a love letter to Anna Meredith

Here are some things that the Anna Meredith gig at the Scala reminded me of:

I'm aged about 20 and I'm watching Tortoise play live in a drab room above a pub in the wastelands of Camden. I feel like I'm on ecstasy because I want to kiss everyone in the room, because they're playing Cornpone Brunch – a song that sounds so tempered on record, so constrained – and it's exploding, propelling, the four arms of the two drummers blurring, the rhythm taut but expanding, swelling, the melody so joyful, beaming, and I know, I know that it's impossible for my body to feel happier, more full and flushed with the sheer fucking rapture of being alive, than it does right now in this room. It is one of four times I see Tortoise play in the space of barely a week, and every single one of those shows triggers the same rush of euphoria.

It's 1996: another day, same era. The needle falls on Squarepusher's Port Rhombus EP. There's a bubble of melody like the glint of tropical fish just out of reach of the sun, and the febrile click of an electronic drum pattern that gets faster and faster until it jitters uncontrolled, multiplying, erupting, splintering, contracting into order then accelerating again. My heartbeat, seduced by the melancholy of the chords, responds to the drumbeat in kind; muscles glitch in rhythm. It's only three songs but the speed of it, the concentration of it, the sheer fucking energy of it, leave me winded.

Aphex Twin. I mean, there was a moment back there when it felt like Aphex Twin was basically god, right?

It's some time in 2008, and I'm working on a column called Readers Recommend for the Guardian. Each week I choose a topic and readers suggest songs related to it, and I choose two playlists, a top 10 which gets published in the paper, and a b-list, like a runners-up prize, for the following week's blog. By this point I know a few things about my taste in music that aren't going to change. I know, for instance, that although I loved Robert Plant's collaboration with Alison Krauss, Raising Sand, Led Zeppelin are repellent. I know that death metal makes me nauseous. And I know prog rock – a phrase I use fairly loosely to describe any ponderous music, probably made in the 1970s, involving flutes and interminable guitar solos – is awful. I cannot abide guitar solos. Not even when Jimi is playing them.

I can't remember any more why it came up, but one week on Readers Recommend someone suggested the song In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson. I listen to it. And I'm... transported. It's utterly compelling. Dramatic, rousing, delicate, taking all the time it needs to develop, to tell its story not just narratively but melodically. I'm listening to it again now for the first time in a few years, and sure, part of me wants to claim that I was under the influence of Grace Slick/Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, but another part of me is also thinking: swoon.

The thing about Tortoise, Sqaurepusher, Aphex and King Crimson (King fucking Crimson though), in case it's not already obvious, is: they're all men. And so the intoxication, the sheer fucking elation of the Anna Meredith gig has, somewhere in the mix, a profound gratitude and satisfaction at seeing a woman – a woman in her late-30s at that – in control of those rapid-fire drumbeats, those arcs of sound, those reins of contain and release. I felt a little sad that the song at the Scala that met with the quietest cheer was Last Rose, sung by Meredith in a voice high and light as a helium balloon: for sure it was restrained, a fragile tempered thing, but that's part of Meredith's skill, the complexity and integrity with which she balances turbulence and composure.

I first saw her in March this year, by accident really: I was looking for gig reviews to pitch to the Guardian, her name had come up when I was working on texts for the new website of the National Youth Orchestra, where she's much admired for her composition Body Parts – no instruments, music made from the slap of hands against faces, torsos, legs, hands, the click and thump of skin against muscle, flab, fabric, skin – and I figured it'd be interesting to see what a contemporary classical composer might be doing in a pop framework. At the ICA, Meredith and her band all wore black with gold accents – best was drummer Sam Wilson, with a huge gold-mirror dinosaur skeleton necklace from Tatty Divine – and played like they'd found the key to harnessing the electricity of the skies. Frantic, screeching riffs that I'd assumed were constructed on synthesisers turned out to be played on live cello, fingers swarming across strings like a colony of cockroaches confronted by lamplight. Wilson might have been both drummers from Tortoise synthesised into one. There was a tuba – a fucking tuba! sorry, I know, too much swearing – strident, resplendent, absurd in its enormity. And over at the side, behind a bank of keyboards dressed in tacky gold velvet, with drums and glockenspiel and occasionally wielding a clarinet, was Meredith, giggling with the fun of it all, thanking us profusely – I'm acting like it's a wedding, she said – bouncing about in a way I'll wager she never gets to do in the concert halls where her other compositions are performed. That was it for me: absolute, undying love. I went and bought the album from her at the merch stall and could barely even speak.

That gig was great: the Scala gig was even better. I stood almost at the front, hairs on both arms fizzing, ribcage ruptured by the weight of the bass, beaming and basking. Six months of playing together has made the band harder, faster, stronger: Meredith composes tight, so every track stays true to the recording, just with the voltage emphatically cranked. What's startling about the arrangements in the instrumentals – that is, the more vigorous and invigorating music – is how rhythmically unstable it is: she'll start in one tempo but will surreptitiously slip in another, forcing the rest of the instruments to adjust to the shift, and then she'll do it again, each time creating a lurch, a dissonance, but also the pleasure of pattern slipping into place, of a Rubik's cube suddenly resolving. And while in a, let's say, prog-ish setting her instruments might be given individual spotlight attention, here they are embedded in the unit; there's a lot of fiddly business on the guitar but it's always integral to the texture, the warp to the cellos' weft.

If I were trying really hard to be critical (ha!) I'd wonder if the exactitude of the playing might have a downside, a lack of improvisatory spontaneity, but Meredith is smarter than that, too: she knows just how to transform each each gig into a unique event. Her Scala show began with her and Wilson on stage, all but shrouded in darkness, and a second drummer similarly concealed ON THE BALCONY ABOVE THE AUDIENCE and I'm using capitals because in what, 25 years of dedication to live music I don't recall seeing the like: Meredith extracted a ticklish, skitterish drum track from her computer, which Wilson intermittently interrupted with a clatter on his drums, the light momentarily illuminating him then instantly flicking over to the second drummer (Chris Brice) who gave a clatter on his. And so it continued for a good five minutes, the three of them playing with dynamics, with anticipation and surprise, the whole thing fiendishly intricate, the flash and lunge of a sword fight translated into light and sound. (I discover later that this is one of Meredith's “contemporary classical” works, Brisk Widow: as if we didn't already know that the distinctions are arbitrary and pointless.) In the middle, Meredith did the same little advertisement for the merch stall that she gave at the ICA, only this time the band performed a faintly sleazy, 1970s cocktail lounge soundtrack behind it, gloopy as an orange lava lamp. And then at the end, they stomped their way through a raucous version of the Proclaimer's 500 Miles and it was like that moment late in a wedding party when the DJ drops something stupendously, ridiculously obvious and everyone loses their shit on the dancefloor, the Scala crowd yelling along with the chorus in a vocal equivalent of dads pogoing to Parklife.

