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While steps were obviously taken to ensure everyone was safe, the roleplay element added a different kind of thrill to the experience, as the audience found itself elevated from the role of mere spectator to that of active participant within a narrative. Calling this a gig felt reductionist, a poor descriptor for what the experience actually was. It ended, rather aptly, with the whole audience, or at least a sizeable portion of it, being invited on the stage with the band, in a riotous recognition of the part they had played in the whole affair.
“Why can’t you just be a band?” a fellow gig-goer jokingly commented on the way out. While the comment was made in jest and with a smile, it did highlight something correctly: to call these artists a band is as inaccurate a description as calling the event itself a gig. Something this ambitious, after all, does not come out of nowhere. More artist collective than band, HMLTD have always put out work that is proudly high-concept; their most recent LP, ‘The Worm’, is a narrative tale of fighting a giant worm in a post-apocalyptic, medieval-flavoured world. Their live shows have also always reflected this, being few and far between but characterised by elaborate stage sets and striking performances that border on storytelling. This is not just a band playing music: it is a group of performers summoning a whole world for their audience to step into.
They are not alone in this. One of the beautiful things about the alternative music landscape is that it allows its artists to do exactly this kind of experimenting, gives them the space to do the left-field things and experiment with different ways of conceptualising live performance. Take for instance The New Eves, who not only have crafted an aesthetic for themselves that immediately triggers a series of cultural associations in the audience’s mind, but have also found ways of leveraging their deeply atmospheric music in order to create an immersive bubble for gig-goers to step into, where the more solemn sections of their songs feel almost like taking part in some ancestral ritual and the parts bordering on spoken word blur the lines between rock gig and poetry slam. Or take Bishopskin, whose live outings frequently offer a taste of the unexpected: one ended with frontman Tiger Nicholson completely naked and covered in blue paint; in another, he cut his hair on stage. Visceral, poetic, and just a little bit shocking, this feels like music meeting performance art of a different kind, the kind grounded in bodies more than in words, with an echo of Viennese Actionism to it. Or you might consider Heartworms, another artist with a consistently high-concept output and a confident aesthetic, whose take on gig immersiveness is quieter and more eerie but no less impactful, incorporating a black-and-white, sharp-edged aesthetic that makes you feel like you’ve been time-warped into some alternative universe version of wartime Britain: the Blitz as David Lynch may have imagined it.
Other artists go even further, giving themselves stage personas who remain active and alive even after the gig is over, accumulating their own lore through the years and telling a story which might diverge considerably from the one of the real performer behind them. Think of The Moonlandingz, a band that doesn’t technically exist, not in the sense proper, with a constantly changing line-up and a slew of impressive collaborations forming the backbone of their records: the focal point of their live shows, and of much of the storytelling surrounding them, is equally fictional frontman Johnny Rocket, who is so much more than a simple stage persona for vocalist Lias Saoudi to inhabit. He has a story to which new bits are constantly being added, a personality that is in equal parts satire of the rockstar concept and rockstar concept itself, immediately recognisable aesthetic quirks (most notably a penchant for cling-filming random objects to his chest), and ultimately a life of his own, which diverges considerably from that of the performer channelling them.
Going one step further, it might be even harder to define what is happening with the faceless pop creature brought to the stage by Lynks, an artist whose shows include complex choreography and elaborate costuming: here the real face of the performer is entirely hidden, an unknown quantity that does not really matter because the character - the entity, almost - stepping onto the stage is the only real thing, at least for the duration of the performance. That makes Lynks (whose debut album was titled, rather pointedly, ‘Abomination’) more than simply a musician: rather, a conduit for a concept made material, a personification of queerness itself and for the societal unease it still is a target of. You might be tempted to borrow a concept from Buddhist folklore and call these stage characters tulpas: entities born of thought which come into existence through the power of a sufficiently large number of people believing they exist, at least, in this case, for the duration of a live performance.
In and of itself, performance-as-storytelling of this stripe is not a new thing in rock music. The late and great David Bowie, after all, crafted alter egos for himself who felt even more alive, more real, than the artist portraying them, be it Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke, and created worlds for them to inhabit which are still populated by the people who love his art. He is only the most striking example of a freedom of experimentation which used to be commonplace - look at the creative ribaldry of the New Romantics; look at the mournful storytelling of early goth-rock - and which has left a deep imprint on the collective mindset of alternative artists.
Today, the mainstream might feel like it has little place for something as ambitious, experimental, and potentially unsettling as this:, but humans are ultimately built to tell and to love stories, and the ability of such line-blurring acts to command cult followings speaks volumes about the need that still persists to engage with art that goes beyond simply singing songs on a stage. There is a collective experience music is capable of that is almost ecstatic in nature, and it is something human beings have been chasing ever since prehistory. Putting on these kinds of shows creates a space for that experience to replicate itself even in the 2020s, and it is for this reason that such artists will always capture their audience’s imagination.
Chiara Strazzulla
Image: Chiara Strazzulla
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