21 January 2011
Does anyone know why the Forum’s Romanesque statues have no genitalia? I recall hearing an urban legend of some crazy dogmatic Mayor or somesuch lopping them all for the good of the children, or some nonsense, but I don’t know who true that is. Somebody please comment and solve the mystery, kthanks.
Conway Savage opens the night; Savage will probably be better known to most as the keys-man for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Tonight, he is more or less solo; he is himself on keys and vocals, with a guitarist and keys/accordion/bongos player in tow. I unfortunately found Savage and Co. deeply dull; the sound was slightly off- the keys often registering far too loud- which did not help matters, and Savage is an obviously highly accomplished pianist, but the whole set rang with a plodding flavourlessness, despite the decent ideas that floated around the set but unfortunately dissipated.
The interval is the tough part of any solo gig adventure. Usually, I amuse myself with people-watching or texting my best friend useless minutiae and quotes (“Ashleigh. Just letting you know you were born a street rat, you will die a street rat, and only your fleas will mourn you” “Phenomenal cosmic powers! Itty bitty living space!”) but my phone is going dead and I can only see the backs of people’s heads tonight. I chat to the folks behind me; I give one of them a picture of a crab I had drawn while waiting for the show to start. He is wearing a top hat…an aristocrab. Tish-boom. Finally, saving me from myself, Cat Power begin.
Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall, opens with a deep, sultry solo cover of The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. “This was written in Australia” she says in a lazy drawl and breaks into Good Woman; the band comes in and supports her gorgeous voice. The noise coming from is so husky, so full, so smoky, so lush. If this were the Thirties, she’d be on the cover of every damn jazz rag in town, hot diggity! It’s at this point that I notice the copious amounts of canoodling couples in the audience- more so than I usually see (and then try not to see); Marshall must wield some sort of aural aphrodisiac in her honeyed lungs.
To a surprisingly quiet but unsurprisingly enraptured crowd, Marshall and band coat the crowd, like so much delicious molasses, in tracks like Don’t Explain, These Days (A much-improved Nico cover; “These days I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do”) and The Greatest. As you are subject to the beauty of the performance, you realise that the songs are really centered around Marshall’s heartening lyricism. The band seeks not to overtake her vocals and therefore tend to keep their instruments away from ‘show-stealer’. The music acts as an emotive backdrop; the well-placed, sometimes sparse, instrumentation that occasionally builds to a shivery crescendo, is very smartly used: “It’s not the size of the band that counts, it’s how you use it”
“I was thinking about naming my kid Melbourne” Marshall squeaks in a rare moment of banter. She is focused on her task and doesn’t interface with the crowd much, but that’s not an snub to her- oddly, it suits her. She, too, doesn’t dance but sometimes sways slightly (and adorably slightly awkwardly). Her figure on stage defies the grandiose nature of the music; she often stands side of stage, out of the stage lights, seemingly not wanting full attention. She ventures into the shadows, she is dressed modestly; how comforting to see a studious type on stage.
The encore fake-out having passed by with the usual run of foot-stomping and riotous applause, Marshall and friends return with Silent Machine and a song I don’t know but it contains within it an appropriation of The Clapping Song by Shirley Ellis (“Three, six, nine, the goose drank wine…”) so I approve. The couples relentlessly sucking face in front of me miss this and I wonder if they care. “Thank you for coming tonight” Marshall says shyly and the one screaming punter that had been yelling “METAL HEART!” the entire set finally got their wish.
Apparently it’d been Marshall’s birthday (the crowd giving her an impromptu Happy Birthday song, or parts thereof, to her quiet amusement) so here is my birthday present to the lovely Miss Marshall. Good show, kiddo.
Lisa Dib
(Cat Power banned all photographers, including ours, just hours before the gig. Instead we’ve drawn a cat superhero to help you visualise what this gig might have been like)
