Aren’t you dead sick of simpering, saccharine-Saturday knock-offs? Christ on a crutch, the cardboard-box industry is radical compared to pop!
How many underage slags in skimpy lingerie are human minds meant to assimilate, let alone tell apart?
But yes, that’s the poxy, life-support state pop’s come to, a playground for pre-geriatrics, minds so uninformed they’re totally taste-free! How did it come to this?
Once, we had the soaring, dark subversive majesty of Marc Almond and Bronski Beat, plus the Pet Shop Boys at their pounding peak.
No longer: the frenzied spirit of Ab Fab irreverence, the questioning of all social norms and tearing of sonic envelopes, is as dead as Elvis.
And what’s even more tragic is that figures who should know much better – fierce soul divas like Beyonce – just hock their chutzpah to pre-programmed pap, not raging, Ettta James righteousness!
But maybe, just maybe, there’s a flicker of hope for music more ambitious than inane boy/girl, sexual polarity angst. Say a big, raucous hello to the startling Anna Calvi, whose eponymous, debut album kicks sterotypes where they hurt.
A diminutive, laser-styled Scottish-Italian, she’s a solo tsunami of huge, rock ‘n’ roll angst, all outsize, Hendrix Stratocaster and precision lipstick.
Forget Adele and other, perfectly adequate vocal cord virtuosos; all the gutsiness alive means nothing glued to garbage songs!
That’s never the case with Miss Calvi, spewing lyrics as radical, disjunctured and perversely powerful as her image, a brazen finger to Robert Palmer’s beyond-smug, ‘Addicted To Love’ video, with its’ three divas adoring a corporate dork!
Never afraid to flaunt her gorgeous, lipstick dykon sexuality, signature Calvi songs share nerve-tingling, common ground with Antony & The Johnsons’ thrilling, deeply ambiguous eroticism.
There’s ‘First We Kiss’, ‘Suzanne And I’, and the stunningly inverted ‘I’ll Be Your Man’, Calvi’s wholesale massacre of easy, cheesy sexual typecasting.
All majestic, soaring vocals over a huge abyss of of echoing, reverb’d guitar, Miss Calvi’s given us gay, indie music to kill for, as intense and ear-ripping as Diamanda Galas, but more tune-tastic than the Shangri-Las on methamphetamine!
You know what? Someday, all pop might remember to live, not eat itself in a diminishing circle of overdubs! Until then, there’s Anna Calvi, food for the mind, heart, and fierce, dancing feet!
Shepherd’s Bush Empire,
1st November
Box Office: 020 8354 3300
Rating: 5/5
