Faye Wong, Singapore Indoor Stadium, 2 June 2004

For the sake of the ang mohs reading this who are even more clueless about Faye Wong than I am, the quick overview is that she’s a hugely famous Chinese singer whose success and popularity is surprising given the relatively adventurous nature of her music (relative to the world of Chinese pop music, that is), but perhaps less surprising given that she is very beautiful and has the voice of an angel. Musically, I’d describe her sound as Dolores O’Riordan meeting Sarah McLachlan at a Teresa Teng concert attended briefly by Bebel Gilberto, but in a good way, apart from when she does the awful Dolores-stylie banshee-keening. I’m sensing disbelief. I’ll move on.

I’ve never heard a fast Chinese pop song that didn’t suck, and unfortunately that trend mostly continued for me during this concert. Her ballads are generally enjoyable because they showcase her exceptional singing ability, but the fast songs sound like I could throw them together in ten minutes with a shitty synthesizer and some bog-standard trance samples. The only exception was a song which is either called Kai Dao Tu Mi or Tian Dao Tu Mi or Kai Dao Tu Ling (look, when you don’t understand what something means, it’s hard to remember exact wordings, okay?) which is very much like Tori Amos when she started experimenting with beats on From The Choirgirl Hotel. Feisty tune, snazzily performed, fun touches like singing through a megaphone so her voice sounds like a raspy vocoder, and interesting, thank God.

But let’s move on to the ballads, because they’re really what get those multi-coloured lightsticks in the audience swaying arrhythmically in the air, and inspire those screams of “WANG FEI! WANG FEI!”

[Why do Chinese audiences shout out the artist’s full name? This is so odd, it’s like going to an English gig and yelling “JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE!” or “WEIRD AL YANKOVIC!” I mean, in other concerts I’ve attended, I certainly never bothered with “Jackson” when I was screaming “I LOVE YOU MICHAEL!”, and my secondary three form teacher didn’t bother to add a “Bon Jovi” when she yelled “FUCK ME JON!” either.]

So anyway, she sang Tian Kong and Dan Yuan Ren Chang Jiu and Wo Yuan Yi and Hong Dou and Xiao Wang Shu and Ren Jian, which was very nice, because they are among the 17 songs of hers that I actually know. She also sang some cover versions with varying success – The Cranberries’ Dreams (fine until the banshee-keening bit, which is dreadful no matter who sings it), The Look Of Love (unexpected, but actually quite nice and Bebel Gilberto-y) and Tori’s Silent All These Years, which seems to be the most successful crossover English song ever in the Chinese pop world, given the number of Chinese pop chicks who keep covering it.

[I asked Terry if they retained the meaning of the Silent All These Years lyrics when they translated it to Chinese. “Of course not,” said Terry, “in Chinese music nothing is about domestic abuse; everything is about breakups.”]

The thing about Faye Wong is that you don’t have to know her songs or understand the lyrics to enjoy her concert, because most of the time, her amazing voice is enough. Depending on the song, she can showcase the rich vibrato of a traditional Chinese chanteuse, she can do the playful delicacy of a funny Broadway number, and she can do the sort of modern balladeering that Sarah McLachlan used to do well and Dido still wishes she could do well. At the end of the day, that voice bridges the gap of my ignorance and my cultural condescension, and is all I ultimately need as explanation of her richly-deserved fame.

Karma Debt

On Friday I watched a (magnificent) media preview of Mahler’s 8th symphony. The actual concerts on Saturday and Sunday had been sold out for weeks. Debbie was singing in the chorus, and managed to get me entry to this.

Tomorrow I am going to a Faye Wong concert, sitting in a $125 seat for which I will have paid $20. Esther is not using her tickets for some reason, and offered them to me.

After that I will be going to see Peter Kruder DJ at Zouk, for free, because Dominique is a member of the Heineken Green Room Sessions thingy (I’m not a member, never bothered to try and become one). I’m not actually a big fan of his, but the crucial point about getting into this for free is that I can also pop into Phuture for my hip-hop fix if I get bored.

