LADY BLACKBIRD – LIVE: REVIEW
LADY BLACKBIRD
Sutherland Pavilion, September 26
OLD PEOPLE – YOU KNOW, 50 years and up: ancient types – like to reminisce about the days when out in the suburbs you didn’t have to go to the city but could see a band in a local venue or somewhere not that far away any night of the week, even if your interests were in the indie/underground or touring Brits and not just blokes playing for blokes on the beers. Oh, we had it good (as long as you don’t mention the fire risks and overcrowding, the clothes smelling of grog and ciggies, and questionable drives home), just ask us!
Those days, like the slim shapes and full heads of hair of the ancients, have long gone. Consequently, unless they’re equally venerable and on the superannuation tour in the big RSL clubs, locals and international touring acts, people playing music on the fringes of pop or jazz or art, even soul-based singers, don’t come out to the ‘burbs, we go to them. Except …
Marley Munroe, the UK-based American with only two albums behind her, entered the stage of the Sutherland Pavilion very much as Lady Blackbird: draped in all black, a halo of platinum hair above a metallic beaded necklace, sporting a cane on which she leaned on-and-off through the night and sometimes wielded as a point-enforcer. It was an arrival part regal, part theatrical, all noteworthy, without having to say a word.
The three-piece band of Chris Seefried on guitar/piano, Johnny Flaugher (who looked straight out of a Fassbinder film) on bass, and Melbourne drummer Felix Bloxsom (who only met the others the day before this show), had prepared the way with a sharp-toned preamble, soon enough would give us a kind of mittel Europe arthouse mood in Collage and later take Come Together into space rock territory, were good. Very good. But attention was focused on one spot as Munroe began singing Pink Floyd’s Mother, a disconcertingly attractive song ostensibly about childhood/parental fears but also about the disconnection of a blasted singer, miles from the audience and sanity (which is no shade on Sutherland, I’m sure).
Even as the vocal sound was blurry – an issue which took several songs to sort – there was something cutting under in it. That something felt even more pronounced through Nina Simone’s Blackbird, as menacing bass and drums, with guitar doing glass shapes and her voice punctuating in brief interjections, appeared as agitated, disrupted, uncomfortable.
For someone who would close the set with her gorgeously moving interpretation of Tim Hardin’s It’ll Never Happen Again (her voice scaling a few peaks but the beauty very human, just like the pain), who would bring a deeper soul twist to the usually plodding Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, and whose call to “bring me to my knees, drowning in wine” in No One Could Love Me (Like You Do) gave off Otis dropping to his knees vibes, Munroe was, and would remain, unafraid to harden the pretty or dirty the field. Here the jazz and art and soul could be reshaped each time, her voice not merely malleable but creatively character-full.
So yes, Man On A Boat (driven by fluid double bass) could have the sway of upstate New York folk/soul, but it was the grain in her voice which brought the depth; If I Told You had the form of a piano-led, country ballad but Munroe owned the southern bar room texture through it; and I Am What I Am grew into a song you could imagine closing the second act of a musical, heartbreak and defiance in one, the Lady leaning into Barbra Streisand.
Here’s the kicker: how people who weren’t like me scouring the social and friend networks for any mention of Lady Blackbird even found out about this show and this ultra brief – three dates only – tour, with practically no mainstream advertising and no media at all, is perplexing. But then so is the fact this show was near the southern tip of Sydney and not in one of the city venues. And people who might have taken a punt on a little-known name were walking away on a “how good was that?” buzz that would last into the next week.
Maybe it really is just like the good old days, on stage and off.
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Lady Blackbird plays:
Melbourne Recital Centre, September 30
Bleach Festival, Gold Coast, October 2
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