There
is no way this is going to make any kind of coherent sense, let's all
just accept that now. Tonight I walked home from the tube with music
loud in headphones for the first time in probably 14 years (safety
first, children) because today Father John Misty has been a life
support machine for me and I couldn't totally be sure the blood would
keep going round my body without him in my ears. (“She said music
is like literally the air that I breathe, the malaprops make me want
to fucking scream.”) I wasn't supposed to go to his gig at Village
Underground tonight: I tried to buy tickets soon after it was
announced but they'd sold out days beforehand; I tried to pull
strings but the saintly patient PR at FJM's label Bella Union was
like, you must be kidding, the beardy male music journos are
salivating all over him; I tried pitching a review to the Guardian
but the email wasn't answered. I'm so fucking glad I didn't get that
commission. Because for a few days now I've been noticing that not
writing on here was feeling like I'd amputated a part of myself and
the wound, far from healing, has been seeping and sore. Tonight
walking home from the tube with Father John Misty loud through the
headphones I looked up at the sky and through London's light
pollution visioned the constellations and all the stars aligned. This
is what I fucking live for.
I
have a lot of trouble being alive. (“I've brought my mother's
depression, you've got your father's scorn and a wayward aunt's
schizophrenia.”) This week I've been doing a lot of lying awake
looking at the darkness (“and there's a black dog on the bed”);
this morning the guy who sweeps the local streets smiled at me when I
was walking home from school and that small act of kindness made me
cry. I came home and vomited over twitter how distraught I was that I
didn't have a ticket for the Father John Misty gig and started
quoting choice lines. “Oh and no one really knows you and life is
brief, so I've heard but what's that got to do with this black hole
[in] me?” “How many people rise and say my brain is so awfully
glad to be here for yet another mindless day?” I managed to hold
myself together through most of the gig, by which I mean I spent
almost all of it with one arm pressed hard against my stomach or
clutching my left ribs, locking my heart in its proper place, but the
song that second line comes from, Bored in the USA, broke me right
open. It's the one that on record Tillman punctuates with brutal
spasms of canned laughter; live, he keeps it simpler, and delivers
the sardonic commentary in his gestures instead: a mocking shrug for
“they gave me a useless education”, a flourish of the hand for
“sub-prime loan”. (I didn't take notes, by the way. This is
impressionism, not journalism.) It's a song that expresses acutely
how the world we live in is a fucking joke. I was walking across the
Thames yesterday and realised I've come to hate the London skyline.
My city has been taken over, diseased by money, and now I have no
true home.
Is
this the part where I get all I ever wanted?
Who
said that?
Can
I get my money back?
A
look of what-the-fuck bewilderment for: “When I was young, I dreamt
of a passionate obligation to a room-mate.” (Actually, apart from I
keep staying up too late, the marriage is fine right now. Thanks for
asking.)
The
only thing that makes living in a city like London bearable are the
moments of connection. Just before going to the FJM gig, I co-hosted
a Dialogue Theatre Club on Kim Noble's You're Not Alone, where this
question of connection was vital. (OK, more truthfully, I ran out on
the Theatre Club to go to the gig, which is rude, but sometimes even
passion-work has got to take a back seat. And anyway, as usual, 75%
of the people who booked didn't bother to show. Do those people
realise how fucking dispiriting it is to be stood up like that?) I
felt bruised by Kim's show; someone else at the Theatre Club said she
found it difficult but ultimately cleansing to watch; what both of us
responded to was the search for connection, the exterior aggression
of that, the gentleness beneath. I got all muddled up trying to say
something about how Kim normalises extreme behaviour, like drilling a
hole through a neighbour's wall; what I meant, but didn't manage to
articulate, is that through this extreme behaviour he conveys tender
messages about what human beings need from each other. The graph he
plots of his neighbours' sex life after drilling the hole shows that
whenever the sex plummets, the arguments increase. There's a lesson
in that for all of us.
Back
to FJM.
Having
vomited over twitter, something amazing happened. Someone who doesn't
have an account, but had some tickets they needed to sell on, saw
what I wrote, found my Dialogue email address and contacted me
offering them. And when it turned out that I would need to meet them
at the same time as doing the Theatre Club to be able to get in, gave
me their mobile number so I could call them on arrival and they would
leave the gig to come out and get me. A total stranger, going out of
their way to be nice to me. Meanwhile, saintly patient PR at Bella
Union – the label I once impatiently described as home to 50%
geniuses, 50% vacuous soundalikes-by-numbers – contacted everyone
with a plus one to find out if they really needed it, and got me on
the guest list. And then, someone I once had a terrible crush on, who
rested his chin on my head at a Smog/Palace gig in Camden, and took
me to the best pinball-machine bar in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and
laughed at me for using fuck-off as a quantifying adjective, and
pretended to need an eye-patch after not seeing me for several months
(turns out I still haven't forgiven him for that one), he picked this
day to find me on twitter as well. Connections, people reaching out
to each other, to me. Small acts of kindness. And then it's 9.15pm
and I've missed the first three songs (including Honeybear! ach) and
I'm worming my way closer and closer to the front where Father John
Misty is scissor-kicking and hurling himself to his knees and rolling
his hips this side, that side, like he's dancing a cha-cha with his
own songs, and his voice is pouring through me like golden honey,
spiced rum, and it's like I have wings, because a handful of people
have been good to me. I'm not supposed to be here, on the right side
of paradise. But I am.
