“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.

Photo by Tom Sheehan

Instrumentally you do some interesting things — would you like to explain how you came upon the crash box and ‘bassterd’ and, indeed, what they are?
Nick: The crashbox is basically a large piece of sprung steel that Gregor [the band’s third member] straps to the front of his drum kit. He found it years ago at a music shop and has never seen one since, He reckons the guy just sold him a bit of steel, but it makes a pretty awesome, if terrifying sound. If it breaks he replaces it with some more sprung steel. The bassterd, or bassturd or basstard is half bass/half guitar. I made it out of my Burns guitar by putting in two separate pickups and outputs for each part. So the low E is now a bass string A. There are only the three of us in the band so it helps fill out the sound and makes a nice racket.

What do you miss most about Glasgow when you are on the road?
N: I miss the man who sits out on Victoria Road every day (who today is sitting in an armchair). We love the anticipation of coming back to the new blue motorway and seeing what building progress has been made.

Am I right in thinking Gregor has some hand in managing Where The Monkey Sleeps? Do the sandwich-making skills come in handy on tour? Considering the fantastic sandwich names there,a Sparrow-themed one should be on the cards…
N: Gregor does make some awesome sandwiches! He is the chef on the road when we’re able to make our own meal. Sometimes, though, our only choice is Roadchef. No matter how fancy and exotic a sandwich, the thing I really desire is plain cheese and ham. I once thought of a cheese-ham snack called ‘cheese-to-meat-you’, don’t know what the Monkey would think about that.

Word of mouth has been fantastic, and any press I’ve read has been extremely kind. Do you feel that support?
N: It’s funny, it’s always surprising and flattering to read the press we come across. It’s hard to know if we feel the support. No, we do feel it, but when you go out to other cities we mainly play to people who have no idea who we are, or sometimes to empty rooms so it’s like an undulating wave.

Most of the songs on Crystals Fall are reproduced versions of previously released ones, was  it hard deciding which tracks to include?
N: It was difficult choosing the songs — in some ways we wanted everything on the album and in the end we went with thirteen songs. Our first EP, Sleight of Hand, we recorded ourselves, so a lot of the recordings and performances weren’t totally up to scratch or we felt like we could do better. We did another EP, Into the Wild, which we did at Divingbell with Marcus Mackay. It was a great experience, his studio is a barn he converted. After that, we were working on some new stuff with Paul Savage and the label were talking about putting everything on the album so we put the new stuff on and remixed the older stuff just as a way to keep some sense of continuity to the sound.

Jill, obviously your voice is pretty astounding, as anyone who has managed to catch a live rendition of Blame It On Me will attest, but were you always aware of the power of your pipes, or is that something that became apparent the more opportunities you had to sing live?
Jill: Wow, well thank you very much! I don’t know, I’ve always loved singing, but I’ve always been really shy. Way back in college my friend and roommate Katie heard me singing in the shower (cliche?!) and she was really the first person to say go out and sing, so she booked me a slot singing a capella in a big hall, it was a celtic song called Stretched on your Grave. I realised that night that while everything else was challenging for me, singing in front of people made me really relaxed and I felt oddly comfortable and happy. It grew from there.

You mentioned A Horse’s Grin was written after reading Geek Love, and a lot of your songs have a great narrative propulsion to them. Are there any other writers you would consider influences? Are you in the middle of anything now?
J: Yes indeed. It was actually Gregor who gave me that book and I just thought, this is disgustingly awesome. I am a big fan of Haruki Murakami, Flannery O’Connor, Dave Eggers, and more recently, the short stories of Raymond Carver. I usually read fiction but right now I’m reading Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin. It’s full of interesting stuff. Henry Ford was intense!

As active tourers it must be hard to hold down a supplementary job, how difficult was this to balance? Have you reached the stage where you are a full-time band yet?
N: Juggling jobs is probably the toughest part of being in this band; Gregor tries to keep the café going part-time, I work freelance as an art technician, and Jill gave up a nine-to-five job in Development Work and now works the odd restaurant shift when we’re not on the road… but we all live in the same flat which makes things a hell of a lot cheaper too. It would be nice to be doing this full-time, and fingers crossed that time comes.

Finally, tell us your plans for the summer.
We’re hoping to play a few shows in New York in June and then it’s festival time. We’re going to play Stag and Dagger in Glasgow, 2000 Trees, Pahoda festival in Slovakia, Bestival, Mosely Folk Fest, Newport Maindee, the Insider in Aviemore, Greenman Festival… hopefully some more too! Also, we plan on visiting some water parks and having a couple of water balloon fights too.

