Showing posts with label Live Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Live Music. Show all posts

Saturday, 1 September 2007

Seasick Steve

One of the many musicians who played the Carling Leeds Festival but the most interesting one of them all. Seasick Steve is a Delta Bluesman who can really captivate an audience. His use of narrative story-telling is reminiscent of folk music but reflects on the hardships and woe of his life before he was discovered.

With the Mississippi Drum Machine; A small wooden box that is stamped to provide percussion, Seasick Steve creates a constant beat that is simple but catchy. His main guitar is called 'The Three Stringed Trance Wonder'. This is a normal guitar, but with only three strings. At the gig, he told the audience the story of how he got the guitar and that he bought it for $75 in this condition in Mississippi from a man named Sherman, who later told him he only paid $25 for it the day before. Steve vowed never to add another string, and that he would tour the world telling his story of how Sherman ripped him off.
After unfolding the origins of his number one guitar he goes onto claim that it is the "...biggest piece of shit in the world!".

From a design point of view Seasick Steve provides a snapshot of Mississippi culture and the Detla Blues scene that has been lost alot in modern day music. His live performance works so well because it is honest and intimate. His style of playing seems to be more about communicating emotion and wisdom from his life experiences.

Friday, 10 August 2007

The Flaming Lips (Live)



When I was posting my blog about Peter Gabriel's live show it reminded me of a live perfomance by The Flaming Lips at last year's 02 Wireless Festival. At the beginning of the set the front-man (Wayne Coyne) stepped into a gaint inflatable ball and rolled over the crowd. It was completely surreal but it fantastic! I thought it was a really good way to communicate the nature of the band as well as creating something memorable, a shared event that all the people who were there could say they witnessed.

Peter Gabriel - Secret World Tour (1994)




Peter Gabriel (ex-genesis member, WOMAD and Realworld founder) has always been well known for his innovative work. The Secret World Tour in 1994 showed how a live tour could be about the theatrical as well as the music to compliment the themes and emotions a song may be trying to get across. Gabriel worked with Robert LePage to create a visionary style of theatre to accompany personal songs focused on relationships.


LePage and Gabriel looked at polarities as well as relationships. For example, synthetic and natural, love and hate, male and female etc. The stages developed for the show emulated the male and female polarities to create the structure below (bird's eye view):
The female stage uses a circle and the male a more geometric rectangle. The props also emulated the polarities; Gabriel emerges from the male stage in a red telephone box (which is arguably a masculine structure constructed from geometric shapes) and later in the show a tree emerges from the female stage (representing nature, mother earth, and in sharp contrast to the man-made phone box). This is a really well thought through tour concept which really showed the possibilities of a live show and set movements for more recent shows like OVO: The Millenium Dome show which was written by Gabriel. The videos above and below are just a glimpse of the tour but I strongly recommend watching the 'Secret World Live' DVD and also his more recent 2003 'Growing Up Tour' DVD.