Amanda Palmer ft Andrew O'Neill
The grand piano was hazy in the mix of purple light and dry ice. Eerily caught in a cosmic disco glow, it waited. Waiting for a certain someone to come and play it.
The suspense was broken by comedian/transvestite/heavy metal enthusiast Andrew O’Neill sweeping on stage in fishnets and hot pants for some MC-ing/stand-up/filibustering. It was an interactive, bamboozling and pant-wettingly funny set, featuring the catchy reinvented sing-along “if you’re depressed and medicated clap your hands” and crowd participation in a Mexican wave of cheek-popping (yes, you read that correctly). Deconstructing knock-knock jokes, as well as spouting surreal musical giblets, Andrew was the perfect aperitif to get us in the mood for the macabre humour and gothic cabaret that was to be Amanda Palmer.
And then we waited some more. The piano beckoned. The waiting became almost unbearable, until …
From the depths of the crowd, the chirpy chords of a ukulele rang out. Bit by bit, people began to stir, shift and ripple, finally parting to make room for a wandering Amanda Palmer singing an acoustic cover of Radiohead’s Creep that somehow managed to be both more depressing and more uplifting than the original version.
Palmer leapt onto the stage for the final refrain, garbed in shiny blood-red Doc Martins laced half-way up the calf, torn black jeans, a moth-eaten black T-shirt, black mesh arm-warmers and red-tinted hair piled helter-skelter atop her head. Scrawled across her ukulele in black nail polish were the words ‘This machine kills fascists’. It had been so well eroded by her enthusiastic playing that the edge of the sound hole had been gaffer-taped and the ‘s’ and ‘c’ painted back over the tape in white. Such was her: I am me, unashamedly me and if you’re not a fan you can kindly show yourself out goth/punk look, it was a struggle not to swoon with admiration before the set even started.
Next came Ampersand, in which she wove in a few topical references to our favourite sexist tycoons, notably embedding a certain “grab her by the pussy” comment. Song-writing seemed to be organic for Amanda - each song was something malleable and fluid, there to be continually amended and re-worked, forever evolving.
The highlight of the event was Palmer trial-running new material from her up-coming 2019 album, including a stream of consciousness railing about parenthood, featuring the cheerful chorus of “At least the baby didn’t die.” The fact that the songs were in their fledgling stages added a whole new dimension to the live music, as these songs might never be heard again or, if they were, they might have changed into something entirely different when finally released. Spotify and vinyl have nothing on Amanda Palmer, who treats songs as un-cut gems that shine all the brighter for their rough-hewn, unpolished shapes. But it wasn’t all fun and games and she warned us that things were going to get very depressing from there on out, and indeed many of her new songs explored the topics of abortion, harassment, the death of loved ones and the things we are most afraid of. With a raw and painful honesty, Palmer wore her heart upon her fishnet sleeve for us that night.
She did name-drop her husband an awful lot (Amanda is married to the award-winning writer Neil Gaiman, didn’t you know?) which was rather sweet and felt almost as if she still couldn’t quite believe to this day how she’d managed to bag him. She even treated us to the only song she’s ever written about him (focusing heavily on his blasted obsession with Vegemite) and featuring a surprise re-appearance by O’Neill, this time bedecked in a stunning crimson and jewel-studded dress, who sang the lyrics and interspersed the track with hilarious rantings about how mental-health labels are making it harder to hate on people because the understanding makes us sympathise with them and takes all the enjoyment out of bitching.
Between songs, she segued between fireside confessions with Andrew, 10-minute introductions to 3-minute songs and Ted-Talk asides about everything from Norwich’s church density, to school shootings, to crowd-funding. Her relationship with the audience felt more symbiotic than the usual dichotomy of worshipers and worshipped and she even took requests from the crowd, with one woman passing her a recommend scribbled surreptitiously on a paper airplane.
For most artists, it would have been difficult to command a stage sat as she was for the most part of it behind a grand piano, but she did the whole thing with panache, stamping and rocking, miming and boogying, keeping things pantomime but also dead serious and throwing in the odd impeccably timed eye-roll and eyebrow-quiver all whilst managing to be a bloody amazing musician. Amanda packed the stage presence, sheer enthusiasm and all-round entertainment of about six band members and still had energy to spare.
No one will ever fill Amanda’s shiny boots – she has broken all the moulds of the music industry and has cast her own instead, with an uncompromising delivery and fierce dedication to a sound and image that are wholly hers and hers alone. The evening marked her as an unstoppable force of pure gothic mania and one of the best live acts ever to have graced our fine city.
