Rufus Wainwright 10/10/07

When I was 14, Kate & Anna McGarrigle were due to play a small show in Dublin, accompanied by Kate’s son Rufus. I was all set to go, but the date coincided with my school’s night-time award ceremony, to which I had been invited. Looking back on it, I probably wouldn’t have been let into the venue anyway, but at the time I sat and fumed throughout the entire ceremony. Finally, almost four years later, I get another chance to see Rufus live. My, it was worth the wait.

Words like “spectacular” and “experience” are carelessly thrown around as regards concert reviews, but Rufus Wainwright justifies them. His stage act is a carefully honed performance, one moment crooning love-lorn piano ballads with the audience in the palm of his hand, the next strutting across the stage in a pair of Lederhosen. The real magic comes when a crack appears in the show, as it did last night during Cigarettes & Chocolate Milk. Half-way through, he forgets to change chords on the piano and stares blankly at his hands, the audience giggling. “Guess I’ll start that again,” he grins. “I was getting cocky”. The song begins again and he plays it through perfectly, elicting whoops from the crowd. It’s a funny little incident, and the night is filled with these kinds of moments, intimate, amusing, human slip-ups, banter and jokes.

Vicar Street is perfectly suited to an act like Rufus, small enough to ensure a perfect view of th stage from any location. He seems to like it too. “I played here when it first opened,” he informs us, squinting out into the dark. “It was smaller then, right? They made it bigger… cause I’m playing.” He’s chatty, milking the crowd for all it’s worth. Unlike many acts who play Dublin, he actually knows Ireland (the McGarrigle side is originally from NI, I believe) and there is none of the customary “Oh, I’m so glad to be here, I always wanted to visit Ireland, I hear it’s such a lovely country” schtick that we’re often subjected to. Instead, a haunting Machusla performed sans microphone, standing alone in a single spotlight in the style of Irish opera singer John McCormac.

The setlist is a pleasing mixture of old and new, to my immense relief. I’m not the greatest fan of “Release the Stars” but the songs translate well in the live setting and the employment of huge disco balls add to the effect. Highlights of the first act include a glitterring Tulsa and a beautiful rendition of The Art Teacher. Every time the band left the stage leaving him on stage by himself I muttered a silent prayer for Poses, yet when the interval came I was still Poses-less. The second half brought a costume change, whilst before there was a striped suit laden with brooches, now we were treated to the infamous Lederhosen. His third clothing choice is a fluffy white bathrobe, when he triumphantly returns to the stage for an extended encore. This was by far my favourite part of the night - you can probably guess why, as he sat at the piano and began those first few notes…

Hearing Poses live was probably one of the best experiences I’ve ever had at a concert. It was up there with Radiohead’s How To Dissapear Completely and Joanna Newsom’s Comia. Poses is from his best (in my opinion) album, and it was the first song of his that I ever fell in love with. If he hadn’t played it, I would have gone away enthralled anyway, but with a teeny touch of disapointment lodged in my brain. As it was, I was walking on air. It was transcendent:

“Now I’m drunk and wearing flip-flops on fifth avenue…”

Everything about that line does it for me. Has their ever been a single lyric that so perfectly summed up it’s singer? The phrasing, setting, melody, flamboyance and subtle melancholy are all pure Rufus. It was the highlight of the week.

I didn’t think anything could top that - and truth be told, nothing really did - but he certainly tried his very best to win me over again. The next two songs were also his last, a drag version of Judy Garland’s Get Happy and a hushed, reverent Gay Messiah. This holy trinity of songs couldn’t have been better chosen - the crowd went bezerk.

He’s currently playing a second date in Dublin. Right now he’s probably telling a cheeky anecdote or making the audience cry. I’d sell a limb to be there…

Rufus Wainwright

In about 6 hours, I'll be listening to Rufus Wainwright sing live.

