Slamming, smiling and unearthly silence – the music gigs our writers loved most in 2015

From Mary J Blige in the rain to Coldplay in a church and Craig Finn at the seaside – here are our writer’s most memorable shows of the year

The 86-year-old who delivered genius to 20,000 people

Some musicians are clearly born with more stamina than others. In 2014, aged 86, Ennio Morricone was forced to cancel his O2 show after spending the year recovering from a spinal injury. Yet he swiftly rescheduled it for the following February, neatly timing it to land on my birthday (thanks, Ennio, just leave my cake with the cloakroom staff).

Morricone’s music has soundtracked more than 500 films, and feels like it’s soundtracked much of my life, too: it’s been with me on road trips through the red rocks of Arizona and scored the trauma of horrible breakups more eloquently than anything else. It’s tied in with so many key memories that I sometimes think it should come labelled with its own trigger warning: I’ve cried, unexpectedly and without warning, to Morricone’s music while sitting on the top deck of a London bus on the way to work. It’s dangerous material, to be handled with caution.

Even in the relative luxury of the O2’s seats, with a glass of red to hand, hearing Morricone could never feel merely indulgent: his music simply does not allow you to tune out. Dressed with Italian style – a black suit and polo neck – and backed by 86 members of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and 76 singers from Hungary’s Kodály Choir, he led us through his soundtrack work from the obscure (1969 Italian sci-fi drama H2S) to the celebrated (those Sergio Leone westerns). When the soprano Susanna Rigacci arrived to perform The Ecstasy of Gold, and was cheered back to do so again later, hairs collectively rose on 20,000 necks.

There was, of course, something poignant about this show’s title: My Life in Music. Watching Morricone turn to his adoring audience and bow during the third encore – to cheers of “Bravo, Maestro!” – it was impossible to escape the feeling that this was a swansong, the master sharing his overflowing cup of achievements with the world one last time. To be honest, those were the thoughts and feelings playing on my mind throughout the show. I was hearing this wonderful music in the context of a goodbye and, as ever with Morricone, it felt like the perfect soundtrack. And yet I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Many people have asked if this tour is my last one,” Morricone had said beforehand. “This is not the case. I feel rested, inspired and excited to be back. I consider it a comeback after a terribly long period of absence. I greatly enjoy conducting my music for my dear audiences and I intend to ‘conduct myself’ in recognition of their esteem and lasting patience.”

Sure enough, he’s back at the O2 again this February. As I said, it’s a matter of stamina. But it’s also, surely, a matter of genius too. Tim Jonze

Live music can transport – even in times of grief

I’m hardly blameless myself but I find myself losing patience with audience members who seem to consider music an unfortunate distraction from catching up with friends or checking their phones. The man in front of me during Madonna’s raucous O2 gig spent half the set responding to Airbnb requests. (“Did you enjoy the show, darling?” “I don’t know but I sorted out the pet deposit.”) Conversely, I’m increasingly moved by seeing people who are firmly in the right-here-right-now, whether that manifests itself in awestruck hush (Joanna Newsom) or boozy hysteria (the Prodigy). During a classic Glastonbury weekend I watched thousands of people spellbound by Mary J Blige’s gut-wrenching, rain-lashed No More Drama and transported by Hot Chip’s ecstatic cover version of Dancing in the Dark, swept up and out of themselves for a few minutes.

Another Glastonbury highlight was Father John Misty. I normally avoid seeing an artist multiple times in one album cycle because once I know the routine it grows stale. But for various reasons I ended up seeing him five times in 2015 and each time inspired a fresh wave of thoughts about the relationship between emotional truth and showbusiness, between performer and audience. His off-the-cuff remarks are better than most artists’ songs and funnier than most stand-up routines, and — the clincher — he never repeated a joke.

Like many people, I experienced live music more keenly in the days after 13 November. There was a collective gasp of catharsis when, three nights later, New Order walked on to the stage beneath a giant Tricolour and Bernard Sumner shouted “Vive La France!” Another during the encore, when they turned Atmosphere into a funeral march for the Paris dead. Two weeks later I went to Paris to see Savages, who knew Eagles of Death Metal and some of the people who died at the Bataclan. Their defiant vigour had a special resonance that night, capable of channelling both grief and celebration. There came a point during the chorus of the powerful new song Adore when the music stopped and the entire room seemed frozen in time, soundless, charged with inexpressible emotions. For me, the most potent moment of any show in 2015 was a few seconds of silence. Dorian Lynskey

Rain-lashed and tearful – the best Glastonbury set ever

I turned up to see Mary J Blige at Glastonbury fresh from glumly watching Catfish and the Bottlemen, the kind of band you suspect the bloke who got up the petition about Kanye West’s headlining set thinks the festival should exclusively deal in. In a perverse way, they were the ideal support act. The music was standard-issue mainstream alt-rock, and there was a great deal of standard-issue black-clad alt-rock posturing going on up there. Everything from the way the lead singer thrashed angstily at his guitar to the drummer insouciantly dropping his sticks at the end of the set looked weirdly hackneyed and unspontaneous. It was as if they’d spent night after night rigorously studying an academic textbook on how to be a rock band. You got the feeling the singer might have crib notes secretly written on his arm: “Remember make feedback & throw guitar @ floor cf. the Who.” Or perhaps I was being unduly cynical: after all, they seemed to be going down a storm. Off I trudged to see the self-styled Queen of Hip-Hop Soul.