Sparrow and the Workshop – Crystals Fall

Sparrow and the Workshop open their debut album with Into the Wild, and immediately it becomes clear that the musical wilderness they chart is entirely their own.
Few songs here are without real thrust, achieved through the singular combination of Jill O’Sullivan’s silvery yet urgent vocal delivery, Nick Packer’s steely-eyed, pistols-at-dawn bass/electric guitar lines and Gregor Donaldson’s thoughtfully riotous drumming. Donaldson’s harmonies may be the band’s secret weapon in fact, neither afraid of the low notes nor the high ones, they paint a rich soundscape either side of O’Sullivan’s melodies, like a kite string both grounding them and helping them to soar. This vocal interplay is particularly commendable on Devil Song, a spectral western akin to the William Tell Overture played along the River Styx. Songs like A Horse’s Grin and Medal Around Your Neck exemplify their habit of moving from restrained verse to explosive chorus, diving headfirst into a musical melee before briefly extracting themselves to brush the dirt off their knees. I Will Break You is another tune perfect for a bar brawl, easily throwing up images of broken stools and shattered glass, yet giving glimpses of bruised beauty as O’Sullivan lets her guard down.
Sparrow’s power lies in their ability to explore both strength and heartbreaking vulnerability, often within the same song, and this is in no place more apparent than on album closer You’ve Got It All, compulsory listening for anyone with a pair of ears and a heart. This impressively tight group make a hot-blooded racket bigger than most bands double their size, with twice the hooks to boot. If big things don’t come for them I’ll eat my hat– more an act of frustration than a betting forfeit.

The kora-bathed Go Long stands out in this way, spiralling upwards from a repeated four chords motif before disintegrating, raining down in polyrhythmic shards like some shattered crystal tower falling in slow motion. Similarly, the early-morning yawn of You and Me Bess becomes a rude awakening as muted brass fanfare accompanies the narrator’s procession to the gallows. While some songs are Ys-like in their allegory, Newsom is surprisingly confessional for much of this album. In California sees her attempt to navigate the pull of two loves, one romantic and the other of her home, while the return of this refrain in album closer Does Not Suffice is graphically heart-breaking, an anatomy of a spent love affair which drowns in unintelligible pain as instruments become indistinguishable, a percussive SOS pleading from piano the last discernable sound. The palate-cleansing, understated highlight Jackrabbits seems to call for reconciliation, while Baby Birch, a feminine counterpoint to ex-beau Smog’s I Break Horses, also calls for peace in the a wake of a child that never was.
There are moments of pure joy here, however, the blindsiding, hit-and-run of Good Intentions Paving Company is an ecstatic surrender to new love and unlike anything we’ve heard from Newsom before in its piano-driven pop, pulling over half way through for a gospel-tinged moment of reflection. Likewise, the title track’s crescendo, a swooping Kate Bush-like hoot over clapped percussion, captures well the dynamism of its subject, the infamous Lola Montez. Newsom seems ready to join the ranks of either of these women as a singular female performer for the ages; judging by this exquisite collection, perhaps sooner rather than later.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try our best to respect their intentions. The rise and omnipresence of digital music has cultivated an increased musical appetite in our generation, yet with so much available to us we’ve been rendered a little more subject to attention deficit than in decades previous. It seems to be more of a conscious effort to put aside an hour, lock the bedroom door and arch your back against the carpet for that ceremonial first listen. We are busy people, you cry, we don’t have time to act out scenes from Almost Famous.
If we do choose to give our full attention to an album as a whole, the one thing the iPod has blessed us with is ease of portability. You can replace the carpet for the grass and, with a good pair of headphones, still hear every string of saliva snap. Some albums beg to be heard in the open air, like Bon Iver’s For Emma Forever Ago; I first listened to this from a misty peak in the wild mountainside of west Cork, a landscape not too dissimilar from the Wisconsin woods which housed the famous cabin in which he recorded it, and the two are now inseparable in my mind.
More recently I chose to absorb Joanna Newsom’s latest LP, or perhaps XXLP, over three meandering walks by the Kelvin River. This collection seemed much more self-conscious of its status as an album, spread as it is over three CDs — even more so considering it would have fit happily on just two — and demanded to be treated as such. The changing of discs pleasingly recalls the days of vinyl, the warm hiss prompting you to flip, the infinitesimal scrape of resistance shooting through your arm as needle hits record. The ultimate evaporation of music’s physicality, of this cooperative effort, is to me a little scary. From vinyl to CD to MP3, eventually we’ll be taking sonic pleasure suppositories that dissolve in our iBrains while Grand High President Twitter invades Mars: this is the future, people.
I am as guilty as any of trivialising music by dutifully donning my headphones whenever I so much as have to leave the bins out, this portability certainly not always functioning as an enhancing element. Nevertheless, every so often it is worth remembering that music exists to underscore human experience: put down the bin bag for forty-five minutes, and let yourself experience it.

