Notes for a review I didn't write
I was lucky enough to see St Vincent's recent intimate show in Bristol. Everyone else is lucky I didn't get to write the review.
If things had gone differently you might be reading these words somewhere else.
No, scratch that. If I’d done as my to-do list told me and suggested the St Vincent gig to the editor before lunch, I might not have missed out to someone who did, and this piece would be a proper review. These words wouldn’t even be these words.
Instead, it is whatever this is. Whatever it is I do here. No, I don’t know either, but I know it’s not journalism. Writing a proper review takes advance effort, and it struck me a couple of days out from the gig that I’d only listened to St Vincent’s new record once. It struck me a half hour into the show I hadn’t recognised a single song.
In the end I knew three or four. The title of just one. If I was - as I often am - a reader of Bristol’s leading independent news and culture publication, then knowing simple things like, y’know, the songs the artist played, would be the least I expect of a reviewer. By this point I was thankful not to be there as a journalist. But I was also wondering what kind of a fan did I think I was, exactly?
You see, this was a fan show in all but name. In SWX - a nightclub, really. A stupidly small venue to be listed alongside the Royal Albert Hall, which is where St Vincent will be playing the night after this, and again the night after that, two sold-out nights, making it pretty clear this is a warm-up gig. Tickets were contingent on pre-ordering the new album. I imagine the clamour from UK fans was rabid (her?, playing here?). I imagine an American exec’s assistant ringing round their UK contacts to find somewhere to fit the bill: yes, near London, please, but also somewhere almost offgrid, where journalists won’t travel, where the audience is grateful.
Somewhere in that throng in front of me, then, stand St Vincent’s people. She’s that kind of artist. That morning on the radio there was a shout-out to someone setting out from Cornwall for the gig. I’m at the back, but there will be others here more committed. People who know more than one song title. The kind of obsessive who, around the time of her breakthrough self-titled record, back when it was all just tumblrs round ‘ere, made her seem the kind of artist I’d have loved when I was young. A Manics-like adoration. A Bowie-like belief that everything mattered.
Show yourselves, slightly-older-now pop kids! Well, how about this man in his sixties asking where everyone who walks past him is disappearing to (they’re going upstairs). Or the introvert couple to my left - young, female, quietly withdrawing into their own shared space - who smile after every song. Or the hetero couple in front of me, him looking like an escapee from Fire Island, all moustache and string vest and wide-leg trousers; her looking like a runaway from The Runaways: red silk shirt, bunched sleeves, wolf haircut. I’m at the back with them all, outsiders to the outsiders.
I reflect on what low level of fandom I can lay claim to, given how little I know about what’s happening. Mostly, I realise with shame, it was forged bearing witness to a show at Glastonbury that is now ten years ago. I wrote about her then too, considering Digital Witness for publication over here. (That piece remains unfinished and also unpublished - am I self-sabotaging here or what?) I still stand by what I said:
St Vincent is about to arrive on stage. Soon her guitar will artfully squizzle and squall its way across an hour of her human-machine grooves. She will square-dance herself left to right, right to left, up, down, diagonally, the way only a Queen can move in chess, feet hidden by monitors so she appears to float. Later, as if to out-Prince Prince, she will composedly lose herself in the act of crawling feet-first on her back up a staircase playing Let’s-Go-Crazy-crescendo guitar. She will not talk to the crowd.
By then she will have become my new favourite pop star.
And she stayed as such (not least because Bowie and Prince were dead within two years and we needed their spirit as much as ever in the aftermath), in theory if not in actual listening time, to the point where my wife jumped at the offer from a friend of two tickets for tonight, knowing we’d both love it. And now she is here. She’s talking to us. It’s a “fucking miracle” we’re here, apparently; few here disagree, whatever the level on which they take the statement . She is simply dressed: white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, short black skirt. Raven black hair. She looks super cool. She looks like PJ Harvey came dressed as Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. She looks like an emo-Britney Spears adopted by the Addams Family. Wednesday, Hit Me One More Time. She proceeds to be brilliant. She knows the power of a well-held pose. Her video backdrop is sometimes a live onstage feed, and sometimes two hands dressed in red, elbow-length leather gloves, fondling one another. A sort of mmmm and then ew all at once. It fits. Shiny, synthetic, raw, a little kinky. Hers is the artful uptight funk of what is at times my favourite twenty-minute run of Bowie - that perfect first side of Scary Monsters, with its mutoid disco and its glitchy stompy pop. It’s the kind of exotic and twisted but accessible aesthetic the art world throws up now and again to snare the mainstream. If I was in her pop generation I too would be down the front, shouting, pleading, partly with her, partly at her, how can anybody have you and lose you, wishing I had the slightest chance of finding out. Not in that way, you understand - I mean that pop fandom is the desire to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with your hero. The price of entry a very willing immolation.
