REVIEW: The 77th Cannes Film Festival

FRENCH CONNECTION

 

The 77^th Cannes Film Festival was marked by the arrival of the MeToo movement in France and defined by stories that focused on the experiences of women.

"Carn. Cans. Can." Meryl Streep takes a moment at the podium and gazes out at the formally dressed audience. It is the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival and all 2300 pairs of eyes rest on her. "We Americans think it's fancy to say Carrrn," she deepens her voice, softens her Rs and arches her brow until it frames a knowing look. "But it's wrong. Cannes," she says, now softening the A and crisply exorcising the final three letters. Streep, recipient of over 200 awards for acting and maybe the last woman on Earth who needs to receive another, is in the process of doing just that. Holding her honorary Palme d'Or, presented moments earlier by fellow acting legend Juliette Binoche, she beams. "This prize is unique in the world of cinema, and I am very, very honoured to receive it."

 

For 77 years, Cannes has endured wars, financial and political crises, labour revolts and a totemic shift in film production and distribution (and that’s just in the last 12 months) to remain unique in the world of cinema. The place best known to some film fans as the destination of Mr Bean’s Holiday remains the global capital of theatrical filmmaking and solemnly reverential toward those who create it. The pride with which the festival takes in tradition is routinely mocked and quietly remarkable. 

However, systemic change is afoot. Days before Streep’s speech, the French government launched an inquiry into sexual and gender-based violence in cinema which comes in the wake of charges of rape and sexual assault levelled against acting icon Gérard Depardieu. Over the last year, the introduction of chaperones for minors on film sets and intimacy coordinators – once inconceivable for an industry in thrall to the vision of the “auteur” – have become commonplace. If there is a face of this change it is actress and director Judith Godrèche. Best known for starring in Ridicule and alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask, Godrèche was one of the first to bring charges of attempted rape against Harvey Weinstein, a crime she alleges took place during the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. In February this year, she filed charges of rape against directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon. All three men have denied her allegations.

Last year, the festival opened with the Johnny Depp-starring French period drama Jeanne Du Barry. This year, the Un Certain Regard sidebar opened with Godrèche's Moi aussi, a short documentary that features personal testimony from hundreds of women in the industry who have experienced sexual abuse. “I am a whistle,” Godrèche said at the premiere. “What we need is a fanfare.”

The festival’s version of a fanfare is the standing ovation. A fixture of every premiere, applause is not an effective measure of quality, but it can be a mark of the film’s first tentative steps into the world, as is booing. The only film at which I heard both was the festival's most expensive and ambitious, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Coppola nodded, bowed and occasionally wept for eight minutes as the Grand Cinema Lumiere expressed its appreciation (though for those keeping score, there was another full minute of applause mid-film in response to a moment of metatextual interactivity that I won’t spoil). The director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now describes his absolutely unhinged $120 million self-funded science fiction opus as “A Roman epic in an imaginary decadent modern America.” In it, Adam Driver plays Cesar, a visionary architect with soaring plans for New Rome, a dystopian analogue of New York City. Cesar has fallen in love with Nathalie Emmanuel’s Julia, daughter of the city’s corrupt mayor, Franklyn Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito. Cicero doesn’t want to lose the world over which he rules, and plots Cesar’s downfall. While one dreams and the other schemes, Aubrey Plaza’s ambitious journalist Wow Platinum begins a relationship with Cesar’s billionaire uncle Hamilton Crassus III, played by Jon Voight, and Shia LeBeouf’s cross-dressing spy Clodio stalks marbled halls, hissing lines like, “Revenge tastes best while wearing a dress.” Even Coppola, who admitted to rewriting the script 300 times over 40 years, professed not to fully comprehend his creation. As I heard one critic say, while queuing for Andrea Arnold’s Bird the following morning, “Anyone who claims to understand it after a single viewing is lying, and no-one will ever watch it twice.” 

Bird is a much easier film to love. Arnold’s gritty, vibrant ode to girlhood follows 12-year-old Bailey, who lives in a liberally graffitied London housing estate with her equally liberally tattooed father, Bug, played by Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan. Bug is breeding a toad that sweats a hallucinogenic slime he is hoping to sell to fund his imminent wedding. Outside, London is all housing estates, green fields, and free roaming children and animals. While on one of her frequent ventures, Bailey meets the elfin Bird, played by Franz Ragowski, who is trying to find his parents. Arnold's film is warm, frequently hilarious, often wincingly violent and tinged with a magical realism that proved divisive among critics. 

Coming of age films, such as those in which Godrèche was cast when she was a child, have been a fixture at Cannes since its inception. The difference today is that they tend to be written and directed by women. Alongside Bird, this year’s selection features Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond, a French film about an influencer and hustler whose life is upended when she successfully auditions to be on a reality television show and India Donaldson’s Sundance triumph Good One, a minimalist, slow-burn story about a hiking trip taken by a father and daughter and a reminder that the 90-minute movie is not dead.

Emilia Perez is Jacques Audiard’s musical about the head of a Mexican drug cartel who hires a lawyer to help fake his death and arrange gender-affirming surgery for his transition. Bought by Netflix, Winner of both the Jury Prize and the Best Actress award for its female leads Selena Gomez, Zoe Soldana, Adriana Paz and trans Argentinean actor Karla Sofía Gascón, Audiard’s audacious film is a compulsively engaging character study overflowing with brio. If the synth-heavy songs like La Vaginoplastia don’t linger in the memory, their context and performance certainly does.