Superbad Comrade, a band with their neck painfully craned not only westward but back in time also, were not particular good. They sound like the kind of band that might play the Bronze in an episode of Buffy, and not a very good episode. This is no great sin in itself, different stroked for tasteless folks and all that, and on another night my wordcount would not be wasted mentioning them, but the lasting effect is seen in the crowd attracted: a crowd, objectively speaking, of ignorant loudmouths.
Hoop tries to be philosophical. “Well, we can’t change what we do, we can only do what we do, no matter what is going on in the back”, and beginning as she does with the flute-like siren call of Whispering Light, we get a good idea of just what it is that Hoop does. The cabaret influence of her previous album Kismet has left its mark on her newer material, but tonight’s songs are much more introspective, akin to a kind of stripped-down, celtic goth-pop, owing much to Kate Bush and Nick Drake, but with shades of Robert Smith pervading. Feast of the Heart is another great example of this, though the unexpected hip-hop assault through the bridge gives us a more modern reference point, as well as setting the scene for the kind of playful rhythms Hoop employs. Four Dreams is the pinnacle of this, the syncopated melody recalling the frenetic excitement of playground chanting, while the infectious, radio-friendly chorus of “come and bring your stereo” has great potential to become a break-through single with a bit of luck and the right exposure.
Angel Mom, a song dealing with the recent death of Hoop’s mother, is delivered heartbreakingly by Hoop, but even more heartbreaking is the fact that we are having to twist our ears towards the stage to hear as shouts from the back drown her out. A plugged in version of Money finally attains a degree of authority over the crowd, Hoop leaving electric guitar duties to her band and laying down her own instrument in favour of a vintage telephone handset. She swings and sways to the immensely catchy tango for the first half, but sings the second verse into the phone, walking circles on the stage and twisting her hair as if carrying a conversation with someone unseen. Talking money down the phone and making it spectacle: Noel Edmunds could learn a thing or two.
Hoop rounds the evening off with the murder ballad Tulip and another older track, Love and Love Again. The finale is a pure piece of musical theatre, almost Disney like in execution. Hoop gesticulates with all the grandour of Piaf to the finger-plucked melody, and throws in the towel after eight songs. I don’t blame her, but it is a shame; in another room it would have brought the house down, whereas here it just underlined what a wasted opportunity tonight has become. Miss Hoop, on behalf of the city of Glasgow, I apologise whole-heartedly.

Bryce Dessner will be best known as a member of The National, but this guest star-studded extracurricular effort may prove much more timeless than anything his day job has produced so far.
The album begins on a high with Cocodrillo, a polyphonic jungle hymnal. Vocal articulations rebound and reflect off each other, unaccompanied, to immense effect as the orchestration spirals outward, conjuring something altogether otherworldly and too perfect for nature. This sonic tapestry recalls the vocal layering of labelmate Nico Muhly, especially once the operatic singing of My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden comes into play. Her refined and trained delivery serves as perfect counterpoint to the organised chaos of composer Padma Newsome’s arrangements. On The Owl of Love she is haunting and desolate against the bardic guitar accompaniment, while on Adages of Cleansing the lack of tonality pitted against her vocal command results in something altogether terrifying. Sufjan Stevens’s guest spot on the album’s final song We Were Here is not so revelatory, a by-numbers lullaby which is really more of an afterthought than a finishing touch.
Red Seas may be the real crown on this album. The first half of this song heavily recalls Nick Drake lyrically, musically and vocally as Dessner takes charge. Its extended instrumental coda is the most arresting part to the song, and possibly the album, jagged strings taking minor-key dives into overheated glockenspiel and punctuating horns — in other words, a hot mess of classical proportions, much like this record as a whole.