None of this came about through any effort of mine, the offers mostly just dropped in my lap, and I took them up. I think I owe the cosmos a couple of random good deeds, and certain people some very fancy coffees at the very least.

Mahler’s 8th Symphony, Esplanade Concert Hall, Singapore, 28 May 2004

I spent Friday night at the most crazy-ass ambitious musical event I have ever witnessed. They’re opening the Singapore Arts Festival with 400 people performing Mahler’s 8th Symphony, and thanks to Debbie, I got to attend the media preview.

I’ve always loved Mahler because he’s such a drama queen, and this symphony didn’t disappoint. By the end of it the audience has been buffetted from side to side like leaves in the wind by superpower choir, mad trombones and walls of orchestra noise. In a good way! I could write more about why I think the performance was musically damn good, but it would almost certainly sound like pretentious bollocks, so all I will say is that everyone involved in this should be bloody proud, and everyone who was lucky enough to get tickets to this before it sold out should be bloody thankful.

SUXORS

There I was all smug because I managed to be on-the-ball enough to get tickets to see Múm at the Old Vic (well, to get Russ to get tickets) the day after I arrive in London. And then I found out about this, conveniently organized for when I’ve fucked off to Krakow. Not living in England any more really sucks.

When something sucks this much, only novelty mp3 downloads can cheer me up, which is why it was fabulous to have found:

(I can’t exactly remember where I found the mp3 links, but I’m pretty sure they were from largehearted boy, which I increasingly realize I can no longer live without.)

Observatory/Kreidler (Esplanade Studios, 11 October 2003)

Well, whaddya know? After writing the previous post, I resigned myself to a quiet Saturday night in. No big deal. I’d divide my time between good movies on HBO and the ton of work I have for next week. Then Ida called, the first time we’d talked for a year (I was there, she was here, we’re both lousy at keeping in touch). In the midst of catch-up conversation she asked if, by any chance, I’d be interested in going to see some German group at the Esplanade tonight. She read about them in the papers and it sounded interesting. WAHOO!

We were both somewhat discouraged by the opening guy. He was hard to describe. He reminded me of the time I was at a David Grubbs gig and couldn’t figure out whether a particular “song” had begun, ended, or gone horribly wrong, except that compared to this guy David Grubbs’s song was a catchy pop gem. We decided it wasn’t our thang and popped out for a drink.

Observatory was next. I haven’t been around for four years and know nothing about the local music scene, but the quality of their performance suggests it’ll be well worth exploring. Again, they’re hard to describe, and in saying some songs were kind of like Air remixed by Thievery Corporation with immensely pleasant male vocals sort of like Calexico and jazzy flourishes on the keyboard, and others were like REM at their best with the occasional harmonica and journeys into shoegazy guitar, I’m not doing the band justice at all. Truly impressive, and a huge incentive for this prodigal daughter to find out more about what her own people are doing rather than buying expensive US indie imports all the time.

Kreidler continued my long-running streak of never being disappointed by anything German. (I clarify: obviously I wasn’t alive during the World Wars.) Interesting sounds that evolved rather than doof!doof!doof!ing on for ages the way some electronica does, endearing crowd manner, and although I was too comfy sprawling on the floor for most of the gig to dance, it certainly kept me bobbing my head and tapping my toes.

But as good as all the acts were, the star of the gig, for me, was the venue. It’s not going to be very difficult to convince me to attend anything at the Esplanade Studios in future, because I have never heard such amazing sound in a gig in all my born days. Crystal clear, wonderfully-balanced, loud enough to dominate the room and send reverberations through the floor, yet not so loud that conversations had to be screamed. A floor so clean you could sprawl on it without having to coat yourself in spilled booze or cigarette ash. Recent letters to the papers here in Singapore have asked if the building of such an expensive concert venue was really worthwhile, and whether it actually makes the arts accessible to the masses or only caters to a certain wealthy elite. I paid $21 (about 8 pounds) for a great gig, with the best sound I’ve ever heard, in beautiful surroundings, and the price even included a drink. All I can say is that I’m an incredibly satisfied customer (mad props to the Government!), I think it really is a world-class venue we should all be proud of, and I’m going to be throwing my money at it fairly regularly from now on.