At the ICA the ludicrous cover was a scuzzed mutation of Jennifer Rush's shoulder-padded time capsule The Power of Love. And this is the other genius thing about Meredith: how liberal she is in her love of music, the evident absence of snobbery in her tastes. She will flirt with bombast, embrace bad taste, risk embarrassment, because she knows that's all nonsense: what matters is how a song sounds and so makes a body feel. If it sounds bewilderingly like Queen, Dizzee Rascal, Metallica and the Field Mice all playing their way at once, but makes the heart pump undiluted bliss, where's the bad in that?

I'm doing it again, framing her within references to men. And at the risk of repetition, although fuck it, this one bears repeating: it means so, so much (to me, but also generally) that Meredith is a woman, in her late-30s, the time when women conventionally are being told to listen out for their biological clocks and get on with the business of making babies, casting off every possible shackle of expectation, labelling, convention, to play. That's what she's doing, not just playing music but playfulling music, so that it's as light and silly and borderline pompous as it is fierce, rigorous, punctilious. There's an interview with her in the Quietus where she talks sidelong about that spirit of play; I'm going to quote it in full because it's gorgeous:

[S]inging was a bit scary, and it's definitely a step on from anything I've ever done before. But there's a real accountability thing with this album. I wanted it to tie in with it feeling like I've done everything on it, and I also always want to push myself. I can't think of anything – in a musical sense – where I've ever said: "Oh no, that's too much for me." Or, "I can't do that, it's too scary." So even though I definitely do not have the best voice, it is my voice, and that's what this whole thing is about. It's honest. It's not very polished. But that's how I sing – like a squeaky five-year-old boy [laughs]. I've made that work for me. I've got loads of amazing singer mates that I could have used, but I wanted not to make it seem like anyone else. I really wanted to make it clear that there was no one else behind the record. There's not some dude behind the scenes who's actually doing all the stuff. This has, from start to finish, been my thing.

And when I've done everything, start to finish, I think it's important to point that out. Hopefully it's also a good role model for younger girls, to feel that they can do it. Whenever I'm teaching teenage girl composers, the one thing I always say is don't be too daunted by stuff you don't know how to do. Because, having dipped my toe into this whole world, I've realised that there are as many factions and preconceptions and problems and rules [in pop] as there are in classical music. Someone, somewhere will always tell you what they think you should be doing. But all you should really be doing is working out what you want to do, and what you can do for yourself.

You couldn't ask for a better guide to living than that.

 

And here are my holiday snaps*

*title a wave hello to Selina Thompson, who sent me an email at exactly the moment I needed a voice from home brimming gossip and love and a knowledge of my other self

Hadestown

It turns out that a full-scale theatre detox – an entire month of seeing next to nothing – is simultaneously healthy prep for the annual Edinburgh fringe binge and a major mistake: within 24 hours of seeing work again my brain was fizzing from the excess of stimulation and I couldn't talk only gabble delirium. The thing that stood next to nothing was Hadestown, a show I've wanted to see for a good five years, ever since I interviewed Anais Mitchell and added her to my pantheon of living-by-their-own-truth role-model women. For the not yet obsessed: Mitchell is a folk singer who created a wonky, sawdust-strewn rewrite of Orpheus and Eurydice to be performed as a community opera with her neighbours in semi-rural Vermont; later she released the songs as an album featuring Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) (be still my heart); and now she's worked with the Team's director, Rachel Chavkin, to transform it into an off-Broadway musical. I love the Hadestown album to distraction. I paid $99 to see the production at the New York Theater Workshop, more than I've spent on a single piece of theatre in years. I went girded for disappointment. But oh. OH.

In an ideal world I'd have seen this with Vernon singing, or at the very least Taylor Mac, who joined Chavkin for R&D work on the show. But it didn't matter that this isn't an ideal world, because Hadestown is a thing of such perfection that it transcends its performers: lyrically, musically, but also narratively and politically. I say this with authority, having witnessed Martin Carthy sing the role of Hades for a gig performance at Union Chapel apparently drunk, missing his cues and forgetting the words. And anyway, Chavkin's performers were pretty much phenomenal. Plus, Mitchell herself worked with Chavkin (and dramaturg Ken Cerniglia) on the additional material, and her composer collaborator Michael Chorney is a vital presence in the theatre band, so hyper-sensitivity to stage change had its balms.

The bare bones of the story are this: Hadestown opens with pragmatic Eurydice grilling her poet-musician boyfriend about how exactly they might survive if they got married. He spins her a golden yarn about nature providing, as though they were hunter-gatherers in a time of Eden; but the fact is, they live in (Depression-era) America, where “times are hard and getting harder all the time”. When she hears the lonesome whistle of the underground train to Hadestown blow, she's lethally tempted: its tycoon despot offers work, money, warmth and security in place of harsh precarity. Orpheus, recognising that she's lost her soul (and, it's implied, her body) to capitalist exploitation, attempts to save her – but Hades, altogether too cognisant of the weakness of humans, inevitably thwarts them.

