A midwinter night’s dream at the Barbican. Those who like their pop music performed by chaps with jeans, preferably gazing at their shoes, and are attached to certain ideas of authenticity would have run screaming for the exit. The Irrepressibles were pop as icy spectacle, as dizzying melodrama, while Gabby Young & Other Animals were raiding the musical dressing-up box and emerging with bits of French chanson, German cabaret and slinky tangos, and having a ball doing it.
Gabby Young’s band created their own party atmosphere and invited the audience along. Their brand of recession chic included accordion, double bass and a nine-piece brass section, who were at times in the Balkans and at others in New Orleans. Their stand-out numbers had pop’s ability to entrance, in Noël Coward’s sense of, “Strange how potent cheap music is.”
There were numerous sing-along tunes that seemed to have existential depth, like “Whose House” – which house are we in, after all? The house of the Lord? A mad house, perhaps? And while we are on the subject, who the hell are we anyway? Another memorable tune, and the title track of the new album We’re All in This Together, seemed to be a splendid barb aimed at one of David Cameron’s more fatuous statements. Yes, of course we are, unless you happen to be the recipient of part of the £7 billion bank bonuses floating around. Even if the song wasn’t inspired by Cameron, it has now become a piece of satire, anyway.
Things were never going to get boring, but just in case, half a dozen ballet dancers emerged into the audience like wonderful butterflies at a picnic towards the end of the set. Gabby Young (pictured right in action at the Barbican by Gem Hall) isn’t someone who believes in minimalism. She calls it all circus-swing and I’d love to see her at a more relaxed venue having a real party.
Fellow maximalist Jamie McDermott and his Irrepressibles were a different stripe of chamber-pop theatrics. The first thing you saw in the darkness of the set was a disco ball just picking up the odd light, and this was a ghostly after-image of disco, an interstellar negative of the Scissor Sisters. Someone should really throw a lot of money at Jamie just to see what happens. If onlt there were prfligate companies like by MainMan, Bowie’s management in the Seventies.
My friend Dominik Scherrer, of my favourite Swiss band Taxi Val Mentek (admittedly, there’s not a lot of competition), also purveyors of theatrical rock, saw the show and decided that The Irrepressibles would be inevitably huge, and Jamie was the male version of Kate Bush. I have some doubts, despite moments of sheer beauty and undeniably thrilling aesthetics. The show is fabulously camp, and it did occur to me that maybe I just wasn’t gay enough to appreciate it totally. Then I recalled I had been one of the first to totally champion Anthony and the Johnsons. I think while Anthony, whose voice is not dissimilar to Jamie’s, draws people in because of his obvious vulnerability, there is something too inaccessible for me about Jamie.
Everything is choreographed minutely, and actually this is rather impressive to begin with. Each musician – and he has a wonderful array including a string section and a clarinettist who looks like Pan – has their moves worked out. Seeing these musos swaying like sea anemones is rather like stumbling into some underwater kingdom, ruled over by Jamie, with his suit and glittering crown.
The words, when you could make snatches of them out, were about nuclear skies, vanity and insecurity. “Silence is sexy” was one of the few comments he addressed to the crowd. He also compared the Barbican Hall to a spaceship.
The strings were sometimes Nymanesque, with their insistent arpeggios that occasionally spun skywards into some kind of transcendence. There was a playful and sharp intelligence about the whole thing. Only in the last couple of numbers could you really hear Jamie and his words: then I was his. But personally - and I was in a minority, as the audience adored it - I found it all a bit too rich. A musical equivalent of a night overdoing the absinthe with Algernon Swinburne: hallucinogenic, brilliant and probably debauched, but I had a throbbing headache afterwards.
Watch The Irrepressibles play at Queen Elizabeth Hall
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