John Grant at The Olympia Theatre | Review

John Grant at The Olympia Theatre, Dublin, 3rd of March 2014

Two songs into his set in The Olympia, Iceland-based American John Grant is treating us to a rendition of Vietnam off his latest record ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ and already we’re into shiver-inducing territory. He sings the beautifully simple melody that glosses the lyrics “…the requisite resolve” in that incomparable voice of his, heading into the chorus and then taking a place by the keyboard to knock out some of the electronic tones that makes up the sound of his latest record.

As he stands there blanketed in shadow his bearded silhouette reminds you of another famously gravel-voiced man who was also destined for the stage. Even his calm walk between instrument and microphone as the solo leads into the verse recalls the unconcerned self-confidence of Orson Welles and on the stage before us he becomes an apparition, a presence, and a voice.

But during this song something goes wrong – either with the keyboard or the electronic samples – and the guitar and the vocal are suddenly competing in a different key with something. Grant powers through and gets a “your monitors are a bit fucked up” from the most obvious man in the crowd when the song finishes, but as he walks from the mic to the electric piano he shakes his head, seemingly put out by whatever went wrong. Two quality performances of Outer Space and Mars follow, but they don’t quite make up for the loss of momentum.

It’s a slow and disjointed road back before he gets into his stride again, but he carries on with some help from Sinéad O’Connor on It Doesn’t Matter, and on Pale Green Ghosts and Blackbelt from some of the most intense bass electronic noises you’ve ever heard, which, when compared to the tickle you get in your ears listening to those tracks on headphones, vibrates you so thoroughly that you feel the complete deatomization of your entire body is imminent.

Things quickly veer off again as Grant goes into some of his less electronic stuff and he even feels obliged to address the elephant in the room by recounting a recent performance he gave where he forgot the piano chords to Sigourney Weaver. Watching these songs puts you in mind of what Hemingway wrote in Death In The Afternoon about the measure of a true bullfighter; that a great bullfighter was not one who never got gored, but one who got gored but could still be brilliant. Grant was pretty badly gored by the technical glitch and he is clearly finding it difficult to lose himself in the music now, as if he’s constantly expecting the next fault to arrive with every new section of every song.

But rather than being a mark against his character it seems more like a testament to how very exposed the man makes himself. In interviews and in his music he makes explicit his alienation from his family, his exile from his home country and the HIV he currently lives with. With the most basic aspects of a person’s life – family and health – entirely out of his hands it’s no wonder that he would react so badly to losing control of his music, the one constant he should be able to claim complete dominance over.

However like Hemingway’s bullfighter John Grant is not one to step back at the approach of the oncoming bull’s horn, instead standing to meet it, aiming his sword directly between the shoulder-blades. With the help of Sinéad O’Connor and Conor O’Brien the album closer Glacier hits a profoundly raw nerve, particularly O’Connor’s singing of the verse “Don’t you pay them fuckers/As they say no never mind/They don’t give two shits about you/It’s the blind leading the blind/What they want is commonly/Referred to as theocracy/And what that boils down to/Is referred to as hypocrisy”.

Why is that a particularly poignant moment? We won’t conjecture. And this is followed by the devastating Queen of Denmark which is as raw and powerful a performance of a song as a Dublin stage has likely seen in quite a while. It’s ironic then that Grant suffers his second goring of the night here as the guitar effects pedal has a spazz attack that extends the pause between the verse and the chorus considerably while the room waits for the temperamental equipment to quiet down again.

It’s like a miracle of bad luck, just when the gig was finding its feet again, reaching a moment of almost transcendent beauty, to have the goddamned electronic tones that make ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ such a formidable album, and such a step up from his debut, fuck everything up. And they did fuck it up. They fucked Grant up proper and the five-track encore he played was admirable because he obviously wanted to rewind the whole thing and start again.

But despite the failings of the equipment, Grant managed to pull at least three moments of profound musical beauty out of debilitating chaos, the kinds of moments most band’s would kill for to be able to summon once in a career. For this every person in The Olympia went home satisfied, and for this we’d all go see John Grant perform again in a heartbeat, on the suspicion raised at tonight’s show that those moments are only a fraction of what Grant can do live when everything – as it must eventually – comes together.