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 …
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