And
it turns out that Father John Misty is a total fucking rock star sex
god. Did you imagine that listening to his records? He sings about
being a ladies' man, or pulling more women than two men or a train
can haul, but it's one thing talking a talk: live, he walks the walk.
Struts it, peacock proud. He's skinny, dressed in black, with a
gleaming swoop of dramatic hair (actually, that was vaguely
disturbing, because he has the exact same hair as Rupert Goold, who
to be fair totally presents himself as the rock star of theatre),
shirt unbuttoned just so, and the hips, the hips, I keep talking
about the hips, they are the hips of a man who KNOWS WHAT TO DO WITH
YOU. I have a friend who pretty much has to start fanning herself
every time Nick Cave is mentioned. Father John Misty has learned a
lot of his moves from Nick Cave; he radiates charisma, it jitters
through his limbs. At one point he makes a rubbish joke along the
lines of doing his best to make everyone's pants wet. People: it's
working.
That
joke is rubbish written down, but basic lesson of comedy: it's all in
the delivery. This is the other surprise. Remember the first time you
saw John Grant play live and discovered that not only does he have
the voice of god, he's also this sharp, spry wit, conversational and
funny, a deprecating storyteller with exquisite timing? Tillman has
that chattiness, too. He makes another bad joke, about mothers, and
decides he's found the limits of British black humour; he teases
himself for a move gone wrong (swinging the microphone, it flies off
to the floor); does the whole encores-are-ridiculous schtick, but
with such appreciation of its absurdity we laugh even more. Like
Grant, he takes the worst of himself,
Every
woman that I've slept with
Every
friendship I've neglected
Didn't
call when grandma died
I
spend my money getting drunk and high
I've
done things unprotected
Proceeded
to drive home wasted
Bought
things to win over siblings
I've
said awful things, such awful things
And
now
Now
it's out
and
in song takes every step from self-pity to lacerating fury to
self-mockery to quiet acceptance – then, in between the songs,
returns emotions to an even keel by the simple expedient of laughing
genially at himself. It's a skill I don't have and I admire it
immensely.
The
thing he does that Grant doesn't do is sing with his whole body –
I'm going to try not to talk about the hips again – underscoring
individual words with gestures. A tap to the head any time wit or
brains are mentioned. A hand skimming a thigh. The Ideal Husband has
him throwing himself around the stage, sinking to his knees as he
screams of being tired of running, tipping back to the ground as he
begs to put a bun in the oven. Holy Shit sends him over the barrier
to bury himself in the crowd, singing:
Oh,
and love is just an institution based on human frailty
What's
your paradise gotta do with Adam and Eve?
Maybe
love is just an economy based on resource scarcity
What
I fail to see is what that's gotta do with you and me
You
and me. That's what this gig is about: him and us, you and me, human
beings having face time, making love, finding companionship, saying
the words that are impossible, reaching out at exactly the moment
when it's needed. Defying every economic structure that's built to
destroy us and keep us apart and creating moments of communion
instead. He teases one person for watching him through the camera
lens of their mobile phone but takes the phone off of someone else to
sing directly into it, a private performance. We gather at his feet
to sing at the top of our voices as one; I look around me and all I
see is joy on faces, amazement, love. It's the mirror of what I feel
shining back at me.
Somewhere
in the middle I remember there has to be an end and it's like the
depression that hits me every midsummer's day, knowing that this is
the beginning of summer's decline. I think I might have to walk home:
it's the only way I can deny that the gig is finished. But when it
really finishes, I know what I have to do. It starts on twitter:
“he's reduced me to archetypal screaming beatles fan”. And then,
for the first time in a long time, I race home and let myself write
something absolutely only for me. Because I want to hold on to this
night for ever. Because I have trouble being alive and nights like
this remind me why I need to stick with it. Because I got a ticket
for free and that was a gift and I want to give something back.
Because I'm really fucking angry right now with everything to do with
theatre criticism and it feels really good to turn my back on it and
write about music instead. Because I can't hold all of this love
inside my body, I'm just not big enough. Some of it has to spill out
into the world.
The
last thing I wrote on twitter about Father John Misty was a
mathematical formula:
john
grant voice + nick cave moves = best sex ever
It's
2.12am and in just under seven hours I'm going to arrive back at this
desk and buy as many tickets as I possibly can for the next FJM gig
in London. When the midsummer day's depression hits, my consolation
will be knowing that autumn will bring him and this night back to me.
