“Gig” Review – Antony and the Johnsons

Antony and the Johnsons perform Turning. Barbican 5/11/06.

Another “"gig"”? Well sort of. Part performance, part art happening. Antony sings his melancholy ballards of love death and gender confusion whilst on the side of the stage is a revolving platform onto which step a succession of thirteen New York “beauties” who are filmed and the images projected on to a giant backscreen where they are mixed live by Charles Atlas.

The Charles Atlas? Yes indeed. The. A man who has cast a long shadow over my artistic world, from the moment I first saw his nineteen eightyfourish (the year, not the Orwellian nightmare) film “Hail the New Puritans” which featured Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, and various other London nightlife bohemians and culminated in strange goings on at the legendary Taboo nightclub. As a young boy this seemed to be where I aspired to be, even though it was no place for a straight, chubby, Jewish boy with a high forehead and a wardrobe of polyester M&S flairs. Atlas has continued to design the lighting for Michael Clark; and it has always been one of the highlights of any Clark show. Austere, with much use of lighting coming from the side of the stage, it provides a particular atmosphere and ambience, very clean and magical. In Clark’s “mmm”, which I saw last week and haven’t had time to blog, there was some interesting use of blocks of more pastel shades. Anyway Atlas is primarily known for his video art rather than lighting per se, and this was the first time I had seen him in action, so to speak.

So tell me about the lovely ladies. Hmmm. Well I am pretty sure that four of them really were women. And I’m pretty sure that five of them were born men. Thereafter, everything is not so very illuminated. As to the degree of transgender transformation I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess, but they probably ranged from straightforward drag queen all the way to post-op. Des Lynam would have been in his element.

So, “Turning”. Yes that’s what it was called. Revolution not evolution. A reference to the rotating platform, but also I thought to the process of feminisation, of turning into a woman. Also of turning as in on the turn, and as in the ageing process, as the big screen brutally revealed every skin blemish, wrinkle, divot, crevice, crater, eruption; the beauties came in all ages and sizes. And the turning of live flesh to screen projection; so often the projected face looked completely different from the real.

Perhaps it should be said that Antony sings like an angel.

1. Coolness of crowd: 10/10. Yes very. All sorts, as you might imagine. And yes there were some people getting in a pickle about which toilets they should be going into, although I suspect this was less a question of gender politics than the size of the queue.

2. Bob quotient: 8/10. Very high. All colours and shapes. Very bobby indeed.

3. Annoyment factor: 10/10. You could hear a pin drop, though Antony does tend to have that effect on people (when he performed at (and won) the 2005 Mercury Music Prize, he silenced a room full of boozed and coked up music executives)

4. Sound quality: 9/10. As always at the Barbican, top notch.

5. Comfort: 7/10. I had a slight bobble in my seat. Also I foolishly had drunk 1 litre of water before going in, and as soon as Antony started singing, the urge was growing. Remember that Shakespeare quote from the last review.

6. Sexytime: 7/10, but I would have to be very very drunk, and not find out until its too late, and then think what the hell, expand your horizons, if it’s good enough for Des Lynam and Alan Partridge…

7. Percussion / sound effect function: 6/10. Well it all sounded lovely, and for once there was no need for extra augmentation (should that be orgmentation?).

Overall: 57/70. Yet another extraordinary and unique event culminates in a rapturous standing ovation.

Merchandise: Two t shirts with ambiguous designs, A glossy brochure. CDs. All top notch stuff.

Gruff Rhys?: He wasn’t there. As you will have gathered, I was bursting for Gruff from the moment of the first note.

Visuals: - yeah well, amazing; haven’t you been paying attention?