ANOHNI & THE JOHNSONS LIVE: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
ANOHNI & THE JOHNSONS
Sydney Opera House, May 26
Some 20 years ago - a virtual lifetime in music; a quite different life for Anohni, who then was Antony, and by no means the star of that Leonard Cohen tribute ensemble show - she entered the Opera House stage with a self-effacing shuffle in a ratty jumper and mussed, face-obscuring black hair, not a word to an audience mumbling with curiosity. She silenced that murmur with a voice that was staggering in its difference, wondrous in its capacity, and shattering in its impact, then left.
This time she came on in a white, floor-length gown with long white gloves and shoulder-length white blonde hair, holding the centre with grace. Still not a word (bar a thankyou and goodnight in the final seconds of the near two-hour show), but certainty shone in everything, even occasionally awkward but deliberate stage moves, that voice remains a thing of wonder of power without domination, and her message resonated through an eight-piece band that encompassed woodwind, strings, percussion, piano, guitars, drums and bass.
The message was in the show’s subtitle: Mourning The Great Barrier Reef. Using underwater footage from off Lizard and Heron Islands as the backdrop, and sobering, frightening, devastating interviews with climate scientists and reef specialists as the mic drop, Anohni wove a story of abuse, attempts to rescue, and a future bleak if still being written. “There really is no way to save the reef by science,” says one of the scientists. “There is not the time.”
The message was not just in those interviews though, but in the weaving of their point within her songs, some that addressed this directly (“I want to see you boil… it’s only 4 degrees”) but most of which had begun life as personal stories of abuse, attempts at rescue, and rewriting a future.
From the pop song in theatrical garb that is Hopelessness (“how did I become the mother of this son?/The face in mind and hands of virulence”) and the Curtis Mayfield-like gospel soul of It Must Change (“I’m not seeking to escape the cycles of life on this earth/I belong here”) to the hauntingly beautiful elegy, You Are My Sister, with sadness built into its tenderness, and Cut The World, a song about freedom beckoning which plays as a long hand reaching out just to hold on, these songs rose to meet us.
In 2016, Anohni’s Opera House show was a similar blend of visuals projecting the natural world in disrepair, a plea to change our ways, and songs that looked to connect personal and societal separation. It was only partially successful because the connection between singer, songs, message and audience was not always established.
But this time the songs, whatever their direction and antecedents, served as cries of anger and pain and loss and resignation and denial and acceptance and warning, with grief under everything. Anohni crushed all hope and somehow offered hope at the same time, like in the old fan favourite which closed out the night, all of us quietly singing, “Hope there’s someone to take care of me when I die”.
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A version of this review ran originally in The Sydney Morning Herald