic growl that require no translation. Besides, watering down his lyrics to appease an English audience would forgo the many wonderful qualities of his mother tongue, most notably Sesotho’s extraordinary click consonants, which give his faster passages of singing a fascinating percussive edge. Selaocoe does offer translations for his song titles, but otherwise we must simply enjoy how his words sound rather than what they mean, and his performance is all the better for it.
Abel Selaocoe often stood to sing.
The best songs were the ones that managed to cram in all the many aspects of Selaocoe’s offering as a performer. Hlokomela / Take care was one of several roof-raisers, starting with gentle singing and plucking before bursting into joyous life, Selaocoe standing up at one point, leading claps for the crowd as if they needed any encouragement. This form of tribal African music seems to dig a layer deeper into our urge to dance as one community than most Western music, and a rowdy Newcastle crowd didn’t require much introduction to get their feet moving and heads bobbing, a few giddy yelps emerging from the audience to greet any particularly acrobatic new bass line from Alan Keary. Mohamadou Kouate was the engine in the centre of stage, kneeling amidst a playground of various percussive wonders but spending most of his time striking a calabash, an upturned dome that, when struck with a firm fist, released the earthy pulse at the heart of Selaocoe’s uptempo crowd pleasers. Hewasn’t merely a beat provider, though; exquisitely gentle Ibuyile l’Africa / Africa is Back sounded like the giant sun rising over the savannah at dawn, complete with birdlike whistles from Kouate, plus a shimmer of beads like a rattlesnake emerging for another day on the plains.
Quite what sort of music we were hearing was difficult to pin down. To English ears it sounded fresh and exotic, but it may not have sounded especially familiar to many of Selaocoe’s South African compatriots either. Some passages veered towards jazz, especially when Fred Thomas’s piano flutterings came to the fore, and Keary was even offered a wild jazz fusion solo on the opening track, an opportunity which he took with aplomb. Other times, Selaocoe played the role of spiritual leader, and an astonishing one at that. Several songs were elevated by two-part harmonies sung by an impressively full-throated Boiler Shop crowd. On the faster numbers the singing just added to the fun-filled chaos, but on slower compositions crowd participation added something deeper. The sound of several hundred strangers singing loudly and proudly will always be moving, but when applied to Selaocoe’s timeless melodies, the effect was transcendental. Ancestral Affirmations provided one such moment, our shared melodies falling like leaves. Most powerful was the fact that this clearly wasn’t just a song about joy – swelling piano chords and murmuring bass gave the music a dark, religious quality, Selaocoe our sombre funeral leader. Ancestral Affirmations truly was not just a song, but an experience, the sort that I’m convinced is impossible to properly convey in words.
“Dudu knows the cosmos better than the rest of us,” Selaocoe told us in his delicious baritone speaking voice between songs at one point, referring to percussionist Kouate. What followed was the most extraordinary percussion solo I’ve ever witnessed. It was not a drum solo in anything like the traditional sense, more a fascinating show-and-tell: here was a strange dark cylinder emitting a sound like waves; a black tube looped around the neck which Kouate blew into; two flexible corrugated plastic tubes which Kouate flung around his head like a football hooligan. Strangest of all were two pipes with cut-open water bottles taped to their ends, which Kouate dipped repetitively into a basin of water as if a plumber trying to dislodge a blockage. It was all inescapably absurd (there were plenty of confused laughs from the crowd, particularly after Selaocoe’s cryptic introduction) and might have devolved into silliness had the actual sounds produced not been so surprising. The hooligan plastic tubes, for instance, were spun at various speeds so as to produce – miraculously – a discernable melody which Thomas later picked up on the piano. The plumbing element initially seemed like a highbrow way to recreate the sound of watery footsteps, until Kouate used the air rushing through the tube and the partly-covered hole as its end to produce a sound like a wind instrument. Kneeling back down at his station, he delved into a tintinnabulum of shiny trinkets, producing a dazzling flurry of tinkles, even if it did occasionally sound like what happens when you open that precariously stacked kitchen cupboard full of saucepans.
By the time Ka Bohaleng / On the Sharp Side came along at the end of the gig, the crowd was in raptures. Destined to be not quite as thrilling or rhythmically impeccable as the brilliant studio recording, there was still a fantastic piece of call and response crowd work in the feverish finale, Selaocoe’s great clapping palms ushering bedlam. Kouate’s climatic solo on talking drum – a two-sided hourglass shaped drum tucked under the arm – had the added thrill of interpretive dance, Kouate’s arms flailing wildly at impossible speed, all silhouetted against a background of pulsing white lights.
It was all a far cry from the gig I had been expecting. Yes, Selaocoe’s debut album contains Ka Bohaleng, but it also contains strikingly restrained accounts of a Platti cello sonata and a few movements from Bach’s cello suites. It makes for a fascinating and perhaps uneven record, and I’d arrived at Boiler Shop prepared to critique Selaocoe’s attempt at marrying Western baroque music with its African antithesis.
But there was to be no such challenges: Selaocoe’s show was devoid of tranquil (and perhaps sleepy) baroque pieces and instead stuck to unchartered territory. I have no doubt Selaocoe’s passion for Bach runs deep, but it’s hard to imagine any music delivered as passionately and compellingly as Selaocoe’s own compositions. Crucially, rather than hearing interpretations of some other composer’s ideas, we got Selaocoe’s own soul. As a result the crowd required little thought before falling in love with it all, judging by all the shouts of joy during the grooviest passages and the staggeringly loud singalongs.
