Graham Greene

I forgot to mention that, while I’ve been doing very little reading over here, I finally finished Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear last week and thoroughly recommend it.  While not too samey in subject matter as his screenplay for the film The Third Man (incidentally, one of the best films ever), which is probably the work of Greene’s that I know best, it does bring up similar noir-ish issues of identity, marred lives, longing and loss.  Excellent.

My week, then …

Hello all.  This past week I’ve not been doing a great deal worth reporting – mostly sorting out stuff for the festival I’m going to next weekend - but I did manage to fit in getting new contact lenses (it’s a whole new world) and a free manicure.  I can tell you’re on the edge of your seats for those stories, but they’ll just have to wait.  Last Thursday I went to see Mr Stephin Merritt (sic) and his band the Magnetic Fields. 

Merritt plays, as far as I know, only seated gigs, and this one took place in the beautiful surroundings of Cadogan Hall, just off Sloane Square (Posh Central).  It was a mixed bag in the choice of material, though I knew this would never be the band or the man to play the hits, such as they are.  On a couple of occasions the female vocalist-pianist got a bit too chatty for Merritt’s liking, and he cut in with a deadpan, “No interaction!”  It was hard to tell whether this was entirely a joke or completely serious; I think it was somewhere in between.  Why else would they play seated-only gigs if not to have the full concentration of the audience on the music rather than dancing or being entertained?

The setlist was samey to some degree – none of the songs ever got beyond a medium tempo and the tone was the band’s typical one throughout (misanthropic, cynical, deadpan, a little bit romantic - I would even go so far as to use the word “wry” here if it didn’t give me a rash just thinking about it), though there was a mix of vocalists so that the actual sound was varied.  All the same, I felt the gig only really took off when Merritt was let shine on his own.  When not in song, Merritt almost achieves stage absence, but in performance he draws all attention to himself.  He undeniably has a beautiful voice, great delivery and his songs show it off to best effect, to the extent that I began to begrudge the other vocalists (two women, one the pianist who features on “Reno Dakota”, the other the intolerably nasal one on “Papa was a Rodeo”) any time at all.  I had come to see Merritt and I don’t really feel I got to see enough of him.

Still – I’ve seen the Magnetic Fields!  Hurray!

I’ll be away from Thursday till Monday and hope to have plenty to report next week on what should be a far more eventful (in a good way) time than I’ve had just recently.