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At the seaside with Jane Siberry
Who’s this? Why, it’s Jane Siberry, famous Canadian singer-songwriter, performing in a living room on the seafront at Portobello, near Edinburgh. You can see the beach through the gap in the curtains.
And who’s this? Why, it’s Andrew from Swimmer One - ie: me - introducing her with a little speech that it took me about a week to write because I was so nervous about messing it up. Since Andy Catlin (fellow Jane Siberry fan) has photographed me from the back, the terror in my face is thankfully not visible (you can see all of Andy’s photos of the evening at his Flickr page. I hope he doesn’t mind me reproducing them here).
Getting to introduce Jane Siberry was, for me, a little like Hamish getting to introduce David Bowie, or Laura getting to introduce PJ Harvey. It was such a nerve-wracking prospect that the first time I was asked to do it (by Elaine, organiser of the Portobello show, who had read a blog I’d written about Jane), I said no. Then Laura looked at me as if I’d gone completely mad, and I changed my mind.
I have gushed quite enough about Jane Siberry in other places, so instead I’ll just talk about the show. The last time Jane Siberry played in Scotland, in 2006, it was to a big crowd at the Queen’s Hall. On this tour she played four Scottish shows, two in Portobello (one in a flat, one in a community centre), one in Glasgow (in a flat) and one in Gatehouse of Fleet (in an art gallery), each to around 30 people.
This might all sound very low key, but the shows are part of a somewhat epic world tour. After kicking off in Toronto on 6 January, Jane’s Salon tour has wound its way across Australia, stopping off in a “cosy private lounge room” in Sydney, among other equally unconventional gig venues, and New Zealand, where she played in a shed on a llama farm (in Waitakere, near Auckland). As I write this she’s travelling onwards to Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland and Poland, again mostly performing in people’s houses. You can follow her continuing adventures on her Facebook page.
Can you imagine Kate Bush doing this? Or Laurie Anderson? Jane’s often been compared to both, but has gone on quite a different life journey in recent years, closing down the record label she ran during the 1990s, selling her home and most of her possessions, and becoming a kind of wandering minstrel. The one thing that remains from her old life is a sizeable global army of fans, who have been very happy to respond to her offer to play small shows in people’s homes. The audience in Portobello was a mix of diehard Siberry fans and curious friends of Elaine and the lovely couple who own the flat.
Clearly I am biased here, but it was a fantastic show, more performance art than pop gig. Jane tells strange, dreamlike stories, one fragment at a time, plays songs that stop and then start again or have little speeches in the middle, goes off on long, rambling tangents about energy and temples, and has imaginary conversations with an invisible dog. She is brilliantly, charismatically, inspiringly, hilariously, charmingly bonkers.
Afterwards, everyone drank wine and ate cheese and biscuits in the kitchen, and discussed what message we’d like Jane to take on to the next town. There was a barbecue in the back yard. Jane mingled. She gave me a CD, so I gave her one, telling her that our song The Fakester Resurrection is pretty much a rip-off of her song The Bird in The Gravel. She was very gracious about it.
And after that, there was a bonfire on the beach, and more wine, and accordion music. Look closely and you can see Laura and me in the middle of the photo. I’m wearing a woolly hat. Jane is over to the right somewhere, sitting on the sand, lost in the moment.
Andrew