The applause was so fervent it made you wonder if the encore really was planned this time, or if the band, like me, had been awed by the sense of occasion. Either way, Selaocoe was not one to get carried away in the moment, standing calmly as the applause quietened before telling us, monk-like, that “with this energy we’re gonna take over the world out there.” The breathtakingly quiet Infinite Love rounded off the night, a delectable waltz that rose elegantly into the Boiler Shop rafters like smoke from an incense stick. Both Selaocoe’s vocals and cello sounded silkier than ever but, not for the first time, it was Mohamadou Kouate’s work on percussion that was most spellbinding. This time his bowl of water played the role of a sonorous kick drum, Kouate floating a smaller, upturned bowl on the water’s surface and deftly striking the top with his palms. Woody crunches like footsteps and sparkles of kalimba, all emanating from Kouate’s encyclopaedic ring of small instruments, completed a stunning soundworld. As his fellow musicians drew the song to a peaceful close, Kouate filled his bowl with water and purposefully poured it back out, his other hand tickling a set of chimes. Some may say the sound of water sloshing isn’t really music, but Abel Selaocoe’s concert had already ventured well beyond the traditional boundaries of music and into something more artful and poignant. As Selaocoe’s last stroke of the cello strings receded to nothing, Kouate shook out what was left of the water, the last drops falling like tears.
Squid’s twisted, ugly brand of post-punk rock music was a perfect match for the industrial surroundings of Newcastle’s finest gigging venue for a set packed with interest and surprises, not least a theatrical twist at its climax.
Squid’s latest tour, in support of their critically acclaimed sophomore album O Monolith, begins with nothing but cowbells. Two rhythms weave immaculately together whilst drummer and frontman Ollie Judge gets comfortable on his stool, plinthed and silhouetted against a growing storm of technicolour stage lights. A buzzy, detuned synth loop arrives spectre-like, then an eerily off-kilter bass line and dizzying assemblage of dovetailing guitar lines. After a minute or two Louis Borlase lunges forward and unleashes a piercing guitar riff, his instrument scratching and screeching higher and higher, urging this monster of a song towards its startling finale. This is Swing (In a Dream), Squid’s fascinating set opener that serves as a head first dive into the strange, nightmarish underworld in which this band’s music resides, full of unhinged melodies and alien stretches of what can only be described as noise. It makes for unrelentingly challenging listening – unlike their similarly daring peers Black Midi, Squid aren’t tempted to throw in a delicate acoustic ballad just to keep the audience on their toes – but it is all utterly enthralling.
Ollie Judge’s endurance as both drummer and vocalist was impressive.
My friend Liam and I are in the thick of it. Despite arriving shortly after doors opened at Newcastle’s Boiler Shop, we’ve somehow secured the best spot in the venue, pressed against the barriers and right under the nose of a shadowy Judge, who is throned centre stage. With the masses of fans all behind us – Bristol group Squid have garnered a comparable cult following to the likes of Black Country, New Road in recent years – we can fully appreciate the perfectness of the venue, a bare and atmospherically lit former warehouse that seems built solely to recreate the dystopian future so vividly painted by Squid’s music. There’s plenty to look at on stage, too: five musicians and many more instruments. Borlase inhabits a small forest of synths on their stands; Laurie Nanivell makes use of a dedicated cowbell station when he’s not injecting songs with trumpet; Arthur Leadbetter has his own ring of synths, plus an electric cello for good measure. What’s more, it’s not all just eye-candy for music nerds like me; Squid’s ambitious compositions genuinely demand half the stock of the nearest Gear4music warehouse. It’s this vast choice of instrumentation that allows these songs to be so volatile, the band indulging in lengthy song transitions that veer towards the genre of ambient noise, full of indecipherable squeals of synth and undulating tides of electronic fuzz.
It’s in these off-script song transitions that Squid were their most daring and compelling. An early sortie in the preamble to Undergrowth was breathless, Judge emerging from a mist of guitar with a thumping dance groove that sounded like a warped version of Parcels in full nightclub mode. Then there was the song itself, with its heavy hip hop groove and sticky guitar hooks. “I’d rather melt, melt, melt, melt away,” Judge yelped in the chorus, competing with a honking trumpet amidst a superb, head-banging racket. Peel St. was another early highlight that emerged from experimental noise, the band miraculously turning what sounded like a jammed photocopier into one of the most lethal grooves they’ve ever dug their teeth into.
Louis Borlase played guitar and electronics whilst Arthur Leadbetter performed on electric cello.
It was all a bit too much for one man a few rows back from us, who used the few pauses in the music so impatiently shout the lyrics to Squid’s biggest hit, Narrator, at one point getting the crowd to clap distractingly during a quiet section of solo guitar. Liam and I saw him extricated from the crowd and awkwardly heaved over the barriers by half a dozen security a few songs later. “Sunday night… who would have thought it?” Judge mentioned quietly at one point, apparently in disapproval. Tellingly, it was one of the only things he said directly to the crowd all night.
It was a good thing that the five members of Squid were all far too absorbed in their craft to let a rude audience put them off. The crowd did at least elevate standout Documentary Filmmaker by singing along gleefully to a trumpet riff, then shouting along to Judge’s descriptions of a hot summer (“the sweat dripped off my plastic sheets”) during a suitably stifling climax. The biggest climax, however, was reserved for a deafening rendition of Siphon Song, which was helped by a more restrained use of the robot-like vocal manipulations that somewhat took the sting out of the studio recording. A patient outro that flickered like a dying ember gradually revealed Narrator, the track that many in the crowd will have been waiting for. It was a performance that was bound to fall short of the experience of listening to the original track for the first time – Martha Skye Murphy, whose blood-curdling screams in the finale make for one of the most disturbing pieces of rock I’ve ever heard, was of course not present at Boiler Shop – but Judge’s sheer vocal stamina in the epic crescendo was admirable, even if the song rather outstayed its welcome over the course of a nearly nine-minute runtime. Simultaneously drumming and singing (or, more accurately, wailing) for such a behemoth of a song was no mean feat.
Laurie Nankivell and Anton Pearson completed the lineup.
