Joanna Newsom plays The Grand Canal Theatre in 2010 (2 Viewers)

[coast to coast]

or indeed someone pretending they were at that gig. That joke was mentioned in an article in The Ticket last friday.

Oh I didn't notice that. I skimmed that article and thought it was standard fawning promo stuff. And there was a factual inaccuracy in it which annoyed me. Didn't notice reference to the joke, but it is on youtube as well so its pretty easy to know without having been at the gig.

 

[Oggy Pip]

sibilent and honky

If I ever form a folk duo Im going to use that name.

I thought the gig was quite good. Some of her songs are a drag -- they meander lyrically and musically -- the slow bit, the fast bit, the drums bit etc. I get bored by this, its empty distractions and the melodies don't take flight, they just meander.

And then there are songs (like the very first two and the very last one) that drag you in, the chord and tempo changes show more imagination and the song works as a whole piece with full band. I still wish she did more from the first album, they are her best songs by a pixie mile. Overall very good.

 

[egg_]

Nah, best song she's written is the second last one on Ys. Whatever it's called

 

[egg_]

One thing... The person who shouted "tell the hippy joke" - that strikes me as a bit lame, done as a way of proclaiming how into Joanna Newsom you are by implying that you remember the onstage banter at a gig over 3 years ago. And who wants to be told the same joke again, just because its Joanna Newsom telling it?

I think you can forgive someone for shouting out something lame while all over-excited at a gig. It wasn't me, but if it had been it wouldn't have been my first time to yell something lame at a gig

 

[coast to coast]

I think you can forgive someone for shouting out something lame while all over-excited at a gig. It wasn't me, but if it had been it wouldn't have been my first time to yell something lame at a gig

Wouldn't shouting "Tell us another joke!" have achieved all the same goals - hearing a joke and implying you were at the gig where she told a funny joke. Am I being too harsh? It really was cloying.

 

[Lili Marlene]

Wouldn't shouting "Tell us another joke!" have achieved all the same goals - hearing a joke and implying you were at the gig where she told a funny joke. Am I being too harsh? It really was cloying.

They should have shouted something along the lines of

"Tell us a joke you told at the Sugar Club in 2004"

 

[egg_]

Am I being too harsh? It really was cloying.

Ah man. If the guy had written it in a letter to the paper then maybe you'd be justified, but I expect it just popped into his head and he blurted it out, poor divil. He's probably crying into his tea right now

 

[ann post]

speaking of shouting lame things at gigs - i went to mayo to see kris kristofferson not so long ago. it was worth it for the heckling alone. why anyone would pay 50 euro to heckle i dont know, but anyways it played out like this.

before the third song a woman in her late 30s/early 40s got out of her seat and walked up to the stage so she was standing right in front of him, she said something to him, he replid 'no i dont do that' - then she said something else to him, he looked a little shocked and said (sarcastically, but still being friendly) 'well thats just beautiful' and launched into the next song before she could carry on. she went back to her seat, then halfway through the song she shouted up 'ASSHOLE' at him. he asked was she going to do that for the whole gig and she stormed out. most of the audience thought she was a bitch and was glad to see her go. anyways, all went peacefully for a while, till some guy behind me came up with 'WHEN DID YOU LAST SHAVE' - after that it was sort of open game for stupid. lots of requests for 'play waylon'* and the best of show was a repeated request for the first song he played.

*a guy who covers some kristiofferson songs.

maybe you had to be there.

 

[rettucs]

whats up with Irish crowds these days? Poor Kris Kristofferson/Axl Rose/Cat Stevens/Joanna Newsom

 

[Lili Marlene]

whats up with Irish crowds these days? Poor Kris Kristofferson/Axl Rose/Cat Stevens/Joanna Newsom

watch Boozed up Irish abroad for an insight into just how charming we like to think we are

(or, of course, watch this or this )

 

[coast to coast]

Ah man. If the guy had written it in a letter to the paper then maybe you'd be justified, but I expect it just popped into his head and he blurted it out, poor divil. He's probably crying into his tea right now

Okay perhaps I'm being too harsh. I think a quite a large proportion of stuff that gets shouted at gigs in Dublin is lame. Either drunk and trying to be some Wildean Dub wit or drunk and just tyring to have a quasi-heckle without being funny. I especially seem to recall some tit at a Ryan Adams gig years ago asking him to take off his hat after ever fucking song, even after he said he wouldn't. Pillock!

Either way yeh, that joke remark was hardly the worst crime in the world by any means, and I suppose you're really opening yourself up to it when theres a harp-tuning/question-answering segment.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

at Roy Harper's gig in Whelans in 2007 there was this really annoying girl sitting beside me constantly interrupting him between every song and shouting "roy, will ooo play Oi Hee-ate De Whoite Man, its moy faaayvorit song", "yoor moi faayvorit artist, like" and "i came all de way up from cark, i can't beleeeve yoor talking to me loike dis". everyone in the place was shouting at her to shut up and roy was taking the piss out of her but she still kept it up. as he was introducing one of his songs he paused for a second to stare at her after saying it was about the end of a relationship. i enjoyed the whole exchange, it was quite entertaining. roy got a bit apologetic later and tried to be nice to her but she had left by then.

 

[worthit]

Oh I didn't notice that. I skimmed that article and thought it was standard fawning promo stuff. And there was a factual inaccuracy in it which annoyed me. Didn't notice reference to the joke, but it is on youtube as well so its pretty easy to know without having been at the gig.

