I 'n' Gigs 1: Joanna Newsom (Somerset, 2007)

I was meant to be going to see Nick Cave and his merry bunch of Bad Seeds this week. Since I'm not, and gigs are something which I'm sure a lot of people are missing, I thought I'd write a little about 10 gigs I went to. Not my favourite per se, just memorable ones from down the years.

These are not reviews. I wouldn't do that very well. They're just memories. I have called the segment "I 'n' Gigs" (a pointless pun on the name Ryan Giggs) ... that is a good indicator of the quality writing to come ...

Here's the first.

I first saw Joanna Newsom at All Tomorrow’s Parties at 2007. I’m pretty certain she played two sets at that wonderful festival at Butlin’s, Minehead. I don’t think my memory is betraying me.

Here is the thing that strikes me about it – she was playing the “second stage” which was basically the bingo hall of the holiday camp. It’s a pretty huge room, but not limitless. She was playing in the afternoon. And the queue, and the buzz, was immense, like nothing else that whole weekend.

I wasn’t really there for Newsom – I was more there for Nick Cave, Cat Power, Spiritualized. But that queue, that buzz, made you feel the weekend was all about her, that this was a STAR happening.

When I saw the queue spilling out, I’d have happily passed. I didn’t like her first album ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender’ at all when it came out, and though I had been won over by ‘Ys’ from late 2006 (I first listened to ‘Ys’ in a hotel room in a seaside town in the Netherlands on a laptop running out of charge cos I’d forgotten to take an adapter, not to mention appropriate shoes for the extremely fancy quiz I was due to host that night … all another story …) I would still have been happy to leave Joanna to her more ardent fans.

But my friends were determined, and we actually found a way to bypass the queue by going round the back of the room and then through the fire escape. It felt terribly illicit, though, in truth, we had every right to be in the room, having paid for the festival, and we didn’t break through any cordons or anything …

I think we were nevertheless a little furtive and crouched down at the back of the room. Which is why I’m pretty certain she played two shows, because I also remember staring pretty close up at her playing the harp and thinking “right, now I get it”.

I realise that admiring pure virtuosity is not something one does all that often at rock gigs. That’s not a bad thing per se. Bands can be magnificent without virtuosity. Virtuosity can be a tremendous bore. But Newsom’s high-wire virtuosity is thrilling. I’m trying to think of other times I’ve been as thrilled by an individual’s musicianship in a live setting – Nels Cline of Wilco playing guitar, Richard Thompson filling a field with sound with the power of his fingers on an acoustic guitar, Dr John on piano perhaps …

And it is truly high-wire with her. It can go wrong. It can go slightly, charmingly wrong, as it did when we saw her at Latitude a year later. The last time I saw her, at End of the Road in 2011, after a bright clear mid-September day which turned, suddenly and shockingly into a Baltic evening, her fingers were too cold to play harp properly, and songs stopped and started with multiple mistakes, and, despite the encouragement of the crowd, it was pretty upsetting to watch her gradually getting defeated and flustered.

But the thing I think about that 2007 show, as I said, was the feeling that this was a STAR. It was the same at Latitude in 2008, when she played a special Sunday lunchtime slot to the big field and there were 20,000 people or so completely rapt. And yet, Joanna Newsom, for all her acclaim and cult status, has really not sold many records. Not in the scheme of things. A few hundred thousand worldwide. ‘Ys’ apparently sold 45,000 in the UK, so really and truly, a noticeable chunk of the Joanna Newsom fans in the UK were at those shows. And despite the sheer wonder and attentiveness those crowds felt, despite the buzz, there has not been a long way for her sales to grow from that.

Not a fair comparison at all, but I think of being in Borderline on Charing Cross in 2004 as a handful of us punters ignoring James Blunt playing a support slot for Damien Dempsey, just a few months before he went stellar with a terrible song and sold more records than almost anyone else in the decade, and think “you really can’t always tell” …

I’d have sworn then that Joanna Newsom would overcome/had already overcome the idiosyncrasies of her form and content, and become, not just a cult star, but a proper massive star famous person, more famous than her famous husband, more famous than  anyone else at those festivals that day.

Fame, oh it is a funny, funny thing …