Whilst Squid’s sonic onslaught was sometimes overwhelming, they could never be accused of boring their audience. In Newcastle this was true right until the very end, with the awe-inspiring The Blades, which started with a clever reprise of the opening cowbell rhythms. Here lies perhaps the most memorable image of all Judge’s sinister lyrics: a drone operator sits alone and watches his screen that shows aerial images of people on the ground which he darkly reduces to “blades of grass waiting to be trimmed.” Judge repeated these menacing lyrics with increasingly uncontrolled yelps, as if playing the drone operator as he gradually loses his mind in the warfare, powerful trumpet melodies and wailing sirens exploding like bombs. It made for a violent depiction of mania that would be compelling even if it didn’t come at a time when war crimes are becoming depressingly common in the news.
Then came the twist. For the first time in the whole gig, Judge stepped out from behind his kit, untangled his microphone from its stand, and positioned himself at the very edge of the stage, almost within touching distance of Liam and me. “Back to bed / Another man’s hand on the joystick,” he almost whispered over dreamlike sustained guitar chords. He looked genuinely frightened, gazing nervously up to the metal rafters of the warehouse building while gradually tangling himself in his microphone cable. Judge – or, more accurately, his character – seemed defeated, lost, hopeless. It was a moment of intense theatre that would haunt me on the subsequent walk home and make me wish Judge had dug even deeper into the performance art that his evocative lyrics so easily lend themselves to. As the quiet final notes of this otherwise thunderous gig rang out, Judge stood alone centre-stage, incapacitated by his own microphone cord. The crowd had been rowdy all night, but something in Judge’s performance seemed to have genuinely struck a nerve. As the stage lights dimmed, all that was left of Squid’s concert was a stunned silence.
A dejected, overwhelmed Lincoln set the scene for a thoroughly unprofessional showing from Penelope Scott, whose pitchy vocals and underwhelming songs made the hour feel like two.
Somewhere between Leeds and Manchester, the knot of anxiety in my stomach tightened. As the light outside the train window weakened, my apprehension of what was to come – namely a solo traversal of Manchester city centre by bus – strengthened. I am lucky to have travelled to far more exotic places than this, but something about the task of negotiating a ticket on the number 1 towards Wythenshaw from a no-nonsense Mancunian bus driver sent shivers down my spine. An egg sandwich bolted at a shady bus stop felt like battle fuel. Of course, as is almost always the case, there was absolutely nothing to worry about, although I had cut things finer than I anticipated, joining good friends Ewan and Isaac in the Deaf Institute’s bar queue with just enough time for hugs and Coke orders before the crowd cheered the night’s first performer onto the stage.
I wasn’t the only one feeling anxious that Wednesday night. Lincoln, a singer-songwriter from Ohio dealing in neatly packaged emo rock and painfully poetic lyrics, is the man responsible for what remains the finest EP I’ve ever heard, 2017’s A Constant State of Ohio. At five songs and 16 minutes long, there isn’t a single minute on Ohio where Lincoln loses his burning sense of creativity, with consistently thrilling songwriting and staggeringly stylish rock arrangements that belied the fact that it was his first – and for many years, only – official release, produced when he was still a teenager. It was this set of five tracks that caught the imaginations of 14-year-old Ewan and I, and we took to playing it in our high school’s only practice room, me bashing out the chords and bass lines on piano, Ewan playing guitar and singing along with all the heartfelt devotion that lyrics like these demand.
The fact that, somewhat out of the blue, Lincoln had booked a brief debut UK tour in support of Penelope Scott seemed too good to be true, and for those initial few minutes settling down in the beautifully restored Deaf Institute it still seemed ridiculous that this random American artist, adored by us and (more or less) us only, was just a matter of metres away from us. But there he was, plodding onto stage alone, head hung low and letting his now chest-length scraggly brown hair fall away in front of him, covering a wiry moustache that almost made Lincoln unrecognisable from the few, aged photos Ewan and I had seen of him online. Immediately, alarm bells were ringing. “There’s a lot of you here and… I’m not ready for this,” were his first tentative words, the crowd’s reaction gradually switching from laughter to intermittent cheers of encouragement as it became clear Lincoln wasn’t joking.
Right from those first words, it was obvious that Lincoln wouldn’t have the conviction to produce a satisfying support set, although circumstances didn’t help. Sat down and hunched over a guitar, he looked crushingly lonely on stage and needed other musicians not just for more visual interest but to beef out his songs – opener Smokey Eyes was a different song altogether without the spectacular drum fill intro that lights the touchpaper of the studio recording. Instead, Lincoln battled on alone, admirably pushing through what seemed like a genuine personal crisis but leaving little musical substance for the few fans like Ewan and I to cling to, even if Ewan proudly belted out every lyric in support anyway.
Lincoln had to battle through his set at the Deaf Institute.
Instrumentation aside, the lyrics remained extraordinary even if Lincoln often didn’t seem to enjoy delivering them. Lines like “quiet lies that you’re telling to those black and screaming skies” were appropriately spat out with disgust from the singer, as was Lincoln’s poetic assertion that “the sky is what we leave behind” on Downhill, which wrapped up this set powerfully as it did on the original EP. Not that Lincoln seemed at all aware of the effortless flow of his rhymes, instead rolling his eyes to the ceiling when they weren’t glued to his feet. He didn’t realise it, but they were songs that he had every right to be proud of.
It soon became clear exactly what he meant by “not ready”, too. Part of Lincoln’s apparent terror was the fact he had walked onto the stage without a plan, improvising a set list and often forgetting his lyrics. Every song seemed like a challenge to be overcome, and with awkward gap came the genuine risk that Lincoln might no longer be able summon the courage to continue at all. He needed the direct help of Ewan – easy to hear over a meek guitar intro – to find the opening line of Banks, a song that shouldn’t have been so difficult to remember; the stunning final four lines about the power and limitations of music and art in general remain etched in my memory since I first heard them years ago. As I would have the chance to insist on Lincoln later, if I was into tattoos, the lyric sheet of Banks would be my first point of call.