Also not leaving the memory any time soon is The Substance. Coralie Fargeat’s Best Screenplay-winning feminist body horror charts the psychological and physical disintegration of Demi Moore's fitness celebrity, Elizabeth Sparkle, who engages the services of a mysterious company that allows her to create “the best version of herself”. This version is played by the younger Margot Qualley, who emerges through a gaping wound in Moore’s back, the first of many exercises in grotesque excess, all in service of Fargeat's commentary about beauty, youth, women’s bodies and the pressures of the entertainment industry, inspired by Moore’s memoir, Inside Out.

 

Only one film at Cannes this year features a dehydrated and screaming Nicholas Cage in the foam of a West Australian beach, forcing a dead rat into the mouth of a surfer called Pitbull, and it wasn’t Yorgos Lanthimos's follow up to Poor Things, the darkly funny Kinds of Kindness. Lorcan Finnegan’s equally entertaining The Surfer, the sole Australian contribution to this year's program, sees Cage returning from thirty years in California to the town he grew up in with dreams of buying his father’s house and taking his son for a surf. Instead, he encounters violent localism from a surf posse headed by Julian McMahon’s Scally: “Don’t live here? Don’t surf here.” Inspired by Australian new wave cinema, The Surfer is buoyed by Finnegan’s potent visual style and Cage’s brand of sympathetic intensity which was on powerful form at the film’s premiere as his cries of “mangez le rat!” ("eat the rat!") from the stage of the Grand Theatre Lumière echoed throughout its standing ovation.

The festival’s most consistently funny and original title was Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language. In Rankin's world, a wintry Canada has adopted Farsi as its official language. Two schoolgirls find a 500 Rial banknote frozen in a block of ice with which they hope to buy a pair of glasses for their friend after they were taken by an errant turkey. Rankin harnesses the dry wit of Garrison Keillor, the precise framing of Wes Anderson and the colour palette of an Soviet industrial estate to create a film full of sweetly weird situations and sight gags.

 

Another out of competition highlight was the 67-minute documentary La Belle de Gaza. Director Yolande Zauberman hears of a trans woman who walked from Gaza to join Tel Aviv's queer community. In the backstreets of the Israeli capital, Zauberman earns the trust of a tightknit group who share their stories and talk about their bodies, religion, sex work and families (some of whom will kill them if they return to their home countries) as Zauberman’s camera watches them pray, sing, dance and hustle. In 2024, La Belle de Gaza feels like a minor miracle.

 

Sean Baker's Anora was another story of sex work. One of the few American films in competition, Baker's film was purchased by Neon, the distributor responsible for the last four Palme d’Or winners. Anora moves with the riotous energy of a 1930s screwball comedy as it trails the romance between Mikey Madison’s Anora and Mark Eydelshteyn’s Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch. With dreams of escaping his family and becoming American, Ivan pays Anora $15,000 to be his “very horny girlfriend” for a week, during which they party in Las Vegas, and marry. With echoes of Martin Scorsese's After Hours and the Safdie brothers' unrelenting Uncut Gems, Anora proved irrepressible to the festival's judges – a group led by Barbie director Greta Gerwig that included Lily Gladstone, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Eva Green – who awarded it the festivals' top prize, the Palme d'Or.

About as far from the heightened energy of Anora as it is possible to be is the film that took the runner up prize, the Grand Prix. All We Imagine as Light is Payal Kapardia’s intimate account of the lives and struggles of two Indian nurses working in a hospital and sharing a small apartment in Mumbai. The first Indian film in competition for 30 years, and the first ever directed by an Indian woman, Kapadia’s film glows warmly, framing its protagonists with deep empathy as they move through the metropolis, beginning and ending relationships in a story that lingered long after its twilit beachside ending.

Another film likely to recur in conversations throughout 2024 is The Apprentice. Among all the possible subjects for that most leaden of genres, the biopic, Donald Trump is likely to be among the least desired. Yet, Iranian director Ali Abbasi has crafted a sharp crime saga that focuses on the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong, and his mentorship of Sebastian Stan’s aspiring real estate mogul from the early 1970s until the mid 1980s. Already the subject of a lawsuit from both Trump and a financier who thought The Apprentice would be more flattering to the former president, Abbasi's character-driven approach allows the many criminal and unethical acts portrayed to speak for themselves, though whether people want to spend time with these characters is another matter.

Last month, another Iranian director, Mohammad Rasoulof, was sentenced to public flogging and eight years imprisonment for making films that Iran's revolutionary court deemed “examples of collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security.” Mid-way into the festival, word spread that Rasoulof had defied authorities to flee Iran and attend Cannes. As Rasoulof walked the red carpet, up the stairs and into the film's premiere, to applause that felt celebratory, he held photos of two of his film’s lead actors, currently detained for their involvement in the film. Filmed in secret, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a domestic thriller in which Misagh Zare plays Iman, a newly appointed investigator to the revolutionary court. The promise of a new house and status is undone when loses his gun, a crime that could see him jailed. Iman accuses his law-abiding wife and two teenage daughters, participants in "Women. Life. Freedom" protest movement, of stealing it. As pressure grows both inside and outside the family's cramped apartment, Rasoulof intercuts real social media footage of police brutality, making for a powerful film that topped critics polls and offered a searing insight into the impossibility of being a "good" citizen.

