disaster is my name
Jandek was pale, in a black hat, just like I’d been led to believe. He brushed the open strings of his guitar hard and resigned so that they formed a constant, queasy drone behind his odd, semitonal picking; so that the effect was of a music with a different scale from ours - the weird displaced tuning of gamelan music,say, or the twanging of a shamisen. His voice was fuller than I expected, off-key and keening but with an undercurrent of age and experience that never faltered. His non-note notes swooped like crows, landing in a flurry of despair and muddied claws: “Leather tore…Spurrrrrrrrsssssss….bro-ken.”
He got up, unbending a thin body, rusty and elegant. He walked from his stage before the altar of St Giles (gold eagle, gold cherub, Exodus XX on the wall) and stooped behind a white partition. I expected him to come out the other side, but that must have been the backstage door, because I never saw him again after that.
Posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005by Frances May Morgan
There wasn’t much behind that door, other than another toilet, denied to the massses who had to queue the other side.
The finnish guys were frivolous and fun as well. Like a jazz version of the Clangers.
Posted by Richard on October 19th, 2005 at 1:14 pm