As with her acting, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s music tends towards emotional minimalism. Her last album made for pleasant listening but carried little weight; certainly not enough to put any strain on the legs of a coffee table. IRM is thankfully a much less anaemic affair, and though it may be useless to scramble for any personal meaning in this collection (the majority of which is penned musically and lyrically by her partner in this endeavour, Beck), she seems to be enjoying herself much more here, and this proves infectious.
From the start of opener Master’s Hand, it is clear that the masterful hand of Beck has been hard at work; techno-tribal percussion the first of many Beckisms in this album’s production. Second track IRM, the french for an MRI scan, has a junkyard punk feel, illustrating the abrasive mechanisms of the machine. Inspired by the sounds heard when scanned for a brain haemorrhage, Gainsbourg is more interested in the limitations of the practice than meditating on life and death: “Analyse EKG, can you see a memory?”. Heaven Can Wait combines elements of french chanson with the drive of David Bowies’s glam rock, yet results in something thoroughly contemporary. The lush blues of Dandelion, however, make it something of an understated triumph, strings and whispers of brass approach and recede like some imagined orchestra in the mind of a homeward bound troubadour.
There are still a few songs which lack thrust, but for the most part Gainsbourg has created something that won’t appeal to everyone who frequents Starbucks — and that is no bad thing.

Photo by Claire Maxwell

The Swell Season – Glasgow City Halls – 16/01/2010

Marketa Irglova, looking very Celtic in a green dress more Riverdance than rock and roll, kneels down with a toy keyboard beside Glen Hansard, past lover and current musical soulmate, and the two begin on playful ground with Fallen From the Sky. Winsome and whimsical, the accessible pop of this song may seem to confirm suspicions of twee from their detractors, but in no way prepares for the ferociously impassioned turns taken tonight, mostly through the astounding musicianship of Hansard. The two could not be more different; he a born showman and she a tentative ingénue, but it works, Irglova’s sweetly artless vocals leveling the ragged valleys of Hansard’s. Their chosen instruments speak volumes about this relationship. Hansard’s long suffering guitar, shot through with jagged holes and frayed lacquer (the same one he can be seen playing in their breakthrough film Once four years ago) may not be beautiful, but it has a forceful immediacy that well compliments its owner’s own power. Irglova is most comfortable by the grand piano, not quite hidden behind but far from draped over it, delicately framing the band’s sound by way of suggestion rather than command

The new material is for the most part strong, beginning our introduction to it by way of Low Rising, a smooth, soulful number that owes as much to Van Morrison as to Marvin Gaye, an influence Hansard acknowledges by singing a bar of Sexual Healing during the bridge. The catchy and purposeful Feeling the Pull is prefaced with a typically rambling exposition by Hansard on its origins, but thankfully he is as good a public speaker as a musician and these digressions add to the charm of the evening.

Irglova is given centre stage for If You Want Me and Fantasy Man, but the uncertainty in her voice does little to pacify the downbeat nature of these songs. Just as uncertain is her attempt to emulate Hansard’s storytelling, but while Hansard’s sense of humour enhances his numbers, her overly-earnest explanations have a slightly weakening effect. Hansard is left alone on the stage after this, giving us something more robust. With the usual loquacity, he relays a touching story about an old woman he encountered in Chicago who lost her son in 9/11, before stepping out in front of the microphone to sing Say It To Me Now completely unplugged. As it reaches its crescendo, Hansard’s delivery reaches blood vessel-busting intensity, every vein on his forehead raised in desperate trails, the tendons in his neck as taut as the strings on his guitar. He follows this with an equally fiery rendition of Leave, though this time with the aid of amplification.

The band returns, though tonight is still about Hansard. A Tim Buckley cover with both singers on one microphone goes down particularly well, but is followed by a rare slump with the laboured and lead-footed Go With Happiness. They regain their passion, thankfully, with Mind Made Up and High Horse, the latter calling for some impressive audience participation. As the first of their five-song encore they play the crowd-pleasing, Oscar-winning Falling Slowly, but it is the finale of Red Chord, a song from Hansard’s long established band The Frames, which proves the most appropriate, as he segues into the old Irish traditional song, The Parting Glass. “Goodnight and joy be with you all” he sings, and he has certainly done his best to make that come true tonight.

Laura Veirs – Oran Mor – 17/01/2010
Four sets of legs walk on to the stage, but there is a fifth member of Laura Veirs’s band tonight, one inside her stomach. Six months pregnant, she is a brave woman to kick of a two month tour in a different continent, though having heard how Martha Wainwright went in to labour on stage she feels ready for that eventuality. Luckily for this kid, Laura Veirs has the perfect voice for a lullabye. Its timbre is completely untrained, rather child-like and distinctly American — most likely coming from her days playing riot grrrl music at college — yet still melodious, and it has a cartoonish air about it. In fact, it calls to mind what might be the singing voice of a character from The Moomins, Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson’s comic and cartoon. Like the cartoon, Veirs’s music too can be outwardly sweet yet still harbour shadows. She seems to have an affinity with Scandinavia anyway, settling on Copenhagan as the city she would want to go into labour in if it must interrupt her tour.

