Head Music

Beth Gibbons, Portishead Gig @ Corn Exchange, Edinburgh, 12.04.2008, originally uploaded by LiAnG_c.

I'm pleased to report that last night's Portishead concert was as good as hoped. So, what's to tell? Well, getting the downers out of the way first:
- The venue was as drab as predicted, a flat-floored hall with no apparent concession towards acoustics - with sloped floor and better sonics, Glasgow's ABC or Academy would've been far more suitable.
- The audience, as feared, contained a fair number of chuntering dipshits who use live music as a backing track for their bellowed conversations. Sadly this wasn't confined to the fringes of the bars, with berks in the 'main' audience blethering throughout both support and headline acts, including inane yapping about "this is my favourite song, oh I can't wait to get home and listen to it" while the song is still being performed. Are some people unable to think without automatically yelping said thought to their fellow schmuck? The performance of Wandering Stars was sublime and delicate, yet there was a tangible wall of background noise from all the many people who'd paid £30+ quid for a ticket to this concert, only to spend it talking shit. It was all horribly reminiscent of the infamous José Gonzales gig of two years back and is enough to make me swear off Edinburgh audiences, but this review of Portishead's London show suggests a similar problem there, with one dipshit interviewed - 'Owen Raven, banker' presumably being rhyming slang - saying "[s]he was just dreary. But then, I've only listened to them a couple of times before. It didn't bother me when they had to go off for the technical problems. It was an excuse to go to the bar." I'd thought the relatively high ticket price would keep away all but committed fans, yet that complete & utter banker represents a notable number of people who seem to buy tickets on a vague whim - 'oh, Portishead, I heard them on This Life a couple of times, yeah why not'. Fuck that mentality and fuck them.
- Lowlight of the night was surely the two student twats in front of us shouting the stupidest, dumbest conversation I've ever had the immense misfortune to hear while we were trying to listen to Hawk & A Hacksaw, made all the worse by the fact that we'd got a good location about 10 rows from the stage. We'd been standing there for a few songs and greatly enjoying it, at which point these two lagered-up cocks lurched through the audience and staggered to a stop in front of the Lass before bellowing away at each other constantly about girls, foreplay, football - christ, I wish I was making this up. Everyone within a metre of them was clearly getting increasingly fecked off but, naturally, no-one said a thing until the Burd (oh, how I love her) asked them to be quiet or take their conversation over to the bar. A normal human being would feel suitably chastised, apologise and gone off to the bar to continue said chuntering, but these immature, irredeemable fuckwads stopped for a second as the feeble neurons in their skulls briefly sparked, then bellowed "FUCKIN STAND IN FRONT OF US THEN!" and would not stop no matter how many times we emphasised they were ruining the music. We gave up and moved back a few 'rows' where quite a few people sympathised with us. It was profoundly depressing for me - when you love music so much, when you connect with others over bands, you (perhaps naively) imagine that fellow fans will be good people, like-minded souls - and at many gigs that's been the case. To find you share a beloved band with foul idiots is strangely disappointing.
- This'll be hugely hypocritical of me, having taken many pictures at concerts myself, but the huge number of cameras/phones in use at this gig was maddening. If you're in the first few rows (as I suspect the photographer of the good photograph above was) you're likely to get a decent snap, so fair play, but the number of people I saw holding up cameras further back in the audience and no doubt coming away with blurred, nonsensical images was ridiculous, not to mention the many others filming entire songs on their phones. When you can't see the stage for all the glowing LCD displays on cameras and phones held aloft, something seems screwy. It's as though for some people an event is only real if they've got some digital record of it, no matter how blurred or bland, yet many were clearly spending time trying to compose shots or change functions when they could've just enjoyed the show - it just seems like a barrier, a filter between the music and the person. I dunno, maybe I'm just a crotchety old bastard...