It wasn’t just Ewan unwaveringly powering Lincoln through this set, although they made up a big proportion of the most vocal supporters. Every song was cheered, every mumbled apology batted away with whoops and laughter and shouts of “we love you!” dotted around the room. When Lincoln cut his finger whilst strumming, one audience member even offered a plaster, symbolic of the band-of-friends atmosphere that had emerged in the Deaf Institute as we watched what felt like a mutual friend crumble in front of us. Of course, Lincoln declined the offer.
He finished the set with a subversion of the usual showman’s routine of lines like “I’m so sorry we’ve ran out of time” or “I can’t wait to see you all again soon!” Instead we got “I’m gonna get down off the stage. Can I do that?” It was a measure of the crowd’s sympathy that instead of the usual pantomime groans, the audience gave a loving, appreciative yes. With that Lincoln wiped his brow a final time, unplugged his guitar and slunk backstage.
Then something remarkable unfolded. Improbably, Ewan had acquired Lincoln’s personal email address in a thorough online trawl of the deepest corners of his elusive online presence in the weeks leading up to the gig, and had managed to persuade Lincoln into an exclusive interview for Ewan’s YouTube channel. After such a forlorn performance, the three of us wondered if he would appear after all, but sure enough Lincoln snuck out from a side door five minutes after leaving the stage, trailed by a lowkey stage manager. Venue security prohibited us from going outside, so the Deaf Institute’s atmospheric, gloomy stairwell would have to do for an interview venue. Lincoln Lutz from Cincinnati, Ohio is hardly Ed Sheeran, but meeting the creator of one of my most treasured works of art felt special. Ewan asked the questions (just as disbelieving as me), Isaac filmed and I positioned myself in a corner, trying to take it all in. Conversation veered chaotically from allusions to years of drug addiction and a sharp decline in mental health (about which Lincoln described himself as becoming “not a person”) to his newfound appreciation of the Manchester fruit juice delicacy Vimto. He was so addicted to nicotine that the transatlantic flight to the UK was a huge struggle, he would later tell me. When asked for wise words from Ewan, “don’t do crack!” was the half-jokey response, a sadness detectable in his muted laughter.
Ewan managed to grab a signature on their vinyl sleeve of Ohio before returning to the concert hall just in time for the appearance of the night’s main act, Penelope Scott. She is one of a new breed of TikTok star, unusual for having gained millions of monthly listeners with little to no mainstream coverage. Perhaps her wild success is down to just how much the Internet age dominates her music, which sounds like a corrupted, freakish video game soundtrack, restlessly lurching from punk rock to cutesy acoustic guitar to plodding 8-bit synths with a joyous disregard for the traditional rules of hit making.
There’s a limit to the mind-boggling numbers, though. The Deaf Institute, for one thing, is a humbling venue, housing just 250 fans at its capacity. Artists with her volume of streams – albeit largely coming from American shores – can at least aim for Gorilla’s 550 capacity, or perhaps even the 1,500 capacity O2 Ritz across the road (incidentally a venue which hosts the abysmally named Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs at the end of the month, a traditionally established metal band with a poxy 60,000 monthly listeners on Spotify). Alas, it seems streaming numbers aren’t everything in today’s gigging circuit. In fact, often they can be completely misleading.
Penelope Scott was in desperate need of a band to support her songs.
Scott’s lack of a backing band was perhaps even more underwhelming than Lincoln’s, largely neutering the tumultuous edge of much of Scott’s louder tracks. Feel Better, for instance, is home to Scott’s most impolite punk riff and was duly screamed in Manchester, but ended up sounding impotent with minimal support behind Scott’s vocals. More often the songs resembled a campfire singalong on a school residential trip, complete with awkward chat between songs and a proudly singing crowd that often drowned out Scott’s weedy amplification. The whiny vocals, invariably pitchy and occasionally nauseating, would have been acceptable from an overconfident middle schooler, but at a show like this were simply below the bare minimum required from a headline act. It was a shame there was no supervising schoolteacher to tell Scott that maybe it was time to give it a rest.
It didn’t help that the songs Scott was singing lacked much of Lincoln’s depth, often reading like stream of consciousness posts from a 15-year-old American girl’s Tumblr page. American Healthcare was typical of Scott’s general rage at the establishment without being able to pin down any specifics beyond scorn towards all those “corporate fucking pricks”. “I bet my shit all sounds the same to you,” she railed at an unappreciative ex on genuinely promising new piano number Cabaret, unaware that, at least when she restricts herself to plonky piano songs and flimsy mid-range vocals, the guy might actually have a point.
The real nail in the coffin, though, was the dearth of professionalism on show. Like Lincoln, although with a less obvious excuse, Scott seemed to have no plan when it came to a set list, nor even when it came to what key to play her songs in; at one point she completely restarted a song after deciding the starting note ought to be a bit lower. Instrumental sections were needlessly injected with lines like “just bear with me here” and “ooh I like this bit” as her tempos veered faster and slower like a bucking bronco.
The evening’s nadir came when Someone Like You began playing through the speakers after Scott left her laptop playing on shuffle after one backing track had finished. I say nadir – it might have been the musical highlight of the night had Scott just sat back and let the Adele classic ring out. Instead, she fumbled her way to the back of the stage and instructed us to talk amongst ourselves as she wrangled with her audio files for two excruciating minutes. As Isaac and Ewan pointed out, it was hardly Mitski-level artistry. With a bored-looking Soap, Scott’s set was over, an hour long reminder that sometimes TikTok success just doesn’t make sense.