The set opens with an ode to bassist Carol Kaye, a pleasant finger-plucked melody on guitar, while the band join in for a blast of four-part harmony recalling the knit-in-the-woods choral efforts of Grizzly Bear or Fleet Foxes. There is more vocal interplay between the band later with Life is Good Blues, layers of off-sync “puh-puh-pum”s creating a surround-sound affect, like a choir of crickets in the undergrowth.

This gig is really about new material, with only a few tracks from previous albums, and most older songs only going back as far as one album — for a woman on her seventh release, the scope is a little disappointing, but she never misses the mark with the songs which she does play. At odds with her guileless, innocent way of singing, she is surprisingly confident and friendly, encouraging a clap along for traditional number Cluck Old Hen and splitting the audience into a two-part choir for To the Country. Whether by herself or with the help of the room, Veirs’ music is a softly enchanting trip. Hopefully motherhood will continue to provide inspiration for this hidden treasure.

Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake – Glasgow Royal Concert Hall – 17/01/2010
After an instrumental introduction, in which the instantly recognisable bass figurings of Drake’s bassist Danny Thompson can be heard, tonight’s first guest Robin Hitchcock flounces on stage with matching polka dot shirt and guitar. A gentle reconstruction of Parasite is an absorbing start, distorted guitar worked to excellent symphonic effect. Time of No Reply is the next song, Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch relaxed but apt in his delivery, followed by Vashti Bunyan. She looks effortlessly cool as she walks on stage, but her voice trembles and sinks a little into the much more purposeful strings of Which Will, a little too tentative to make comfortable listening. It is up to Lisa Hannigan to rescue the stride of the evening with At the Chime of a City Clock. Hannigan is absolutely in her element here — with a voice milked from moonlight she explores the sinister paths of Drake’s melody with neck-prickling authority.

An instrumental One of These Things First is given an orchestral flourish through Zoe Rahman’s piano, which initially makes up for the lack of vocals, yet as the song becomes increasingly mired in expressive timing, the performance perilously approaches the realm of lounge music. This vacuity is remedied by Krystle Warren’s slowly swelling take on Time Has Told Me, a muscular, blues tinged performance. Her voice has a familiarity about it that is impossible to place, though somewhere between Nina Simone and Joan Armatrading is a fair attempt; It has the texture of a voice truly informed by time.

A disarmingly soulful version of Poor Boy with Teddy Thompson at the helm is another winning interpretation. Aided by the girl-group vocals of Hannigan, Warren and musical director Kate St. John, Thompson leads the song in a soulful makeover, a great degree of propulsion lent to the song by the house band. Way to Blue is performed with determined faithfulness by the trio of Green Gartside, Teddy Thompson and Lisa Hannigan, each taking a verse for their own. This works perfectly for Thompson and Hannigan’s parts, but their effort is diluted by the strained vocals of Gartside. After this, the previously shaky Bunyan returns in fantastic form for a charming, folk inflected song by Nick’s mother. Warren’s acapella take on Deem Me So High follows, while Teddy Thompson’s Riverman has all of its edges sanded off by the infusion of a shuffle rhythm through the drums. The effect is pleasing if a little lightweight, unlike the ensuing highlight.

Accompanying herself initially with only a portable harmonium and the stomp of her foot, Hannigan’s version of Black-eyed Dog begins messily engrossing, melodically unclear but visually astounding as she rocks possessed over her instrument. As the band enters, you start to see it for the true session-song it is, especially once it finds its centre around a driving Celtic guitar rhythm. The applause after a false ending is interrupted by a rollicking coda, but rather than ceasing it integrates, clapping in time as Hannigan repeats the chorus plea “I’m growing old and I wanna go home”. The Mercury-nominated songstress’s charm offensive shows no signs of stopping — this is the finest tribute given to Drake tonight. She takes a sheepish curtsy, modesty at odds with the revelation we just witnessed, and my heart drops, wishing I had pockets deep enough to house her.

The rest of the night is pleasant, but not transcendent. Teddy Thompson and Krystle Warren’s Pink Moon duet is endearing, singing it to each other rather than us, and all the better for it. A finale including all of tonight’s singers taking on Voice From the Mountain, gathered Feed The World-style around the front of the stage, is a fitting end. Despite a few missteps tonight, its hard to leave without feeling a modicum of that inspiration yourself.