Here's a a rough outline of what he played in Berlin last week:

Release the Stars
Going To A Town
Sanssouci
Rules and Regulations
Do I Dissapoint You
Tiergarten
Tulsa
Nobody’s Off the Hook
The Art Teacher
Beautiful Child
Between My Legs
14th Street
Leaving for Paris
Macushla
The Consort
Foggy Day
If Love Were All
Not Ready To Love
Slideshow
Danny Boy
Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk
Get Happy
Gay Messiah

Looks pretty good, I can't wait to see him pull a Judy on "Get Happy". I can't find the setlist for last night's Belfast concert but it appears that he played "Poses", my favourite of his songs.
If he played "Poses", I might just keel over in happiness.

Pop Quiz

What do these three artists have in common?

Bill Bailey

The Shins

Rufus Wainwright

Answer: Yours truly shall be gracing their presence in the coming months. Rawk.

Joanna Newsom concert Pt. 2

So, I was flitting around on Youtube and decided to type in "Joanna Newsom" + "Dublin" just in case somehow had clips from the show, and as luck would have it, they did! Yaaay! So, for your viewing pleasure, we have:




"Peach, Plum Pear"



Her hippie joke.

And, my highlight,



"Cosmia"

Awesomeness.

My Joanna Newsom concert experience

Joanna Newsom @ The Olympia, 14^th April 2007

And, Emily - I saw you last night by the river
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever,
In a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror

In twenty years, when music historians try to determine the musical visionarys of our generation, it will be a great shame if Joanna Newsom doesn’t appear at the top of their list. At first glance, she seems impossibly twee, a diminuitive Calafornian harpist who sings like Lisa Simpson with a mouthful of marbles, writes 10 minute songs and uses words like “thee” and “fain” without a hint of irony. Her sophomore album was entitled Ys after a mythical city and the cover art depicted Newsom as a maiden in a renaissance painting. In this age of music downloads and Myspace, Newsom should feel quaint, out-dated, redundant.

Yet, when she takes the stage in the Olympia, almost dwarfed by her harp even with the high-heels she sports, the crowd goes insane, rolls of applause like thunder, wolf-whistles, screams, shouts of joy. How did this folkie garner such appreciation? The answer’s simple – she just writes the best songs of the new millennium. They transcend time, sneak into your head without warning, one moment whispering pledges of love underneath a tinkling harp, the next ambushing you with a full orchestral arrangement, Newsom’s voice sounding like nothing you’ve heard before. In Dublin, she doesn’t have the orchestra with her, it’s just a violinist, banjo/tambura player, drummer and herself. The Olympia is the perfect setting for a Joanna Newsom concert, a small venue, elegantly built, old fashioned.

She opens with Bridges & Balloons, an earlier song that elicts a whoop of joy from the audience before they settle down to listen attentively. It’s the same throughout the whole concert, there are no big singalongs (even those familiar with the music would find it difficult to sing along with her). In the quiet moments you can hear a pin drop, every pluck of the harpstrings ringing out clear, every tremble of the cymbals shivering throughout the auditorium.

When she finishes the first song, she introduces the band by name, giving us time to cheer them all. When this is over, she bends her head to fiddle with the harpstrings and in the silence, a man’s voice calls out “I love you Joanna!”. The audience laugh and wait to see how she will react. She doesn’t seem to have heard him, concentrating on her instrument. Then, “…aw, do you?” she sighs, a hint of a smile on her face. Her comic timing is impeccable.

The next song is the first from Ys, Emily, an ode to her astrophysicist sister who teaches her about the stars. It’s one of my favourite songs and when the first “big” moment arrives in “We've seen those mountains kneeling, felten and grey, We thought our very hearts would up and melt away” I felt a shiver. When she reaches the closest thing the song has to a chourus, the almost catchy;

That the meteorite is a source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

you can almost sense the crowd aching to sing along, but nobody does. It’s almost religious, the reverence she recieves.

