More often than not, I take my camera with me when I go for walks. You never know what you might find: something lying in the street, someone lying in the street, or something you have never noticed you walk past every day.
I have uploaded some photos from a walk I took the other day in my photo gallery (they are sitting there on the last page of photos). I should probably make a new section for this sort of photo. God knows I take enough of them.
You can tell that folk / indie artists have hit the big time when they start performing in concert halls (and selling them out). Will Oldham did just that on Tuesday night.
He may look like a troubled baby with a redneck beard, but his voice is beautiful: a balance of emotional valency and intricate delicacy. His lyrics are relevant and interesting, and he is clearly a consummate professional as well as a cordial and fun performer. For example, while one of his band members was changing a string it occurred to him that the monitors at the front of the stage were like teeth, the audience was like a big tongue and he was being eaten. He told us so.
But this image was pertinent for a negative reason. Despite Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s excellent energy, musicality and personal presence, the copious venue swallowed him.
It is not his fault. The songs varied from indie rock to sotto voce ballads, so in other words barn-stomping or intimate. With the former you would want to ideally get up for a dance, drink a keg of moonshine, break a chair over your face, and throw a young lady (or boy) out of a window, and cackle like you have rabies; with the latter you want to be able to see the folds of the performers face. But in the RFH you are stuck in your seat confined to sober reflection befitting a classical concert.
They tried to make it visually interesting with lighting. But the interest is only fleeting. They also got it critically wrong the one time they tried to do something clever with the fantastic song ‘I See a Darkness’.
The song takes the form of a secret confession to a close friend of deeply troubling thoughts thus the chorus refrain “I see a darkness” (this is a gross over-simplification, so go and listen to this amazing song yourself). To signify this the lighting director progressively dimmed the lights till by the end of the song the whole band was in total darkness. Nice, but wrong. Firstly, it is so obvious it looked cheap; secondly, the whole beauty of the song is in the contrast between the darkness held inside the singer and his jovial, brighter exterior; thirdly, metaphors should stay metaphors or they get a bit silly. Despite this, the rendition of the song was so beautiful I barely noticed the annoying lighting.
Big venues can work for rock, indie and folk musicians. But a traditional concert hall I find too cosseted. It is set up so that you can ignore your neighbours as efficiently as possible, and this is great for classical music. But with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy I can’t help but think that there should be a more communal feel. Or some spittoons, at least.