St Vincent Live: The art of performance as performance art.

St Vincent

Carriageworks

Jun 17 2018

Much like Goldfrapp’s equivalent Vivid Festival show here the year before, there’s an element among the crowd more intent on just being seen, rather than knowing a damn thing about the artist they were witnessing. They’re still out by the food trucks, arguing about the Arts Council grant for their experimental documentary. Their loss.

For Annie Clark in her St Vincent guise is making pop music as performance art. Her live show now a mix of technology and humanity, topped with a Day-Glo cartoon fantasy erotica that’s alluring, uncomfortable, and maybe mocking all at once.

Lights go down, a corner of the stage curtains opened and all hot pink latex and matching thigh-boots, she is amongst us. The first part of this, er, ‘performance’ – it’s not really an orthodox gig or concert as Clark is alone onstage, playing over and around backing tapes, but with enough room left for her often quite extraordinary guitar playing – cherry-picks from her back catalogue. The awkward Marry Me, through the angles of Digital Witness, and the gleefully blunt and insistent Birth In Reverse all little set-pieces as the artist finds spaces in the drapes, shadows, and lights of the stage. She’s somehow tiny and huge at once. She exchanges one of her beautifully balanced self-designed guitars for another between almost every song. Even that simple act comes with a twist – delivered by an anonymous masked roadie, or a Helmut Newton-esque S&M Valkyrie in buttock-baring pants. As you do.

But it doesn’t really fly until Act Two. A few moments of darkness, and the whole stage is revealed: cinema-sized video screen drenching this frayed industrial building with colour. And now it’s slinky silver miniskirt and matching shiny ankle boots to deliver a track-by-track recital of the gloriously sprawling Masseduction album.
Each song comes with visual backdrop – sometimes revealing, sometimes ironic, sometimes just ‘What the fuck?’ surreal imagery. St Vincent teeters on her heels, shuffles, then splays into full guitar hero pose and shreds, funks, howls, attacks her instrument. She’s unarguably sexy and sexual, yes. It’s still more arty than merely voyeuristic, twisting the conventions – but are we in on the joke or not?

There’s layers in the songs: some real human heartbreak in Los Ageless - even as she sneers at the nip-and-tuck culture. Happy Birthday Johnny is plaintive, the screen blank until the song’s payoff line ‘Of course I blame me…’ is projected on it. Then it just cuts to black.

There’s even some space for some messing with some showbiz conventions. The melancholy beauty of New York first offered scatty jazz-style, with some “Hello Springfield!”-type hokey Sydney references thrown in. St Vincent then stops it, and pulls it back into line as the aching keen of longing of it is made into a crowd clapalong like something rumbling up from the eponymous city’s subway. Slow Disco comes in its original, er, slow form. “Hope everyone has someone to love tonight…” the suddenly vulnerable Annie offers. She appears to mean it.

Smoking Section is the end of the album, and the show. The big screen tells us so. The curtains close, the lights come on. Most everyone - including the scenester crowd - pause for a moment to get their breath back, then move towards the doors.