To Glitch Or Not To Glitch?

Wow. Kreidler tomorrow at the Esplanade Studios, Luomo and Farben next week at Zouk as part of an electronica festival. The last two in particular would be a coup to be trumpeted even for glitch-capital-of-London the ICA. Every time I start getting bored with Singapore it does tend to surprise me with things like this, bless it.

The next question is whether I really want to go. First, I don’t know anyone else here who’d be interested. And while I have a certain geeky interest in seeing high-cred music types live I’m not all that sure I’d enjoy it much if I was there alone. I don’t find house music absorbing enough to be listened to as foreground music, and microhouse is even worse. I can certainly tolerate it and sometimes even enjoy it (albeit on a somewhat clinically detached level), but not if the beat’s my only friend there.

BENNY! I MISS YOU!

Vladimir Ashkenazy/Min Lee Concert (25 September, 2003)

Not since I played the organ at a memorial service in pajamas and slippers have I been so inappropriately dressed for an occasion.

The phone call came at 4.30 this afternoon. My sister’s colleague had two tickets to the Vladimir Ashkenazy/Min Lee concert tonight, and something had come up at the last minute preventing her from attending. I’d really wanted to go to this concert, but all the affordable tickets were sold out.

So far, so fantastic, but here’s the rub: they were complimentary tickets, designated “VVIP”. What’s wrong with that, you ask, sounds even better! The problem was that I was in university, had no time to go home and change before the concert, and was wearing trainers, jeans, and a raglan tee featuring a fluorescent green alien. Completely acceptable for the pleb seats, but not when you arrive and realize you are sitting in the same row as the Deputy Prime Minister.

We fished my leather jacket out of a bag of designated dry-cleaning in my mother’s car boot, and that mostly concealed the fluorescent alien, but next to people in silk shawls and cocktail dresses, I still kinda stood out. I tried to hold my head high and remind myself that I’d probably spent more hours actually playing in orchestras than most other people in those VVIP rows (including you, Mr Lee!), but then decided discretion was the better part of valour and spent most of the interval skulking behind a large staircase.

BUT! Whatever embarrassment I might have felt at other parts of the evening was more than compensated for by the rapture of the performances. I mean, Vladimir Ashkenazy. I saw Joshua Bell playing the Sibelius in London, but Ashkenazy is in a whole other league of classical music stardom. He played a Mozart piano concerto, conducting the orchestra at the same time from his seat at the grand piano, and from our VVIP seats we could see every flash of his fingers. The real joy for me was yet to come though. I’m not at all fond of Mozart, and therefore didn’t enjoy Ashkenazy’s performance as much as I could have (amazing though he was), but Min Lee was going to be playing the Bruch violin concerto, which I adore intensely.

[One of my small claims to violin fame is that once, I was, technically, “competition” for Min Lee. To be rather more accurate, we took part in the same round of the National Music Competition. I must have been about 10 or 11, she must have been about 8. Obviously, she kicked everyone’s asses roundly and won the competition, but for one small moment in time I was technically in the same league. I emphasize “technically” here. ]

There’s a certain feeling that overwhelms me when I’m watching a performance of a particular classical music piece I love; the almost violent beating of the heart in the opening notes, the surge of what can only be described as euphoria when the music builds to a climax, the teetering on the brink of tears at the sheer wonder of the beauty human civilization can create when it wants to. That feeling enveloped me tonight, both during the pure unadulterated jubilance of the final movement of the Bruch, and later, when the orchestra played Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