The three of us lingered in the venue until security told us to leave. I was surprised by how much passionate Scott fans Ewan and Isaac agreed with my general disappointment. The gig had left a bitter aftertaste for us all given the toils involved in getting to Manchester on a Wednesday night in the first place. Ewan slipped backstage and bumped into both performers whilst Isaac and I waited outside, Ewan eventually emerging with a pizza-hungry Lincoln following behind. We stood in line with Lincoln at Domino’s – a genuinely surreal experience – before relocating to a shady bench where we chatted happily despite the growing chill and the unsettling number of beggars approaching us. We said our goodbyes to Lincoln at midnight and walked to Piccadilly still in disbelief. Ewan seemed dazed after a meaningful conversation with a deeply influential musical hero, leaving Isaac and I to be giddy on their behalf. The journey home would be gruelling, but discussing the most impossible events of the night – Lincoln referring to Ewan as a friend, the fact the embattled Lincoln had even agreed to chat in the first place – it was clear to all of us that this venture had been worth it, albeit for everything besides the music.
On a damp and dreary night in Glasgow, Theo Katzman showcased his exemplary songwriting and impressive technique despite a set bloated with solos in one of those gigs overshadowed by my own circumstances.
Another gig, another nervous train journey. This time I was gazing out the window somewhere on Scotland’s central belt, the outside world so uniformly dark it was genuinely difficult to tell whether or not the train was passing through one very long tunnel on the way to Glasgow. I’d already had plenty of excitement for a Tuesday night – I sprinted in a failed attempt to catch an earlier train in Edinburgh, my overnight bag bouncing uncomfortably on my back – but the biggest challenge was to come: making it to the renovated church of Òran Mór in Glasgow’s West End before American singer-songwriter Theo Katzman took to the stage bright and early at 8.15 p.m.. Glasgow was damp and gloomy but jogging through the dimly glowing backstreets in search of the flat where my friend Fionn was waiting for me felt enjoyably like a movie, at least until I soaked my trainers in a puddle. I buzzed in to find a nervous Fionn, and understandably so. He’d had to buy a dodgy ticket online in the days leading up to the gig and was, crushingly, denied entry on the door. Neither of us had the guts to do a runner – this was, in truth, hardly a high-security venue – so we just stood there stunned for a few minutes, waiting for a solution to reveal itself which never came. Only when we heard the cheers heralding Katzman’s punctual appearance were we triggered to say a sad goodbye and part ways. Fionn made the 10 minute walk home alone whilst I shuffled into the already stuffy Òran Mór to find almost nowhere to get a good view. I settled on a spot just in front of the bar, my view of the main man largely obscured by pillars, and tried to focus on the music.
It was in these circumstances that I first saw Theo Katzman in person. His was the third name on my bucket list of Vulfpeck members to see live after prolific guitarist Cory Wong and fabled bassist Joe Dart, who happened to be stood right next to Katzman in Glasgow, the glints from his customary sunglasses dazzling even in the short glimpses I got from the back of the room. A guitarist, vocalist and drummer for Vulfpeck, Katzman’s showmanship instincts have sometimes felt squashed in that band by the zany presence of frontman Jack Stratton, but whilst Vulfpeck have taken an extended hiatus Katzman has grasped the opportunity to show the world exactly what he’s made of. Showing up tonight sporting a skew-whiff oversized baseball cap and loose, exposing denim jacket, Katzman has always felt a little different from the rest of the Vulfpeck gang, even if he can funk just as hard as the rest of ‘em. His distinctive take on country rock has only the barest resemblance to Vulfpeck, the link most clear in those moments he opts for a particularly perky funk bass line or indulges in a gleeful, improvised falsetto run. Lyrically, Katzman’s solo discography is so smartly written and heartfelt it makes you wonder what heights that Michigan band might have scaled if they chose to sing about something more stimulating than self aware ducks and whales with feet.
Katzman arrived in this damp Scottish city after, like many of contemporaries, having undertaken something of a creative (and, perhaps, personal) reinvention during the pandemic. He spent much of his chat during this gig discussing a formative year or two alone in the wild woods of the American midwest, doing little else than simply “thinking”. He cut himself off from the Internet for long periods, becoming self-sufficient and discovering the counterintuitive yet ever trendy hobby of extreme cold water swimming. It all amounted to a spiritual awakening that seemed destined to result in either powerfully profound or powerfully pretentious new material. A monologue played through the speakers as the band took to the stage in which a disembodied Katzman espoused the “universal law” that “everything in nature has a cost” and insisted that “we ourselves are nature,” dangerously teetered towards the latter, although in the remaining brief speeches that would pepper the rest of the gig Katzman came across as far more a humbly passionate advocate of spirituality than a self-absorbed ‘enlightened one’.
That said, Katzman’s latest album, Be The Wheel, is hardly a George Harrison-level musical departure from his earlier work, the change instead making itself clear in a notable decrease in the specificity of his lyrics. The title track and Hit The Target got things moving in Òran Mór, and although Katzman’s calls to “be the wheel” and “put down the pistol” seem indecipherable to anyone other himself, there was plenty to love in the consistently interesting composition, particularly than it came to the writhing retro synth in the latter track. 5-Watt Rock was an outlier in its directness – an endearing, self-aware tale about wooing a lover despite an underpowered guitar amp – but was tellingly one of the most enjoyable tracks of the night, the harmonised group vocals in that unforgettable chorus sounding even more glorious in the flesh.
Katzman performed to a sold out Òran Mór.
Katzman was blessed with a stellar live band, not least when it came to Mr. Dart, who is as far as I’m concerned one of the finest bassists active today. They were kept busy with a daunting quantity of solos – almost every song found eight bars to lend to one of the musicians who, whilst clearly very capable performers, occasionally struggled to justify every departure from the standard rock formula. At their best these improvisations were transformative – Dave Mackay’s blues blast on piano on Trump-bashing You Could Be President was a thing to behold – but other times, like on 5-Watt Rock, the solos added little to the original. At least Dart’s superfluous diversion on She’s In My Shoe added a degree of interest to an otherwise uninspiring plodder. Still, we were left wanting more – the cutting of a few solos would have been a small price to pay had Dart or one of his bandmates been given enough airtime to fully explore his instrument within a single song.