That's the skeleton: what makes Hadestown exquisite are the feathers and jewels with which Mitchell, Chorney and now Chavkin adorn it. In some ways that's the wrong metaphor, as attested by Chavkin's rough-hewn aesthetic: working with designer Rachel Huack, she stripped the theatre back to a wooden floor, installed a homestead amphitheatre of mismatched wooden chairs (a smart nod to the pioneers and Puritans of America's past, and its constitutional commitment to rugged individualism), and set the action in an open circle overshadowed by the gnarled branches of a single, wintry tree. The sparseness brightened the gleam of Mitchell's peripheral characters: bold and swaggering Persephone (exquisitely played by TEAM regular Amber Grey, crackling as she twisted her body into jagged origami); the glittering chorus of Fates, watchful, teasing, never judgemental; and Hermes, gossamer on record but in Chris Sullivan's performance stomping and robust, a railroad man with a touch of Charon in his crepuscular gaze. Like Chorney's orchestration, a tapestry of American sounds weaving jazz, country and more, Michael Krass's costumes criss-crossed the decades: 1950s bobby sox and dirndl for Eurydice, a 1930s embroidered slip for Persephone, patchwork silks and leathers for the Fates. Everything on stage felt thrown together yet intimately cohesive, simple in a way that belied its complexity.

For Orpheus, love is simple, and so is life; he's a sentimental romantic, but he's also, as Hermes so tenderly puts it, an artist who “sees the world as it could be, not how it is”. Mitchell and Chavkin are unsparing in puncturing that romanticism while committing absolutely to its promise: Hadestown really is hell, overheated, overlit, over-policed and over-provided, and while Mitchell had plenty of gated communities to draw on when she conceived the notion of a workforce committed to constructing the wall that separates its own wealth from its fear of the poverty and jealous need beyond, that imagery has all the more bite with Trump's Mexico manifesto (and, on our side, the appalling Calais action) poisoning the air. Any hint of a middle-class or left-wing sneer at the “stupid” working classes (the criticism levied as much at Brexit voters as Trump enthusiasts) who unthinkingly follow-the-leader is quashed by Mitchell's clear differentiation between people and structures. People are moulded by the context that contains them: Hades himself is built by the system he builds, his humanity and happiness compromised by it. In Eurydice's shoes, the Fates demand, what might we all do the same? When Orpheus looks back, Mitchell and Chavkin open the possibility that it's not an innate emotional weakness at fault but some trick of structural oppression that ensures even the most strenuous of opponents will ultimately be crushed. This is what makes Hadestown emotionally devastating: not the fact that Orpheus loses Eurydice, as the myth declares he must, but the deeper loss of the collective human soul to capitalist inequality, from which – no matter how hard we might try to stride into a different future – there seems to be no escape.

But there is. Orpheus is still singing, and dreaming of a better future. We know this, because Mitchell wrote Hadestown.

Warpand Weft

Laura Veirs shares the left-wing politics of Anais Mitchell, and her earnestness of expression, too; but whereas Mitchell's solo work is more straightforwardly me-and-my-guitar folk, Veirs' collaborations with producer Tucker Martine pack the musical references of Hadestown into erudite pop songs. It took me a while to click with her, but since 2010's July Flame I've been a devoted fan. We played Warp and Weft as we drove across Indiana, and it reminded me of listening to PJ Harvey's Let England Shake while driving through the Cotswolds, those placid rolling hills suddenly muddied and seething with the ghosts of dead soldiers, insurrectionists, men. Indiana is basically flat; I'd guess it's desolate in winter, but it's verdant in early August, field after field of thriving maize. Veirs' circumspect songs made that landscape churn with alarm at what America has become and what it's built on:

How can it be so cold out here in America

Everybody is packing heat in America

Training their barrels on the city streets in America

Every bad man finds his peace in America

In America

No shootings were reported while we were in the country, but I did read of the Black Lives Matter action shutting down the M4 back home and glowed with admiration and a sense of possibility. Ever since Theresa May glided into her premiership that's what I've wanted to do: just sit in the middle of roads, bringing cities to a standstill. Instead I sat in our hired car for hour upon hour, contemplating the spray contraption that looms over so many field, maybe distributing a fine mist of water but more likely showers of pesticide, noting how many billboards advertise litigation lawyers, wondering how houses that don't have garden fences around them can suggest so much hostility towards the unknown stranger. Laura Veirs sang and her words ploughed the land, churning to the surface its lack of care.

Later we played Anna Meredith's Varmints and I thought again that it's my favourite album released so far this year.

A Lotof Sorrow

I'm honestly embarrassed by how much I love the National. Looking at them in the film of A Lot of Sorrow, installed at the Art Institute of Chicago, I was overwhelmed again by shame, that these middle-aged white guys, with their suits and wedding rings and thinning hair, are so capable of turning me to putty. And yes, I'm ashamed of my superficiality in judging them by appearance: me, a middle-aged white woman, with my own wedding ring, constantly reminded by the queer and feminist art with which I align myself of how essentially straight I am; ashamed, too, of the craven lingering adolescent desire to be different, other, strange. My embarrassment at loving the National is a nugget of a more general shame I feel just being me.

But maybe the National are embarrassed in a similar way; or rather, my feeling is that its members, especially Aaron and Bryce Dessner, use this middle-of-the-road rock behemoth to finance all the different, other, strange art they want to make. (Thus Orpheus entered Hadestown, proud even in his submission.) A Lot of Sorrow is a fascinating intersection of those two impulses: a continuous performance of the song Sorrow, from their 2010 album High Violet, over and over, non-stop, for six hours, in a white-walled room in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. I saw at most 16 minutes of it on film, and not even consecutively, but it was enough to get my pulse racing at the intricacy of detail: the jitter of exhausted fingers, the crack of voice, the decision to switch to playing guitar with a violin bow, the pause to gather resources, the slipped note, the brow that furrows with effort, the snatched snacks for sustenance. Their bodies are entirely at the mercy of the song: it plays over them, through them, and so plays through me; for days after its words spill out of me unbidden, no matter that they're sunk in cliche.

Those few stolen minutes in front of it are every night I've huddled in the dark listening to the same song(s) over and over: listening to Cat Power so obsessively that the person I was staying with told me I'd ruined What Would the Community Think? for them forever, listening to Godspeed as though they could realign the stars, listening to Interpol's NYC, a song that haunted me this holiday (“got to be some more change in my life”), listening to that National album I was reviewing for the Guardian stupefied by how out of sorts it left me. On all those nights I was alone, but watching A Lot of Sorrow in Chicago I was with my son – my funny little boy who likes his music gentle and melancholy, has a penchant for Debussy, and was as mesmerised by the film as me. I twined my arms around him, grateful for this lifebuoy of love.

