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Concert reviews Music

Antony’s controlled chaos

ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tuesday, February 17. Rating: NNNNN


The one topic on everyone’s lips (and in every review so far) after Antony and the Johnsons‘ stunningly heart wrenching performance was the puzzling sound issues that plagued the set from the beginning.

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Random bursts of static occurred sporadically all night, sounding like a bad guitar cable or a dirty mixing board, but strangely the band appeared unaware.

After doing a bit of sleuthing, it turns out that the answer is stranger than anyone could have guessed. According to the promoters it was all intentional – a texture that was deliberately added as part of the show.

This bit of information changes everything. Does this also mean that the songs he interrupted midway through due to being “distracted” were also staged events to allow him some space to deliver monologues?

This all sounds kind of crazy, but in retrospect it may have also been genius. It made the whole thing seem kind of precarious, which injected some very tangible tension into an evening of tragic ballads. The dry sense of humour of his mid-song spoken word interludes momentarily broke that tension, and then it was back into the beautiful torch songs we love him for.

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