Rants over. Now, GOOD STUFF!
- I'd heard the support act, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, a few times beforehand and never really paid much attention - while slightly reminiscent of Beirut or bits of Neutral Milk Hotel, it just didn't connect. Live, however, their music worked really well, excellent musicianship and some energised rhythms backed with strings, accordian, clarinet, trumpet and a couple of other intriguing instruments. Mostly instrumental, it felt as though initially the audience viewed them as a novelty but the first song won most people over. I missed most of the second half of their set due to the aforementioned pair of pricks, but that first half was grand, the music conjuring images of Eastern European villages and Mexican mariachis.
- Then, of course, the main act. Portishead played as a six-piece, with lead guitar, bass guitar, two sets of percussion, keyboard and vocals. Ah, the vocals. Beth's voice is, if anything, even more versatile and affecting than that last time in 1997, able to go from cooing like a theremin to shrieking like a death metallist possessed and everything inbetween. She's an incredible performer, seemingly pouring herself into the microphone with agony at points, but between songs was clearly loving the gig - even from a distance we could see her beaming as the audience roared approval for every song. Machine Gun, in particular, went down an absolute storm - and with good reason, the sound of that percussion battering around the hall was stunning - and to see something so (relatively) harsh cheered by an audience that could've just been there to hear Sour Times was really quite heartening.
- Talking of which, to counterpoint the above frothy rantings, much of the audience was great and clearly well into the music. The fact it was on a Saturday might've meant a lot of people had been drinking since the afternoon but it also seemed to loosen up the audience as well. While not always a good thing - clapping along to songs really should be left to Dire Straits gigs - it was great to see so many people reacting to the new music so well, and it felt like the band thought the same.
- The black-clad band as a whole was on top form and did their recorded work justice. Burrow's guitar playing was especially good, at one point conjuring up Joy Division, later veering into drone-metal territory, a very good place to be. While Portishead aren't a band for on-stage theatrics - much like Radiohead, they pretty much stand where they are and make this amazing music - it was thrilling to watch them playing.
- The visuals were well chosen, blending between live footage of the band shot from fixed cameras and various pieces of film depending on the song. A strange animation of forests and beasts, children playing on Super-8 film, electrical lines stuttering, even something as simple as the [P] logo being distorted to fuck, suited the music well.
- All the same, I quite happily spent much of the concert with my eyes closed. Partly because I was bored of all the LCD screens but mainly because, with some live acts (Pelican, Isis, Sigur Ros) the music being played is so rich, so deep that it's a pleasure to just shut your eyes and focus utterly on the sounds. There were so many points in this show when I could do this, the first coming to mind being when Mysterons kicked in, theremin sounds curling around taut percussion and Beth's plaintive singing. Absolutely gorgeous, the sonic equivalent of tasting something so good that you want to briefly shut off all other four senses and give it the focus it deserves.
- For the curious, the setlist is here.
- Oh aye, on arriving at the gig we were given a little lanyard with a littler USB stick attached, suitably P-branded. Popped it into the Precious after getting home and up popped a brief but enjoyable staccato of images and sound, as though someone were skipping through a DVD of the making of their new album. I might pop it up on here sometime for any fans of the band who didn't get to see them live, and as free promo items go it beats postcards.

In summary? Fucking marvellous, well worth the wait, even if I came away just that little bit more misanthropic than before. And while I've been tapping away furiously like a berk, the missus-to-be has started, finished and published her own account of the gig, which no doubt makes more sense than my wibblings. Next up - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Glasgow Academy. Expect fire, brimstone and facial hair.

Comments

[jons dad]

many sympathies re people talking - mum & I went along to Ciarfest in Cambridge last night which was in a room smaller than your living room over at Dean Village - somewhat intimate - and there were groups of people nattering away during the music - one group were eventualy spoken to by one of the organisers and I also spoke to a couple standing next to me - they eventually left - I went to an Emily Barker gig in Bristol and it was non stop chatter- why pay good money and then ignore the artist - bizarre - I feel a rant coming on so will stop - AND... theres nowt wrong with clapping at a dire straits concert - you're just in the wrong generation - incidentially one of the groups last night were THE SINGING LOINS - Medway folk/punk and brilliant - how often do you get a track called THE TOPLESS TWINS OF ALLHALLOWS-ON-SEA?