The Rodney Graham Band
ABC, Glasgow, UK
The Rodney Graham Band featuring the Amazing Rotary Psycho-Opticon, Gi Festival 2008, Glasgow. Photo by Angie Catlin.
Hosted by The Common Guild as part of the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art, The Rodney Graham Band’s gig at ABC promised a mixture of ‘rock and roll psychedelia with folk music earnestness’. The odd assertion that Graham would be appearing ‘as himself’ was a taster of the puzzling fare to come. The curtains drew back to reveal the Rotary Psycho-Opticon, a set of revolving spiral panels that provided an unlikely human focus throughout, appearing to speed up and slow down as though cranked by hand. The op art-esque wall’s headline part in the band’s billing was a nicely wry touch in an otherwise opaque event.
Was this experience the unmediated Rodney Graham as promised, or Graham performing on his own imaginary Ready Steady Go!-type TV show? As part of his practice Graham has ‘played’ a number of roles, but as himself he appeared strangely dry. His band was similarly workmanlike, dispatching the songs with a session musician’s minimum of fuss. With such a gruff stage presence it was hard to know if their neutrality was designed to throw features of the song writing into sharper relief. Graham and guitarist David Carswell wore suits in vague acknowledgement of a performance but their interaction consisted mainly of mutual nodding to indicate the next number. With waning expectation levels for any particularly wild entertainment Graham’s lyrics became the concert’s saving grace.
The Neil Young-esque strumathons were dutifully earnest, strangely disconnected from the knowing content of the songs. The country-rock sludge was cut through with lines like ‘don’t trust a person over 30’ (from the song of the same name). The audience duly responded with knowing smiles to the concluding line: ‘because they’re fucking old’. Looking around the venue, Graham certainly knew how to tease his demographic and be self-deprecating at the same time.
There is something of the troubadour’s careworn delivery in Graham’s singing voice and, appropriately, he has talked of his love of the gravel-throated Lee Hazlewood. In keeping with his idol’s dirges, Graham’s ‘The Merry Month of May’ was anything but merry. He couldn’t ‘paint his way out of a wet paper bag’ he informed us, as the imploding art gags continued. In an interview with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon for Bomb Magazine, Graham once proclaimed, ‘I basically want to get the band out on a little tour for people who are strictly music fans’. Despite much manful strumming, on this occasion it was clear that this gig was never going to be strictly for music fans. As an increasingly weird impersonation of a bar room band, those on stage only allowed Graham’s defeatist sketches to gently insinuate themselves into the audience’s consciousness when his art world musings were to the fore.
Mick Peter
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