Songs of Innocence - 18 June 2005

[Andrew F Wilson <andrewfwilson>]

Patti's fire sheds little warmth
By Nick Hasted

Songs of Innocence
Royal Festival Hall, London,
The Independent, Monday, 20 June 2005

Patti Smith's turn as Meltdown Festival director has lured an enviable
assembly of artists to the South Bank this month. Tonight's bill is
maybe the most casually extraordinary, bringing together mostly female
pop icons from Yoko Ono to Sinead O'Connor to perform work "for and
about children", in loose tribute to the great London visionary
William Blake.

All the vast talent on display over three-and-a-half gradually
enervating hours, though, only proves that you can have too much of a
good thing. The first minutes are the most engaging and mysterious.
Bob Dylan's recorded voice ghosts on to the empty stage, sounding both
ancient and fresh as he sings "Million Dollar Bash". Silent footage of
a little boy capering to a record follows, at such length the innocent
charm is squeezed from it, a characteristic misjudgement tonight.

Showing the surfeit of riches back-stage, Miranda Richardson wanders
on to read some Blake (Tilda Swinton does the honours later). Then
Patti Smith appears, to try to kick-start things in style. In her
fifties, she looks like a grey-maned street urchin, still with most of
the band that drove her on as one of New York punk's first voices in
the '70s. Singing "Birdland", from her debut Horses , she plugs right
into this occasion's themes, mentioning fathers, sons, abandonment and
peeled vision, her own words suggesting Blake's. But when she attempts
incantatory ascension, pumping her fists and speeding her voice till
words are smashed together, she flops back to earth. And earth-bound
is where we then stay.

Billy Bragg, breathlessly en route to his own Meltdown gig, lightens
the mood with Woody Guthrie's children's song "I Woke Up in a Dry
Bed", a rite of passage that unsurprisingly fails to spark a
singalong. Eliza Carty then lends her vaulting voice to a folk song
about a woman burying her late child husband in the soil, suggesting
the deep rhythms of fertility and decay that underlie youth. Beth
Orton soon follows with another Guthrie song, "Don't Push Me Down".
Her voice invests its lyrics with the fragile, gathering strength of
an essentially helpless child standing up for herself, the sort of
sentiment rock's concentration on angry adolescence forgets. Film
footage of children in a street market, lost in their own worlds, adds
to this moment of revelation, before Tori Amos explodes on to the
stage. Sweeping to her piano in a diaphanous cape, she squats on its
stool, legs braced as if ready to run right through it. Private
groans, growls and roars punctuate a set starting with "Silent All
These Years". Tossing her red mane back, saying nothing, she is
extreme and initially magnetic. One nod to Blake aside, though, she
blanks the night's wider themes, unless you accept Sinead O'Connor's
woolly contention later that "we're all children, really". The
feminine bias of the bill, like Amos's set, suggests a confused
infantilising of women which was surely not Smith's intention. The
vastly under-rated Yoko Ono then essays some gutteral yelps of her own
on "Rising", to sadly dated effect, and some giggles. It's left to
ex-James man Tim Booth to inject pop passion. Singing "Sit Down" for
the first time in years, he refinds this Madchester anti-anthem's
meaning as a hymn to ordinary adolescent madness. Marianne Faithfull,
after reading Blake's startling "The Little Black Boy", musically
massacres Lennon's "Working Class Hero", while letting its lyrics'
cold fury burn through. Kristin Hersh then sweetly inhabits the male
murderers and female victims of Appallachian folk tunes, before Sinead
O'Connor lets the hard notes of her songs hang in the air, in an
evening of exceptional vocalists.

A ragged, cast-assembling finale sees O'Connor and Ono in a deep hug
of sisterhood. But there have been no such historic musical moments.
It's been too unfocused, for far too long, plain and bitty gruel that
leaves me flat. Blake's name, and Smith's, deserve fierier fare than
that.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=648224&host=5&dir=230