"It is so much quieter this year," an Uber driver told me, toward the end of the festival. "It's no good." Due to last year's screenwriters and actors' strikes, this year's festival featured fewer American films. Instead, more focus has been put on female-fronted events and the festival's unofficial awards. The competition for the Queer Palm – awarded to the film that best deals with LGBT+, feminist characters and topics or challenging gender norms – was fierce, with the award going to Three Kilometers to the End of the World, Emanuel Parvu’s claustrophobic account of virulent homophobia in a small Romanian town. Last year the Palm Dog, the award given to the best canine performance in a film, went to Messi, the border collie from Anatomy of a Fall. This year a griffon mix called Kodi, star of the lightweight legal comedy Dog on Trial, a film about the judging of a mordacious dog, took home the prize.

 

“It was an embarrassment of riches this year in terms of cinema,” said Gerwig during the closing ceremony. “We really led with our hearts for everything we watched.” As the films make their way into Australian cinemas and onto streaming platforms over the next 12 months, cinephiles can be sure of finding films to love.

Live Review: Nat Vazer, Willowbank Grove, Private Mountain

Howler April 19, 2024

 

The arboreal enclave of Brunswick's Howler plays host to an odd crowd tonight. Older fans who are there for what could prove to be the last ever lineup of one of the city's greatest live acts, and a much younger and louder group who seem more familiar with the two support acts. The first of these comprises a solo set from Tom Pleasance, better known as the frontman for the unassuming and quietly amazing psych pop combo Private Mountain. Anyone who has come across the band on stage or online will know about Pleasance's wry turns of phrase and gift with melodies and instrumentation. Solo, these songs are a very different prospect. Shorn of the arrangements and layers that make them songs so remarkable, his set feels slightly aimless and the songs repetitive. Though his voice is a powerful instrument – especially when he pushes it a little and it gains a raspy edge – Pleasance relies on dynamics to a degree that suggests he knows the songs aren't strong enough in this format. His thick guitar chords plucked or lightly strummed come almost as an afterthought. Songs like From Moment to Moment, so compelling and exciting on record, seem formless and thinner in this version. New songs that comprise the rest of the set are difficult to gauge in their full versions, and yet, I cannot wait to see them played as a band. Pleasance is a compelling presence and a truly exciting talent.

 

Until 12 hours before showtime, the middle slot of the evening was due to be taken by one of Melbourne's most hyped and exciting bands, Moaning Lisa. Due to what we later learn is "a nasty case of Covid", the band withdrew, and youthful funk sextet Willowbank Grove stepped up to the plate. Sounding and looking like the offspring of The Cat Empire, or a band that heard Red Hot Chilli Peppers' One Hot Minute and decided that was all the inspiration they needed to form a band, Willowbank Grove has a lot going on. Distinct personalities abound. Songs seem to be vehicles for energy, with all the members playing all the time. Well, we later get some slap bass solos, but even then the band’s two singers partake in a rhythmic dance that involves hitting each other’s shoes with their own. Regardless of whether you find this endearing or weirdly twee what matters is that the band think this matters. There is no apology or shyness or reticence. What there is, is so much musical talent and joy in performance – especially in the form of singer Camryn Jordans – that it's almost impossible to deny. Afternoon slots in music festivals were invented for a band like this one. 

 

Also overcoming sound issues with sheer tightness is the woman who is the reason we are all here. Before she even plays a note, Nat Vazer is an immediately powerful stage presence. Opening with Alexander and the stunning Higher Places, Vazer and her band lock into airy and propulsive grooves over which her voice swoops and glides. It's a stunning combination and one that arrests the attention of all in the room. A subsequent gorgeously moody version of Reptilia uncovers depths that even The Strokes didn't know it held. 

 

"It's an emotional night, tonight," Vazer tells the crowd. This will be the band's last Melbourne show for the foreseeable future, as they are soon to relocate to the United States. The move will be without guitarist Andy Campbell who Vazer describes as "the best guitarist in the country". Though a contested title, Campbell makes a strong argument for its truth with his work on the ensuing tracks Addicted to Misery and Rumours, two high points of Vazer’s 2023 album Strange Adrenaline. The interplay between Vazer and Campbell's guitars has always been a highlight of her songs, and it is hard to imagine that his fiery solos and textured, fluid chords will be easily replaced. "He's been with us for five and a half years," says Vazer, as the audience applauds. Campbell nods politely. Introducing "a new song that hasn't been recorded yet," the band ease into Fortune Teller, a rich and languid song that, like many of her best, is pushed along by Vazer's deft finger picking and toasted guitar tone. With the opening notes of her best-known song, Strange Adrenaline, fans surge to the stage, phones aloft, to film the performance and join her in the catchy chorus. Again, the dual guitars of Vazer and Campbell push a good song to even greater heights. Smiling, and looking as though she is feeling the emotion she mentioned earlier, Vazer thanks the support acts and introduces the band. "This next song is our last one," says Vazer. Closing with another of her best songs, Grateful, the surging guitars, the pointed lyrics, the smart, twisting arrangement and cacophonous outro all make the case for her as Vazer being one of the city’s great hidden talents. One we are soon – temporarily at least – to lose. As she sings, minutes before leaving the stage: "She climbed so high, she broke the ceiling / So we can do it once more with feeling / They tell me it could be easy / And I should be grateful". She might not need to be, but we are. 