JohnOliver

The friend we stayed with in Chicago is a fascinating combination of socially Democrat (that's how she votes, too) but economically Republican (a committed believer in success rewarding hard work, adherent to the American Dream). She's white Scottish, her husband black Chicagoan, and their political engagement – both donated to the Bernie Sanders campaign – gifted plenty of lively conversation in their house about disappointment in Obama's leadership, lack of belief in Sanders' revolutionary agenda, and the dire prospects of the upcoming election. The thing that took me by surprise was their admission that they get at least half of their political news from watching the plethora of satirical programmes that screen in the US. It's not a healthy state of affairs, they said, because what's needed is cultural balance, a space in which people can actually speak across the political divide, rather than hurling snark at each other. But the thing is, I can't remember the last time I engaged with any news-related programming on the BBC without wanting to punch people for allowing so much inanity so much airspace. If we're going to ape American programming, can we at least import the acute with the vapid.

We spent an evening watching John Oliver programmes, and one in particular landed a horrible punch. It's a programme about drones, in which Oliver shows a clip of a young teenager from Pakistan, talking about the sky: grey days are good, he says, because that's when his head feels clear of anxiety. Blue skies, by contrast, fill him with fear. And people wonder how Muslim children might become “radicalised”.

Lightat the edge of land

Peter McMaster's blog was my holiday firefly, bringing flashes of natural wonder to a fortnight of preying architecture and obsidious concrete. I harbour a deep and quiet love for Peter and his work, and the attempt at a different way of living, thinking, making art and opening up to the world represented by Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides reminds me how much and why. The work takes the form of a two-week cycle tour, marking in gold leaf upon land's edge a line to which, at a conservative estimate, it's anticipated water will rise as human-accelerated climate change affects sea levels. The gold is ostentatious but the action anything but: it's a humble attempt to reckon with environmental destruction, a lament for what might soon not be, a movement towards a different sense of value. It's art made for no money or purpose other than to notice, to acknowledge, to witness – not what's before us, but what's unseen.

There's a beautiful thing Peggy Phelan says in her forward to the Tim Etchells book Certain Fragments, identifying “the essential nature of witnessing itself: to continue a conversation that without your intervention would cease”. Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides continues a conversation between human and land, one Peter still dominates (painting rock with gold is “an unsympathetic defacing”), but in a way that's diametric to the domination humans generally exert, plundering earth's resources without care. His journey coincided exactly with mine to the US, a piquant synchronicity: while he cycled, camped, measured and gilded, I visited the Natural History museum in Manhattan, Prospect Park zoo and the aquarium in Chicago, and in each place fretted at the ethics of human-animal relations, the cruelty required to give children a glimpse of wild nature, and the extent to which cities diminish and even eliminate opportunity for children to commune with a greater outdoors.

Peter's blog posts continue another conversation: with the unseen audience. When Phelan writes of the witness, she's thinking of course of the audience, and I value that sentence so much for its suggestiveness regarding criticism or writing about theatre. To me it presents a set of open questions: is it enough to be a silent witness? Is documentation essential if the conversation is to continue? Is it possible to engage in the conversation as critic/critical writer/whatever without overbearing? I don't know. But there was a warmth for me in reading Peter's posts and recognising in the scenario an echo of when I first met him, at Battersea Arts Centre, when he was thinking similarly but in a different context about masculinity, privilege, and solitude, environment and the spiritual possibilities of a closer connection to nature. There is a longevity and depth to our conversation, but also a scarcity, privately as well as professionally: I rarely see him; I've seen much more of his work than I've written about. And so how might it register if I stopped being witness, if the conversation ceased? Would it matter?

It was such an unexpected gift, a few days after I got home from Chicago, to bump into Peter at Forest Fringe, where he was performing another variation on the Gold Piece strand, a one-on-one called CommitmentCards. The work is exquisite in its shape and generosity: Peter begins by offering tea, then asks what you're yet to say no to. Gently he guides the conversation to an invitation to commit to something, with him as witness. Work like this galvanises but also disquiets me: it's so open that it inspires openness, and how much must the artist then absorb of human anxiety or insecurity as participants unburden? Megan Vaughan, writing about her interaction with Commitment Cards, describes Peter as “a reassuring therapist”, and Peter himself says in his blog post about the evening that he's “not afraid of the idea of art-work being therapeutic” or “to embrace the sensation of therapeutic experience”. I worry because he doesn't have a therapist's training or safety mechanisms; that these things aren't required for one human to give their ear to another is a useful and inspiring thing to remember. As Peter says in the blog: “I was moved by witnessing someone open up for the benefit of both of us, for the creation of a bigger idea of self-expression and compassionate communication being allowed to exist in the world.”

I've participated in one other Gold Piece with Peter and cherish it precisely for its compassionate communication, achieved without speaking at all. Based on the Japanese practice of kintsugi, the root Gold Piece invites its participant to mend a piece of broken china, gluing the pieces together then painting the cracks with gold dust. As I did so, I felt Peter was silently forgiving me for every stupid or thoughtless or mistaken thing I'd ever done. Kintsugi is a philosophy as much as a practical art: it values the imperfect, honours its scars. There's another thing I want to write about it (especially since my brilliant friend Anna spotted a reference to kintsugi in Beyonce's Lemonade) so I'll shut up now, but this strand of Peter's work feels so important to have in the world – not just in spite of its minimal reach, but because of it.

WandaJackson

The Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland is so bizarre: a small-town museum in everything but pretensions, closer in spirit to those ramshackle rooms devoted to dolls (Dunster), shells (Margate) or fishing paraphernalia (Hastings) than the more grandiose cultural houses that its architecture evokes. I loved it, the more so for being ridiculous. Highlights: the Elvis display, which I wanted to bring home to my mum; the drawings by Jimi Hendrix; the absurd attempt to claim Cleveland as the epicentre of the pop universe; the fact that the area devoted to the history of hip-hop is only slightly bigger than the area devoted to outfits worn by Beyonce. Best of all are the listening booths that people – locals, I'm guessing – have claimed for karaoke, each one packed with friends singing at the tops of their voices, not caring for the lack of closed doors. I didn't buy any memorabilia because I'm going to make it instead: my own version of a dress worn by Wanda Jackson, with a panel of gold sequins down the front and red fringing down the sides, something to fill a dance floor with flames.