The new material may have its fair share of duds, but there’s no disputing what an exceptional songwriter Katzman is – unmatched by any of his Vulfpeck peers. The remarkable What Did You Mean (When You Said Love) is his best song and he knows it, drawing it out in Glasgow with a pretty yet convoluted piano intro followed by a stripped-back, overly theatrical first verse that showcased both Katzman’s expressive vocals and the song’s undulating harmonic foundations. Virtually every phrase was followed by an increasingly dramatic pause, culminating in a lengthy silence that verged on mick-taking before the band’s entry. “Do it, ya bastard!” one unmistakably Glaswegian man couldn’t help but blurt out from the back, somewhat puncturing all the romantic tension Katzman had worked so hard to construct, even if he had been playful about it. He did, eventually, “do it”, throwing in a jazz piano solo and rampaging electric guitar solo for good measure. The song came out perhaps a little overcooked, stretching out into a six minute epic, but if any Katzman song can withstand this sort of abuse, it’s this one. The Death of Us came as a welcome contrast, the sticky funk groove light on its feet yet still offering an electrifying extended jam that had these five musicians operating at the peak of their powers.
Katzman’s unwaveringly earnest inter-song talks about the new worldview he acquired during that forest retreat were hit and miss. A speech about bravery before You Gotta Go Through Me was genuinely compelling, Katzman urging us to take that crucial first step outside our comfort zones, starting tomorrow morning; cue a muted applause. “Yeah, that one never goes down that well,” he admitted. It was a pity that all the oration came as a prelude to one of Katzman’s sleepier numbers, but at least the song gave me a chance to make the most of my back row spot and get hold of a queue-free delayed Coke. There were also a lot of ‘prayers’ at play: The Only Chance We Have was “a prayer for listening”, followed by Corn Does Grow, which was both a “prayer for nature” and “a prayer for us”. Really, Corn Does Grow was just a rollicking country rock song, delivered in Glasgow without the excessive vocal distortion of the studio recording. Instead, there was the most head-banging guitar solo of the night and plenty of intense riffing – by the end, the temperature in an already stifling Òran Mór seemed to have gone up a degree or two.
Rip-roaring new tune Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day was the best surprise of the night, Katzman asking desperately “but how long did it take to fall down?” as chugging drums and guitars gathered pace around him. The other uptempo Rome-themed song in Katzman’s canon, As the Romans Do, would have made for a worthy finale but instead we got That’s The Life, a disappointingly middle-of-the-road choice of closing number but a neat encapsulation of the Katzman appeal, with lyrics about searching for life’s purpose set to the sound of a light-hearted hoe down. Heads bobbed politely in the crowd in front of me, but there was a sense that we weren’t quite seeing Katzman at his uninhibited best.
It was still drizzling when I found Fionn waiting outside for me, needlessly apologetic. I joked that it had been a rubbish gig anyway, but it was true that Fionn’s absence hadn’t been the only disappointment of the night. Katzman remains a consummate entertainer – his free-wheeling falsetto feats were so consistently remarkable it became easy to take them for granted – but it seems when he found himself in the woods he partly lost sight of what made his music so much fun – namely uncomplicated, joyous rock hooks. Unlike a good deal of his contemporaries, Katzman has plenty of worthwhile things to say, but on this sad night in Glasgow I was left wishing he’d let the music do more of the talking.
Challenging and ambitious, Emma Rawicz’s polymorphous jazz sought to tread new ground on a yearly return to the Brudenell. Epic solos and an extraordinary closing number had the audience baying for more, not least because her 90-minute set contained just six songs.
“Proper” jazz music – that is, music that isn’t strictly rehearsed, with the length of each section negotiated on the fly via nods and gestures between bandmates – brings with it two big risks when it comes to live performances. The first, and most obvious, is that it all unravels in miscommunication, perhaps with a disagreement about who should solo first or which chord they should be playing. In practice, however, a good ear and a knack for fast thinking in resolving any musical disagreements in an instant is a minimum requirement for any professional jazz musician. Less talked about, but far more common, are the perils of an open solo. Picture the scene: you’re a few minutes into a tune in front of a few hundred patrons of Brudenell Social Club. Emma Rawicz – a much talked-about bright spark in UK jazz – wraps up a final saxophone lick and turns to give you a knowing nod, and suddenly all eyes are on you to come up with something to play. For once you have the spotlight; you step to the front of the stage and revel in the complete creative freedom of being able to play more or less anything, for as long as you like. After a while you consider relinquishing to the patient pianist looking your way in the corner, but there’s still a particularly clever tangle of notes left in your fingers that you’re desperate to get out with one more repeat of the chords. A two minute solo becomes a five minute solo (a very different prospect), and before you know it there are audience members heading for a loo break and Emma seems to glare at you as she shoulders her way back into the song. Of course, it’s hard to play a harmonically interesting, technically impressive solo for five minutes straight, but it’s even harder to play for just one.
It was consequently a pleasant surprise to have seats for Emma Rawicz, owing Brudenell’s secondary venue a far more relaxed atmosphere compared to the last time I was there, not knowing my luck to see Parcels as my first ever gig back in 2018. It was a shrewd move from the organisers too – with currently only one album to her name, last year’s strong but underappreciated Incantation – 21-year-old Rawicz has only just joined her first record label, and the Brudenell would have felt underwhelmingly half-empty if it weren’t for all the tables and chairs. She did at least have the gravitas to warrant a dedicated introduction over the PA system from the sound guy at the back, in an endearing first for an Undertone gig.
Emma Rawicz backed by Conor Chaplin and Ant Law
A first half of entirely unreleased music started slowly. Patience-testing opening number Rangwali was carefully assembled like a sort of free jazz jigsaw, and a tedious one at that. A lopsided shuffle seemed to be implied by the drummer, but the grooves were too fickle, the chordless interlocking melodies too nebulous to give the unfamiliar listener any chance of finding solid ground in all the shifting textures. An assured piano intro into the second track promised more, but still the melodies remained frustratingly slippery and the solos overly tangential, eventually wheeling back to an apologetically short head thrown in at the end seemingly because Rawicz felt obliged to repeat the ‘hook’ at least once.
