Blood Harmonies

Bravo Martha

Ever since her eponymous debut album, Martha Wainwright has always held pole position on my iPod.  Everything from her haunting, lingering voice, to her painfully raw candour, appeals to me.  Plus, she’s from Montreal, which invariably strikes me as a good thing.

Then a couple of years ago, I happened upon an article in which she explained the genesis of a particular song, and reading it made me love her even more. If your only experience of Martha is on the radio, then you are unlikely to have heard the song, since it has the somewhat airwave unfriendly title, Bloody Motherfucking Asshole, and this phrase is frequently reprised throughout.

Although I’d heard this track many times, I’d always assumed that was about a love affair gone wrong.  But around this time I happened to being thinking a lot about difficult family relationships because I already had in mind that this would be the core of the book I am currently working on, The Quartet. So I sat down to google Larkin’s poem about what parents do us, and thanks to the wonders of the internet, I ended up in an article from the Guardian, where to my delight, I discovered Martha had written Bloody Motherfucking Asshole for her father (in part because he doesn’t like it when she swears).

Since then I tried, but sadly failed, to get tickets to see her live a few times.  But last night I finally had the enormous pleasure of catching her performance at the Barbican, where she’s currently, doing a small number of shows for the release of her new album of Edith Piaf songs, Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers.  (The title comes from a song about French soldiers in the Napoleonic wars, who fought on ‘without guns, or shoes’.  As it was Remembrance Day, this seemed a particularly poignant reminder of how little has changed for those on the front lines of the wars we wage.)

The show was nothing short of a triumph, as is the album, which was recorded live in Paris earlier this year.  Wainwright has the same intense emotional register as Piaf, but to my ear, has a greater and more nuanced vocal range. By deliberately choosing less well known songs, Martha avoided the trap of descending into the pastiche trap which has caught out generations of singers who’ve tried to pay homage to Edith Piaf.  Throughout the show, Wainwright spoke frequently, explaining her reasons for her choices, or translating bits of lyrics for the audience.  She admitted that she had deliberately decided to concentrate on the three hundred songs she had been sent by producer Hal Willner, rather than researching Piaf herself.  She confessed to not even having seen the recent biopic La Môme, but pointed out that having been brought up in Montreal, she could hardly have failed to be familiar with a fair bit of Piaf’s back catalogue.

This is normally the point where I should say that Martha made the songs her own, and while this is undeniably true, there is another sense in which it was not the feeling I had at all.  In a recent interview in the Times, she said ‘Edith Piaf became the ghost behind all that I sang’ and sitting in the semi-dark of the Barbican last night it was hard to shake the feeling that Edith was lurking somewhere in the Gods.  For although Wainwright fully inhabited each song, with an amazing energy despite being obviously heavily pregnant.  She was frequently physically pushing at the boundaries of the songs, not just vocally, but with her arms and legs, as though forcing her way in to bring new shades of angst and passion to each one.  And yet, always with a palpable reverence for the originals.

Although it was by no means a big musical production, a black and white video installation added enormously to the proceedings.  It was projected in two montages behind the accompanying ensemble of nine musicians (including Wainwright’s husband, on double bass).  Both screens started out, and frequently returned to, two white on black line drawings.  On the left, Edith Piaf, on the right, Martha Wainwright.  During the songs, these changed to black and white images, close ups of locations it was initially not possible to identify, and which at first I took to be still photos.  What they seemed to have in common was that they depicted solid, old structures, so that the photos might have been taken any time in the last hundred or so years.  But then, without warning, a jogger wearing a baseball cap emerged from under a tunnel on Martha’s side of the stage, and it became clear these were video installations.  To me, they added enormously to the poignancy of the show, because while Edith’s side of the installation was frequently static, Martha’s was continually showing modern life emerging from, or continuing amongst, lingering landscapes from the past, as a sort of visual metaphor for her entire project.  But like everything else about the show, the metaphor wasn’t laboured at all, and the installation moved on, inviting the audience to make other connections with the material.

While I greatly admired the decision to steer clear of the most well-known Piaf songs, as the show went on, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to hear Martha belting out a classic.  Needless to say, this was a treat she’d reserved for the encore.  When she returned to the stage, she spoke about how she’d been mindful that it was Remembrance Day, and so had considered trying to do something in English, from the First World War.  But since all that came to mind was It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, she decided to give that a miss.  Instead, she opted for a Second World War song which evoked the despair of a soldier who returns from the front only to discover there is nothing waiting for him at home.  I can only hope her astonishingly heart-rending version of Brother Can you Spare a Dime is recorded somewhere, because it is not to be missed.

Finally, she tried to get the capacity crowd in the Barbican to sing La Vie en Rose.  Whether it was English reticence, or the fact no one new the words, she had trouble coaxing the crowd along, until she pointed out that everyone at least knows the la, la, la, la, la, la, la…part.

All in all, it was a superb evening, and at the end I’d have happily rewound and sat through it all again.  Bravo Martha.  I cannot wait to hear what you come up with next.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 12:01 and is filed under Brain rechargers, Novels in Progress and tagged with The Quartet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.