Every time I renew my long-lapsed relationship with classical music I am reminded that its power is at its most elemental and intense when it is unadulterated by our modern attempts at “updating” its sound. (William Orbit, I suppose I can’t fault you for trying, but, er, please don’t try any more.) Vanessa Mae can do her violin version of the Toccatta and Fugue to dance beats and yes, it sounds energetic and is perhaps more likely to succeed with the MTV generation, but all I want is to sit in an empty church and listen to its cascading fury unleashed by an organist who doesn’t know I’m there. Rob D can sample the Enigma Variations for the beginning of Clubbed To Death, and everyone will love it because it was in The Matrix and all, but sit in a concert hall listening as the Nimrod variation rolls out its exquisite expanse of sound, and you don’t need flashy bullet-time cinematography to understand that all you really want is to live in this moment forever.

Yo La Tengo/Calexico (Somerset House, London, July 2003)

Monday was a brief respite from international trade law into indie music.

I trawled Berwick Street with ever-patient Benny, sold about 10 CDs and justified buying more on the grounds that I’d probably have to pay expensive import prices for these in Singapore:

  • King Geedorah: Take Me To Your Leader
  • Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks: Pig Lib
  • Manitoba: Start Breaking My Heart

This was all a prelude to meeting Alec (and Benny’s friend Polly, as Yo La Tengo mad as me) for the Yo La Tengo/Calexico gig at Somerset House in the evening.

Yo La Tengo started off, which seemed strange given their relatively senior status in the indie pantheon. They played many songs off Summer Sun, which I haven’t listened to yet, a fun frantic screechy version of Cherry Chapstick, and Tom Courtenay, which I love madly, and which they didn’t play the first time I saw them live. They finished with Sun Ra’s Nuclear War and left the stage with its ending whispers of “Goodbye.” They displayed everything I loved about them the first time I saw them live, and given the same amount of time with them I feel certain I would have emerged in a similar state of gibbering. But that pleasure was denied me. The length of the set seemed distinctly that of an “opening band”, which is really a bit of a travesty given that the marketing of the gig never indicated that Calexico would be headlining, and Yo La Tengo relegated.

I guess it’s a credit to Calexico that they mostly managed to assuage my dissatisfaction with the length of the YLT set by putting on an excellent show. It seemed as if they livened up the Feast Of Wire songs a little for the performance, which worked fine for most of them, but disappointed me for Black Heart, where they opted for Bond movie music razzle-dazzle, glitz and glam and general high campness in the strings rather than the mournful, desert-on-the-darker-side-of-dusk feel it had (and I loved) on the album. It seemed as though they’d decided that the overriding tone of this gig would be a party, which isn’t necessarily a bad decision, especially when you have trumpets and frequently do that country-yodelly “Aiiiiyiyiyiyi!” thing at appropriate bits in the songs.

Leaving the gig, it occurred to me that I’d actually seen both these bands in the space of an April week a little over two years ago, Yo La Tengo headlining (as they SHOULD be, damn you Somerset House) on the Tuesday and Calexico opening for Stephen Malkmus on the Thursday. I saw both gigs with Marten, who was, at the time, the only person in my London circle of friends who had even heard of most of the bands I wanted to see (I had abundant clubbing companions, but only Marten for gigs). I remember coming back from the Malkmus gig and meeting Alec, about to get drunk, in the basement of our hall. Neither of us had the tiniest inkling of any future connection beyond mild recognition of each other’s photos in the hall yearbook.

How things change.

Low/Radiohead (Bergamo Arena, Italy)

I’d initially been really excited about the fact that Low was opening for Radiohead. I missed Low’s gig at the Union Chapel earlier this year because it was Valentine’s Day weekend and I grudgingly recognized the need to do something romantic rather than drag long-suffering Alec to yet another gig. The sacrifice was more than worthwhile, but I always hoped I’d get another chance to see Low, and this was it. The problem was that their beautiful, deliberative harmonies were completely incompatible with a jabbering crowd of people who didn’t seem to give a damn about them. Little Argument With Myself, so well-suited to late nights alone in my room, lying on the bed in the dark waiting for sleep, just didn’t work in a huge outdoor venue. With twilight more than an hour away, that sublime climax of “Cos there’s nothing as sad as a man on his back counting STARS” fell flat, or at least it was hard for me to feel much while trying to shut out the clamouring Italians around me. Oh well. Great band, wrong place and time. A pity.