Nonetheless, it was engagingly daring opening 45 minutes, the highlights being Rawicz’s dazzling solos. Launching up and down the octaves – embracing every nook and cranny of the tenor saxophone’s magnificent range – Rawicz sounded more than capable of carving out her own niche in the contemporary saxophone world, her preferred style nimbler than Nubya Garcia and more delicate than Shabaka Hutchings. Seasoned touring guitarist Ant Law’s solos meanwhile contained the grandest narrative arcs. At one point he apparently tried to pull a string right off his instrument, the resulting clang prompting audible shock from the crowd. Asaf Sirkis’s brainy drum solos, on the other hand, were neither restrained enough to sound succinct and sharp nor wild enough to impress on technique alone.
At one point a sudden cloud of stage smoke appeared to quite feasibly rise from Rawicz’s restless fingers.
After just three songs of intensive jazz exposure, an interval came with all the relief of finding shelter from the gusts on a windy day. I caught my companions Thomas and Rob checking the time a little nervously: it was 10 p.m., and all signs pointed to at least an 11 p.m. finish before a somewhat gruelling three-leg journey home. At least Rawicz seemed full of beans, spending the entire break personally selling CDs and chatting with fans, only hopping backstage to grab her sax in time for the second act.
The second half was much the better of the two. Voodoo, at last a familiar song at least to me (and sadly the only inclusion from Incantation for this gig) got things underway with punchy guitar chords, a nippy bass-and-piano riff and a taut melody delivered with impressive synchronicity by Rawicz and Law. Rawicz’s solo was even fiercer than usual and at one point a sudden cloud of stage smoke appeared to quite plausibly rise from her restless fingers. Nerdy rhythmic trickery behind the guitar solo triggered knowing smiles between those in attendance swatted up on the concept of metric modulation, but was an otherwise unnecessary distraction. By contrast, Sirkis’ explosive closing drum solo was less thinking and more thrashing, and the result was thrilling. He almost fell off his stool by the end of it.
Ant Law’s solos provided some of the evening’s highlights.
Middle Ground happened to be released on the very same night of Rawicz’s performance at the Brudenell and provided a much needed element of calm and meditation to the night’s proceedings. The chord progression was stunning, and Rawicz’s contemplative, beautifully drawn out melodies were as breathtaking to hear as they must have been to play. The accompaniment was unflashy – Law provided a smattering of fade-in guitar chords, bassist Conor Chaplin produced a woody rumble at the back – but the result was a gorgeous concoction of sound. Ivo Neame, this evening’s pianist and still a professor at Rawicz’s not-so-old haunt of Chetham’s School in Manchester, also gave one of the performances of the night. His sophisticated, kaleidoscopic solo had Rawicz shaking her head in blissful disbelief, before a rousing and unusually catchy closing refrain.
I felt a tingle of excitement as Conor Chaplin played the opening bars of Phlox, the sixth and final song of the night and Rawicz’s recent single which I had been eager to hear live. It features the meatiest, most rhythmically engrossing riff I’ve heard all year, served up with the unassailable momentum of a heavy metal showstopper. Rawicz’s furious, high-octane solo was a whirlwind of honks and screeches before Neame’s intricate and eventually clamorous bluesy riffs and immense chordal runs. The finale found Sirkis at last in his element, causing utter havoc on the skins as that angular riff continued to gain momentum. At the Brudenell it felt like the first track of the night with a palpable sense of purpose and urgency and, at least until her sophomore album is released, Phlox is the clear standout song of Rawicz’s career thus far.
Phlox featured the meatiest riff I’ve heard all year, served up with the unassailable momentum of a heavy metal showstopper.
Groans of “more!” came seconds after Sirkis’ last triumphant strike of the cymbals and were so persistent that the MC at the back had to grab his microphone and mumble something about the 11 p.m. live music curfew to get everyone to calm down. Part of the appeals for more must have surely stemmed from the fact Rawicz had played just six songs, leaving plenty of solid material from the first album unaired. “We prepped twelve, we’ve got more!” she was eager to tell us at the end, mentioning that they’d all had “too much fun,” but perhaps wishing there had been at least some songs that weighed in at less than 15 minutes a piece.
It wasn’t just the length that made this a gig suited to the hardcore jazzheads only. This rendition was far wilder, stranger and more polymorphous than the manageable, if occasionally unoriginal fusion cuts from Rawicz’s debut. Rarely did grooves settle into a recognisable form, and determining a time signature invariably required a diploma in jazz musicianship; in other words, attempting to dance along or even bob your head to this music is an exercise in confusion. It’s tempting to scold Rawicz for leaving behind the familiar, accessible world of funk-informed fusion music, but these bold steps forward into the unknown are exactly what jazz thrives on, even if not all of the experiments are going to land. Indeed, the fusion side of Rawicz’s sound could become something very lucrative – Snarky Puppy have filled the Royal Albert Hall on songs with the same DNA as Rawicz’s Wishbone or Incantation – but it takes genuine guts to unleash a set as challenging as this one. The mainstream, even in jazz terms, remains some way away from Rawicz, but her ample creativity and individualism looks set to thrive as a result. All she and her colleagues have left to do is play a bit less.
After releasing the best album of their careers last year, the Beths are reaping their rewards with bigger venues and an ever more affectionate fanbase. Improved on all fronts since their visit to Leeds last year, all that this gig needed was a bit of extra bite.