Did you start Chemikal underground primarily as an outlet for your own band, The Delgados?
Well actually, I’ll disabuse that notion right from the start. The Delgados were certainly the first band to be released, but Chemikal Underground was not created by us as a vehicle for The Delgados, it was always our intention that we would create a full grown record label and start signing bands as soon as possible. It was definitely born out of naivety as much as anything else. At that time as well it’s fair to point out that Glasgow was experiencing a rebirth, if you like. For a number of years prior to when we started the label, Glasgow had been stagnating a bit, after the success of Teenage Fanclub you had a lot of copycats floating around.

What were the main teething problems you faced?
The biggest issue for us was that we had too much success too quickly. We had started working with Bis, and we got a phone call to Paul and Emma’s kitchen (which was our office at the time) to say that Bis were going to be on Top of the Pops  and we needed another 30,000 cds. We had only manufactured two, we only had a couple of hundred quid in the bank. So we had the Bis thing, The Delgados were getting pretty good press, then we signed Arab Strap from a demo we’d been sent, and Mogwai came on board shortly after. Arab Strap were a bit of a phenomenon, and then Mogwai just took off like you wouldn’t believe. So we were up, and running, flying even, before we knew it. Given that none of us had ran a business before, it got a bit messy. There was a lot of money being spent and not a  lot of budgets being done. Not to mention the fact that the Delgados were trying to balance running the label and being on tour at the same time.

Now celebrating fifteen years in business, would you say you are any more or less selective in the bands you sign?
Certainly not any less selective. I would like to think that it’s incredibly hard to get signed to Chemikal Underground. We also don’t have the time to wade through all these postbags of demos, which, in the main, I mean ninety-nine percent of the demos we get sent are fucking rubbish, no point beating about the bush. I think from Chemikal undeground’s point of view, we’ve always tried our best to satisfy our own taste in music. It’s not a public service, it’s a vanity project. It’s about trying to find something that appeals to the four of us.
Would you say you are quite hands on with your Glasgow-based bands in terms of encouragement and advice?
Yeah, I’d say more as time goes on. As we’ve got older and more experienced, the bands got younger, and there does come a point, it’s not in an interfering way, but we do feel that having been in a band ourselves, we do have experience of things that some younger bands wouldn’t have. I think that we would sit down and suggest things to bands now that we wouldn’t have suggested back in ‘96 or ‘97 sat around a table with Arab Strap. At the time we were learning ourselves, everything was done on hunches and instinct, but after you’ve been doing it for fifteen years, you start to get some sense of… “thats not really the best idea, I don’t think you should be doing it like that, because we did it like that before and it was a fucking disaster”

Have you felt the effect of online downloading on business?
Absolutely. I don’t want to sound like a Chelsea pensioner, but the last fifteen years that have coincided with the time the label has been running have recognised a siesmic change in the music industry, it’s unrecognisable from when we started, the internet was a babe in arms when we started. There will always be traditional music lovers who will want to go to record shops and buy vinyl, but they will be in the very sizable minority. We can’t compete with all the big supermarkets, so what we have to try and do is to set up our website, set up our online shop, and make the punters feel like they are part of the company, that they are supporting human beings. We’re not philanthropists by any stretch, we are trying to make a profit, but if people respect what it is we do and feel that we’re worth helping and supporting, that’s the best way that we have to try and secure our future.

What does 2010 hold in store for Chemikal Underground?
We’ve got an Unwinding Hours album, that’s the new project from Craig and Ian who used to be in Aereogramme. Emma Pollock from the Delgados, she’s got a new album that’s coming out in March. We’re also going to be reissuing the first two Arab Strap albums with a whole load of bonus material in a box set called Scenes of a Sexual Nature. Beyond that, there’ll be another Phantom Band album later in the year, there’s a few other things we’re looking at but I’d have to torture you if I told you.

Walking in on The Flaming Lips’ pre-gig stage show is like arriving early to a superbly weird and decadent party. Backstage is peopled with roadies dressed in bright orange dungarees, working away on parts of the intricate stage and camouflaged amongst the amps and props decked out in the same luminous colour. We pass one group blowing up giant balloons, others concern themselves with the spacey video projections, while one prepares the specially painted cannons which in a few hours will be erupting clouds of yellow and orange paper over a delirious crowd. The Flaming Lips circus has come to town and from the midst of the apparent madness emerges its ring leader: Wayne Coyne. With his ruffled grey mane and characteristic suit, Coyne embodies a kind of Willy Wonka for the musical sphere, a top hat and cane all that is missing to complete the picture — out of the corner of your eye you could easily mistake the stooping, orange-clad roadies for Oompa Loompas. He momentarily leaves his station to lead us through the labyrinthine corridors of the O2 Academy and into the band’s dressing room hidden deep in the bowels of the old theatre.

