22 ***^ Thursday 1 August 2019 The Daily Telegraph‘I’d love to do
an interview,
but I might
be drunk’
Amanda Palmer is one of music’s most
outrageous stars. Tristram Fane Saunders
braces himself for an unusual encounter
She started playing at house parties
around Massachusetts – where
she was raised by her computer
programmer mother and physicist
stepfather, and supplemented her
income by busking as a “living statue”- but has slowly built an obsessive,
international cult following.
This close relationship with her fan
base also helped her to crowdfund her
album, Theatre Is Evil, in 2012, when
she fell out with her record label.
Offering rewards for different
donations (from a download
of the album for $1, to $5,000
for her to throw a party in
your home), Palmer raised an
unprecedented $1.2 million
through around 250,000
donations. Her TED talk
about it was watched by five
million people on YouTube; a
book based on the talk became
a bestseller. The album was also a
critical success: “$1.2 million sounds
like a bargain” was Rolling Stone’s
verdict.
Since then, she has been releasing
music to her “patrons”, subscribers
who pay a set amount each time
she releases something through
the website Patreon, such as a
song, blog post or music video.
Half the pub’s audience are
“patrons”. But, finally, this year, she
released another solo studio album,
There Will Be No Intermission.
Palmer has a thorny relationship
with the media. She was widely
pilloried after publishing a
misjudged poem about the Boston
Marathon bomber (“you don’t
know how to explain yourself ” she
wrote, attempting to address him
sympathetically); one website called
her “the most hated woman on the
internet”. After a tabloid wrote a
story about a Janet Jackson-esque
wardrobe malfunction she had atTale of the Luddite rebellion too
experimental – and too modern
T
he Manchester Royal Exchange
is often at its most inspiring
and essential when it looks
close to home for subject matter and
particularly to the city’s past.
A crucible of the Industrial
Revolution, Manchester’s rapid
expansion into a northern powerhouse
in the 19th century offers a rich source
of material: the spectacle of Britain at
its high-achieving best and Dickensian
worst. One of my all-time favourite
regional productions was Sarah
Frankcom’s 2006 staging here of Mary
Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrait
of downtrodden cotton-mill workers.
That adaptation was period-dress:
conventional, but not remotely boring.
There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,
taking its main title from a Smiths song
(and elaborating its theme in its subtitle
“Scenes from the Luddite Rebellion”),
focuses on early-19th century industrial
unrest in the region, but it isn’t cut
from the same artistic cloth.
James Yeatman and Lauren Mooney
of theatre company Kandinsky
assemble a cast who look as if they’ve
walked in from the nearby shopping
centre. No dirt, grime, bonnets and
clogs, but casual clothes and hoodies- albeit with the odd striking costume
flourish: a heavy waterproof coat and
sou’wester is donned to denote “King
Ludd”, the apocryphal leader of the
secretive Luddite movement of textile
workers that swept the Midlands and
the North in violent resistance to the
use of new machinery.
The approach, then, is open-ended,
disparate and experimental. Following
the cheery announcement “Turn off
your mobile phones or we’ll smash
them with hammers”, we are told that
verbatim material from the period- letters, newspaper articles and
first-hand accounts – will be bulked
out with fiction, reinforcing a point
made in E P Thompson’s definitive
history of the era, The Making of the
English Working Class, that the nature
of Luddism left holes in terms of
written evidence.
There’s a raised, blood-red stage
area, with whatever’s to hand as props;
microphone-stands deployed in unison
to denote mechanical activity, with the
odd hapless soul scrabbling about in
repeated, mindless motion while the
air thickens with deafening industrial
roars. It is quite an interesting style –
at once back to basics and also a nod
to today’s post-Luddite world (with
its own technological threats to job
security). Yet the collage approach
means we get something that often
flickers with fascination, but to
seldom fully illuminates.
There’s a lot to take in: interactions
between a wary local informer and his
paymaster, concerned chat between
a hard-toiling mill worker and her
aggrieved Luddite father. Sundry civic
upheavals of 1812 are included: the
burning down of Westhoughton’s and
Burton’s mills, the ransacking of the
Exchange itself.
The descent into violence (part-
stoked by the authorities, it seems) is
well charted, but rather lost is a sense
of who these ordinary people were.
What were their songs, for instance?
Call me a Luddite, but when members
of the cast writhe about on the floor
to Blondie’s Rapture, encapsulating
the carefree gaiety of Regency-era
nobility, it’s hard not to feel that
something has been lost amid the
progressive theatricals.TheatreThere Is a Light That
Never Goes Out
Manchester Royal Exchange★★★★★
By Dominic CavendishRage against the machines: cast members Nisa Cole, Amelda Brown and David Crellin‘G
o on – ask me a
question!” says
Amanda Palmer,
nudging me towards
a microphone. We are
standing on the pool
table of a north London pub, facing
a crowd of 200-odd people, with the
emphasis on odd.
