Face it, some music barely deserves toilet love, as in immediate flushing! Ah, but Meltdown 2012, my dears, is an annual, priceless, sonic K-hole to be cherished at all costs.
Flawlessly catering to the dissonant extremes of our musical culture, it’s a spiritual A&E department for lost souls otherwise left untended. Does that immediately suggest sad-sack losers to you? Well, sorry to pop your precious, fluffy butt-bubbles, sweethearts, but there’s way more to killer sounds than X Factor clone-puke and stage-school show tune queens, whatever their sex!
Annually curated and chosen by some of the most distinguished figures in modern music – previous luminaries have included Elvis Costello, Nick Cave and Morrisey, who pulled off the fabulous coup of reuniting the long-disbanded New York Dolls – Meltdown’s a yearly gauntlet slapped in the face of mass mediocrity. And this year – in gorgeous opposition to the trite, heterosexual machismo of the Olympics, Meltdown is gloriously, unashamedly queer, with a capital Q!
So it should be, with trans prodigy Anthony Hegarty fiercely at the helm. The gender-free, Nina Simone-styled vocalist of acclaimed, Mercury prize-winning band Anthony and the Johnsons, Hegarty’s never one to settle for the obvious; as ever, he prefers his music – and explored the outer allegiances – to be deliciously transgressive.
So, opening the festival is the no-concessions to polite taste whatsoever, scorched-earth feminist firebrand Diamanda Galas. A former hooker, street-knife queen and militant AIDS campaigner, Galas applies Jack the Ripper frenzy to accepted notions of voice production, swooping from blackly dense, bluesy gravel to hardly-bearable, demonic shrieking in seconds.
Producing vocals so intense and disturbing she’s been publicly castigated by the Pope on grounds of blasphemy, Galas attacks fence-sitters with furious venom; “Give me sodomy or give me death!” she shrieks.
Memorable? Oh Christ, yes! From her album Plague Mass onwards, dedicated to her brother who died from AIDS, Galas has explored the outer limits and twilight zones of performance.
Onstage, her body appears to uncannily morph in time with her voice, a sound you can’t believe a human throat can produce. But if she’s unquestionably the most sonically radical performer in Meltdown, she’s in the company of equally adept, if lower-intensity, noisescape explorers.
Take NY’s chanteuse vivant Joey Arias, an ambisexual, female impressionist (the phrase drag queen is far too crude) who channels not only the spirit and sound of Billy Holliday, but the counter-culture ambiance of gender ambiguity and smoky, heroin-inflected jazz life itself. A Wigstock veteran par excellence, Arias is an exquisite, Alice-through-the-looking-glass double-take on fellow unclassifiable performers CocoRosie.
Following fellow musical iconoclast Devendra Banhart’s semi-drag and exotically instrumental lead, Cocorosie – the two sister duo Sierra and Bianca Casady – play what’s loosely been called ‘freak folk’.
As quirky as the name suggests, it’s as confrontational and unpredictable as queer sister Bianca’s onstage penchant for (male) drag. And further, impeccable queercore credentials can be found on the gals’ third album, The Adventures Of Ghosthorse And Stillborn, a photo from gay provocateurs Pierre et Gilles.
Perhaps most special, however, is gay icon supreme Marc Almond’s live performance of his inexplicably-neglected, 1983 masterpiece, Torment And Toreros, a non-stop assault on cosy, dozy, David Cameron-style family values. Featuring puke, spunk, after-birth and perished, deeply abused orifices, all human strife is there!
But frankly, the album’s best described as legendary, lyric tenor Scott Walker fried alive, all swooping strings, manic, amphetamine sulphate beats, anguished ballads and operatic despair, a totally queer, totally unrestrained ‘Ziggy Stardust’ anticipating the rise of the startling, LGBT mutations of the 21st century!
If loosely allied by the sentiments of David Bowie’s seminal song ‘Changes’ (“You gotta make way for the Homo Superior”) Meltdown 2012 decisively proves that real queer music – not sappy boy bands – never takes the easy way out!
• Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX. Runs to 12th August. www.southbankcentre.co.uk. 5/5
