At the Manchester Apollo (2008)

From The Fly
The Manchester Apollo is quite a building, and one that in all fairness has seen more than most of us over the years.

As with all old theatres, it has a kind of semi-faded glory and gravitas about it that seems to hint at the ghosts of shows past – narrow your eyes and you can almost sense the spirits music-hall performers at the periphery of your vision, unable or unwilling to quite leave the scene of their essence. Its grandeur allows it a special place in the hearts of those who head out to medium-to-largeish gigs, but a decent booking policy means also that it has the ability to really skip and jump with the prevailing winds.

Take last month or so as an example; it all began for me with a gig by Björk there. The last time I’d seen said Icelander was, boastfully enough, at the start of her Volta tour in 2007. It was a magical occasion at the end of a magical few days over in that magical country involving hair-raising aeroplane rides, fishing and houses named after entire cities, a lot of beer and contemplation of the infinite, shit-talking and devil-dancing in old fishing factories. That gig, at the Ice Hockey arena in Reykjavik, had been wonderful enough but somehow as the night ended I’d found myself putting White Russians on the credit card in a crazily-quiet bar at 4am along with her entire band and the woman herself nursing a lemonade across the bar.

 It was bizarre, and wonderful, and typically 101ish, and I almost missed my flight as a result but was gutted to find I did actually manage to leave the country. In Manc guise, however, Björk’s show was as inventive, challenging and wonderfully rave-centric as it has been for years. Whether shooting silk from her fingers or leading the band in proto-totem-dance, she filled the venue with a kind of blend of in-your-face intelligence and skewed-dream poetry.

It energised and reconciled, resplendent and resonant, political and personal. And as soon as a song labelled itself it would be discarded, or, better, morphed, into another shade of life in all it’s cocked-head, double-take alchemy. It’s hard to write about it without falling into flowery traps, which is why she’s so important. ‘Declare Independence,’ she finally urged, ‘Don’t let them do that to you.’ I used to think it was a track about the Faroe Islands secession from their Danish protectorate (and in a sense it is), but that’s not the whole story: it applies equally, I think, to the ebb and flow and final tide of a failing relationship, or maybe is a call to arms. To never stop dreaming, or looking, for the best in life, not to get bogged down by greyness but to believe in better and to find it on your own terms. Björk is punk rock personified, in the only sense that matters, and the venue filled with glitter to disprove it.

A few days later it was The Kooks’ turn to hit the Apollo, the Brighton poppers at an interesting stage of their still-nascent career. I’d once interviewed them in Ibiza, which was and still is something that makes me smile cause it was a crazy 36 hours that involved hardly any sleep for anyone, and getting up at midnight to go and have lunch before a gig in San Antonio that finished at 6am.

Ibiza rocked that weekend, for sure, and I managed to spend an hour giggling to myself, lying on a beach dipping my jammy Welsh toes in the clearest, bluest Mediterranean sea whilst I thought about how ludicrous life was sometimes. Back then, they were yet to release that debut album and it was such early days that they’d barely done a tour of the toilet circuit, let alone 2,000 capacity venues.

 It was, however, more than obvious that they were going to take off: the record company understood them and were backing them to the hilt with their support, for sure, but in that Manumission gig the charisma of the songs was gushingly playful despite some equipment problems. Three years and a new bass player later, and they bounce onto the Apollo stage grinning floppily to a crowd of youngsters for whom the Kooks are their first love; Naiive, She Moves In Her Own Way, Ooh La all setting off funbombs in the hearts of the crowd. Whether the new album, Konk, will ever have the same impact as that debut is uncertain, but those tracks capture a moment in the Kooks’ lives – as well as their audiences – when it really all was about snatching a kiss, secret trysts and fumbling for a shared moment. The ghosts are still there, and they smile.

Rounding off the trio of gigs was an astonishing performance by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. I’m not great at sitting down in concerts cause I fidget, rock backwards and forwards, pick my nose and generally get a bit antsy, but it’s also undeniable that when the Apollo is seated it takes on yet another guise. Whereas The Kooks had been all gumtree gumption and snogging in the back row and Björk had been a conduit for lightning love and magic, Plant and Krauss made the venue a breathtaking blend of intimacy and hefty wonderment. 

The crowd, mostly made up of ageing Zep fans and the Q-set, sat wide-eyed and excited, falling in love and out of their minds. The funny thing is that I’d never been mad on Zep themselves, or not got round to it yet – but hearing ‘When The Levee Breaks’ led by mandolin and violin rather than twin geetars was something unique and special. Plant could have probably made a fuckload of cash touring with Led Zeppelin this year, but it’s clear that he doesn’t need or want to. Krauss has won about a billion Grammy awards, and T-Bone Burnett popped up onstage to lead the band through a historical primer full of ghosts, a kind of folk/blues seminar for the uninitiated as well as a reaffirmation for the faithful. 

Two hours is a long time to sit still but this went in a blink; at the age of 58 and a few clicks, Plant seemed to have found something about him that radiated out into the venue. Not the voice, the echoes of the younger man or even, I venture, the songs. It was something more. Something a bit more soul-shaking than all that. The collaboration with Krauss and Burnett had been more than an old man’s folly, more than what you might call an auld rocker paying homage to his heroes. It was, in many ways, a man who’d realised that, even in the early days, this is both from where his muse originated and what had been there before him and would be there after he’d long gone. The start, and the end of a journey, in a sense; the man comes around.

The Manchester Apollo divested itself of its audience, cleaned up, yawned, and went back to sleep. Tomorrow another set of musicians would bring another set of emotions here. Playful, spiritual, gnarled or just damned noisy, it’s all part of the same game but to be in it you’ve got to get up off your arse and catch the breeze. 

The great thing about theatres is the suspension of disbelief demanded: once inside, anything goes, and to be open to that is perhaps to find things out about yourself that you didn’t expect or even want revealed.

And then to get stuck in a traffic jam on the way home.