During Brighton Festival
It’s the last night of the bank holiday weekend and everyone is tingling from the heat. I sit in the – thankfully – cool Brighton Dome, poised. Five warm spots pour down onto the stage, illuminating dry ice. Thirty-foot curtains frame the posing instruments. We all know what’s happening. Aldous Harding is coming on soon. She’ll pick up one of the guitars, she’ll dance, and she’ll show us an enchanting version of the world.
True to form, Aldous strides on in a silk bomber, a favourite new purchase it seems (also modelled in the mesmerising video of One Stop). She begins the set with the title track of her new album Train on the Island, a forceful yet sparse arrangement. The slow pace lets us fall into the song with her, to an unknown place – somewhere eerie and full of mystique. The purple wash of lights adds to this feeling, illuminating her dutiful bandmates on guitar, bass, drums, keyboard and harp, respectively. They stay with the new album for the next three tracks, layering perfect rhythms then moving deftly between instruments. Meanwhile, Aldous’ vocals are rich and clear. Hands on our chins, we contemplate. There’s a gravitas to their performance, more concert than gig. The vocal break in San Francisco is startling, almost transcendental.
Occasionally, Aldous interrupts the silence between songs with a random noise, or a positive assertion. Whether about the beer she’s sipping, or the song just finished, ‘Not bad!’ is a hilarious understatement. These musicians are tight-knit talent, namely H Hawkline who accompanies her on vocals for the catchy Venus in the Zinnia. This is the kind of lyrical complexity we’ve come to expect from Aldous, who told us in 2019 that she’s got ‘the weight of the planets’, then in 2022’s single Fever how ‘the weather opened up like a birthday card’. Her stories are unusual, and we want to know all of them.
She moves us through the years, reminding us of Warm Chris and the propulsive Passion Babe, sitting, standing, even at times lying on stage. Anyone who’s heard of her has also surely heard of her iconic dancing. When she moves, she flies on the spot, angular and avian. She claims never to have ‘been in charge of any of it’, but her presence is commanding, her transitions slick. She cooly counts into the mic before launching into songs; waits for a standing ovation to build before an encore. It’s now that the crowd cry for The Barrel. Instead, she gives us Imagining My Man and Designer, proving she’s much more than her most famous track.
As Aldous and her flock fade out, I think how lucky we are to live in a city that musicians like her want to come to. Outside, the sun has gone but the surreal, dreamlike moon is high, and we are all still tingling.
During Brighton Fringe
Franz Kafka was famously a tortured soul. He worked all day in a lawyer’s office, came home and wrote surreal stories all night. Most people have heard of The Metamorphosis, about an ordinary man who one day woke up as a beetle. Not many, however, know of A Hunger Artist, about an altogether different kind of entrapment.
The hunger artist spends his day locked behind bars, starving himself for passing crowds to admire. His longest hunger stint is forty days, after which point he is extracted from his cage and force fed. Classic Kafka – a protagonist at the mercy of others’ will. In The Trial, Josef. K is being tried for a crime he’s not aware of. In Amerika, Karl is forced to emigrate from Prague to New York. Tonight, the hunger artist (who is never given a name) is caged in Brighton, in the smaller sister of the Bubble tent, aptly named Squeak.
Writer and performer Johnathan Sidgwick (Eastenders, Coronation Street, Hollyoaks) has adapted Kafka’s ten-page story into an hour-long show. And Sidgwick is a convincing performer, with sharp shifts between passion and anger. He plays the hunger artist, recounting the story of his downfall. He has a handle on character acting, too. Scenes come to life with differentiated voices and exuberant gestures. At times, he bursts into song, spiralling his arms out of the cage while maintaining eye contact. It’s a captivating, experimental performance, as if the fourth wall never existed.
‘Everyone wanted to see me at least once per day’, the hunger artist laments. But times changed. People changed. Emotive strings music endorses us to feel this with him. His poetic script is enthralling, if flowery. The reveal of the hunger artist simply not enjoying food is given ample space to land. It raises the idea of self-imposed limitations, how we might need to limit ourselves to find our place in an ever-changing world. ‘I am free and that is why I am lost’, Kafka once wrote. But behind Kafka’s symbolic bars, Sidgwick has certainly found his place.