Live Review: Chris Isaak, Bobbie Lee Stamper

Palais Theatre, April 16, 2024

 

With the Melbourne International Comedy Festival filling the city streets with punters hungry for laughs, it turns out that one of the funniest and most enjoyable shows in town this evening has nothing to do with the festival at all.

 

But before the Chris Isaak show can begin, an almost-full theatre is treated to the hushed folk rock of Ohioan singer-songwriter Bobbie Lee Stamper. Stamper’s finger picking style is easy on the ear and his voice brings to mind Mark Knopfler or Bruce Springsteen. To hold a sold-out Palais to attention requires charisma and thankfully Stamper has plenty. His songs Too Much Light, Another Human Heart and Burn So Bright sound as though they could have been released anytime in the last 50 years, and they hush the audience in a way that is surprising for someone relatively unknown. Playing much of his 2023 album Bad Rhythm of a Good Heart, Stamper's songs are deceptively straightforward, balancing simple structures, unshowy playing and sharp, observational lyrics. He closes his set with Black Eye, a “drinking song for people who don’t drink”, its lyrics full of Americana references like county lines, tanks of gas and shotgun shacks; imagery the audience eats up. But of course, we're leaving plenty of room for the main course.

 

As Isaak arrives the stage is bathed in warm lights and red drapes that can't help recalling the world of Twin Peaks. The crowd, mostly aged as if they caught Isaak on his first tour in 1995, thrill with excitement. More than anywhere else in the world, Australia has had a lasting love for Isaak, sending his albums high in the charts during his heyday and warmly welcoming him to X-Factor and the 2015 AFL Grand Final decades later. It’s a curious obsession but one that comes to a full-throated denouement this evening. Within moments of beginning American Boy ("I'm the original American boy / Love you baby, with all my heart / Ten times better than those movie stars") there is no flicker of a doubt that we are in good hands. Isaak's magnificent voice, his good-natured Hanks-ian charm and his musical proficiency; it’s all here and no screaming impassioned sexagenarian fan will sway him. Isaak’s band – most of whom we are later reminded have been with him for over 39 years – are equally at ease in the songs, on the stage and with the crowd. Sometimes, such as in the case of some recent tours from long-running bands, familiarity can result in lazy concerts in which the audience is taken for granted. Not so with Isaak. After a version of Somebody's Crying that sees the band dancing energetically while holding their guitars aloft, Isaak pauses to talk to the crowd. “I mean, we might not be Taylor Swift quality,” he says in mock seriousness, snapping a friendship bracelet on his wrist. “But we are union quality and tonight you’re going to see this band give at least 60 per cent. Maybe even higher.” Isaak spends the next two songs testing the range of his wireless microphone as he ventures throughout the crowd, up the stairs and to the very back of the higher balcony, posing for selfies, doling out high fives and ensuring no face is left glum. Skills that led to him being given the short-lived sitcom The Chris Isaak Show television series are being exercised to their fullest. 

 

“You’re not a crowd, you're a mob,” he says, smiling and breathless from the exertion. Once back on stage the band reel through the high energy rock of I Want Your Love and the spellbinding tenderness of Wicked Game, a delicate atmosphere of close mic'ed vocals that swoop to a peerless falsetto and resonant guitar lines, broken only by the incessant screams of an inebriated fan. Tonight's crowd contains more boomer energy than a Kmart Boxing Day sale, but again, nothing phases Isaak. Not even when a story about visiting Sun Studios is interrupted by a fan in the crowd who insists he sign her tee-shirt. "Man, I feel like I'm in a bar again," he says, smiling and taking her pen.

 

Speak of the Devil, Summer Holiday and a cover of Pretty Woman bring the crowd to its feet, much to Isaak's delight, "come on, stand up!" he tells us. "Pants are overrated." Much of the second half of the concert is given over to cover versions of fifties and sixties classics, and it is a thrill to hear not only Isaak's magnificent voice curl its way around melodies that he almost makes his own, but of the personal connections to that era of music. Returning to the Sun Studios story, Isaak shares how he met Elvis Presley's guitarist Scotty Moore there, and later sung with proto-rock legends Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison, "a man who was friends with everyone in this band." It is this connection that is clearly a huge part of his appeal, yet it is one that never overshadows Isaak's talents. 

 

For the concert's acoustic session, the audience returns to their seats and the band draw themselves to the front of the stage, Isaak taking an acoustic guitar to lead them through Forever Blue, Two Hearts and another Orbison cover, Only the Lonely. It is here that the musicianship on stage really shines. Drummer and backing vocalist Kenney Dale Johnson, bassist Roly Salley, guitarist Hershel Yatovitz and keyboard player Timothy Drury feel like a band who have played together for nearly four decades. Occasionally moving into synchronised dance moves, as in Livin’ for Your Lover (used in the film Blue Velvet), pitching in with perfect backing vocals and looking like exactly what you would expect someone who has made a living as a session musician to look, they are exactly the right crew for the job. The band and Isaak move with a joyous ease and freedom when goofing around or nailing the chorus of a pop classic like Blue Hotel. Tonight, we get two Elvis covers, I Forgot to Remember to Forget and I Can't Help Falling in Love With You and gags about long-term relationships and the value of being passionate over being good at something, before we get the set closer, Big Wide Wonderful World. 

