Liner Notes Live
Liner Notes Live is a literary cabaret in tribute to a classic album, with different artists taking a track and expressing it in their own way: through song, poetry or a personal story, and it’s all held together by a ‘making of’ commentary delivered live from the stage.
David Bowie’s iconic masterpiece from 1972 is the subject of this Liner Notes Live, and the excellent five-piece band launches into “Ziggy Stardust” with host David Nolan bewigged and eye-patched taking the centre mic. The band (the ‘Spiders from Marden’) looks and sounds the part, and Nolan has a great Bowie voice: it’s a fantastic introduction to the evening and sets the standard high.
Yet it never drops: nine other performers takes us on a journey through their experiences of the music, the impact it has on their lives, or the broader meaning of Bowie’s words today.
Yana Alana transports us from the words of “Five Years” nearly fifty years into the future, transforming those lyrics into a warning for 2019, a political commentary on the state of democracy. Alan Duffy is a professional astrophysicist, dissecting the well-known “Starman” into facts about the planets in our galaxy, with political overtones of what we’re consuming and destroying on ours.
Connecting each act, Nolan tells us of the origins of Ziggy Stardust, its influences, its own rises and falls since its inception. There’s a wonderful reading from an online forum where fans try to outdo each other by describing how many versions of the album they own, getting to a point where even the most fervent fan can only say in response ‘Wow. That’s impressive’.
And the audience reacts the same way here, without that one-upmanship: each contribution is unique, related and relatable. Sabrina D’Angelo is a mime artist and drawing on Bowie’s own influence from being a pupil of Marcel Marceau, brings the white gloves, together with physical comedy, to the song “Soul Love”; Mantra freestyles rap to introduce himself and tells a touching, personal story of how his father introduced him to Ziggy; Maxine Beneba Clarke reveals her first sexual awakening to “It Ain’t Easy” with courage and humour and a clearly nervous Angie Hart tells us she’s playing guitar on stage for just the third time through her stories, weaved into snippets of “Ziggy Stardust”.
The show is produced by Nolan, Sean M Whelan (who appears in a velcro onesie for his take on “Moonage Daydream”) and Emile Zoey Baker (who closes the show with a raucous rendition of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” and with her memories of Bowie in the film Labyrinth).
It’s an extraordinary two hours exploring the power of music and the different ways it changes us: not just in the moment, but in our lives.
Mark Wickett
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