So finally, Radiohead. What can I say except that they were a dream come true, and by this I don’t mean the kind of dream where all my teeth are falling out and I can taste the blood but the kind where I’m roller-blading and I’m amazing, I can jump and turn and land and do all the cool stunts, but of course I’m not weighed down by all that pesky safety gear ‘cos I don’t need it, I’m amazing, and at the end I even start to fly.

Here’s a setlist:

  • There there
  • 2+2 = 5 (Thom swats flies which keep clustering around the mike, nice parallel with “I swat em like flies but like flies the buggers keep coming back” in the song although I don’t think he could possibly have planned it.)
  • Lucky
  • Talk Show Host
  • Scatterbrain
  • The National Anthem
  • Backdrifts
  • Sail To The Moon
  • Kid A
  • Bones
  • Where I End and You Begin
  • I Might Be Wrong
  • Fake Plastic Trees
  • A Punchup at a Wedding
  • Paranoid Android (Thom: “This is a song called Paranoid Android.” As if you needed to name it.)
  • Idioteque
  • Everything In Its Right Place
  • The Gloaming
  • Pyramid Song
  • My Iron Lung
  • Like Spinning Plates
  • Exit Music (For A Film)
  • Sit down. Stand up.
  • Karma Police

The feelings of inadequacy that plague me every time I try to write about music are slapping me around the head with a vengeance here. I feel almost, well, unworthy to review a Radiohead concert. We are not on the same musical plane, they and I. They make music and I learn to like it, it’s that simple. This doesn’t require much effort, but I sometimes need a fair amount of time to get my head round the music, which leads me to the first thing I was going to say.

Most of the songs sounded pretty much similar to their studio recordings, which is not a bad thing given that their studio recordings sound bloody fabulous, but I guess I was hoping for more radical reworkings. I’d have quite liked to work more to figure out the songs, rather than recognize them instantly from the start. On the other hand, this may not be the best way to do a big outdoor summer gig which people don’t expect to be “difficult”. So I’m not too sure what to make of their rather happy romping versions of Kid A and Everything In Its Place. They were certainly interesting to listen to, but they featured nothing I’d liked about the recordings. The piano version of Like Spinning Plates, however, was heartstopping.

In general, HappyThom was the order of the evening, dancing like a loon to Idioteque, doing Karma Police like a massive goodbye singalong with none of the claustrophobia or despair of the album version, no venom at all in the middle section of Paranoid Android where he used to spit “Kicking squealing Gucci little piggy.” Dancing crazily is rather endearing, but I’d have rather liked a bit of the old bitterness in the latter two.

This isn’t to say that everything was sweet and fuzzy. Guitars went mad in Backdrifts, which is even more fantastic live than it is on the album. The National Anthem, Bones, and I Might Be Wrong rocked hard, and the buildup in Sit Down Stand Up to the frenetic “The raindrops” climax was brilliantly agonizing.

Would I have changed some songs in the set? Well, yes. I’d have taken out Scatterbrain, Kid A, Bones, Pyramid Song and My Iron Lung, but only because I like them less than Black Star, No Surprises, You And Whose Army (make that most of Amnesiac, actually), I Will and Wolf At The Door.

Okay. Enough of this attempt at objectivity, balance or good writing. I SAW RADIOHEAD!!! THEY PLAYED LOTS AND LOTS OF SONGS!!! I REALLY REALLY LOVE RADIOHEAD!!!

Nick Cave (Hammersmith Apollo, London, June 2003)

There are many sorts of gig.

Sometimes a gig’s in a small dingy bar, you’re all about three feet from the band, who is unknown and always will be because face it, they’re mediocre, and people in the front are taking bets on what deodorant (if any) the drummer uses. You’re having a good time partly because the bands are, and mostly because you’re drunk.