 

Disappearing off stage just long enough to change into a suit made of small rectangular mirrors, Isaak and the band return to the ominous chug of his evergreen hit Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing, which sees him bring some of the few women in the crowd under 40 to the stage to dance alongside him. Like him, and us, they can barely keep the smiles from their faces. 

 

  

Live Review: Love of Diagrams, Scott and Charlene's Wedding, Thibault

The Northcote Social Club, March 22, 2024

 

Much like Wilco's recent shows at the Forum, and the prices at the merch desk ($30 for an album, $20 for a t-shirt), tonight's concert evokes an earlier time. The difference between Wilco's audience and tonight's sold-out show is that here there are just as many, if not more, women than dads. 

 

But before we can revel in one of the great Melbourne bands of the 2000s, comes the appealing assertiveness of Thibault. Multi-instrumentalist Nicole Thibault is a glorious presence on stage. Fingers picking out arpeggios and stabbing at chords on her Nord keyboard, dress billowing as she moves between instruments, her warm and piercing voice filling the room. Thibault seems most at home when talking to the audience, which seems to be largely made up of friends or people she treats as friends. Sharing stories about demolishing the rider at last night's show, about a drunken Mac DeMarco inviting her to his house for Christmas (“I don’t know how he’s still alive. He really knows how to party”) and inviting people to join her band mid-gig (“I’ve asked people to join my band but...no one has ever asked me to join their band,” she observes) she is joyous company. Thankfully, her songs are just as engaging. Bright keyboard lines, fluid textures from guitarist Zak Olsen and the rhythm section of local legends Parsnip – bassist Stella Rennex and drummer Rebecca Liston – round out songs like the home cooking ode Spanakopita and glittering instrumental, Treasure Trove. “We're going to play a new song now,” says Thibault, picking up her trombone. “It's a song that rips off all my other songs, but that’s how it works isn’t it?” The band closes out their set with Put in Bin which segues into Later Expectations, a highlight from the band's 2020 album 'Or Not Thibault'. They're a band that is so unassuming and so welcoming it is easy to forget just how great they are.

 

As Scott and Charlene’s Wedding arrive on stage the room gets tighter and the mood is dialled to a gentle convivial euphoria. Everyone seems excited to be out and buoyed by memories of the last time they heard this music. Another soundtrack to many of these is Craig Dermody's project, now in its 18th year. Joined by bassist Jack Farley, lead guitarist and singer Gill Tucker and drummer Joe Alexander, Dermody peals through some of the band's best songs, Scrambled Eggs, Bush and Don't Bother Me. As with Thibault, it is easy to overlook the talent that exists in our midst, and Dermody stakes yet another claim as being one of the city's greatest songwriters. "'Cause I've seen days / Turn my world black, black, black, black, black / Now these little things, they don't bother me," he sings as he slashes away at his Telecaster. Meanwhile Tucker – scarcely able to conceal her joy at performing – almost steals the show with her solos and fluid playing. It's a dynamite combination. "Love of Diagrams have been away for seven years," says Dermody. "They mentored me. They mentored all of us." he adds to cheers from the crowd. Closing with "my favourite song", Dermody dives into Footscray Station, I think I lost my brain / I think I lost my soul / But I found it again in rock roll". Surely another under-sung anthem.

 

"One of the thoughts I had after having a break was, I wanted to be less hectic about the way that I shared music with other people," Love of Diagrams' Antonia Sellbach told Sam Cummins on his Triple R radio show Press Colour earlier in the week. "Essentially you are communing together, and I didn't necessarily want to be passing on those feelings I had in a public arena." Beginning as an instrumental band, Love of Diagrams have always made songs that are open to interpretation. Full of power and moving along a spectrum that ranged from seismic exhilaration to mournful anxiety, the crowds they drew from their birth in the early 2000s was unusually broad for a band once described by Pitchfork as working "with mad scientific precision". Asking people what they thought songs were "about" was a fraught exercise. This openness means that when the trio of guitarist and singer Luke Horton, drummer Monica Fikerle and Sellbach on bass and vocals, revisit these songs, they too have the capacity to understand them anew. Hearing this music played with the forceful intensity that was always part of the band's music but through a better soundsystem and a renewed confidence and intentionality is thrilling. Fikerle's militaristic drumming is still a thing of wonder. Constantly pushing the songs forward, her precision combined with Sellbach's melodic and often distorted basslines anchor the songs in a way that still feels new. Album and live reviews in the past might have leaned on genres like shoegaze, no-wave and post-punk, but in full flight, it feels like no other band has dug as deep into this specific way of using guitar, bass and drums. Few bands sound this tight, this well-rehearsed, and driven by personalities more content to express themselves through their instruments. Opening with What Are You Waiting For?, the first track on their 2007 release 'The Target is You', the crowd is instantly on board. Waiting, The Pyramid and Blast follow. Even listening to the way Horton retunes his guitars between the songs sounds transportive, but this concert is not just about nostalgia. Songs like How You Run, The Pace and the Patience and Deep Sky still sound thrillingly visceral. Love of Diagrams still sound like a band on the verge of being "discovered" by a new generation of musicians. As to why we have waited so long for a Love of Diagrams show, Horton offers "our daughter is seven. I blame her." Closing with the staggering Counting to Ten, Mountain and an encore of "that one that was in The O.C.", No Way Out, Love of Diagrams prove that, despite all that has happened in the last seven years, they still sound like no one else. 