Abrief history of humankind

There are things generally known, at least by the people I surround myself with. It's known, for instance, that humans are humans, regardless of what country they're from or what colour skin they have. It's known that humans have affected and accelerated ecological devastation. It's known that story is vital to human culture and existence. Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind repeats these known things, but places them in a depth of field (as he puts it, scanning “millennia rather than centuries”) in ways that are surprising and transformative. I'm prone to hyperbole I know, nothing I say can be trusted, but I'm only two-fifths through and already I'm changed by it. Or rather, he's brought to light and forced me to acknowledge a whole lot of weak thinking in my brain and challenged it in necessary ways.

It's an incredibly depressing book, because page after page asserts the same argument: that it's actually impossible to change the culture in which we live, because the story of it is too tenacious, too embedded. In no way is he saying that we are by nature neo-liberal acolytes of the free market, but that all societies coalesce through story, and the stories that dominate now have been in place for thousands of years. This bit in particular is devastating: he's talking about how difficult it would be to shift inter-subjective imagined orders (the examples he gives are “the dollar, human rights and the United States of America”) because to do so would require “simultaneously chang[ing] the consciousness of billions of people”, and to do that would require creating “an alternative imagined order” even more powerful than the one you're attempting to change. And so, he concludes: “There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.” The book is full of statements like that and every one stings.

But. BUT. He's affirmed my belief in feminism as the story with the most potential to create change. His chapter on the patriarchal structure is brilliant, because it comes right out and says that its “universality and stability” is bewildering. He presents all the key arguments for masculine supremacy and steadfastly exposes them as arrant nonsense. There's a glorious butter-wouldn't-melt tone to this writing: a swallowed amusement that no one will admit that the real reason men dominate over women is that, in general, they are selfish shitbags who chanced to seize an opportunity for power and never let go. The feminist story struggles because it is disparate and scratchy with argument and riddled with its own damaging hierarchies, but there is hope in its tenacity, its adaptability, its ongoing refusals, its compassionate communication (such a useful phrase). It is the story in which I have most faith, and which gives me the most strength.

He's also made me feel better about the idea of living in a bubble. If the imagined order at the macro scale is so impossible to change, why not collectively imagine a new order on a micro scale and live within that instead? At some level that's the ultimate in white middle-class privilege, of course – the same line of argument that builds walls and gated communities – but I don't, I hope, mean it that way. My alternative world is populated by makers of story, theatre, art, music and more, by feminists and activists, by people who don't retreat from the bigger world but comment on it, rewrite it, work against it. Each fuelling the other, giving each other purpose and sustenance, and making life in that bigger system possible.

Scandinavian pain

We went back, me and my funny little son, to A Lot of Sorrow, because – and, dozy as I am, I had to go to Chicago to find this out – the film was also screening in London over the summer, as part of the Ragnar Kjartansson exhibition at the Barbican. And then I had to go back a third time, because there were chunks of the exhibition deemed unsuitable for children (translation: he missed out on seeing a hilarious film of a dog running round and round a swimming pool as a woman swam lengths because it was next to a video of a couple having sex), and because he was tired by the time we reached the Visitors room and two minutes in there was 58 not enough.

I realised something, watching A Lot of Sorrow that third time, laughing as Kjartansson brought out burgers to the band, ribs crushing and convulsing every time Matt Berninger rumbled the opening line. There's a National lyric that's key to the whole exhibition, but it's not from Sorrow, it's from Pink Rabbits, an absolute humdinger in a song full of them:

You didn't see me, I was falling apart

I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park

You didn't see me, I was falling apart

I was a television version of a person with a broken heart

A television version of a person with a broken heart. Just writing it gives me shivers.

Kjartansson is fascinated by the interface of performance and personal, the effects of external culture on internal emotions, the ways in which people make stories which inform human behaviour, the Mobius strip of mirror and mirrored. In the accompanying text for the multi-video installation Scenes From Western Culture, he talks about the pervasiveness of certain atmospheres, certain settings and moods, wanting to jolt the brain into seeing them and maybe even resisting them. By using repetition, he invites audiences to look harder, give better attention: to seek out the difference between the television version and the person.

But it's the broken-hearted bit he's particularly incisive with. My son had zero tolerance for God, in which Kjartansson dresses up as a Rat Pack crooner and, accompanied by a cruise-liner swing band in a pink-satin room, warbles the words “sorrow conquers happiness” on repeat, and to be honest I didn't bother returning: the minute I saw felt off-kilter compared with the fine balancing act of A Lot of Sorrow and in particular The Visitors. There's such subtlety to the permutations of melancholy in both of those: the performers wallow in it, luxuriate in it, step away from it so easily that one person I know complained on twitter that he “smelt the faint whiff of vacuous”, saw only “irony on loop”; but there's also a fine and solicitous appreciation of how intense and real and consuming melancholy can be, how weird and jolting it is to feel like shit and yet sometimes be capable of laughing or noticing beauty, how excruciating it is to know somewhere deep down that the melancholy that is so overwhelming might also be something you're performing (a question Selina – waving hello again – asks of herself in Salt). Nothing about A Lot of Sorrow, or The Visitors, or Take Me Here by the Dishwasher felt ironic to me: there's a grain of playfulness in them, even in Dishwaster a dash of cheerful stupidity (in this one, Kjartansson has isolated three minutes of a soft-focus Mills & Boon movie romance, in which a woman in a pink maribou dressing gown has a tryst in the kitchen with a man in plumber's uniform, and projects it on a wall while young male musicians loll about the partially decorated gallery space strumming at guitars and droning the dialogue from the film on repeat). But the questions these works ask about how we see or feel or differentiate between the real, the imagined, the fantasised, the performed, and how our ability to do so is affected or conditioned by the art, film, theatre, music, TV and books we consume, are serious and rigorous and give Kjartansson's work its vitality.

