Interview: Amanda Palmer rises from the ashes
You are going to see something… rather odd,” begins Amanda Palmer’s candid introduction to an evening which could variously be described as unique, bizarre, hilarious, compelling and unforgettable; adjectives equally applicable to the night’s host. At one time best known as one half of Brechtian-punk cabaret duo Dresden Dolls, the avenues through which she is now discovered range from her solo record Who Killed Amanda Palmer? to her fervently ambassadorial attitude towards Twitter, or since January, her status as fiancée of cult writer Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman comic series and Coraline. To understand why this show may be odder than anticipated, a little background is needed, as Palmer announces to those unaware: “If you haven’t been following the story of my life in the last forty-eight hours, it’s completely fucked up.
“Tonight was supposed to be the international debut of the world’s only known conjoined twin singer-songwriter duo, Evelyn Evelyn” — the latest project of Palmer along with long-time friend Jason Webley that would see them perform as sisters in a mix of theatre, comedy and music, with Sxip Shirey playing their pantomimically sleazy manager — “The twins couldn’t make it. The twins are stuck in New York.” Travelling ahead of her crew for an appearance on Steve Lamacq’s Round Table for 6 Music, Palmer’s flight from Boston landed for a layover, as planned — in Iceland, just as the airborne toxic event that was the Eyjafjallajökull eruption began to grind Europe to a halt, stranding her crew, props and instruments about four thousand miles west of her position.
We are lucky she managed to get out of Iceland at all. Gaiman’s efforts to organise her convoy by cargo ship being unsuccessful, she managed to catch a highly sought-after flight to Glasgow the following day. Rather crucially, though, in sister Webley’s absence, her left hand has also found itself separated by the broad shoulders of the Atlantic from her right, a difficulty she wryly confides in her congregation. “I may have had a hand in writing these songs, but I only had a hand: this hand. If you notice during the playing of these songs that I’m not playing them well… that’s because I can’t.”
I am scheduled to meet the present twin at sound-check a few hours before the gig, but as she spends two hours trying to scramble a show together by teaching her support act songs at the same time as re-learning the bass clef herself, time runs outs and we decide to catch up after the event instead. Rather than being an inconvenience, this rescheduling results in the singular opportunity to watch the show being built from the ground up, and observing how Palmer raises such a spectacle from the ashes is an absolutely fascinating experience.
Then the show. Palmer is on stage for about forty-five minutes before a single key is struck, but it is not long until it becomes obvious that the main entertainment of tonight is not going to be musical. A feeling hits half way in, like biting into a nectarine but expecting an apple — not what we were expecting, but ultimately much bolder and, judging by the reception of the crowd, not at all unwelcome. In fact, reception is the wrong word entirely, because this was not a performance just received, so much as a communally constructed evening. Fans brought props, from kazoos to cowboy hats, drew and acted out a puppet show under Palmer’s direction, and formed an ersatz tech crew to aid both broadcasting the show and holding a transatlantic conference call of legendary proportions with Webley over Skype.
Initially coming online only to say hello, Webley donned his Evelyn wig and bravely began playing the left hand on Amanda’s own piano in her flat, a spontaneous on-stage decision which categorically made the night. Navigating the time delay, rather than ruining the performance, increased exponentially the fun of this glorious mess as Palmer and Webley tripped over each other’s lines in the call and response of speakeasy shuffle number Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn? In between each song — and in some cases during — Palmer gave us a manic digest of the plot of the planned show, darting around the stage and acting out every character’s part à la Tim Curry in Clue, while her support act Bitter Ruin accompanied her by playing the theme from the same movie.
As the show progressed, Webley and Palmer began to feel instinctively how to best combine their efforts, and the performances became more cohesive affairs, at times losing nothing for the miles in between. If anything at all, the evening benefitted from such an impressive, and thematically apt, display of sonic symbiosis which only two musicians very well acquainted with one another could pull off under such seismic testing. Finishing with a cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart with Webley on ukulele, the night reached an unexpected equilibrium and served as a reminder that despite their success as a comedy double-act, their ability to entertain is rooted in the dedication to music.