Live Review: Teenage Fanclub, Euros Childs

The Croxton Bandroom, March 9, 2024

 

During the 1990s, it was hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about the Glaswegian quintet. Kurt Cobain called them "the best band in the world". Liam Gallagher described them as "the second-best band in Britain" (after his own, of course). Since then, the band's longevity has led them to be cherished even more with each passing year and tonight, the room is full of fans in love with its steadfast commitment to jangly guitars, distorted lead breaks and simmering harmonies.

 

Before we could get to the Fannies, tonight's audience were treated to a set from the band's keyboard player and backing vocalist Euros Childs, once better known as the lead singer songwriter in Welsh psychedelic pop group Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. Opening with the barrelhouse organ singalong style of Tete a Tete, Childs delivers a set that is heavy on surrealistic joy and humility. Songs like Bits of Me (Falling Off) about a man whose body is disintegrating in socially awkward ways, to Happy Coma, about a hospital patient unable to ask his partner not to turn off a life support machine, a song about Richard Branson buying the moon (Virgin Moon), the Gorky's Poodle Rockin' and the Kinks-ish Stunt Man, echo John Betjemen's blend of absurdism and observational pathos. Childs uses his voice to powerful effect, investing his bizarre imagery with the gravitas necessary to bring out the humanity in his observations. To have heard Childs' songs feels fortuitous. It would have been some kind of crime to have kept a talent like his in the background of the ensuing show.

 

Arriving on stage looking like the last academics remaining in Glasgow University Library at closing time, Teenage Fanclub smile at the crowded room, a swathe of which is still made up of snaking beer queues. The band open with Home, the first of several songs from their 2021 album Endless Arcade. The moment lead singer Norman Blake and guitarist Raymond McGinley harmonise, the band's true distinctiveness is revealed. Many bands combine comfortable rhythms with jangling guitars and male vocals, but the Fannies' impact has always come from the combination of the voices of Blake, McGinley and Gerard Love and the deceptively simple and complementary melodies they share. That Love left the band in 2018 means that any concert since that point misses not only his voice and basslines, the latter of which are amply covered by former keyboard player Dave McGowan. Citing an unwillingness to tour as reasons for his departure, McGowan, Euros Childs and drummer Francis McDonald are all fine singers, but there is a sense that this band can only be two-thirds of their former selves, a point driven home by the gulf between the quality of songs written and recorded in the 1990s and everything that came after. 

 

Highlighting their latest album, Nothing Lasts Forever, and best equipped to play songs written since Love's departure, there is a lethargy and indifference to those newer songs, both in their execution and reception. "I just got 10,000 steps there," says Blake, glancing at his fitness tracker at the end of the band's most recent single, Foreign Land. It is about the most interesting thing about the performance of a song that looks back contentedly on a sunlit past. Songs written in the last couple of decades, like Falling into the Sun, I Left a Light On and Everything is Falling Apart, are perfectly serviceable. But the moment the band begin one of the songs that Cobain and Gallagher fell in love with – I Don't Want Control of You, Alcoholiday or What You Do to Me – the place explodes. Arms are thrust aloft, joy blooms, even a few tears flow. It is heady stuff. While the band deploy the same amount of energy to play these songs (maybe the same amount you might when separating the recycling), their smiles widen and the band seem recharged by these receptions. You can see Blake, McGinlay and McGowan thinking "This is why we have travelled to the other side of the world". After so many years singing together, this is a band empowered by performing live, the raw sound in the room brings an edge buffed off by the studio production. The sweetness of their voices becomes immeasurably more potent when it clashes with distorted guitars, a fuzzy bass and the occasional dissonance of a feedback squall. This is a combination they employed copiously with their early albums but missing from their more recent releases. 

 

“We’ve got a few more songs for you then we’ll go off and pretend that the show has finished," Blake helpfully tells us. "Then we’ll come back and play four more songs and then that’s the show," he smiles. "Have to keep you up to date with what’s going on.” The band launch into I'm in Love from their 2016 album Here, My Uptight Life, from their 2000 album Howdy, and close their set with The Concept, one of the greatest songs from the 1990s. A song so powerful that Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody knew she could use 20 seconds of it to perfectly encapsulate a character and then repeat those 20 seconds multiple times, safe in the knowledge it wouldn't be annoying.

 

The band return, as they told us they would, to play four more songs, the last of which is, as it almost always has been with this band, their first single, the orgiastic Everything Flows. “See you get older every year," Blake sings. "But you don’t change, I don’t notice you changing.” With most bands you would be disappointed by stasis. With Teenage Fanclub, we are impossibly fortunate to have them.

