Courtney Barnett-
Gorilla, Manchester, April 3rd.
I don’t normally write gig reviews but in this instance, because of what you will read later in this short piece, I think I’ll make an exception.
April 3rd.
Friday April 3rd.
Good Friday.
This was the day and it was going to be a Good Friday indeed.
I was heading off to see Courtney Barnett play in Manchester, at Gorilla, which I gathered was a fairly small club and somewhere I’d never been before. Being generally a touch lazy and too old to mess around, I wouldn’t normally make too much of an effort to go too far for a gig, but as Courtney Barnett wasn’t playing Liverpool, I had to drive the 35 miles or so down the M62 from Liverpool to get there. This sort of encapsulates quite neatly how much I wanted to be there because in the past, I’ve missed out on gigs in Liverpool (my home town) not because I’ve not got tickets but because it was too cold or raining or I just couldn’t be arsed trooping into town. All of 5 miles or so. (To my eternal regret I missed out on seeing both Captain Beefheart and The Residents for those very reasons.)
So I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again, especially because I had managed to get a ticket for a show that sold out very quickly and I had a distinct feeling that this show was going to be something special.
I’ve written (at
length) about Courtney Barnett before and won’t reiterate all the stuff from
earlier but suffice to say that having seen her play twice at Glastonbury in
2014, played her first EP’s to death and no doubt bored the socks off all my
mates about her, that I really had to put the effort in to get to Manchester.
There’s always a risk that when seeing anyone play live that you may end up disappointed, that things don’t exactly live up to expectations and you may end up feeling a bit let down. Or in extreme cases, leaving the gig half way through. I haven’t done this many times, but I do remember a disastrous Killing Joke show in the mid 80’s when not just myself, but droves of others were heading for the exit three songs into their set.
It was therefore with this in mind that I got into the car early evening and headed off in the typical Bank Holiday rain to Manchester. Although I had said to Mrs L that the gig “would be fantastic” and I was sure that it would be, there was a slight nagging doubt in the back of my mind that sometimes things don’t always go exactly to plan. It happens. People have off days, things don’t work out.
Maybe Courtney Barnett would be knackered having played so many gigs, maybe she wouldn’t feel like giving it too much on a Bank Holiday. Maybe a rainy miserable Manchester would be too much.
It’s
enough to make the most optimistic person a tad grumpy at the best of times.
Maybe being Easter time and with Courtney and the band not being used to our
“Northern” diet, they would have over done the sausage rolls, pies and hot
cross buns and would simply feel like a good sit down instead of giving it
loads on stage. You never know. There’s
a myriad of things that could go wrong, I thought as I turned onto to the
motorway, the new Courtney Barnett album playing away, but if I didn’t try,
then I’d never know.
The new album, “Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit” had come out about two weeks before. I must have listened to it at least once every day. You know when you get a new record that you’ve been looking forward to for ages? You play it a lot for the first few days until you reach a point when you half-think that it’s ok, but maybe not as good as you first thought? You stick it on the shelf with all your other records, meaning to listen to it again at some undefined point in future? Probably later on in the year when you’re reminded you’ve actually got it when it appears in albums-of-the-year lists?
Well, occasionally, very occasionally, that doesn’t happen. Sometimes you really can’t get enough of it. One week, two weeks, three weeks a month or more goes past and you’re still playing it constantly, almost to the exclusion of everything else. You try to play something else but you keep getting drawn back to that record? That’s how it was turning out with the Courtney Barnett album. I couldn’t stop listening to it! I was staggered about how good it was. If this was her debut then what else was to come in the future?
This was another reason not to miss the gig and to see some of the songs played live. The timing worked perfectly. Although it was Good Friday and I might have expected the motorways to be busy, most people were heading north or south and not west to east. I managed to get from Liverpool to Manchester in just over 40 minutes and switched the engine off as the last note of the album finished. An auspicious sign.
It was still raining as I walked the few hundred yards to Gorilla. That Bank Holiday weather never lets you down. Once inside, I was really surprised how small the venue was. I knew it was going to be small, but not that small. I kind of figured out that if it was sold out and really crammed then maybe 700 or so people would squeeze into it. This was a very good thing. I guessed that the place had been booked ages before the buzz about Courtney Barnett and the new album had kicked in. That accounted for the amazingly low ticket price as well. Ten pounds! When was the last time you ever paid a tenner for a gig? One of the other dates on her tour had been bumped up to a larger venue, but I suppose that trying to find somewhere else bigger to play on a Friday night in Manchester and on a Bank Holiday weekend at that would have been too difficult. But as I say, this was A Good Thing. A small venue and packed to the gills. It was all lining up to be a special show.
I’d missed most of the first of the two support acts, Fraser A. Gorman. From what I was he was alright, a sort of singer-songwritery young Australian chap with an acoustic guitar, a harmonica and some fairly wry, self-deprecating lines. He seemed to go down quite well with what was at that stage, early on in the proceedings, a sparse-ish crowd.
