It's My Party

Modern Art: Dangerous people making dull things*

The fact that we give an enormous amount of leeway to talented people is unbelievable. You don’t notice it but somewhere along the line of behavioural development we decided that we would allow talented people to act like fools. Thus the massive leeway for Amy Winehouse and Pete Docherty, not so much for Kerry Katona and Jade Goody. Maybe it’s stuck in the British psyche that we have to act that way. We are, after all, the reason why many people needlessly died on the titanic.

I went to watch my first concert of the year on Saturday. It was Sebastien Tellier and it was shit. Now even as I write this I am looking for excuses for his performance. And I have found some.



The reason why my friends and I had decided to come was his last album sexuality. And album which is about emotions combined with sex. A personal thing. An internal experience, unless you come as a couple these are songs that you can’t express with your friends. Or fully express with an audience. You can’t really sing along with others. The one song you could, Divine, Mr Tellier was too busy humping a blow up globe. The globe was brought by a fan inspired by the Frenchman’s Eurovision performance. And it was at that moment, three songs in, I realised something was wrong.

Tellier is horrible live. His music doesn’t translate well. He rambles on about being a free form jazz poet then pretends to drink wine on stage. He reveals that it is in fact a wine bottle filled with mineral water. Maybe he being drunk would have helped. The first time he did his stage patter it was funny but during the hour that I was there, we all left early, about half of it was spent perfecting the Tellier comedy hour. He knew that he wasn’t that funny but he continued on mentioning sausages, his fat, ugly mother and jazz bars. Joke after joke fell flat.

Normally a crowd will give an artist some time (I watched a horrible electro poet get 2 songs worth until the crowd turned on her. Then she took off her fur coat to expose her breasts and they let her finish her set) but his crowd was about a third French. Some of whom travelled from Paris to catch him perform. They do not put up with that nonsense. And this sparked a weird battle between the artist and the crowd. Whilst Tellier tried to tell jokes the crowd bellowed at him to:
“cut off his beard”
“where Jennifer( former keyboardist) was?” he replied that she was blowing men.
“speak only in French”
“smoke on stage” this resulted in him being reprimanded by his tour manager after succumbing to the chants.
This was a pure case of the crowd making him dance like a monkey. He didn’t help by deciding to run on the spot instead.

And he probably hated every second of it. He did have something in his arsenal to shut the up. The majestic, love song La Ritournelle. The song, which he said is about a toilet, is likely to be the first song at a wedding for just as many couples as take that. The song is 7 minutes long and each aspect in it never bores me.
The drumming by Tony Allen, Fela Kuti’s drummer, the piano arrangement and the synth strings all are mesmerising. So good that I would go and see him again, this time with a girl that I loved. That way I would know that if we get through this we can get through anything.


* a line taken from an old review of tellier.