Live Review: Kings of Convenience, Magic Steven and Banjo Lucia

The Forum

"I am wearing a boob tube and... fuck. I mean, I have never worn one before and it is freezing up here." Fremantle singer-songwriter and pianist Banjo Lucia laughs and takes a sip from a sippy cup that, like her clothing, also becomes the subject for extremely personable chit-chat. Lucia has been steadily building a career as a sassy and insightful performer who, much like an ocker Joanna Newsom or Fiona Apple, has a penchant for songs that have few chords, a lot of lyrics and fluid vocal melodies. What really stands out from her brief set is her personality. “I had to walk in the rain before and I have bangs so you can imagine how traumatising that was,” she deadpans before breaking into a smile. "Anyway, this next song is a cover of a song by Cher. It's a very obscure, low-key track you've probably never heard before, uhh...it's called Believe." While the interpretation offers nothing new, and her own songs like Big Big Fish and the closing That's Not Loving, showcase a reality television show's worth of melisma and a tendency to use four notes when one will do, there is a talent and a personality here that could fuel a record label for years. It’s an odd thing to write about a singer-songwriter who writes such deeply personal songs, but Lucia is so funny and engaging and such brilliant company that you wish she would put more of herself into the songs, or at the very least announce a stand-up show. 

Unusually, tonight's second support act, Magic Steven, is not a musician. Steven, a middle-aged man in a cap pulled down over his handsome face, reads to us from a notebook. Over the course of the next 25 minutes, we are told detailed and compelling descriptions of a personal search for meaning in day-to-day life. Beginning with a forensic linguistic analysis of bookmarks, Steven progresses to reading a book about creativity that provides him with the inspiration to "look for clues". Tricking his body into changing his mind's relationship with caffeine, his darkly comic journey gradually becomes more focused and curiously profound. However, a reading this drily humorous and well-constructed is one that rewards attention, and few in the room have the patience for Steven's odd mix of philosophy and humour. He loses the crowd, yet this only gives his performance more meaning. That he is reading a story about paying closer attention to the world around him as the world goes on without him adds a layer of pathos. By the time he is describing the surprisingly profound impact of the abysmally reviewed Christmas film Holly and the Hot Chocolate, and he shares its message, "When something out of the ordinary happens, you should pay attention,” something out of the ordinary is happening. That almost no one seems to be paying attention is oddly perfect. Magic Steven is an inspired choice for an opening act. Seek him out.

By the time Kings of Convenience arrive, the Forum is full of chattering couples and groups of friends who are rapidly turned into excited versions of their younger selves as the duo of Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe wait for the cheering to die down before speaking. 

"Hello, we are Kings of Convenience," says Bøe with his appealingly strong Norwegian accent. Opening with a stunning version of Comb My Hair the duo's delicately plucked guitars – one nylon string the other steel string – blend together so mellifluously that it makes you wonder whether the contribution of electricity to popular music might have been overrated. The voices of the two men and their close harmony style of singing is breathtakingly simple and effective. The following songs, their 2021 single Rocky Trail and an immaculately succinct version of one of their best known songs, Cayman Islands, 

While their music is so gentle and intimate it is essentially a cashmere cardigan rendered as a series of three-minute acoustic ballads, Kings of Convenience are eager to let us know their shows are not a place for maudlin introspection. "Can you snap your fingers?" asks Erlend Øye. We snap our fingers. “Yes, you can,” he nods. As we follow the rhythm of his nod, our clicking becoming an introduction to their song Angel.

Once the belletristic chime of his melodic refrain dies down and our cheering fades, Bøe gives us some history to their next song. “We come from the city of Bergen, Norway," he says, "When you grow up there you feel like there is not very much going on. Or you feel there is something going on but it’s elsewhere." The song inspired by the first book to take place in Bergen, Agnar Mykle's The Song of the Red Ruby, is the stunning Love is a Lonely Thing. Catholic Country and Homesick follow, all impeccably written paeans to quiet living and huge emotions that grow exponentially with entwining guitar parts and Simon and Garfunkel harmonies that are so beautifully arranged that sound so simple you know they must have been hewn with great care. For their song Know-how, the women of the audience take the part recorded by Feist, with the men joining later to create a surprisingly impactful choir. 

Throughout the concert Øye and Bøe have shared the stage with a bass amplifier and drum kit. Finally, they are employed by what the duo refers to as their "Mexican backing band". The members were introduced by Øye but his accent was so strong and their names so Mexican that I hesitate to transcribe them. Regardless, once their skills are employed, we are dancing. Again, the simplicity and care of the arrangements of these songs feels almost miraculous. Who knew you needed so few sounds to make a song this full? Fever, Boat Behind, Rule My World and I'd Rather Dance with You seem to invent a new genre. "Acoustic disco" sounds awful, but Kings of Convenience manage to make two acoustic guitars, bass and drums sound as epic as anything Giorgio Moroder cooked up. As soon as they leave, we decide we would like much more of this so cheer them back. Øye and Bøe return for a hushed encore of 24-25 and the full band join them for a finale of Scars on Land, the closing song from their 2012 album Declaration of Dependence. For a band who manage to somehow sound better with age, it's a safe bet no one filing out of the Forum tonight wants to wait another 11 years for a show like this. 

