Sasha Selavie reviews gothic queen Diamanda Galas’s confrontational Barbican show
Why isn’t Diamanda Galas the greatest gay idol ever on God’s poxy earth? Certainly, it’s not for want of trying. Physically, she looks like the gang-rape child of Morticia Addams and Liberace, a fabulously slim, borderline anorexic swathed in quintessential, black goth drag. And her hair – as you’d expect – follows exactly the same, unflinchingly obvious dress code, a hanging swag of straight, jet black locks, precisely parted at the forehead. A textbook, irritatingly self-righteous poster saint for terminally sullen misfits then, but in the complete absence of conventional glamour – no Beyoncé butt or boobs – WTF is Diamanda’s gay appeal?
Well, forget fluffy show tunes, feel-good lyrics or killer, breakbeat hooks – frankly, if they entered Diamanda’s act at any point, they’d be shot on sight! You see, Diamanda’s unique selling point, always, is a complete lack of compromise, and her entire persona is a furious, hellfire gay activist screaming with multi-octave, operatic mania! Does that sound somewhat off-putting? It should – Diamanda’s voice is definitely a pure Marmite experience, a shrieking, multilingual dental drill that only hardcore, S&M torture queens could possibly take to their bosoms!
So thank holy bleeding Jesus Diamanda’s virtually abandoned recording for a decade – it’s taken me that long to recover from her last London date. See, one never simply attends a Diamanda show – rather, you’re subjected to a brutally uneasy listening session, on a par with paying demented whores to scream non-stop in your ears!
Not that that’s a criticism. If Simon Cowell’s X Factor imbeciles are content to warble autotune lullabies, Diamanda is determined to test drive sanity, musicality and linguistic extremity to complete, gloriously self-combusting destruction. But why is she so insanely driven and intense? Why does she insist her fans virtually consent to aural rape by the most harrowing vocal sounds possible?
The answer is simple – single-handedly, she’s trying to alert a still disgustingly complacent straight world to the ongoing horrors of the AIDS pandemic. Phillip-Dimitri Galas – Diamanda’s brother – died of AIDS-related complications in 1982, and it’s arguable that Diamanda took his stunningly confrontational stance as a template for her work. Tellingly, one of his plays was entitled ‘Performance Hell’, a precise, pithy summation of the experience Diamanda normally inflicts on her audiences.
That’s also a legacy, perhaps, of Diamanda’s still-inadequately explained, pre-recording career as a sex-worker and dominatrix. Her knuckles bear a fiercely provocative tattoo – ‘We are all HIV+’ – which vividly indicts any form of indifference whatsoever to a still shocking, worldwide crisis.
One of her previous albums – The Sporting Life – simply crackles with contempt for straight men, a superbly vicious riposte to all the hollow-dicked posturing of gangster rappers. Forget Kylie Minogue mimsiness – Diamanda’s preferred world is one of forcible, straight male castration, rape, torture and murder, not exactly express pathways to global adoration!
But, it’d be a hugely demeaning mistake to assume Diamanda is simply milking some revenge sex fantasy as her muse. Rather, the experience of turning tricks – no matter how erotically uninspired – simply opened her eyes to an anaesthetised, heterosexual mindset she’s determined to shock into awareness.
So, did she succeed at preaching to the similarly perverted who flocked to her recent, Barbican show? Yes and no – the voice, like Maria Callas burning at the stake and high on crack, stayed as painfully persuasive as ever, completely disconnected from reason, restraint or apparent meaning. Still, me, I’m a contrary bitch, and my butt screamed boredom from enduring Diamanda’s predictable mania.
Sonically, she’s scraping the barrel of diminishing returns, and doesn’t any outrage become more persuasive when it’s explored from multiple perspectives? But obviously, Diamanda’s indifferent to musical light and shade, and the show became the musical equivalent of a wanked-out, geriatic orgy, all lifeless genitals incapable of orgasm!
Sure, technically, she’s simply astonishing, but who needs vocal baseball bats smacking a message of care, compassion and transcendence into our poor, defenceless skulls? Me, I’ll stick to manageable doses of Diamanda on my CD player – at least her savagely humane passion can be switched off!