Growing Old With You

Before I saw Search Party's Growing Old With You at Forest Fringe, Andy Field texted a warning: “your heart is going to BREAK”. I braced so strenuously that for most of it I was steel. But then Pete lay down on a table and Jodie began to cover his body in salt. And that was it. Snap.

Search Party are just about my favourite theatre-makers in Britain (inevitably that's a long list in which everyone is joint first). I love them for Save Me, the semaphore show, in which they stand at opposite ends of a public thoroughfare and communicate messages given by passers-by to each other; with patience and grace and infinite charm it makes visible the fragility of communication and the ways in which people speak their truest selves to strangers. I especially love them for My Son & Heir, the parenting show, in which they speak so honestly of the strains and anxieties and competitiveness and compromises and horrible absurdities of bringing up children that I wept almost non-stop through it. And now I love them for Growing Old With You, the all-of-our-lives show that they're going to make new versions of every 10 years. At Forest they performed the first instalment, and because it's already a few years old, it feels like an act of nostalgia as much as documentation and assessment. The scene in which Jodie covers Pete in salt felt, in the moment of watching, overwhelming in its romance and longing: for youth to be preserved, for the intensity and joy of falling in love and getting married to never be lost. But on reflection, its complexity is unfurling. I see the futility of that attempt to control time, and also the limitation of it: where's the room for growth or change? I see Pete lying still on the table like a corpse: that time is already gone, fleeting as the life of a butterfly, and nothing can ever bring it back. Above all, I see that while you can't argue with perfect being, maybe you can't live a full life either.

Dept. of Speculation

There's a great paragraph in a Guardian interview with Jenny Offill from last year in which she talks about her admiration for visual artists who “take an everyday thing and somehow make it, by accumulation, into something much bigger”, and in particular her delight that British reviewers of the book understood its humour, “all these moments which are really meant to be kind of a joke about what it’s like to be depressed”, which tells me she's probably a big fan of Kjartansson. I'm finding her novel Dept. of Speculation painful to read, because it's like she's poking needles into my brain. I had to put it down for two days after this line: “Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.” The paragraph in which the narrator, a woman of “crooked heart”, describes her happiest time as “a time you were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you, not even love” made me choke. I feel exposed by it, the more so because I so desperately wish I were smart and brave and gifted enough to have written it and it's lacerating to reminded page after page that I'm not.

The thing is, I never make room for other kinds of writing in my life, because I'm always writing about what other people make. Holding up a mirror to the mirror, an endless loop, shoring fragments of feeling and experience against my ruins.

Demolition plot (extended play)

There was a time when I wrote a diary. Not every day; intermittently, for about four years. I stopped when I realised that a) I was only writing it when I was miserable, b) I was repeating myself, c) writing it changed nothing.

There was a time when I thought Chekhov, if not the most boring playwright in the history of theatre, certainly in the top 10.

I'm sorry if you've read these things before here.

Remember that last sharp day of winter we had? At least, it was the last sharp day London had: Tuesday 26 April, 2016. I stood at the kitchen window and tried to work out if those slushy white flakes were hail or snow. A few days later I stood in the same place and realised I was looking at the first sharp day of spring: green leaves so defined against a bright blue sky they seemed extra-dimensional. And I had a thought I'd never had before: this means nothing to me. The spring, the brightness, the green, the blue. Time turning, age grinding, unremarkable repetition, and a slow, inexorable deadening.

This is the emotional voice in my head that listened to Chekhov's First Play and heard its echo.

But we won't start with either of those.

Let's start with Dominic Dromgoole.

In 2000 he published an “A-Z of contemporary playwrights”, The Full Room, written with such irascible passion that with every dip I come away scalded. On Phyllis Nagy: “I'm sure she's terrific, but for me it always sounds like someone being a writer, rather than someone writing about being.” On Lee Hall: “Somehow he manages to keep many thousands of hungry mouths happy with a few loaves of a talent.” That the witticisms emerge from a forensic scrutiny of the actual plays gives everything he writes an air of justice, despite his protestations in the introduction that he's not here to judge, and regardless of whether or not I agree. But if he's ruthless in exposing flaws or inconsistencies, he's also intemperate with admiration: in the heat and light of his praise, his subjects glow.

He also writes with a strong moral compass, whose true north is Chekhov. In the entry on Anthony Neilson, he notes approvingly: “As Chekhov could dream of a better world in time to come, without providing some glib programme of improvement, so Neilson looks four-square into the heart of our sexual darkness, and allows himself to dream of a better world.” And in the entry on Patrick Marber – “a brilliant boulevard entertainer” – he looks in vain for “a real wish for good. With a Chekhov, with a Brecht, with a Beckett,” he explains, “you see a brilliantly realised and brutally honest vision, behind which there hovers the ghost of a better, fairer, more beautiful world. With Marber … beyond what we see is a chaos filled with violence, sexual desire and sexual disgust, and endless mutual loathing.”

I think about this chapter on Marber a lot, in particular for what Dromgoole says in the final paragraph:

“Chekhov wrote volumes of work, built schools, opened hospitals, interviewed ten thousand prisoners on Sakhalin island, kept his family, kept his patients alive, held hundreds as they died, spent fifteen years coughing his own life away, and still managed to keep hope in balance with despair, still managed to love life and its mad optimism.”

The leaves, drunk on chlorophyll, radiant and meaningless.

*

The “director” of Chekhov's First Play (warning: a frenzy of spoilers lies ahead) has read a biography of Chekhov; he knows these facts and knows that, by comparison, he himself is failing. I put “director” in quote marks to differentiate him from Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, who co-directed Dead Centre's production, not because they didn't genuinely read the biography, but because I left the Mayfest performance stupefied by an adolescent crush on Moukarzel, who also wrote the adaptation and plays the “director” on stage, that heard everything he said as soul-dredging confession. I need the quotation marks to remind me that this is a character, that the voice that is speaking is a performed voice, that when the “director” begins berating himself as “a fraud”, when he says “I don't know what I'm doing” or that “I haven't been feeling myself lately. And by lately, I mean ever”, what I'm hearing is a fabrication. Never mind if it's the words I hear in my head all the time.