The ceiling lights in Manchester’s swish New Century Hall are so remarkable it wasn’t long before they were a topic of extensive onstage conversation from four-piece Kiwi rock outfit the Beths. Each of the perfectly uniform bulbs were framed by thousands of geometric slabs of smooth matte metal, creating an impressive array of shapes and shadows that could pass as one of the less noteworthy works in a spacious gallery of Tate Modern. “Does anybody know how many there are?” bassist Benjamin Sinclair wondered, to which an overly lubricated man beside me shouted “at least 12!”. But authoritative guitarist Jonathan Pearce – who radiates the musical expertise of a man who knows his vintage Fender Stratocasters from his Gibson Firebirds – had done the maths. 1,250 according to his assessment, having divided the ceiling into smaller, countable subsections. When he cued a “special message” written in the lights for one night only I’m convinced I wasn’t the only one that looked up with complete faith in his abilities.
Liz Stokes and Benjamin Sinclair of the Beths, with Tristan Deck behind on drums
The Beths can be forgiven for getting a little carried away with a venue as glitzy and capacious as New Century Hall. It’s been little over a year since frontwoman Liz Stokes was getting self-conscious over a poorly angled mirror above the bar at Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club, a decidedly more intimate venue that seemed to underplay the quality of her songwriting. Tonight they’ve graduated Leeds and are now filling out one of the trendiest venues in the city’s big brother to the west, an expensively refurbished hall that once played host to the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees in its heyday. 2022’s exemplary third album Expert In A Dying Field is surely driving the surge in support; an album that more than makes up for a lack of the cutting-edge with a glut of indelible chorus hooks and some of the most brilliantly crafted guitar solos of the year. As the crowds gathered ahead of the Beths’ entrance in Manchester, it was reassuring to see that good music can simply propel good bands onwards; for all the complaints about modern music’s “industry plants” and stadium-filling megastars pumping out one lazy album after another, a feeble musical meritocracy still stands firm.
A Passing Rain followed the hard rock formula to a tee: four good chords, played loud and fast, over and over.
Filling out the heart of the band’s set this evening, it was that batch of fresh material that provided many of the gig’s highlights. Head In the Clouds‘ wonderfully choppy bridge gave way to an anthemic chorus that had the crowds pointing to the ceiling bulbs in euphoria; lilting delight When You Know You Know had Stokes dusting off her acoustic guitar for the most exquisite chorus melody she’s ever penned. Given deserved late billing in the set list, all-rounder Expert In A Dying Field was greeted by the audience like an old friend.
Of course, this performance necessarily extended beyond all the great new songs, and the old essence of what first made the Beths worth listening to remained. It was telling that Future Me Hates Me – the title track from their debut album – was chosen to open the show ahead of recent, more obvious options. It worked well as the band’s introductory theme song, those four words in the title nicely encapsulating Stokes’ relatable lyrical style of half-serious self-deprecation. An endearing routine with the band members introducing one another in turn also remained, giving a sense of their individual personalities and providing a golden opportunity for Sinclair to plug his travel blog, which he sheepishly took.
At other times the Beths were perhaps a little too sheepish. More a musician than a performer, Stokes was not the sort of frontwoman to dictate any crowd participation beyond a knowing smile at any organic audience-clapping and moshing was out of the question. Sure, jumping around like a maniac has a time and a place, but there were a few songs that were heavy enough to deserve the full monty, not least A Passing Rain, which follows the hard rock formula for success to a tee: four good chords, played loud and fast, over and over. It didn’t help that Sinclair’s bass – used judiciously in this song to make its eventual impact in the second chorus all the more earth-shattering – felt weedy and undercooked, and the crowd seemed indifferent to the track as a result. It was this mixing issue that held back the Beths when delving into the punkier corners of their discography, with killer single Not Getting Excited also lacking crucial bite.
Each of Pearce’s guitar solos was a phenomenon, the crowd hooked on every twang and twiddle.
Even Pearce’s countless guitar solos felt a little restrained as a result of their conciseness, but wisely so. A majority of tracks were graced with his solos, each one its own phenomenon teased out one by one to a crowd hooked on every twang and twiddle. A lesser guitarist might be tempted towards directionless improvised shredding over such a juicy bounty of solid rock tracks, but Pearce’s guitar solos were meticulous and intelligently crafted, each one neatly wrapped up the moment before Stokes’ vocals rejoined. A refreshingly ingenious yet humble lead guitarist, it was Pearce that shone as this band’s outstanding talent.
Backed by a giant inflatable fish head, Jonathan Pearce’s guitar solos were consistently remarkable.
By far the evening’s most memorable moment came late on with Dying to Believe, which saw audience member Abi supplant Sinclair after the band spotted her banner requesting to play bass for a song. She performed it with complete conviction, and the audience erupted. There was something joyful about witnessing a person seize the moment with such aplomb, and a confidently delivered bass solo towards the end had the crowd rightly giving one of the biggest roars of the night. Sinclair somewhat amusingly became a spare part, microphone still in hand as he watched on. “I discovered quickly that I don’t know any cool ways to hold a microphone,” he would later write on that blog.
By the end of the night, it seemed confirmed that the Beths will never be the sort of rock band gunning for stadium-sized gigs as a result of their relatively lowkey and conservative approach to indie rock. And nor should they be: Stokes’ introspective lyricism doesn’t deserve to be lost to a melee of chucked beers and wayward limbs. The utterly heartbreaking acoustic encore track You Are a Beam of Light provoked a dumbfounded silence and stillness from the audience that was as emotionally potent an experience as any mosh pit. There is evidently still a space for subtler displays of emotion in today’s indie music, and the Beth’s trajectory remains upward; it was a symptom of their success that their latest album necessitated a cutting of some fine material from their live set (Whatever, Uptown Girl and River Run: Lvl 1, all highlights of last year’s gig in Leeds, have since been culled). Still, there’s work to be done. “They’re Australian, right?” I overheard one concertgoer ask a friend as we left the venue and almost tutted. These New Zealanders have come so improbably far already, but you get the sense there’s still a little more room to grow.