 

Live Review: Cavetown, Aleksiah

The Forum 

"Oversold," is how tonight's show is described by a box office staffer. And it certainly seems so. A long queue of curly haired kids in anime-hued clothes, some caped in trans and pride flags with headphones curled around their dyed hair, snakes from the doors of the Forum throughout the city. Occasional squeals emerge from mouths covered by hands, some leap in the air to release the nervous tension coursing through the line. 

The reason that this all-ages show sold out in 48 hours is down to one person, Robin Skinner, the artist better known as Cavetown. Since the release of their debut album in 2015, Cavetown has drawn a deep and abiding passion among a certain section of music fandom, one that grew exponentially during Covid lockdowns when intimate vocals best listened to on headphones, gently strummed acoustic guitars and ASMR-adjacent electronica became especially popular. These textural qualities that can often be a challenge to translate to the stage, especially when performing to an audience as vocally passionate as tonight’s. However, while this crowd is in a very forgiving mood, it quickly becomes clear nothing needs forgiving.

Opening four-piece Aleksiah is a vehicle for singer-songwriter Alexia Damokas whose tight backing band peel indie pop riffs off angular Fenders while she lingers over vocal melodies on a series of mellow tunes like her first single, Fern. "I wanna put you on a pedestal / Eat you like a cannibal / Maybe it's chemical / But I wanna keep you like a fucking collectible," she sings to bursts of emphatic appreciation and a forest of heart hand gestures. “We're going to play a couple of love songs, so give the person you’re with a big hug and a kiss," Damaokas tells the crowd. "Consensually, of course”. The band's closing song and latest single, 24, is perhaps their strongest. Here, the balance between the sweetness of the music, the subversion of the lyrics, the athleticism of the rhythm and the originality of the melodies reach an apex.

While Aleksiah successfully harnessed the optimism in the room and delivered at least one song that should feature in next year's Triple J Hottest 100, louder cheers of excitement came with the arrival of Cavetown's roadies who gesture for calm as they try to prepare the stage for the main event. The need to let off nervous energy is extreme. The pre-show music, a selection of classic indie pop plays quietly. The crowd is full of polite excitement and enthusiastic respect until the moment the lights dim, and all sense of decorum and quietude vanish. Screaming to rival the appreciation shown in the MCG over the weekend dies down as Skinner and the band arrive on stage and play the opening bars of Worm Food. "Why does this matter so much to me?” sings Skinner over keenly strummed chords. “Sometimes, I wish I didn't matter to anybody / And sometimes, I forget I do”.

Buoyed by the reaction from the crowd, Cavetown play like a band who know they can't fail. Their songs are simple, even as the music varies between manic hyperpop and the aural equivalent of a fidget spinner. Skinner’s lyrics are heartfelt and clearly deeply personal. A pale English waif who resembles a young Weird Al Yankovic, their voice manages to sound intimate, even over the hurricane of love coming from the crowd. While they sing softly, their body courses with joy. Skinner runs across the stage, arms outstretched, gesturing for the crowd to be even more vocal in their appreciation. 

"What the heck is up with you guys?" they ask during a rare quiet moment between songs. "Thank you for being so welcoming and so happy to see me. I have a question for you. Do you like frogs?" The crowd screams in affirmation, knowing that this must mean their song Frog is next. "Is that a no?" deadpans Skinner. "You might like this next song, is what I’m saying." This kind of playfulness recurs throughout the night. While many of Skinner's lyrics explore complex subjects – mental health, loneliness, gender identity, the pressures of growing up in an oppressive society – with an intensely humanistic approach, there is never any sense of wallowing or angst. Songs like Heart Attack and new single Let Them Know They're on Your Mind are glorious affirmations of self, and ones that clearly and deeply resonate with the audience tonight, who find a place to put that nervous energy. "Sometimes I act like I know / But I'm really just a kid / With two corks in his eyes / And a bully in his head", Skinner sings in Juliet.

“I don’t know about you guys," they say in their clipped English tones, "but I feel like a little soft song. This is a song for little Juno." Skinner accompanies themselves on guitar for a song about their cat, a sweet ballad that inspires a thousand phones to be waved aloft, lights shining in the soft blue air of the room.

"Thanks for having such an awesome country I wish that everyone I loved lived here so I didn't have to leave," Skinner tells us, as a prelude to a story about finding "a squishy thing on a beach" that really emphasises their Englishness.

1994, Hug All Ur Friends, Fall in Love with a Girl and Laundry Day follow, each finding Skinner pacing the stage with a pride flag emblazoned with the band's name across it. He spins it in the air, drapes it over his shoulders and ties it to the microphone stand, by which time we find ourselves racing toward the end of the concert. It is here that Cavetown plays their best known songs and those few unmoved members of the crowd find their voices. Lemon Boy turns the crowd into a choir and This is Home inspires an even more colossal response with its refrain: "Get a load of this train-wreck / His hair's a mess and he doesn't know who he is yet /  But little do we know, the stars / Welcome him with open arms".

After Cavetown leaves the stage and the lights fall to black, the crowd responds with one of the loudest chants of "one more song" that this writer has ever heard. The band return for the gently daft Boys Will Be Bugs and the heaviest song of the night, one that even flirts with atonality, Devil Town. The song’s very controlled and metal-inspired bombast sees Skinner depart the stage, cardboard crown on their head and arms aloft, signifiers, as if they were needed, that this night was a triumph.