Someone had mentioned that at one of earlier dates in the tour the audience was pretty much full of young hipster folk. I was kind of thinking that I’d be the oldest person at Gorilla by a country mile and whilst at one stage, I must have been young, it’s a known fact that I was never hip at all. I feared that I would stick out like a sore thumb. However, I needn’t have worried that much. Looking around the room, there were certainly plenty of other people that fell into my demographic; i.e. a fair share of receding hairlines, comfortable jeans and waistlines that had seen trimmer days and probably only a decade or so from being able to claim a bus pass. Not unhip exactly, just more relaxed. I guessed that it was something to do with being “up North”.
Now here comes the thing.
Before the second support act, Spring King, came on at eight o’clock, I nipped outside to the smoking area, which was in reality was a small area underneath a railway arch at the back of the venue, fenced off with a tall corrugated iron fence. I stood under the dripping arch with a few other desperate souls (for all the non-smokers out there, I know it doesn’t sound especially enticing) and had a quick smoke. To my surprise, while I was standing there, wondering to myself if the support band was going to be any cop, Courtney Barnett and the band trooped out through the door to join us in our anti-social pastime.
Was I going to act really cool and ignore them or just half-nod in a sign of studied recognition, you know, just kind of let on, but no more? Was I fuck! I’d been going on so, so much about her being the “most exciting act that I’d heard for years” and “the heir to 60’s electric-era Dylan” that I couldn’t really let the chance to say pass me by. On that basis imagine how I’d feel in years to come telling people that I once stood next to Courtney Barnett and her band and never said a word because I was being “too cool”. Bollocks to that.
It is a bit odd though. What exactly do you say to someone who’s artistic work you admire without coming across as a bit of dickhead? Do you revert to the typical English thing and talk about the weather? Well, I didn’t, but as it was raining, I came pretty close.
I didn’t want to disturb their ciggie break too much, so I went over and mumbled something about thanking them for all the great music. (When I related this bit to my son later that night, he stuck his fingers in his ears, said that he didn’t want to hear any more and called me a “cringe-wanker”. A fair point, if a little rough.)
To their credit, Courtney Barnett and the band were very nice. She complemented me on the AC/DC hoodie I was wearing (I’d forgotten the Australian connection when I’d put it on that evening) and mentioned I’d seen then at Glasto, loved the new album and was persuading everyone I knew to get it. We all shook hands in a very un-rock and roll manner and they said they hoped I’d enjoy the show.
I should have done what others have do and got a photo on my phone but as I’m generally crap with such things, I’d have probably ended up with a shot of the back of my hand. So my brush with fame (of sorts). Something I’d probably never do again, with any other artist, even if I had the chance, but I’m glad I did. Courtney Barnett and the band just seem like very pleasant and humble kids, not acting like “stars” at all. I think that even if she becomes massively commercially successful then she’d probably stay just like that. Sometimes people are just genuinely nice.
As I walked back inside, it struck me as strange that I was going to watching a band who probably were of the same age as my kids. Maybe I was getting to old for this and I’d been listening to music for too long. Maybe it was time to give it all up and take up a hobby that is more suited to my age. Get an allotment or a shed or something. On the other hand, I was going to be seeing someone who I’d (only half-ironically and ripping off Jon Landau’s description of seeing Springsteen for the first time), termed the “future of rock and roll.” Of course I wasn’t going to get a fucking shed!
There was a poster pinned up beside the bar. It helpfully pointed out Fraser A. Gorman 7 pm, Spring King 8pm and Courtney Barnett 9.00 pm. I had therefore just an hour or so to go.
Spring King were kind of alright. Kind of. A bit sort of derivative, sub-Clashy, shouty rock. Nothing to get too steamed up about, but they went down pretty well with what was becoming a fairly packed audience.
I managed to get a spec right next to the very low stage, at the side rather than the front. This meant that although I wouldn’t be facing the stage, I would still have a pretty good view and have the added advantage of being able to lean against the barrier without getting crushed. Such things are important.
Spring King came and went and then it was time.
Courtney, Dave (the drummer) and Bones (the bassist) bounded on stage at spot on 9.00 p.m. (very professional) and launched into the first track of the new album, “Elevator Operator.” The place was heaving by now and this was just the thing to get everyone- and I mean everyone- grinning along. 700-odd smiles and 1400- odd feet tapping. A room full of joyful happiness on a rainy Friday night in Manchester.
Possibly because I was so close to the stage, being only a foot or so away from where Courtney Barnett was, that I watched the whole gig from a perspective I’ve never really seen at any other show. She was sort of stationed with her back to where I and a few others were standing and in fact at one point was gracious enough to apologise for being rude and turning her back to us. (Bet you don’t get that from Kanye West or Mick Jagger.) What I did notice all the way through the gig were those interactions between the band, those smiles, winks and cues that you don’t always see when you’re either too far away or in the thick of it in the middle of the audience.