Was the factual inaccuracy that she said she played solo in the Olympia when in actual fact she played with pretty much the same band she had this time? That annoyed me too.

 

[worthit]

Nah, best song she's written is the second last one on Ys. Whatever it's called

Only Skin? Fuckin love that song and she never plays it. Although I saw her play it with an orchestra in Glasgow. That was good.

 

[worthit]

This is my favourite of her songs. It's the B-side to Sprout and the Bean.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrzLKRLur0Y

 

[coast to coast]

Was the factual inaccuracy that she said she played solo in the Olympia when in actual fact she played with pretty much the same band she had this time? That annoyed me too.

Good call, it was that exact factual inaccuracy!

 

[rettucs]

unashamedly stolen from today's Irish Times

JOANNA NEWSOM is one of those musicians of whom it tends to be said that you either love her or hate her. This is probably an oversimplification. I imagine the “don’t care either way” demographic is also quite sizable. As, still, is the “never heard of her” sub-grouping. But in my household, at least, the cliched extremes are well represented.


The moment I first met Joanna – aurally, across a crowded Tower Records store a few years ago – I fell hard. It was a Platonic love too, because I hadn’t yet seen any pictures of her to corrupt my thoughts. So I bought the album (her second) there and then and took it home. Whereupon, I became acquainted with the other end of her audience-reaction spectrum.
A close female relative who shall remain nameless, but who is known to my children as “Mammy”, sometimes has to leave the room when I play Newsom’s records (I have all three now). If exposed to the music for more than two minutes at a time, she all but breaks out in a rash. And when I try very hard to be objective about it, I almost understand her aversion.
Newsom’s singing voice is certainly unusual. At its best, she sounds like Marge Simpson. At worst, she sounds like a very high-pitched version of Brian Cowen after a night out. And then there’s the music.
Which, although usually classified as “freak folk”, is not quite like anything I’ve heard before.
Typical of her repertoire is a song called Monkey and Bear, a sprawling nine-minute epic about a pair of performing animals and their attempt to escape a life of exploitation: ultimately thwarted – SPOILER ALERT! – by the monkey’s cynicism, which dooms the bear to repeat enslavement.
The lyrics are highly literate. And I’m told by harpists that her chord sequences are very fancy too.
Despite which, the song provokes a particularly visceral dislike in the aforementioned female relative, whose typical response to all the painstaking artistry involved is: “Jesus! Not the monkey and the bear, again!”
SO, HAVING bought two tickets to see Newsom’s Dublin concert earlier this week, I had no choice but to go accompanied by the next-oldest member of the family. My 12-year-old daughter is the only representative I yet know of a fifth sub-grouping, Newsom-wise, in that she “kind-of” likes the music (especially Monkey and Bear). And although we didn’t see a single other child there, I was glad I brought her, because in one sense we fitted right in.
I had no real idea what sort of people would turn up at the show – for which the Grand Canal Theatre was sold out – especially when it emerged that the support act was 1970s folkie Roy Harper, whose career Newsom has revived. But I was taken aback at how alike – at least physically – most of the audience seemed to be.
They were nearly all thin, for one thing. The male attenders also had a strong tendency to have beards. Not big bushy beards like 1970s folkies, or members of the Taliban. No, the beards were thin too. And the most uniform thing about the audience was that – I swear – they were all 27 years old. So, at least when my daughter and I were averaged out, we were about the right age.
I have since learned that many of those present may have been “hipsters”, an exclusive, self-policing subculture of sophisticated urbanites who, according to The Hipster Handbook (2003), “possess tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool”. Mind you, the same handbook cautions that hipsters no longer use the word “cool”, preferring “deck” as an adjective of approval. But that was back in 2003, and the codes will all have been changed again since then to prevent the likes of me getting in, no matter how many Joanna Newsom albums we have.
I suspect my daughter, on the other hand, is a future hipster – or whatever the species has morphed into by then. She was effortlessly cool throughout most of the concert, dropping her guard only to make me buy her ice-cream and sweets, and then to fall asleep for half an hour until the Monkey and Bear song woke her up. In her defence, it was way past bedtime.
At least one of us, meanwhile, was rapt by the music, which Roy Harper rightly described as “magical”. And yet it was a strange show. In some ways, it was devoid of what you would normally call “concert atmosphere”. Much of which, after all, depends on the shameless sycophancy of audiences towards performers.
Those ripples of applause at the opening chords of a favourite song; the more ostentatious cheers of recognition from a few anoraks for an obscure number only they know; the shouts of “we love you”, etc. These were conspicuously absent the other night. So much so, that I thought the rest of the crowd wasn’t enjoying itself much; until, at the end, they rose as one in a standing ovation.
Not one of those forced ovations, where a few people (possibly paid by the theatre) get up, and gradually embarrass those around them into doing likewise, until they achieve a critical mass and the rest of the audience, sheeplike, join in. No, this was instantaneous. And I assumed, in turn, that it would lead to at least six encores. Some of them perhaps even unplanned.
But I was wrong again. The band played one more song. Then the lights came up and the crowd went home without a fight, apparently happy. It must be a hipster thing.

 

[egg_]

Hehe
That's a funny review. Who wrote it?

 

[egg_]

BTW "Monkey and Bear" is one of my least favourite JN songs. It's kinda obvious in a real un-obvious way. Have I made myself clear?

 

[rettucs]

Hehe
That's a funny review. Who wrote it?

its today's Irishman's Diary - by Frank McNally.