Photos by Luke Winter

Wayne Coyne is an interviewer’s delight: pleasant, talkative and genuinely enthusiastic. After twelve albums The Flaming Lips have remained a band consistently following their own path, from the spaced out symphonic electronics of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots to their early freaky guitar albums such as Clouds Taste Metallic and In a Priest Driven Ambulance. Though at first listen, latest album Embryonic may seem a departure from their previous work, Coyne explains that it felt like just another natural progression for The Flaming Lips: “I don’t think we looked at it as really being that different from a lot of what we do… I think the worst thing that can happen to groups is that they finally figure out what it is that they do and they do it over and over again. I don’t know why but that always bores me.” The freedom afforded to them by record label Warner Brothers and their open-minded fan base has always allowed them to be fearless, taking each album as it comes and being unafraid to just be “completely freaky”. “Since 1984 no one has ever come in and said ‘you have got to do it my way,’ I think that has been the worst thing that has happened to us, no one has ever come in and really dictated what we do. They have always loved us as this weird party-freaky-rock ensemble from Oklahoma, they have never seen us as some cash cow you know like Linkin Park or the Chili Peppers.”

They say if you are nervous about meeting someone, you should imagine them naked. As anyone keeping up to date with NSFW videos now knows, we need no longer merely imagine for Coyne. The recent video for latest single Watching the Planets has the frontman stripped of his clothes by a horde of savage nudists before being dragged back into a giant vaginal sphere. “I had heard on a radio show about these cyclists who will get a troop of maybe 200 people together and ride through the streets of Portland, Oregon naked.” Coyne contacted the organisers, and thus the video was born. Coyne is refreshingly honest in outlining his initial concerns “Your fear with any nudity is that it is gonna be forty old fat guys showing up naked and it will be horrible, to my surprise it was a group of healthy, enthusiastic young people, many of them quite beautiful women, running around for two days straight completely naked, there are worse things in the world! Since I am the director I had to come up with some idea/story. So I built this giant fur, vaginalistic, living bubble thing which is like my space bubble but going back in time, the pre-space bubble thing or whatever. I conceptualised that these strange otherworldly people would be born out of it while these peaceful naked people are cycling around Portland and somewhere in the middle they would meet and I would be their catalyst by which the magic underground world of naked people and the weird real underground Portland world of naked people would come together.” Misgivings about his own nudity were also quickly overcome: “I looked at them and thought gee, if they can do it then why can’t I! Before you know it, you are doing it! When you are with a couple of hundred people who are also naked, it’s no big deal.”

This isn’t the first time nudity has been linked with The Flaming Lips, at a recent festival appearance in New Orleans one of the band’s renowned on-stage dancing animals burst out of her Yeti suit and ran to embrace Coyne before being escorted off-stage. “I guess it is not as weird as you would think. When you are around people you are always expecting crazy sort of shit and when you are around a bunch of girls… It is not about sex though, it doesn’t feel weird. Nudity in the way that the Flaming Lips use it is a way of saying, we are not restricted. No one is making us live our lives any way other than the way we want to. To me, I am not doing it to compete with Shakira or Madonna, I am doing it to say we are all allowed to do the music we want, to look the way we want, to say what we want and to be the way we want.” The flower-child freedom Wayne espouses has not caught on in our part of the world, though: “There are only a few European countries in which, if I asked some people to come dance naked with me, they would do it. It would never happen in the UK” — perhaps this might not be so much a question of propriety but of temperature.

Photos by Luke Winter

The Flaming Lips are a group famous for their intensely devoted following. With fans so willing to throw themselves at his feet, has he ever been afraid of what he has created? “No, I mean they are devoted but they are not just devoted to me, this isn’t like Charlie Manson, they love music, they love art and they love the idea that you can be inspired by an experience, and I know that people who go to see The Flaming Lips will go to see another band tomorrow and another band next week, and they will go to museums and read books, and I’m not the only thing and that’s what is so great about them. They have a lot of experience and they feel this thing is worth their time and energy and for me, that makes all the difference because I don’t want just a bunch of mindless super fans.” It is true too, if you look around in the audience you will see teenage goths, middle aged metal heads, tweed-coated art students, all looking up at the raining confetti with abject wonder transforming their faces into mile-wide smiles. It would be impossible to find any real majority, other than people who love good music and are willing to put themselves out there and enjoy it. “That’s what I like, it’s not just bands liking bands, it is people who make art liking other art.”

