Amanda Palmer, Hollywood Theatre, 12 March 2020: Concert Review

Amanda Palmer greeted her Hollywood Avondale audience with her ukelele and a song she wrote yesterday afternoon about New Zealand. From there it was a long strange trip (with an intermission!) for the Auckland stop of her There Will Be No Intermission tour. Rev Orange Peel reports back.

The Hollywood Theatre tonight resembles the nightclub setting which closed each episode of the recently screened third series of Twin Peaks. Musical artists supplied a usually subdued closing song of which Amanda Palmer could easily have been one.

The Hollywood stage is beautifully lit whilst we wait. A large piano sits off-centre and the atmosphere is hazy and ethereal.

Amanda, who comes from Boston, Massachusetts first gained attention as a duo with Brian Viglione, as the Dresden Dolls. Their music was startling and original. Although punk was in the description, it was also cabaret and theatrical, and they evoked the nightclub culture of Germany between the Great Wars.

Amanda started a solo career in 2007 and her first album was called Who Killed Amanda Palmer.

After Aretha Franklin’s version of Respect is played at low volume, Amanda is welcomed on stage by the sell-out theatre audience. Except she comes off the stage and walks around the front row. She has a ukelele and she plays a song she wrote that afternoon about New Zealand.

Her singing is powerful enough without microphone to reach the entire theatre.  Unadorned, she sings in a New York folk style not too unlike Jonathan Richman, who also hails from Boston.

And now here is where the audience would be well advised to strap themselves to a tree with roots (so you don’t go anywhere) as the show really begins.

It is centred around her album released last year, There Will Be No intermission, a confessional, cathartic work of masterly and powerful songs.

In the first half of tonights show we are taken back to Amandas’ teens. Her manner is very easy and humorous as we are led into the details of the sexual grooming of her fourteen year old self at the hands of a seventeen year old male called The Corrupter. This builds to a situation where she finds herself naked, tied to a table, as a birthday present for The Corrupters friend.

What follows is…

You won’t find out in this piece of writing, but this is the opening story of Amanda’s own examination of her personal traumas, and wider tragic events, how she found herself in the darkest places and how eventually the light came through.

It is the story of how she used her song-writing to enable this catharsis, and a resulting deep examination of the process.

It is a tremendously brave and courageous show, equally very funny and profane and then emotionally raw. Being a typical Kiwi male who finds it virtually impossible to cry as it would be like pulling off a finger, I found this deeply moving.

And it will only get sadder, she warns.

What follows is then an examination of her pregnancy at seventeen, and the steps that led to that abortion. How it felt as a teen to face aggressively angry protesters outside the clinic as she tried to enter.

The show tonight is more talk than songs, and she addresses this with the audience. She won’t mind if you leave, if you were expecting songs and finishing about now. Eighty shows have preceded tonight and I get the impression she has gained energy and momentum rather than lost it.

Amanda is married to Neil Gaiman, of Sandman fame and many other highly regarded graphic novels and books. We are told the events leading up to the birth of their son. A Mothers Confession is the song of an incident where he was left in a hot car at four months old and the near–miss of a tragedy.

There is Machete, honouring the death of a father-figure (her biological father left the family when she was a one year old).

Voicemail For Jill is a song about abortion which feminists hated in America. In Britain they saw the humour in it. Amanda tells us feminists in America have no sense of humour.

All these songs are given extended workouts on stage, her voice more powerful here than on record and she really does have a richer tone than a more typical punk vocalist.

There will be an intermission.

Ater the break, we hear Coin Operated Boy, a Dresden Doll’s song. It sounds bright, funny and quirky but with dark undertones.

We are told the story of Amanda as a yoga teacher, participating in a restorative justice retreat for serious, hardened male criminals at Boston prison. Murderers often with life terms and no parole, rapists, perpetrators of horrific violence. We are told the stories of their victim survivors.

Throughout the evening there is the underlying theme of compassion towards people that have abused her, and have abused others.

Amanda delves deep into her traumas, and further down into the traumas of her community.

She relates the tragedy of the Boston marathon bombing, and how she was villified when she posted a compassionate item about a nineteen year-old perpetrator.

This is especially poignant as she does her very last show in Christchurch this Sunday.

Around the four-hour mark, she reminds us again this is not something that anyone would want to review. Then she does the job for me.

Where has this come from?

From comedienne Hannah Gadsby, whose shows are currently on Netflix. From Nick Cave, a musical idol, and especially his performing of Skeleton Key live, where he dealt with the grief of his son’s death.

And to Bruce Springsteen and his recent Broadway show where he talked about his own life and the traumas he dealt with, as he performed alone with guitar and piano (and a cameo by wife Patti).

She has been involved with Patreon since 2015, where she has subscribers funding her music, and this has changed her method of song-writing. As she puts it, she was tired of sucking corporate cock.

The closing song is Ride, a very moving and philosophical song off the album and her favourite. Frogs in water that’s heating up, some of those frogs are her friends.

Her message to young women, “You come equipped, let it go”.

Mine. Music, it’s not like it is life or death, it’s much more important than that.

Recommended
Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Captain Beefheart Beatle Bones and Smokin’ Stones
Eminem   Marshall Mathers LP
 
~Rev Orange Peel