The Bong-bird of St Reefersburg

Various circumstances have conspired to stop me seeing much theatre recently: so here is a temporary lapse into a concert review. Many apologies: normal service will resume shortly.

http://www.grebenshikovconcert.com/index.html

Last Monday I went to see Boris Purushottoma Grebenshikov perform at the Royal Albert Hall. I had never heard of him, but he is big news: a Russian rock star, poet and dissident, who emerged in the early 80s but was promptly suppressed by the Soviet regime, and who then rode the fallout energy of the Soviet Union to great success. Unlike Vaclav Havel, who rode his new status into politics, Boris stayed in music. However, there is still a big agenda - to guide people to enlightenment, through a particular type of Hindu spirituality espoused by a recently deceased guru called Sri Chimnoy.

The relevance of this is that Sir Chimney (as I couldn't help of thinking of him) had amassed enough money- in his life of helping various rich people on their way to spiritual harmony- to let Boris perform a free concert in the Royal Albert Hall last Monday. And so, with a kind invitation from a Russian cultural guide and drinking buddy, I went along.

Boris himself, as he takes to stage, is hard to quantify. The build of a bouncer, the beard of Rasputin, the glasses of Lennon, ears from Buddha, an earring from the 80s, and the clothes of a roadie. The set is his rock music replayed by an orchestra of crack folk musicians.

There is a man with a bodhran, with a slightly furtive air about him, as befits a man who plays the bodhran, the timpani or the triangle - instruments of childlike simplicity which nonetheless can get you onto a big stage if you remember not to giggle. Throughout the set he is making eyes at a woman who plays a bewildering array of ethnic string instruments, pulling out a new and even more primitive one for each song, until I swear she is playing an empty tissue box with rubber bands over in a Blue Peter style by the end. She was next to another woman who was like an Asian version of Joss Stone, and sat pretending to be in Sri Chimnoy's garden and not actually surrounded by microphones and loads of people. She played, when she deigned to, the sitar. The stage was filled with similar folk virtuosi.

The vast majority of the songs were in Russian, but fear not - from the sound of each I was able to guess the subject matter, which I noted down next to the song number during the concert. Here are some of the notes I took during the evening:

"#3 This song is about a large truck."

"#4 Boris has taken his glasses off. Now we are in his inner sanctum, hearing his secret thoughts in a very intimate song. I wish I could understand what he is saying."

"#5 This one is about a girl who gets crushed in a landslide. She was top of the class. On second thoughts the song is too epic to be about a girl who gets crushed in a landslide. It is about a girl whose man goes away and then comes back on a horse. She would like to take him in her arms but she realises that she can't because while he was away she was crushed by a landslide."

"#7 This is a barnstormer about a man who has split up with his girlfriend and tries to cook himself the things his girlfriend always cooked for them. He fails and the meal is disgusting. He curses the absent girlfriend vehemently, and eats the whole thing anyway in defiance."

"#8 A man lets his prize racing pigeons go free. The one pigeon that he had always loved most shuns freedom and comes back to him. It sings on the lawn at his feet. He is mowing the lawn and doesn't hear it because of the noise, and so he mows it to pieces."

Now, apparently Boris used to play quite hardcore rock. Around this time in the concert I began to wonder whether Alex Turner or Pete Doherty would turn Hindu on us in old age and play these kind of gigs, with 'You Can't Stand Me Now' done with Uillean Pipes and Tin Whistle, or 'I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor' done with Tabla, Harmonium and Sitar.

The one musician tenaciously hanging on from the rock days was the keyboard player, who looked consistently disillusioned with the softcore world music versions of the songs being played. I imagined him cheekily slipping his keyboard into the 'ethnic instruments' register, then playing bum notes in order to get some of the other musicians sacked.

- 'Boris the Song-Bird of St Petersburg!' [so I imagine the rest of the band have to address the leading Boris] 'You have to get rid of the sarangi player. Did you hear her hitting an F-sharp over the D-minor backing?'
- 'Be quiet lesser Boris' [the keyboard player is also called Boris] 'I saw your keyboard set to register 443, you're fooling no-one.'

Apart from the simmering rage of the keyboard player, there was also the rivalry of Brian Finnegan and Premik Russell Tubbs, the two flautists of the evening. Premik was a tall, hollow-cheeked, priestly looking chap, as likely to bless the flute as to blow it, whereas Brian looked like a cross between a young Paul Gascoigne and Moby, but with the attitude of the former. At one point Brian cut into one of Premik's saintly solos and blasted out some top flute playing as a retort: I thought we were up for an epic flute battle, but Premik wimped out and never came back with a counter attack.

"#11 opens on a long prayer to Ganesh from the man with the harmonium. This one is upbeat. It tells about how all of the animals in the tundra have their place in the cycles of natures. The ocelot says 'Hey yeah I'm going to eat you mr vole'. The vole says 'hey that's cool mr ocelot' and everyone is happy. The song is quite short because the tundra is not very biodiverse and so not many animals can talk to each other."

"#14 is about a bridge. The people go past in their cars without thinking about what it took to build the bridge - the blood of innocent men! The songs treats the other things that civilisation has created - printing presses, mobile phones, microwaves, forklifts etc, also built with the blood of innocent men."

"#15 a 7yr old son addresses his mother, who he thinks is wonderful. He asks her to explain the world."

Around this time I began to ponder the peculiar fate of the Uillean Harp. It was a lovely instrument, but has now been completely spoilt, because no matter how beautiful the harmony, it instantly makes people think of the Titanic theme video, and Celine Dion touching herself on a big boat.

"#20 sounds a bit like the Beatles. It is a song addressed to the last boy alone at a school disco, sung to him by the condom machine in the men's toilets, along the lines of 'don't worry' etc. It is a waltz in 6/4."

"21 This is an upbeat one about what the singer is going to do to his wife when they get home. It has a slight tension because, in the song, they are on a bus and people are beginning to give the singing man dirty looks. On the last chorus, everyone in the band and the audience joins in singing about what they will do to the wife when they get home."

The moment when a choir appeared dressed all in white, I had a flashback to a Christian concert I went to when I was about 11 and having a bit of a religious phase. As I remember, the concert helped me get over my pubescent religiosity, because I eventually realised that I couldn't carry on attending religious events if the music was going to be so cheesy.

Brian Finnegan, playing what his testicles told him rather than what Sri Chimnoy might have wanted, was out on his own: likewise, a few upbeat numbers, where the band really started swinging, left the audience aching to hear more in that vein. But then the song-bird of St Petersburg would sit down again on his stool and drift into another noodling meditative medley. As my Russian guide explained, "his music has changed because he mostly smokes cannabis now."