Many are wearing T-shirts for the
singer-songwriter’s former band,
cabaret duo Dresden Dolls, but just
as many are in corsets, bowler hats or
eccentric steampunk garb. They have
come here at two hours’ notice – some
rushing from other cities – for one of
Palmer’s “ninja gigs”.
In London on a brief stopover, the
American singer asked her one million
Twitter followers for a venue – and
someone volunteered their pub. On a
whim, she decided to start the show
with this Q&A on the makeshift stage.
(Q: What’s the last film that made hercry? A: Watching Toy Story 4 with her
three-year-old son. Cue cheers.)
This is not how celebrity interviews
usually work. There’s usually a string
of formal emails, filtered through a
publicist, an agent and the publicist’s
agent before the star agrees to meet in
a soulless hotel room a month later.
But Palmer – recently dubbed “the
queen of DIY music” by Telegraph
rock critic Neil McCormick – likes to
do things her own way. When I ask for
an interview on Twitter, she replies
in two minutes (“YES. PLEASE”) and
suggests a chat that same day, adding
“but I may be drunk on cocktails”.
In the end, I ask her a few questions
on the pool table and then sit down to
talk to her properly in a corner of the
pub. In between, she performs her
“ninja” set – an hour of strumming
a ukulele and howling as if her life
depended on it, hopping across the
room from pool table to bar-top, takingSIMON MELBER; GETTY IMAGES; REDFERNSMANUEL HARLANrequests, telling stories and cracking
jokes about her husband, American
Gods author Neil Gaiman. It’s a warm,
intimate experience, and utterly
charming. Unusually for a gig in 2019,
very few of the audience have their
phones out to film it – most seem to
be just enjoying the moment.
And, after the set, Palmer stands on
the street outside, drinking cocktails,
while her fans form a queue. “I will
stay here until you all get what you
need,” she shouts. She wants to speak
to every single person. More and more
arrive. At 9pm I wander over and find
the signing queue seems to involve the
fans signing Palmer. “We’re making a
project!” she cries, delighted, as they
scribble on her torso in felt tip. For
Palmer, this is a typical Wednesday.
Her insistence on building a direct
connection with fans – often sleeping
on their sofas after shows – is at the
heart of an unorthodox music career.Amanda Palmer tours the UK
from Oct 16 until Dec 13. Details:
amandapalmer.netUntil Aug 10. Tickets: 0161 833 9833;
royalexchange.co.ukGlastonbury, she performed a riposte,
naked, at her next show. It’s not
uncharacteristic that she begins her
pub gig by complaining about another
newspaper’s music editors. She says
moving to Patreon was “a way to
stay in my safe art-cave”, away from
mainstream scrutiny.
For non-patrons, the deeply
personal piano ballads on There Will Be
No Intermission arrived as a surprise.
There are songs about a friend who
died in her arms, another friend’s
abortion, her own anxiety about
parenthood. It’s a departure from her
early blackly comic, elliptical ditties.
“When I talk to Neil about the way
we make art, I call it the ‘costuming’,”
she says. “Instead of showing the
naked body, it’s got eight layers of
costumes and gloves and hats and
glasses and you have no idea what’s
really f------ in there.” That she appears
stark naked on her new album’s cover
is a signal that the costuming has
come off.
She wrote these songs during a
traumatic period in her personal
life. Leaning over the pub table in
a crumpled white shirt, she speaks
about it with disarming candour. “We
were excited to have a second child,
and then I went through a really brutal
miscarriage,” she says.
How did she feel? “Invincible. That’s
not what you’re supposed to feel after
a miscarriage. You’re supposed to justfeel sorrow, grief and silence.” It was
an awful experience, but she found
that working her way through it left
her feeling stronger. “I felt a real...
power in the face of that grief that
wasn’t expected.”
For all her frankness, there are
some topics she won’t openly address
in her songs. “Neil and I are in an open
relationship, and do I write songs that
are directly about that? Hell no! It’d be
so disrespectful to Neil, to my lovers,
to whoever’s involved.” Was agreeing
to sleep with other people a difficult
conversation to have? “F--- yes!”
she hollers, grinning and rolling
her eyes to the heavens. “So that’s
where the temptation of costuming
and metaphor comes into play. If I’m
going to talk about those complicated,
nuanced feelings, they’re going to
have to wear gloves and hats.”
In conversation, however, the
hats come off. What does Gaiman do
that annoys her? “How much time
do you have?” she laughs, then
suddenly becomes very earnest.
“He does not hold himself
accountable for his choices about
time. He has a really hard time
saying no – to me, to friends,
to publishers, to people who
want an introduction, and it’s
like death by a thousand cuts ...
He’s so generous, but I watch it
eating him alive, and it drives
me crazy.”
Then she stands up, with
a laugh. “I am going to go fall
over!” And off the ninja goes to
catch her flight.Cabaret: Palmer,
right, and with
Brian Viglione in the
Dresden Dolls, leftFashion statement: Palmer with
Neil Gaiman and their son Anthony‘I’d never write songs about
my open relationship.That is so disrespectful
to whoever is involved’Arts
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