Perhaps the most visible sign of the crowd’s deference is what isn’t happening. Very few people are taking photos. I decide that with the withering, satirical Digital Witness, St Vincent has achieved what no amount of lecturing has done, and embarrassed people out of that most automatic of gig-going behaviours. Ten years ago, I noted how she made it an explicit part of her performance:
The crowd is being instructed by a stagey 1984 doom-laden voice. We are to put away our phones. St Vincent does not wish to inveigle herself into the timelines of people who have not bothered to be here. She does not want us to remind ourselves later of what we saw. She wants us to witness it now, for real.
She is going to perform for us. We are here to watch.
The restriction was a kind of freedom, of course (which sounds kinky in itself). An instruction that was also permission - permission to be present. The song is persuasive, too, thanks to its portrayal of a dystopian world and the implication we’re already in it. In the song, St Vincent plays two roles, one on either side of a screen - each dumb, both terrifying. On this side is us, more persona than person, one that spends its time scrolling, snapping and sharing, a life more broadcast than lived. We are hooked on validation, and skewered by St Vincent’s merciless eye. “What’s the point of even sleeping?” she asks. “If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me. What’s the point of doing anything?” Ouch.
On the other side of the screen, St Vincent plays the role of, well, what exactly? A greedy, unknowable force, indiscriminate yet unstoppable, swallowing our world and our identities from behind the glassy interface. “I want all of your mind,” this voice drones. “Give me all of your mind. I want all of your mind. Give me all of it.” This force is never satisfied, yet always available. It is not the voice of the pop star, but of the system in which the pop star now flourishes, one that exists purely for monetisation. Our scrolling, sharing persona worships at its altar, has become an essential part of it. We confess everything; it takes everything from us. When St Vincent sings “won’t somebody sell me back to me?” tonight, it seems pitilessly ironic, as I cast my mind back a few hours to the moment I clicked a button to accept the transfer of tickets, only to find I was required to update all my details, including my phone number for that all-important two-factor authentication, and also my home address, for god-knows-what, all so that Ticketmaster had the most up-to-date watermark of my digital existence, all so that I could simply be in this room to enjoy the communal pleasures of live pop music and reflect on my place in the world. The very next day after this gig, news of the Ticketmaster data hack breaks. Ouch.
In a landscape like this, we need a better way to bear witness to the things we love, to the experiences that make us. How do we assert our fandom if we don’t project it onto the world? We’re part of the machine whether we like it or not, but we can always choose not to upload photos. We can choose not to take them in the first place. We can also choose to write, of course. Either for other people, for money; or for ourselves, because writing in any form is a form of attention. It helps us remember what we loved about a moment. It does more than convey to others we were there.
These words are these words because I chose to write them here. They turned out just how I needed them. I have been reminded of the many different ways that exist to be a fan. I don’t need to know song titles. I was allowed to be there. The cost of entry was to be alive to the relationship between where/who I am and where I believe the artist to be. That’s all this ever is. All it ever can be. That said, an artist like St Vincent warrants the kind of fandom she got, in the end, from the review I didn’t write. I didn’t read it until I’d nearly finished this. It’s great - exactly the kind of reverie I want from someone reviewing an artist they love. His review is from the front of the crowd, just where it should be, not the back.
The fandom I was able to bring is valid. His is the kind the gig deserved.
Like a good barrister you are able to represent/articulate my thoughts/feelings better than I can (sometimes).