But let's avoid that voice a little longer.

It's hard to avoid the “director's” voice in this production. Once he's delivered his pitch-perfect introduction – light as a meringue and yet ominous, not just because he wields a gun, but because he makes visible something I (and likely others in the room) had never contemplated before: the audience member's temporary legal ownership of their theatre seat, its status as “private property” – he retreats to the wings and talks around, across and over his actors, commenting on their performances, his own choices, the themes and subtexts of the play. Of course, some of his own text has a subtext: when he says, close to the beginning, “I love real life. The detail”, there is an underlying irony that is quickly exposed when he begins to berate the actors for moving in the wrong way and forgetting their lines, in other words being real people, but also an undertow of pathos whose emotional pull operates more slowly.

What he particularly wants to draw our attention to is the reflection – no, continuation – of Chekhov's world in our own. Some of that is to do with unchanging human nature: as he notes in his introduction, all Chekhov's plays “ask the big questions: who am I? What kind of a society do I want to live in? What do I want?” But some of it is to do with the ways in which Chekhov thought about “the kind of society” that surrounded him, his attitudes towards privilege and work, property and debt, social stagnation and the possibility or imminence of change. These attitudes, compassionate, socialist and challenging of orthodoxy, have a pliability that the best directors (and playwright-adapters) seize as gleefully as children do playdoh.

I didn't think any of this until I watched Benedict Andrews' production of Three Sisters (Young Vic, 2012): it spoke so precisely to the frustrations of my own life, and to the stuckness I've been able to name since reading the Ann Cvetkovich book on depression, that I heard more vividly the play's address to society at large. I felt the same wonder and excitement watching Katie Mitchell's production of The Cherry Orchard (Young Vic, 2014): as adapted by Simon Stephens, it wasn't a play about privileged (albeit poor) people for whom I felt no sympathy, but the complex relationship between class, capitalism and environmental devastation. Robert Icke's Uncle Vanya (Almeida, 2016) was the least convincing of the three, in that a lot of the staging choices were fucking annoying even if they did make intellectual sense, but as a portrait of people damaged by the basic condition of being alive, holding down the lid on their hopes, desires, frustrations and anger before inevitably boiling over, it was exemplary.

I'd seen all of these plays before, sometimes in pretty good productions, but my general idea of Chekhov was sealed early on by a Cherry Orchard played in a wealthy suburb of London, by actors with plummy accents wearing white lace and linen suits, that left me wanting to punch every person on stage, for their entitlement, apathy and mediocrity. This was the problem of Chekhov's First Play for me: when the curtain rises, it looks like just such a traditional, tedious production. And that's a lie. The directors, Kidd and Moukarzel, know that it's a lie: they know they're working within a “German theatre” aesthetic, but they pretend not to be for dramatic and comic effect. To be fair, it works: the jokes teasing conservative theatre, in which the “director” complains about the actors and lets slip the sexual shenanigans going on behind the scenes, easily win the laughs they chase. OK, I sound like a miserabilist. But Chekhov's First Play does something incredibly powerful politically, and for me that could have been more potent still if Dead Centre hadn't settled on the chocolate-box image of a sprawling country house as the site for that action: an image that distances more than it implicates.

In other ways, Chekhov's First Play is rigorous in implicating. It makes explicit reference to Ireland's recent history, first with jokes about its flaccid economy, but gradually becoming more serious about the spiritual effect of debt. (Something about the way it compacted gravity and sickly unease into comedy reminded me of John McDonagh's film Calvary.) It talks about the central character of Platonov as someone “over-educated but useless, unnecessary”, typical of a generation who have “let go of ideals”: people who know that there is social inequality, rising poverty, ecological catastrophe taking place, but are comfortable enough themselves never to do anything more serious to challenge it than mouthing off on social media. (I'm very much describing myself here.) It spends its entire first half insistently arguing that we can't wait for someone else to save us. And then. And then.

Two months on, I still feel giddy and breathless just thinking about it. Because the hinge point of Chekhov's First Play unleashed all my wildest fantasies of what I'd like to do in the political world. It drops a wrecking ball from the flies and proceeds to demolish everything: the physical set, but also the metaphysical structures that hold the characters – and us, the audience – in place. That wrecking ball smashes at property, at family, at propriety and expectation. When it falls, the women stop talking in a vaguely dissatisfied way about lacking a sense of purpose and start naming their specific hatred of “my marriage and capitalism and my student loan and how the modern consumer society separates us from ourselves … normality and monogamy and gender normative privilege”. Being idealistic about wanting these things to change isn't enough. You have to get out there and actively fight them. You have to live the difference you want to see.

To do that takes courage and verve. It takes a willingness to make mistakes, look awkward, feel out-of-step with everyone else. It takes quick thinking and attentive listening. And Chekhov's First Play shows us how. It pulls someone out of the audience, someone prepared enough in advance to be wearing a particular red denim jacket but no more, and gets them to play Platonov. I've since read the playtext (THANK YOU OBERON for replacing the copy I stupidly lost) and understand a lot more about what happened in this half of the production, but I'm going to be truthful about the experience of watching and say that there was much that I didn't hear or that didn't feel clear in this section. It didn't matter: chaos was part of the point, the necessary correlative of destruction.

Through most of this, the “director's” voice is absent: he's silent because he shot himself, unable to bear the disparity between what he wanted the production to be and what he had actually made. Implicit in his adaptation is a question – what does it take to be extraordinary, and actually change the world? – and a recognition that it's the wrong question, playing into patriarchal notions of singularity and genius. Far better to be a nobody: but a nobody genuinely dedicated to the cause of helping other nobodies, enabling them to escape the bonds that tie them, enabling them to cast off the pressures of keeping up with life as shaped by neoliberalism. Platonov is that nobody: he's just a stranger, plucked from the auditorium. It could have been any one of us. And because of that, it's all of us.

Such was my intense sense of identification with this Platonov that I felt quite upset when the staging required him to point a gun at his own head. It felt wrong, an unethical ask. Reading back over the text, I wonder what it means to have a character repeatedly described as useless and unnecessary, and then have him played by a member of the audience. I worry that if I pick at the wrong thread of Moukarzel's adaptation, the whole thing will unravel.

