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ARE YOU SITTING UNCOMFORTABLY?
Review of Diamanda Galas at Royal Festival Hall
May 13 l998
by Nigel Williamson
THE TIMES London, U.K.
This concert was meant to have taken place at the Union Chapel, but
the Islington church elders took fright at Diamanda's reputation and
banned her. Fortunately, the Festival Hall stepped in to stage her
CONCERT FOR THE DAMNED, a disconcerting experience that saw the
uncompromising Galas confronting the audience with her extreme voice
and radically deconstructed arrangements.
Her songs took as their themes suffering, death and retribution as,
Seated alone at the grand piano with a single spotlight and a
blacked-out theatre, she used her extraordinary four-octave voice as
an instrument of terror, tearing songs apart and rebuilding them as
explosive emotional weapons.
Galas is at the very cutting edge of experimental composition, yet she
is essentially a live experience.. Her new album, MALEDICTION AND
PRAYER,
was recorded live and features mostly the same material, yet it sounds
flat stripped of the edgy presence and sense of occasion she generates
in a
concert hall. At times her screaming was physically painful yet one
was compulsively drawn to listen.
A Galas concert is probably the most uncomfortable thing you will ever
hear--and one of the most intense and extraordinary. Part of her
appeal is that she takes the clichéd argot of popular song and
reinvests it with a startling emotional intensity. Phrases such as
"save me' and "have mercy on my wicked soul" have become meaningless
fillers in the mouths of cabaret singers. Delivered by Galas, whether
in a whisper or a scream, they become desperate cries ripped from
humanity's tormented soul.
There were unrecognisable arrangements of blues songs by Son House and
Willie Dixon and her own setting of lyrics by Pasolini and Baudelaire.
Yet most extraordinary of all was 25 MINUTES TO GO, a dramatic musical
monologue from the condemned man's cell once sung by Johnny Cash
{composed by Shel Silverstein}. Galas, bathed in an eerily dim red
light, turned it into The most harrowing piece of music you have ever
heard. By the end of the chilling countdown the audience itself was
sitting in the electric chair, a
cathartic experience in which all of our musical preconceptions had
been well and truly purged.
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