She continues the show with the next song on Ys, Monkey and Bear. It’s the clearest storyline out of all her songs, but that doesn’t diminish the emotional wallop of the ending, in which the bear dies. Even when she’s singing her most arcane songs, lines that simply don’t make sense when read on paper, somehow her phrasing and accenting give them extra meaning, lacing the words with emotion or respect or humour. At times during the concert her phrasing is exactly like the recording, at others she twists phrases around, placing emphasis on different words. One wonders how she remembers some of these lyrics, the 17 minute Only Skin being one of the most impressive feats of memory, reeling off lines like she’s reciting Shakespeare, uncomprehensible to some, filled with truth and beauty to others.

If some of my words sound overtly respectful or awefilled, I admit that once under the Newsom spell it’s difficult to extract yourself. You can get swept up in the grandoise of the music, the classical allusions of the lyrics, but luckily, Newsom never takes herself too seriously. When she plays, she looks like she’s in a trance, lightening-speeded fingers tapping at her instrument, hollering the melody, but once a song is over she snaps out of her reverie to joke with the audience. She relates a little anecdote about her last trip to Dublin, tells us of her love for Ned Collete, her supporting act. When a mobile phone goes off, she jokes “Is there a doctor in the house?” and then, moments later while playing the introduction to Cosmia, apologies “I bet that person is really embarrassed right now. I’m sorry for laughing at you…”.

The set is a mixture of the old and the new. She plays every song from Ys and a handful of favourites from The Milk-Eyed Mender. The songs from the latter sound better than they do on the album, her voice has matured a lot since she recorded them and so has her sense of musicality.

The band are a delight. Most of the songs on Ys feature intense orchestral arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, but here they are transposed to one woman playing violin and one man playing the tambura and banjo. They do an admirable job and at times the music beautifully swells into something much more powerful than just four people playing music on a stage. Some changes are inspired, the smooth accordian on Cosmia is played as a quick, bluegrass-esque banjo solo, which is the only time during the night that the crowd appluad during a song.

When she announces “I’ve got two songs left”, groans of disapointment ripple through the building and she looks up, surprised, “It’s a long set, you guys! A long set!”. And it was. Even at only about 12 songs, she played for a long time; and every song was an experience. It’s a definite toss-up between this and Radiohead in Marlay Park for my favourite ever concert, but for the time being, Joanna’s still on constant rotation on my cd player.

Overheard in St. Patrick's Cathedral

Two smartly-dressed women, during the interval of the Good Friday concert.

"Sorry, who's taking the photographs?"

"That would be Stella."

"Riiiight. Just that, well, she's actually taking some while the singers are onstage."

"What?"

"Yes...it's quite bright, the flash."

"I'll...I'm so sorry. I'll go talk to her. Excuse us. Stella? Steeelllaaaaaaaaaaaa!?!"

The programme for the evening was:

Allegri's Miserere
Bach's Ich Habe Genug.
Faure's Cantique de Jean Racine and Requiem.

All pieces were beautiful, but the Bach didn't hold me. It's a cantata in 5 movements, with a bass soloist. It was the only piece I wasn't familiar with and we were sitting to the side, which meant we were away from the soloist and the acoustic seemed to swallow him up. The cold air inside the church was extremely unfavourable to the musicians; the acoustics weren't great on the whole and it also played havoc with the instruments. In the Requiem, which was played last, some of the brass sounded decidedly odd and the violin part in the Sanctus sounded a little out of tune and offputting. It was a minor quibble though; on the whole, it was a fitting end to Good Friday. We're learning the Cantique in choir and hearing it sung live is really impressive, especially when you consider that Fauré was a 20 year old student when he composed it. His Requiem, written not too long after, is such a gorgeous piece of music that I almost want it for my own funeral - if people could sit that long. Apart from the violin in Sanctus, it was a rousing and moving performance. It's hard for go wrong with Fauré, really.