Palmer could have done a solo show of her own material and it would have been excellent, but it could never have been this fantastic. Besides, as such a prolific live performer it will hardly be long before we could see another straight-up Amanda Palmer show — what we got was something unrepeatable, a living breathing burlesque staying true to the theatrical spirit of the project while simultaneously sending up the absurdity of the entire situation: an impromptu farce, part vaudeville, part Benny Hill, but wholly Amanda Palmer. The goal of music should be, quite simply, to bridge the gap between people, to bring them together, and the extent to which this was realised, whether across the room or across the water, is nothing short of admirable.
“I think the biggest achievement of my life, so far, is this show” imparts Palmer to me in the corner of the Oran Mor brasserie with deserved sincerity, plucking a peanut from a ramekin on the table and popping it into her mouth. “You know what I love, you saw the sound-check, I think you can only truly understand how awesome that gig was if you saw the sound-check.” I have to agree, being able to vouch that the sound-check, although an interesting diversion, had little-to-nothing to do with the finished product, which was more than anything an organic response to the crowd gathered. “See, I’m of the opinion you can always do that, you get a room of people, and you can do that. That is what is so incredibly depressing about music nowadays, is that musicians don’t understand entertainment, and I don’t mean entertainment of like ‘be silly, be funny’, but really thinking about that fact that someone has come into a room, and you are both there to service a night. It is definitely not all about you, and it is definitely not all about them. It is about you guys meeting each other and creating something.”
“So many musicians really believe that the coolest thing they can do is stand on stage, act cool, and ignore the audience, and they don’t get why it doesn’t work. They’re just fucking clueless. They don’t understand.” Her exasperation grows the longer she engages with the state of mainstream music, taking a breath before adopting a more pleading note: “Those people standing there, you have to care about them, you really do. If you don’t, the really masochistic indie hipsters … the small percentage of them that you don’t give a shit about will be like ‘that’s awesome!’ The majority of people out there want to be cared about, they want to be seen and recognised, and communicated with, and connected with.”
This is what has earned her one of the most fiercely loyal fanbases, and it all stems from her conviction that being one’s self and entertaining others are not mutually exclusive approaches to an evening. “That died a death in the ’90s. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s even if musicians were going off into the avant garde, most of them to some extent still had a leftover trajectory from the ’40s or ’50s or ’60s where you entertained or you died. You didn’t get on stage and wank, it was not fucking allowed. In the ’90s there was a shift where authenticity changed its assumptions, and a lot of musicians started to think it was uncool to entertain. That’s gotta die. That has to die. It’s so bad,” she asserts, slapping the table with slack force as she finishes each concluding sentence, her tone not only betraying a passionate disillusionment with the attitude of her peers but also, encouragingly, a determined confidence that this is the real future of the industry.
With more and more bands adopting a DIY approach to music, cutting out an irrelevance of middlemen (as the collective noun should go), this direct co-dependency between artist and audience is revealing itself to be one of the most sustainable anti-business business models. Coming from a street performance background, Palmer is not ashamed to pass the hat, literally, in order to raise money. Last year she did this to pay for her theatre troupe, the Danger Ensemble, to travel with her on tour, and the loyalty of her fanbase well-ensured that this group received their dues. Tonight, she called for donations to Bitter Ruin, the emergency support act, to raise money for their train back to Brighton. I ask whether they managed to gather enough money, and her face lights up with a wide-eyed smile. “Yes! Exactly, right?!”
Consistently gracious to her fanbase, Palmer is vocally appreciative of any help she receives. “The fans are very smart and they know, and they’re ready to support. The important part to do is to send a message that even if you don’t have money, I’m relying on you.” This reliance takes other forms, on this tour and others, calling on fans with spare beds to put up herself and her crew in exchange for merchandise, guest lists and, obviously, the chance to chill out with an artist as important to them as they are to her.
“My whole view on tech and the Internet and music and digital is that audiences just need to be trained to know that it’s fine for an artist to stand there and say ‘you have to pay me in order for me to get to the next city,’ and it actually works that way, it’s not a joke. So I think even just saying in front of people, and getting them back into the mentality that the community supports the artist, it doesn’t go through some mystical machine, it actually is from me to you. People are not used to that, they are so used to gazillions of middleman.”
