Issue 95 / Dec18/Jan19

REVIEWS
Nick Mulvey
Arts Club – 12/10
Is this what we’ve been reduced to? Are we witnessing the
desperate, pained horror of music and the way we celebrate it
finally breathing its last miserable and hopeless breath? What’s
that sound? Is it the end? That agonised, guttural and wretched
hacking cough of a long, slow death, as the air grows thinner
around it. It’s fading away. Time slips ever further and even
quicker. Is this the end of days?
What it once was is not what it now is. It lies forlorn, with
its back turned on the glorious energy and blinding light of a
dreamlike youth so painfully far behind it. Almost a dream. A
nightmare. A long-since-enjoyed trip. Is it over yet? Has the
pain finally consumed it, regurgitating itself inside out, smeared
in its own entrails for the evil-eyed vulture of consumerism to
scavenge from its fetid, turgid and rotten corpse? This diabolical
and visceral dystopia. Music, no fucking more.
Here we have the culture of self. We are consumed by an
age of filter-faced fucking narcissism, instant gratification and
the buy now, fuck off-tomorrow disposability of our times.
Nothing matters any more. Who cares? Nothing lasts forever,
even memories. They can be replaced just as quick as they took
to happen, as along as we’ve enough GB on our device. What
matters is me. Just me. Taking a photo of me, superimposed with
cute bunny ears or fucking cat’s whiskers. With my favourite
musician behind me onstage. A picture I’ll never look at, a film I’ll
never watch. Our yelled and dull conversations with our friends
take precedence over the music we claim to like. But that’s fine.
We’ve paid for our tickets, so we’re entitled. Entitled. Fucking
entitled.
NICK MULVEY’s gig at Arts Club brings a huge crowd. Busy,
busy. You can’t move. Or hear. A Friday night in Liverpool. Never
the best time to go and watch a man with a guitar do two equally
unmoving and depressingly magnolia sets of god knows what.
Judging by the size of the crowd though, much fuss is made of
this artist. Weeks later, I’m still struggling to think why. You see,
this is the problem with artists building their fanbase through
streaming. There’s no investment from the audience, literally,
figuratively, or financially. No link. No connection between artist
and listener. Albums are dead. Irrelevant, almost. People pick
a single song, maybe two, and will happily buy a ticket for the
show to hear and sing along to those two songs, and only those
two. That’s how it works. The rest doesn’t matter. It’s disposable.
Instantly. Once it’s over, they continue the conversation. Loudly,
insistently and depressingly. And let’s not forget. They’ve bought
the ticket, so they’re entitled, right? Don’t forget that.
Not that it matters at this Mulvey gig. It doesn’t matter at
all, because there is nothing to hear. Nothing worth hearing at
any rate. Just the bland, insipid and limp musings of an artist so
dull, so wet and utterly soulless, we wondered how hundreds of
years of folk, blues, soul, jazz, rock and roll, punk and everything
else had left so little mark on him. Nothing. No lessons learned
from anything. His music, at least as presented here, offers no
challenge, nor solace. Free of soul, character or belief, it asks
no questions and brings no answers. It neither enthuses nor
engages. It is a nothing. And in the Arts Club, a throwaway
nothing. Earnest in intent perhaps, but ultimately unworthy in its
delivery. So, we endure the sigh inducing, eye-rolling spectacle
of someone performing instantly forgettable music to an
uninterested crowd of onlookers busying themselves with their
own lives, their own brief and petty distractions. Music should
help. On this occasion, it isn’t even a hindrance. And, like this
review probably, it just doesn’t matter. None of it.
We leave at the end, and breathing the cold relief of the
Autumn air, we head home to drink pints of gin and tonic and
watch Japanese cartoons. And that’s fine, because we’re entitled.
Paul Fitzgerald / @NothingvilleM
Nick Mulvey (Darren Aston)
John Waters
Homotopia @ Philharmonic Hall – 10/11
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Gazing across the crowd in the Phil tonight is akin to being on the set of a JOHN WATERS
movie. Beautifully sculptured moustaches, leopard print dresses, hair of every colour and some of
the finest retro outfits outside of Baltimore. John Waters is back in town and we freaks just love it.
His last Homotopia appearance five years ago conjured similar scenes as he prowls the stage
reminiscing about his movies and his Dreamland buddies; tales peppered with delicious obscenity
and acid wit. This time round he has some perfect source material to work on, biting into Trump and
getting his head around modern parenting in a time of accelerating political correctness. It’s not a
trait Waters is known for. He announces that he wants to run for presidency – “Let’s face it, anyone
can get in now” – and his plans are unsurprisingly sleazy in the extreme. At 71, his R-rated views
on life should come across as unpleasantly sordid, but bad taste is his stock in trade. Therefore, he
remains comfortably loveable and irresistibly hilarious.
His tirades plough mercilessly through topics of ‘can you be too gay?’, ‘can you be too straight?’,
airline toilets and horrible children – each barb delivered in Waters’ Baltimore drawl and trademark
sneer. Some obsessions remain, he still lusts after Bieber (despite his new-found religion) and has
a new-found object of desire in Troye Sivan. Even here he manages not to descend into pure dirty
uncle creepiness, just a theatrical playfulness.
Some of the material tonight has followed Waters round for years; we have already heard his
list of favourite perversions: the snowman is a favourite, seriously out grossing tea-bagging. His
on-set tales, working chronologically through his celluloid atrocities are also a regular feature of
his show, but each time updated with tales of his cast’s exploits. Each character he treats as family
with a genuine warmth. He tells of how he visited Cry Baby star Amy Locane in prison after a fatal
accident due to drink driving; you can sense his sincere concern. With so many Dreamlanders now
dead he talks of how he has already booked his plot alongside them in the cemetery, in an area he
calls Disgraceland.
The usual perverse tales of early movies like Mondo Trasho and Pink Flamingos satisfy
everyone and he ably justifies his move to the mainstream with the Hairspray musical by explaining
how it has given a voice to so many overweight girls. His sadness for the early demise of his unique
muse, Divine, is still present, and he tells how a statue is being planned to commemorate the star on
the corner where a certain snack was consumed over 40 years ago.
When Waters invites the audience to ask questions his real humility shows. He loves his fans
and never patronises with smart-ass answers. When someone says she is doing her dissertation on
him he is clearly intrigued and grateful. The ninety-minute show is over too soon as Waters urges
his crowd to contribute to keeping this world filthy. Virtually the entire audience rush to the foyer
to meet their hero up close and personal with books to sign. It’s a lengthy but worthwhile wait as
he treats each fan with respect and genuine interest. Despite his status as the world’s leading cult
director, there resides no pretence.
Spending the evening in the presence of John Waters is an elevating, hilarious, intimate, and
pleasantly shocking experience. You really do sense that you are in the room with a true living
legend of absolute filth.
Del Pike / @del_pike
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