I knew that the sound would be heavier and thrashier than the records; the new album has that distinct air about it anyway, but without distracting from her amazing talent with words and storytelling.
What surprised me was so precise all the playing was. I guess that it’s easy to thrash away at a song, to flail away at it and it all can become a bit loose and unfocussed. There was none of this here though. After “Elevator Operator”, it carried onto “An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York” from the new album and then “Lance Jr” off the early E.P. In “Lance Jr” , Courtney Barnett really let rip with her guitar, giving it some serious welly and hammering it as if it was something that needed to be tamed. It was like a fight between her and the Fender and as I watched it, I wasn’t sure who was going to come out on top. This is when the penny dropped for me (again). I was really seeing something very special indeed; something that I’d never seen at any gig at all. It’s hard to define it exactly.
Although it was, on the face of it, a rock gig with a three piece band, (something I’ve seen hundreds of times before), there was something more, something undefinable and slightly intangible. I watched Courtney Barnett wrestle with that guitar. There were no histrionics, no clichéd rock guitar poses; I watched her face and she seemed for a few minutes totally oblivious to everything else. There was no-one in the room except for her and that song. It was a tight focus that I’ve never seen anywhere else, a concentration that was so intense that it was jaw dropping.
The song finished and she was back in the room again, with a grin for everyone before kicking things along with “Are You Looking After Yourself”, another early song, then “Dead Fox” and “Small Poppies” from the new album. Any doubts that I’d had about the new songs not coming over well, just because they were new and not played as much, were banished immediately. These were timeless classics already. It wasn’t just me who thought this. Everyone seemed blown away. At the end of “Small Poppies”, Courtney Barnett fell to her knees and finally sorted out who was in control of the guitar. I know this does sound like a rock cliché, as if she should have whipped out some lighter fluid and set fire to the damn thing, a la Hendrix, but it wasn’t. It just felt right!
Now if you’ve never been to Preston, Lancashire, then you’d smile at the sheer absurdity of a few hundred people in Manchester singing along to a song about a suburb in Australia called Preston, and I did when everyone crooned along to “Depreston”. I haven’t the best singing voice by any stretch of the imagination and am only known to break into a tuneless crooning of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” when surrounded by thousands of others at the match. But on this occasion, I let my guard down and joined in. Despite my voice, it was a magnificent moment and showed a genuine commonality between the “artist” and the “audience”; there were no barriers. This was true punk rock. Courtney Barnett seemed touched by it all as well and thanked everyone for a special moment. Who’d have thought it; a song about Preston bringing people together?
Even at the best gigs, I find myself looking at my watch every now and then, but I didn’t for this one at all. Time rattled by at the same pace as the songs. Two of the poppiest songs from the new album quickly followed “Depreston”, “Debbie Downer” and “Nobody Cares If You Don’t Go To the Party”, the latter, which if you’ve haven’t heard yet, has a classically brilliant drum roll to kick it off at the start.
She was always going to play “Avant Gardener”, I supposed and she did next. A sign of it being a great song is that despite listening to it a lot over the past year or so, I’ve not become bored with it in the slightest and it’s as fresh as the first time I heard it. It still brings a lump to my throat and a tear to my eye when she sings about the paramedic being “clever because she stops people dying”. It’s that “Abide With Me” Cup Final moment for me and even in the midst of a packed club, I found myself blinking unashamedly at that point.
The gig finished with hectic and exultant versions of “History Eraser” and “Pedestrian at Best”, the former wilder than the recorded version and so much the better for it, and the latter bringing the whole shebang to a fittingly unrestrained climax.
It was spot on 10.00 p.m. as they left the stage to loud cheers. I thought that was going to be it because there was a strict 10.00 p.m. curfew but no, after a few moments, they bounced back on stage, picked up their guitars and drumsticks. Courtney Barnett said there was “one last song”, everyone cheered, she grinned ecstatically at the band and the audience, and treated us to a brilliant, Nuggets-type version of The Easybeats “I’ll Make You Happy”. What a way to end the show!
And that was it.
Courtney and the band waved us all goodbye as they left the stage the last time and everyone shuffled through their way through the exits and onto the street.
It had stopped raining.
**********
It’s only just over 48 hours since I was at the gig and my initial impressions have not diminished one jot. If anything, I know that I saw something special and without a word of lie, it was the greatest show I’ve ever seen. I’m not going to list all the brilliant ones I’ve been to over the past 35 or so years of gig-going, but I have seen some great ones.
Courtney Barnett in Manchester topped them all. I very much doubt I will ever get the chance to see her play somewhere so small again and be so close, but I’m so glad that I did.
Good Friday indeed!
You can find my other writings about Courtney Barnett on Toppermost here:
http://www.toppermost.co.uk/courtney-barnett/
Courtney Barnett Offical Site;
http://courtneybarnett.com.au/
Courtney Barnett Offical Site;
http://courtneybarnett.com.au/
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