As Twitter fatigue starts to hit hard, Palmer remains a refreshing force on the micro-blogging site. She does not just use it to report on her experiences, but to create altogether more exciting ones. Stranded in Iceland, she used it to turn a disaster into an adventure, finding a fan to drive her to the Blue Lagoon before using it to organise a free three-hour gig for anyone interested. Her dynamic relationship with Twitter makes up for all the static vacuity seen in ninety-nine per cent of its members, regularly organising free “ninja” gigs for followers in bars and on beaches, using it to hand out free tickets to her booked performances, as well as conducting an adorably public love affair with Gaiman, one hundred and forty characters at a time.
“You know, if I didn’t have Twitter, I could have probably found a fan to put me up, and I could have probably had a good time,” she acknowledges with a considered drawl, “but I wouldn’t have had a great time. And the fact that it was instant, it was like ‘I need a place to stay,’ here, ‘I need a ride,’ here, ‘I need a gig,’ here, ‘everybody come,’ we’re here, and the gig was amazing! It all happened within six hours. It used to be that when you had a gig you had to print postcards, stamp them, address them, mail them, wait three days for them to get to your fans and then hope that they would be able to come to your show three weeks later, and now you can do it in a millisecond.”
The milliseconds run out, however, and Palmer has to return to her adopted family for a farewell drink after a quick update on her upcoming release, an EP of Radiohead covers (For anyone unconvinced, familiarise yourself with her sparse ukulele cover of Creep and be astounded). A fitting band to take on, perhaps, considering their donation model for In Rainbows, though the difference is that they may do this out of luxury, whereas Palmer undertakes this out of unwavering trust. “I’m going to try and do it for donation only,” she reveals, before taking visible delight in one small caveat, “minus — this is brilliant actually — the publishing fee which I have to pay to Radiohead, which is about 50 cents.”
Still, you can’t knock value for money. “I approved a mix for Idiotheque today and it sounds amazing.” It takes no small amount of bravery to take on such a sacred cow of the musical sphere, but if this night is anything to go by, don’t be surprised if fortune favours the bold — and there are few artists bolder than Amanda Palmer.
Evelyn Evelyn – Evelyn Evelyn
Not so much a side-project as an attached-at-the-side-project, Evelyn Evelyn is not only one of the most thinly veiled musical hoaxes in history, but also one of the most interesting and affecting (barring of course Joaquin Phoenix’s foray into hip-hop– that was a hoax, right?). Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer and long-time friend/collaborator Jason Webley bring out the best in each other as siamese-twin sisters Eva and Lynn Neville on this album, finding the perfect outlet to capitalise on the former’s taste for the intelligently macabre and the latter’s hand at carnivalesque folk.
The tone of this album is as two-headed as its stars, exploring both the interior thoughts of the twins as well as the exterior view of them, and this binary is set up immediately. Beginning with Evelyn Evelyn, the day to day concerns of the the sisters are reeled off as they navigate their path along the periphery of a society who see one oddity rather than of two people, ‘Should we be movie stars, can we be millionaires?/ I want to be famous, they’re watching us anyway’. Conversely, second track A Campaign of Shock and Awe is principally narrated by this external gaze. A seasick waltz carries the step-right-up sales pitch of Palmer and Webley, a dizzying call and response which encircles the girls, and the listener, like a drunken vulture as it presents a catalogue of exploitation.
The dress-up opportunity is taken to float, as they sing themselves, “between eras and genres”, from the Vaudevillian shuffle Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn? to the country twang of You Only Want Me ‘Cause You Want My Sister, in both cases masterfully pairing the appropriate subject matter with their chosen mode. This playful spirit is also seen in the gypsy-classical lunacy of Chicken Man and in naive ode to animal husbandry Elephant Elephant, but care is taken to balance whimsy against woe– and whoa is there woe. The inventory of misfortune and abuse extolled by the twins against a haunting score in the three Tragic Events narratives gives J.T Leroy a run for his/her money, and is made all the more disturbing by the disembodied monotone through which its narrators speak.
Palmer and Webley don a number of masks on this record and it works almost perfectly, the only misstep perhaps being My Space, which lovingly lampoons the New Wave Power Ballad; While succeeding comedically, it makes for relatively turgid listening after a record of such energy and accomplished musicianship. The duo find their footing for a redeeming finale of Love Will Tear Us Apart on the ukulele, thankfully, bookending an absorbing tale of oddity and audience with tongue fitfully and firmly in cheek.