I’d never seem Mary J Blige live before, although I knew she was a great performer. About 10 years ago, I sat boggling in front of Later With Jools Holland as she opened the show with a version of Family Affair so gutsy and forceful that it made you wonder why every other artist present didn’t just quietly pack up their equipment and go home when it finished. But I still wasn’t ready for her Glastonbury performance of No More Drama. It was the way she kept ratcheting up the song’s emotional intensity: the music more or less stayed the same, but her voice got more and more forceful. By the end, she’d left the song’s lyrics behind, but what she was doing with her voice had absolutely nothing to do with the kind of show-offy melismatic widdly-woo guitar solo for the mouth that singers do to signify emotion. It was guttural and pained and cathartic, simultaneously dazzling and harrowing to listen to: it sounded like she was delving into some terrible darkness and wrenching every note out of it. She certainly wasn’t above a bit of showmanship to amp up her performance – she ventured out to the lip of the stage, and fell to her knees, lashed by rain that had started falling midway through her set with a ferocity that suggested every other rainstorm at Glastonburys past was merely a rehearsal – but at the centre of it was something really potent, all too believable. You couldn’t learn how to do this from a textbook.

Clearly, I wasn’t the only person who felt like that. When the song finally ended, there was a weird instant of silence and then the crowd started howling. They wouldn’t stop: Mary J Blige started crying, which only made them shout louder. It’s the single best performance I’ve ever seen at Glastonbury. Alexis Petridis

A tale of two great women performers – from Horses to babies

I’ve been fascinated by Patti Smith’s Horses ever since I picked it up after reading Johnny Marr eulogising it in an old interview, but I thought I was much to late to the game to hear it performed live with anything like the old intensity. However, in June, 40 years after its release, the 67-year old singer unleashed those wild thoroughbreds once again in a cataclysmic performance at Manchester Apollo. Occasionally slightly remodelling the songs for the modern era – the desperate character attacked in a hallway in Land/Horses was cheekily relocated to Manchester – she seemed all the more driven to find that issues she confronted in 1975 haven’t gone away. The eerily intense atmosphere was finally broken during Elegie’s lengthy roll call of those departed, when someone in the audience yelled out the name of Timperley’s late finest, Frank Sidebottom – AKA comedian/musician Chris Sievey – to the song’s list of names.

I had a very different experience watching Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes. Sitting just feet away from front of the big voice and hair behind Be My Baby and Baby, I Love You, I was surprised to find myself welling up. It wasn’t the fact that this 72-year old woman – in unfeasibly fine shape – was singing classic old love songs that have perhaps taken on a darker shadow since her ex-husband/producer/songwriter Phil was sentenced to life for murder. It was more the almost out-of-body experience I was feeling as the wind tunnel of sound and her instantly recognisable voice reminded me how truly great pop music can take us to emotional places little else can. Having first experienced that as a troubled seven-year old, unexpectedly feeling the same almost supernatural raw power as adult on a wet Monday night in Gateshead felt ecstatic and revelatory. Dave Simpson

No crying, just crushing

I used to measure my favourite gigs by how hard they’d make me cry, from bawling with joy to Arcade Fire in a field in Germany to breaking down during a Janelle Monáe set in south London. I’m a bit of a sap. This year, thankfully for the people standing around me, I kept it together watching Canadian noise band Viet Cong – perhaps because their bristling ferocity knocked me back too far for my body to attempt tears. Theirs is a crushingly visceral live set, one that practically left me gasping for breath as all four band members pounded through music both melodic and relentless. They combine post-punk and garage-rock without taking themselves too seriously, and instead create a glorious, cathartic racket.

Less loud, but perhaps more intense, was Björk’s set at the New York festival Governors Ball. Her searing breakup laments from album Vulnicura were in no way suited to an event teeming with chatty teens, most of whom trickled away from the main stage in bewilderment the longer the Icelandic star played. But I was transfixed. Standing in an armour-like, bejewelled dress, Björk roared, belted and cooed her way through just about every aspect of the devastation of heartbreak that you’d can imagine. I loved the way she whispered “Thank you” after each song, with the politeness of someone who’d just picked up a Royal Mail delivery rather than one who’d so generously poured out the details of her last relationship’s disintegration.

