Considering their first performances in nearly a decade were the events everyone at this year’s ATP was really bursting their nuts to see, I was in no great rush to watch Godspeed You! Black Emperor play this weekend. Other people queued for a wristband to make sure they got in to see their Friday and Saturday shows — in the limited capacity Centre Stage auditorium — but I was quite happy, even reluctant to drag myself to their show for the first time on Sunday.
Here’s why: when music overlaps with a particular time and place so closely that it’s almost impossible to tear it away from the scenery it evokes — say the cruel vistas of Death Valley in California — you’re going to be uneasy about hearing it played in a holiday camp surrounded by cut-outs of Bob the Builder and people who keep asking you for a high five. Still, when GY!BE morphed half an hour of introductory drones into set opener ‘East Hastings’, it was the nearest thing to being teleported to a strange place without swallowing a piece of blotter paper.
The eight people onstage — two percussionists, cello, violin, bass and three guitars — were expressionless puppets, turning up the soundtrack to that non-existent hallucinatory movie. But the most edifying aspect of seeing them play live — for someone too young to have seen them before — is not anything to do with the content of the music they play, which is largely a note-by-note reproduction of songs from their albums; it’s that the shimmering sound of the desert is created mostly by guitars rather than rewired old radios, samples or the hands of God himself. They were, then, more like a ‘proper band’ than the genius ciphers that their legend has led people to believe, and actually not much different from, say Mogwai or Sigur Ros when it boils down to what they do rather than who they are.
For two hours GY!BE totally absorbed the audience in apocalyptic desert music and then left without once looking at either the audience or one another. Apparently they hate each other as well as capitalist modes of production, which is why they’ve been absent for so long, and why their current batch of shows is small enough to make sure no one walks out before it’s finished.
Bardo Pond played mostly new stuff on the Saturday, which suggests their new album will be a dream-pop masterpiece. It does that great thing where they put country melodies underneath a wall of noise which means Isobel Sollenberger’s vocals sound like they’re coming from a Texas radio station adjusted by Kevin Shields.
The storm clouds of noise which had dominated the entire weekend finally gave way to the golden rays of the Boban Markovic Orchestra and the king of pop parodies ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic on Sunday night. Boy, did everyone salute those Serbian guys with the wildest monkey-howling sing-alongs and ovations you ever did hear — especially when we’d waited all that time just to have a dance! And nobody sends an audience into salivating madness quite as proficiently as Serbia’s most acclaimed brass band. People were still chanting the melodies on Monday morning, which you can’t say for any other band this weekend (although the vast majority had no melodies to chant).
Weird Al’s live shows — on a British stage for the first time — are tightly stage-managed to allow for costume changes between each song, so pretty much half of the show is a pre-recorded set of cut-and-paste ‘interviews’ with celebrities where performs the difficult task of making people like Jessica Simpson look numb in the head. When he wasn’t busy getting changed, the human Weird Al — not the prerecorded one — took the piss out of the likes of Coolio, James Blunt and Nirvana pretty well, although once you’ve heard him do ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, you’re not exactly taken aback by what he does with ‘You’re Beautiful’. (Hint: it’s called ‘You’re Pitiful’.)
Finally, one of the prolific Ben Wallers’ many bands, Country Teasers, made me laugh for the second time in a single day at what must surely be the gloomiest line-up in the history of three-day-musical-events-with-guest-curators-held-at-holiday-camps. Looking like Lee Evans dressed as a schoolboy, Wallers’ band played scratchy guitar rock while he sung anecdotal songs not suitable for the kids — my favourite was about a woman being raped by a farmhand, but there were others of an equally high standard. Then afterwards, I spotted Ben Wallers at the disco, dancing as though he was hit very hard with a mallet as a child. As epic and well-put-together GY!BE were, it’s this kind of moment you really cherish when all weekend you’ve been faced with the choice of watching either Wolves In The Throne Room, Neurosis, or a short film showing a man having epileptic seizures.
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