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Baby Gramps leads the chorus through the Rogues’ encore. Photos provided by Welin Wang /Flickr |
Epic folk voyage on the seven seas
REVIEW: ROGUE'S GALLERY
Barbican
IT'S a sweltering night in Silk Street, and inside the Barbican’s main hall the audience fan themselves with their programmes.
The scene creates an odd sense of a 19th-century crowd of dandies waiting for the first dance in Bath’s Assembly Rooms, but as the Rogue’s Gallery take the stage, all semblance of refinement and delicacy is lost to the winds.
Fellatio and fornication, piracy and plundering, necrophiliacs and ne’er-do-wells; the whole spectrum of human misdemeanours on the high seas was rolled out in an epic evening of “chanteys”, performed by a mind-boggling line-up of stars and quirky left-field artists.
Toe-curlying exclamations of “Arrrr” were mercifully abandoned after the first few minutes, and the evening quickly built up a head of steam that kept the audience rapt. From the comical lunacy of an opening set by Baby Gramps, things turned dark and serious and it soon became clear that this show was sailing in waters far removed from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that inspired it.
Though the sense of fun was never fully lost, there were moments of sheer intensity – Sandy Dillon singing Leave Her Johnny, for example – that were enough to take the enamel off your teeth.
Actor Tim Robbins proved surprisingly able at taking centre stage, and even Gavin Friday – who still seems to be labouring under the impression that he is, in fact, Bono – managed to pull it out of the bag, scoring early points for his rendition of Baltimore Whores with the outstanding Eliza Carthy.
Eliza was later joined by her mother and father, Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy, for the high water mark of the night – an emotional version of Bay of Biscay, which wrought every drop of yearning out of the song and left the audience dumbstruck.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. Pete Doherty didn’t turn up – having apparently refused to get out of his car; no great loss – and the sound desk not only suffered from a few gremlins, but at times seems to have been operated by one (though mishaps are perhaps excusable when you have this many stage changes).
Hunter Thompson once famously told his friend and collaborator Ralph Steadman: “Don’t write, Ralph. You’ll bring shame on your family.” He might well have added, “And don’t sing, either.”
But the fact that the Welsh cartoonist has a truly awful voice that wouldn’t be tolerated at closing time in a fishing village tavern only added to the charm of his performance. This was Little Boy Billie delivered as it was probably delivered ten thousand times before – badly, and with a joyful, reckless abandon for musical technicalities – and to criticise Steadman because he can’t sing would be missing the point entirely.
Speaking of missing the point – Martha Wainwright. Leaving aside the sparkly high-heels and party dress, Wainwright sounded like she was auditioning to sing the closing credits to a Disney film about a lonely genie, or maybe a kitten with a sore paw. She was excruciating, keening her way through a version of Lowlands Away so sickly sweet that the first three rows of the audience probably developed type-1 diabetes.
But the only real downer on the night was Shane McGowan; not because his performance was bad – and it was awful – but rather because it was heartbreaking to see a man whose genius as a lyricist and a performer have been so corrupted by years of alcohol abuse, reducing him to a clown-like figure who needed to be led around the stage, hacking out unintelligible gibberish into the microphone on the odd occasions he could find it.
He might well represent the ultimate “drunken sailor”, but to use him in this way is a cheap trick on the part of director Hal Willner, and borders on being exploitative.
At almost four hours, Rogue’s Gallery was probably longer than some of the voyages being recounted. Taking into account the few howlers that just didn’t work on the night, the show could easily lose up to an hour off its running time without being any the worse for it.
But when you cast your net as wide as Rogue’s Gallery does, you’ve got to expect that you’ll haul in a few old boots and empty cans along with your desired catch.
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