Finally, a combination of technical skill and onstage charm underscored my other favourite this year. I’ve seen 21-year-old London rapper Little Simz three times in 2015, and am always astounded by her mastery of rhythm, diction and tongue-twisting lyrical flow. She’s wonderfully charismatic, able to seem cheeky rather than bratty when scolding the crowd at Wireless festival in Finsbury Park for not dancing to her afternoon set with enough vigour. She often plays to audiences who look a good decade younger than I. At the risk of sounding misty-eyed and sentimental, it’s wonderful to see them, hands raised and jumping, as one of their peers excels. No tissues needed. Tshepo Mokoena

Nice guys do it better

For the pathetically sensitive and those with an obsessional yearning for teenage frivolity (on both counts, I admit to being incurable) two of my most notable gigs were fuelled by the impenetrable force of nice guys and their guitars.

First was Mac DeMarco, playing his fried and fuzzily nostalgic songs; songs written and recorded in his musty bedroom and designed for teenagers as they fumble with bra straps or cigarette lighters in their musty bedrooms. Yet when performed live, his music evokes the kind of crazed, hive-minded hysteria normally inspired by music that’s more aggressive or arena filling than surreal slacker rock. The febrile reactions from the DeMarco clones who heaved their bodies at the Roundhouse back in September was a testament to the enduring power of the counterculture: these were more cult members than casual 6Music fans. Somehow it moved me in a melancholy way: I knew all the words, I loved the songs, but felt disconnected from the collective excitement; embarrassed that I was part of the 10% who weren’t dressed in an uniform of faded caps, plaid shirts and skater pants. I was a spectator, not a participator, of the spectacle.

Safe among my generational tribe (plus Peter Crouch and Abbey Clancy) I retreated into the warm, heavily moisturised bosom of Chris Martin a few months later, and was relieved to find myself a bit giddy during Coldplay’s gig at St John’s Church in Hackney in east London. Having spent younger years reacting to Coldplay as if I were watching Mark Owen writhing around in jelly in the early 90s rather than observing four men dressed in double layered T-shirts performing indie ballads in the early 00s, going to this intimate show was a reminder that formative fandom never leaves the system. I was so transported back to the delirium of hearing a song (a song about clocks ... CLOCKS!) that I hadn’t had time to register my own tears. Fifteen years on from when I first saw them, and now armed with an array of ludicrously large songs, Coldplay were loud, bombastic, and powered by a wall of heavenly and synthetic sounds, while a rainbow spectrum of colours shone on their frontman – a ridiculous vessel of energy who still makes me feel pathetically sensitive, but crushes that obsessional yearning for teenage frivolity, for 58 minutes at least. Harriet Gibsone

Every gig should have a raffle before the encore

We were partway up the M2, heading back to London from the Thanet coast in the early hours of the morning, and Craig Finn was remembering a gig in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his first serious band, Lifter Puller. There had been an afterparty at a house filled with TV sets showing a fat young man having sex. At his moment of climax, there were cheers around the house – the fat young man turned out to be at the party. He told Finn his aspiration was to break into the porn industry full time, but the only roles he’d been able to get in California so far were “jacking off in the background”.

There had been no aspirant porn stars, so far as I know, at the gig Craig had just played. In a moment of madness, I had agreed to Laura Barton’s suggestion that we put on a show at Ramsgate Music Hall in Kent. I asked Craig if he would do it. He and his management were up for it. I asked another musician friend, Steven James Adams, if he would play, too. He was up for it. And so I found myself, at 46, a gig promoter, in a town I had never visited. Honestly, though, I think this would have been one of my shows of the year, even if I hadn’t put it on. I’m on regular record (with tedious frequency) as loving the music of both Craig and Steve, both solo and with their current and former groups respectively, the Hold Steady and the Broken Family Band, and it’s a bill I would have driven to Ramsgate for, even if I didn’t have two musicians and two guitars in my litter-strewn Focus.

Laura and I wanted to make the gig fun, not just another show. We dressed the stage with fairy lights; we decided to run a free raffle for everyone who came – and so just before they finished the night by duetting on the Constantines’ Young Lions, Finn and Adams drew the winning raffle tickets – to win, variously, a Cadbury’s Christmas selection box, a tin of old-fashioned sweets, a couple of CD box sets, a stack of vinyl, Finn’s handwritten lyrics to his David Coverdale tribute Dark Days for a Cocksman, and his Kiss guitar pick.