True to this belief, The Flaming Lips recently recorded their own version of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of Moon. Although initially suggested as a joke by Coyne after iTunes asked for an exclusive release from any surplus material from Embryonic, it soon took on a life of its own. “So I asked my nephew’s band, and in the meantime we thought we’d ask Henry Rollins to help us. We thought we could get Peaches or Karen O to do the screaming, orgasmic death chant on Great Gig in the Sky and my imagination got going, but we love that record and our version of it is different enough so that anybody who knows that music will hear new things within that.”

The aforementioned nephew’s band, Stardeath and White Dwarfs, after having toured with the Flaming Lips for six years, return this year as the support band. There may be a whiff of nepotism, but nothing to complain about when talent runs in the family. There is always the danger with such bands that the standard of music may be eclipsed by their associated heritage, but Dennis Coyne is happy to resolutely celebrate his connection to the Flaming Lips. “If some people will listen to us just because I’m Wayne’s nephew that’s fine, just like some people may hate us just because I’m Wayne’s nephew. All those people that are either gonna hate us or love us are going to listen to our record.” There seems to be a certain dialogue between the two bands — Stardeath undoubtedly holding a candle for middle-era Lips material — and there is also a concordance between the title of their debut, The Birth, with Embryonic. Is this something deliberate? “To say there isn’t any would be false. We are always together so much and even if it’s not openly talked about I think the relationship between the bands is just there. Some songs may sound similar and some titles may sound similar, literally because we both were reading the same magazine or heard a song we liked … but I don’t think either band would say there is a conscious resemblance.” Of their recent collaboration, Coyne Jnr. explains: “We thought, ‘wouldn’t it be fucking cool if we could sit down and do one of our favourite records together?’ We’re going to play it live in Oklahoma City on New Year’s Eve.”

For a band so representative of counterculture spirit and enlightened ideals, it is important to note that the soil from which The Flaming Lips sprang, Oklahoma City, is not known for such libertarianism. One indication of this is the state’s endorsement of John McCain in the last election, winning over every county and with the highest percentage of any state during the presidential race. Nevertheless, The Flaming Lips are adored by their home city, with an alley named in their honour and Do You Realize? recently voted as the state rock song.

“I have lived in Oklahoma City all my life and I live in a very poor part of the city, a crime-ridden, crack-smoking, prostitute kind of area but they like that and they like to use me as an example. Some of the guys who pushed this are a lot younger than me and so they have been Flaming Lips fans since they were twelve so it’s not actually that weird! As I said, in Oklahoma there is country music, sport and the bible, we are not trying to obliterate that, I’d say now that instead of being three things there are four: there is also The Flaming Lips, we are never going to get rid of those other ones.”

So it is a case of accumulation rather than transformation, but still a fantastic accomplishment. “It is not like Glasgow, it is a new, weird, midwestern city — I mean if it can happen in Oklahoma City to the Flaming Lips then it can happen anywhere!”

Music critic Kitty Empire recently proclaimed in her Observer review of Embryonic that if secular humanism were to have a house band, the Flaming Lips would be it. This assertion proves to hold salt at the performance later in the evening, Coyne preaching joy and goodwill between songs, and of course crystallising it all with the finale of Do You Realize?, an existential anthem, celebrating the fragility and transience of life, wrapped in the unassuming beauty of a perfectly written pop song. “Well that’s a great compliment!” Coyne replies. “I know Do You Realize? was a song I fumbled upon and especially the line “everyone you know someday will die”, the big statement in that. I hear it now and I see why people would play it at funerals, weddings, the birth of their children, I can understand how that ties in. I run into people every night, when we play, who have some story about how this song has helped them to overcome some thing, some big challenge in their life.” The live incarnation of The Flaming Lips does exactly this, it transports the audience, offers a temporary relief and cements their status as one of the most significant bands of our time. “I know it can sound a bit Bon Jovi-ish but those things are true: music does that, music… you hear a song and you make it your own; you give it all the power. It is what every songwriter dreams of, creating something that connects your life with these other people through this big cosmic thing.” With that Coyne is summoned to the helm once more and though there is the feeling he could talk for hours and hours, we allow him to return to his symphony of sound and vision.