Review: Evelyn Evelyn (Mostly) at The Academy

Whether you’re a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty, or who-the-Jaysus-fecked-me-glass kind of person, you’ve got to admit that there’s no better excuse for cancelling a gig than “A volcano erupted and banjaxed air travel as we know it”. No one is going to blame you for not crooning for the agreed two hours because of an Act of Gawd, especially if, like 50%-of-Evelyn-Evelyn Amanda Palmer, you were in Reykjavik at the time that volcano became the world’s least convenient wonder. But then again, Amanda Palmer is not just Amanda Palmer. She’s Amanda Fucking Palmer. And in The Academy, Dublin, on the 19th of April, Amanda Fucking Palmer and the giant head of Jason Webley, beamed in especially through the magic of Teh Internetz, proved to all present and entranced what’s really meant by that old chestnut “The Show Must Go On”.

With Jason forced into putting his feet up in Brooklyn, and the props that fictional, conjoined twin geniuses Evelyn and Evelyn Neville rely on to help tell their story completely absent, you would be forgiven for thinking that all hope was, if not lost, then at least in the bar weeping over a pint o’bitter. But swap puppets for hastily-scribbled A4 artworks, Jason’s physical presence for his Cheshire Cat grin on a projector screen, and choreographed lights and sounds for Amanda’s descriptive and endearingly desperate gestures, and with a sprinkling of imagination you’ve got exactly what you paid to see - a stage show/musical/concert/oddity to astound and delight … with a sense of intimacy you couldn’t hope to get in a volcano-free atmosphere. Being at Evelyn Evelyn at The Academy felt like being at a hasty, giggly rehearsal; it felt like being invited into the inner circle, to watch the cogs being lubricated and wound up. I don’t like to presume that everyone in the audience appreciated this haphazard delight, but I certainly saw no evidence of disillusioned grumbling. The audience was very much part of the whole thing. It felt like a huge gang of friends getting together to shout ideas and sing at each other. It looked like pretty, pretty anarchy.

Support on the night came from Brighton noir-folk band Bitter Ruin, a flawlessly theatrical pair who mix complex guitar melody with gorgeously anguished vocals; this is exactly the right time for this band to be huge. Support, by the way, is not defined here as standard - Ben and Georgia* pitched in right throughout the show, becoming part of Evelyn Evelyn as events dictated.

Amanda and Jason, then, were chatty, fun, and impressively all over the place, and there were plenty laughs to be had from one not knowing what the other was at (Jason’s big screen secret messages often flying over Amanda’s busy head, rather like the most popular scamp in the class getting one over on the teacher). They complimented and corrected one another in all the appropriate places, their rapport alone worth the admission price. The set finished with a glorious rendition of My Space, during which we were lucky not to be chargrilled as the audience went one over on Amanda’s request for phone screens to light her through, and sparked up every lighter in the gaff. The icing on this delightful mess was Amanda’s private encore - Astronaut, Runs In The Family, and naturally enough, the right proper anthemic Oasis, were reason enough for anyone’s inner rock chick to lose the run of herself.

But there, unfortunately, I had to leave the circus. Sick as a two-headed pachyderm (ultra-clever in-joke alert), I was forced to skip the venue before my reflexes went into overdrive and I spasmed all over AFP and the floating head of JFW. However, apparently we ended up with this …

… co-written by Amanda’s beloved, Neil Gaiman, which I’m very sorry to have missed, although not as sorry as she would have been if I’d gotten sick on her head (I was on the balcony right above her).

Don’t be fooled by reports of my churning stomach, though. Evelyn Evelyn at The Academy was an unforgettable gig, and one that proved that the jiggery-pokery of an expensive light-show, or the timely twitchings of a host of greased-up dancers, is not and will never be a vital ingredient of an amazing concert. Amidst the missed cues, sniggering backchat, and hasty prop appropriation, there was heart, there was inspiration, and there was the Spirit Of Rawk, in all its messy glory. This was music. These were musicians. And if there was a single person in the place who didn’t want to be up there, livin’ the dream with them, let us sacrifice them to the angry volcano gods.

*Georgia’s last name is Train. How awesome?