Sometimes you’re a notch higher, somewhere equally small but with ventilation and candles and organic ales and bands you have actually heard of, although this isn’t because they’re actually famous, it’s just because you spend way too much time reading music sites on the Internet. After the set, the band still steps off the foot-high stage, buys pints, and mingles with the crowd. I like these gigs. You get at least three bands for less than the price of an album, and you get to feel all indie until you make the mistake of trying to chat to the bands, at which point you make some horribly embarrassing remark and spend the rest of the evening alternately crippled and tickled by your own idiocy. (Okay, so the last bit of this may just be me.)

And then sometimes you see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at the Hammersmith Apollo.

I’ve been trying, since we saw him on Friday, to write something here that would do the show justice, that would be able to go beyond recitation of a setlist to actually evoking what it was like to be me, so overwhelmed by the power of The Mercy Seat that I was actually on the point of tears. Today I admit defeat – I can’t come up with the review I want to write, I can only churn out badly phrased, probably cliched stream-of-consciousness impressions of two songs amazingly performed, and tack on bits here and there about the rest. So here goes. It’s all a bit convoluted.

He started with Wonderful Life from the new album, sounding overwrought and a bit off-tune and I was suddenly worried I’d just wasted £23, sucked in by a Big Name who could no longer deliver. But then the next song was Red Right Hand, which started off almost playful and loungy, Nick almost whispering “He’s a god, he’s a man, he’s a ghost, he’s a guru” like a conspiratorial secret-sharing, the chorus section surprisingly sedate (I don’t remember even hearing the bell), which made it all the more climactic by the time he was spitting “You’re a microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan, designed and directed by his RED RIGHT HAND” with crashing bells, flashing red lights and pounding piano, and at that point I stopped worrying.

Then West Country Girl and a beautiful ballad I didn’t know, Hallelujah, Do You Love Me, Bring It On (a real clunker from the new album, and the low point of the gig for me), Henry Lee (which lost something in its conversion to stage rawk – snarling “La la la la la” just didn’t really work very well as compared to dueting liltingly with PJ Harvey on the album version), Still In Love With You, Watching Alice.

Then he sat down at the piano and started playing something that sounded like it would be a ballad, until he sang “It began when they come took me from my home and put me on Dead Row” and oh my God, it was The Mercy Seat, but dramatically slowed down and every word carrying a horror and power surpassing anything I ever felt listening to the record. Halfway through, the pace started to quicken, tension started to build, I sat transfixed on the edge of my seat as lights flashed, the tragedy unfolded, the violin screeched like a demented banshee (I really must go get a Dirty Three album, if that was Warren Ellis, he was fantastic), and always that voice, thundering in the middle of the storm: “And the mercy seat is waiting. And I think my head is burning.” But somewhere something’s got to give, eventually the condemned man’s spasms too must cease; we gradually returned to the slow ominous gloom of the piano, he sang the final chorus with its agonizing, infuriating last line, then black out, and I sat in the darkness with heart racing, a lump in my throat, and goose-pimples.

Another song I didn’t know. Then From Her To Eternity, Wild World, and they left the stage. We screamed, stamped, whistled and clapped for ages. They came back, played Into My Arms and Tupelo, and left. We screamed, stamped, whistled and clapped for ages. They came back and sang He Wants You and Deanna, and this time it was the last time, and as we left the venue I worried briefly that Califone at the Spitz (gig venue category: small, arty, candles etc.) this Friday would pale in comparison.

What I like most about Nick Cave on record was displayed in abundance seeing him live – his strong versatile voice capable of both punk shrieking and intimate balladeering. What I didn’t realize about the Bad Seeds on record came across blindingly clearly live – they’re a bloody fantastic band, and delivered every song with more depth and texture than I ever noticed on the record (this is incredibly rare in my opinion – most bands struggle just to sound as good as they do on record, and many fail to do even that).

This year has really been a gig goldmine for me, and this was another one to treasure.