All of which would have been so much frippery had both Craig and Steve – playing in a wonderful little room, which the week before had won NME’s best small venue award – not been so fabulous. Steve interrupted his song Tears of Happiness – “I promised myself I wouldn’t do this” – to explain a reference to Boney Fuller. “I was researching England’s leading satanists while I wrote this song,” he said. “Boney Fuller actually invented the tank.” And then back to the song, whose guitar solo was replaced by a demand – which was met – for the audience to whoop and cheer and shout. Craig engaged in monologues about his love of Kiss, discussed pizza with the front row, and filled the room with warmth and good humour. I am prone to crying at particularly startling gigs; my eyes filled with tears repeatedly that evening, but mainly because I was laughing so hard. Searching social media the next day to see what people who had been there had been saying, I found a post on Instagram that summed it up: “Tonight I watched Craig Finn present a raffle. In Ramsgate. He played a Lifter Puller song. I SWEAR I AM NOT MAKING ANY OF THIS UP … it was absolutely surreal and amazing.” Quite.

The gigs I love best leave me feeling warm and fulfilled for days afterwards. With this one, I couldn’t help watching and rewatching the clip I filmed from the side of the stage, after the raffle, of the two of them playing Young Lions. I wouldn’t want to promote gigs every week, but I’m glad I’ve done it once, and I’m glad it felt perfect. And after hearing Craig’s story, Steve promises his album after next will be called Steven James Adams Is Jacking Off in the Background. Michael Hann

Britain’s street sound finds its audience – cause for celebration

Yep, sorry in advance, brace yourself, because what everyone wants for Christmas is another music journalist banging on about grime in 2015. I tried my best to think of another gig that suckerpunched me as much, maybe Richard Dawson’s skewed folk yarns in the rain at Green Man festival, or Sufjan Stevens’s sobfest at Southbank, which had me snivelling into a friend’s sleeve all night. But I’m done being emotional: grime forefathers Skepta and JME’s shows this year were – to use one of those internet phrases that I don’t think is age-appropriate for me but I’m going to try anyway – “lit”. Or to put it another way, I’ve lost about a pint of sweat at each of their shows I’ve been to, at Glastonbury, at Sonar, at Simple Things festival in Bristol, because these brothers bring the party. They don’t just deserve the props they get because everyone now knows that grime is brilliant, but because they’re great performers. JME knows that: he performs in a T-shirt bearing his face.

It started for me with their gig at May’s Great Escape festival, which was more thrilling than any punk show. The night was something of a grime revue, also featuring Stormzy, Novelist and the Square crew – the first time they had appeared on a stage together since they’d joined Kanye West at the Brits in February. By way of celebration, and a statement of exactly what business they meant, they turned Brighton’s Dome into a swirling 1,000-person circle pit. Excitable grown men pulled gun fingers from the balconies, kids shoved into each other enthusiastically below, and you’ve never seen women dance the way they did when Skepta and JME cracked out their Boy Better Know crew’s anthem Too Many Man (with its glorious chorus of “we need some more girls in here, there’s too many man”). This wasn’t about people wanting to get wavy on a Saturday night: it was the victory dance for a British street sound that had finally found its mass audience. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of celebrating that. Kate Hutchinson

The smell of woodsmoke and a woman dancing in the window

I often wonder if writers on other subjects find their senses start to dull. Does the restaurant reviewer grow weary of seafood veloute? Does the art critic come to dread the slow, dry air of the gallery? Because I always feel that writing about music is an invigorating thing; that I am spectacularly lucky to write about something so variegated and kaleidoscopic, so capable of colour and surprise.

It’s often at gigs that I feel this most keenly; how strange and wonderful it is to gather together in a tiny club or a stadium or a festival field to listen to someone play. Some shows, of course, make me feel this more acutely than others.

On a cold Saturday night just a few weeks ago I went to see Rozi Plain and Seamus Fogarty play at 33 Chatsworth Road, a venue in east London more frequently referred to as The Dentist. It’s a ramshackle place – an old dental surgery that has not so much been converted as inhabited. The ceiling tiles sit out of place, wires droop, a wooden platform area stands hastily erected in the back room. It holds a handful of people, pressed close to each other and right up at eye-level with the band.

You could smell the fire before we got there, all along the street the cold evening air filled with the scent of woodsmoke and hot sparks, and in the garden people huddled around it, drinking warm cider served through a hatch in the basement, their faces lit up with booze and flame and excitement.

Inside, the bands stood with their backs against the plate-glass window, so that as they played the audience could see out beyond them, on to the street: the pedestrians idling by, the car slowly botching a reverse park, the woman who scampered right up to the glass and grinned and danced for us.

Music at such proximity has a kind of warmth, and that night Fogarty and Plain’s songs – already beautiful and supple things, took on for me a new depth and tenderness. And as I watched I thought of how the inside of this little venue seemed an echo of its backyard: that here we stood, gathered together around this musical bonfire, feeling its glow. Laura Barton

Contributors

Tim Jonze, Dorian Lynskey, Alexis Petridis, Dave Simpson, Tshepo Mokoena, Harriet Gibsone, Michael Hann and Kate Hutchinson , Laura Barton

The GuardianTramp

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