LIVE REVIEW: John Grant + Nadine Khouri @ Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisboa (23/11/2023)
The last show on this year's Misty Fest programme was also the most eagerly awaited - and John Grant does not disappoint.
Unfortunately this was the only show of this year’s Misty Fest that I was able to catch, but such is the beauty of this kind of event - a month-long, slow drip of isolated shows in select venues means that you can even treat each of them as its own thing and you’ll be okay. Not that there weren’t amazing names this year, like Lambchop, Alan Sparhawk or Wim Mertens, but hey, if there has to be only one, Highlander-style, for me it’ll almost always be John Grant holding all the other severed heads at the top of the mountain. Figuratively speaking, and yeah, that seems the kind of outlandish analogy I’m sure he’d appreciate using in one of his songs.
A little word of appreciation for Nadine Khouri, an Anglo-Lebanese singer/songwriter who held up the difficult position of opening for the larger-than-life Grant with class and aplomb. Quietly shy in her short but sweet conversations with the audience in between songs, she confidently breaks any such shackles with passionate renditions of some of her more memorable songs. For almost an hour, the mood swinged from the quiet beauty of opener ‘Broken Star’ or the particularly shadowy highlight that was ‘Box Of Echoes’ to the feet-stomping energy of ‘Shake It Like A Shaman’. Focusing mostly on her recent ‘Another Life‘ album while still pleasing fans of the successful ‘The Salted Air‘ (2017), Nadine and her band left a wonderful and perhaps even surprising mark on the evening. Go check out her music.
Setlist:
Broken Star / You Got A Fire / Vertigo / Visitations / Box Of Echoes / Keep On Pushing These Walls / To Sleep / Song Of A Caged Bird / Shake It Like A Shaman / Another Life
I’m what you might call a John Grant fanboy, I admit it. Ever since a casual blind purchase of The Czar’s ‘Moodswing’ debut it feels like the man’s voice and way with words has kept me under an unbreakable spell, and every record he has released since, either with that old band of his or under his own name, has just further reinforced this rather wonderful hypnosis. It has been wonderful to witness how much this great man has grown as a singer and an artist in these almost three decades that have passed since that unassuming little alt-rock record. Armed with just a piano and the usual lovely company of Chris Pemberton on keys and synths, his voice and charisma fill up the entire Great Auditorium of the CCB with ease and a sort of natural majesty right from the off.
A remarkable opening trio of ‘The Cruise Room’ (funnily enough, the only song off his most recent ‘Boy From Michigan’ album performed this evening), the epic ‘Where Dreams Go To Die’ and the quirky yet deep ‘Grey Tickles, Black Pressure’, the title track of my favourite record of his (unfortunately, also the only song off that one to be aired for this show), ensured that, through the immense spectrum of emotion contained therein, Grant had the audience fully in his tight grip straight from the beginning. From then on, it was just a question of chatting a bit, always very naturally and genuinely, thanking people and making a few cool comments about how beautiful the tiles are in Lisboa and offering little background tidbits on the songs’ themes, and then letting his mighty voice soar. Either really high, like in that climax bit of ‘Queen Of Denmark’ (promptly received with loud claps and yahoos from an enraptured audience), or in the most emotional, quietly moving parts, such as in the surprisingly discreet encore, which consisted of new song ‘Zeitgeist’ and the lovely ‘Caramel’, off ‘Queen Of Denmark’ again (which continues to be the most visited album), at the piano or just standing up in front of the mic, everything John did and sang was pure gold. Seems so easy when you’re this talented, isn’t it?
Right before the encore, we got one Czars song, ‘Drug’, which still hits as hard as it did back in the day, when the amazing ‘The Ugly People -Vs- The Beautiful People’ came out, their first effort for Bella Union. Complaints? Well, sure, but only on a purely personal setlist-picking level. Would have been nice to get a cut or two more off ‘Grey Tickles…’, maybe ‘Global Warming’ or one of those epic croony ones like ‘Magma Arrives’ or ‘Geraldine’. And hey, why not prolong that little trip to the past and give us The Czars’ ‘Paint The Moon’ too as well as ‘Drug’? But whatever. It’s just nitpicking. What matters is that this man continues to grace our lives with his voice, his presence and his glorious songs. “There‘s nothing more comforting than to know, know you exist in this time, in this place”, he sings on yet another song that could have made it to the setlist, ‘Disappointing’, and though this memorable show was anything but, there’s no way to not agree with the sentiment of that lyric. Thank you, John.
Setlist:
The Cruise Room / Where Dreams Go To Die / Grey Tickles, Black Pressure / Touch And Go / Is He Strange / Outer Space / Marz / Glacier / Queen Of Denmark / Drug (The Czars)
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Zeitgeist / Caramel
All photos by Luís Sousa | Música em DX, used with kind permission. Thank you Luís and Sara.