What holds it all together for me, allows me to live in its contradictions, is that voice, the “director's” voice, which is also Platonov's, and mine. That voice caught between idealism and pessimism, hope and depression, knowledge of the work that needs doing and terror of actually doing it. The “director” seems so confident when Chekhov's First Play starts, but it's all bluff. He lacks faith not only in himself but in theatre as a medium: “It's so aimless,” he mourns, as his characters sing People Ain't No Good in Russian. The song returns in the final scene, when the “director” returns, head bandaged, for a speech that devastated me:

“This gun. At least let me explain one thing right. Chekhov's first play had a gun in it and his second, and all the rest had guns in them in one way or another, until in his last play … it was gone. It's like he got over it. He wrote away the gun.

He realised his characters have to do something even harder than dying. They have to go on living.”

I've lost count of the number of times I've thought those last two sentences in the past few years. The accuracy with which they echoed my inner voice – the inner voice that the “director” explicitly acknowledges in his opening speech – meant that the words that followed reduced me to a puddle. “I don't know who I am, what it is I want, why I'm alive. But I need to have courage,” his voice, my voice, said. “I wonder will this voice ever stop? … This commentary, commenting on everything. Will it ever go away?” Not just my inner voice but the voice I hear speaking to a counsellor, a weirdly out-of-body experience. “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say...?” These are the questions that consume me at night, lying awake in my too-hard bed. And as I sat in my theatre seat – my own private property, which holds me in place, in which I always behave with absolute decorum, just as I do in the world outside – I knew exactly what was coming next, but still felt an intense sense of gratification when Platonov's final word is: hello.

*

For such a basic word, hello is really hard to say.

On Friday 1 July, I visited the South-East London Sisters Uncut occupation of a disused shop in Peckham. I'd planned to get there early and sit with my laptop, writing about the room, but also maybe writing this, or about Ria Hartley's work, or maybe about what it was to grow up in Thatcher's Britain as a way of reflecting on the terror and anxiety but also weird sense of euphoria I felt in the first week post-referendum, when it still seemed vaguely possible that there might be a left-wing resurgence (excuse me while I wring my hands with despair). Instead, I found all sorts of excuses to delay leaving home. There wasn't going to be wifi in the building. I had some scraps of food in the house that I ought to cook for my lunch. And so it was 1.30pm by the time I arrived, giving me barely an hour in the space before the school run.

The people on the door were immediately friendly but the usual shyness consumed me so I rejected the offer of a tour and had a look round on my own. The main room was welcoming, warm and light, despite having few windows and no carpet on the concrete floor. It was the warmth and light of generosity and political fervour. The occupation was staged to draw attention to the lack of provision for women living in Southwark who experience domestic violence, particularly black and minority ethnic women following austerity cuts. Along one wall was a huge banner bearing the group's slogan: how can she leave if there's nowhere to go? Along another, lively posters detailed previous Sisters Uncut actions, in photographs and clips from less than sympathetic media. There were sofas and a large children's play space with toys and a wendy house and drawing materials, and a stack of food with an invitation to all-comers to help themselves. Scattered around were copies of the excellently thoughtful safe space policy, and reminders that the space was open only to people who identify as female or non-binary. It was beautiful.

Looking around gave me the courage to go back to the people at the door and say hello. This is how I met Sita X. When a friend of Sita's arrived I continued the conversation with Becca, asking about how the occupation was going, and about Sisters Uncut generally. When I had to leave, I felt like an idiot: I hadn't had enough time. I wished I'd been there all day.

I asked Becca why Southwark in particular and she patiently told me about its appalling record of failing women who come to the council seeking help in escaping abuse situations. We talked about the council's bristly, patronising response to the occupation, that “statistics don't tell the whole story”, and the blog Sisters Uncut planned to publish in reply. I asked how they managed to get into the building, and Becca told me about laws related to squatting and the mechanics of the occupation, how everyone involved was taking time off from work or study to be there. I've always been terrified of this kind of direct action – and there was a moment when the Sisters gathered at the door, worried that an aggressive man might be seeking entry, that reminded me why – but talking to Becca and Sita, it felt possible. More than that: necessary.

I can't imagine not writing about theatre but nor can I carry on as I am, advocating in the abstract for social change without doing physical work to bring it about. In the time it's taken me to write this post, I've been reading Here We Stand, a glorious, invigorating book of interviews with and texts by female activists, that is nourishing me and encouraging me and giving me a way forward. There's one woman in particular, Mary Sharkey, that I'm clinging to because she was in her early 40s before she became politically active: what a relief to encounter her, and recognise that there's no point berating myself for wasting time and not doing this sooner (that voice again, commenting on everything) because – as she says in the final line of her interview – it's never too late to start. She has an excellent motto, too: “Behold the turtle, who makes progress when she sticks her neck out.” Perfect.

So I've been inhaling that, and also Kimya Dawson's album Thunder Thighs, which I deeply regret missing on first release, if only because it would have done me much good to hear her sing “now I'm 37 and I'm glad that I'm alive” when I was 37 and really not. There are so many best-friend songs on this album: Same Shit/Complicated, which trumps me for ultra-earnest expression; Utopian Futures, which to the letter describes the place I want to live; Zero or a Zillion, a piquant fuck you to the art accountants out there. But I think my favourite is Miami Advice, in particular the chorus that closes it:

You think I'm preaching to the choir

But I am not

I'm singing with the choir

This is such a key point made by the women of Here We Stand (a book, it's worth noting, that was recommended to me by Mary Paterson, with whom I've been working for a couple of years and in that time has taught me so much about collaboration and political engagement): the real goal isn't individual action but collective. “What we create are ripples,” says Liz Crow, “where the work of many peoples combines to make change.” And collectivity starts with saying hello.

*

Five years ago, I started writing a diary again. It's going OK: I'm doing better at turning to it in different moods, and trying hard not to repeat myself. I still know it doesn't change anything, not materially. But it does something my old diary never did. It says hello. I know this because you're reading it now.

 

It may be just us who feel this way

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.