The Dresden Dolls
by Lisa Lunskaya Gordon

As always I arrived in Manchester at least a couple of hours before the show. I would much rather walk around, to kill some time, than to sit in a traffic jam panicking that I'd miss something, or not get a spot near the front.

The people queuing outside the Academy 2 were predictably young and ‘goth’ like. One ‘goth’ girl in front of me couldn’t stop talking the whole time that I was waiting. She actually pointed out an older gentleman further up in the queue saying, “Yeah, look at him, that old bloke smoking!”. It’s as if she thought that there should be an age limit to liking certain kinds of music. That only the young and trendy should be allowed out at night to see their favourite bands. If such a limit was enforced it should be an IQ limit or an attitude limit instead of one based on age. Fortunately or unfortunately I was within earshot so she didn’t talk to her mates about me. These mates, by the way, were behind us in the queue and she invited them all to join her. Don’t mind me, or ask if it’s okay! Judging from the scars on her forearm she had problems.

So it was quite interesting, as always, just standing there in the drizzle watching the people go by. A few people were dressed suitably for the occasion. A couple of men wearing bowler hats, one of them even wearing stockings, short trousers and white face paint. One chap was dressed in a suit and had a top hat on his head (were else!) and I'm sure I recognised him. It must have been at the Rollins show at the Academy because I've only been out twice this year.

Of course it was only later that I would recognise the two members of Bang On walking by and also two members of DeVotchKa getting out of a cab.

After what seemed like ages we, or rather me and everyone else, were let into the building out of the rain. Only to have to queue again to get into the hall itself, which strangely enough, is upstairs. The Academy 2 must be about the same size as the assembly hall at my old school. The gig was supposed to be in the Academy 3, which by its name alone, must be even smaller still. Probably about the size of my living room!

I was stood in a pretty good spot, just right of centre about ten feet from the stage. The gaggle of girls (what is the collective noun for a group of ‘goths’?) were stood, more or less, at the front but on the far right next to the speaker stacks. Why would anyone want to stand there instead of in the middle where you can see all of the stage?

From the ‘Show Time’ notices outside the opening band weren’t going to start until 8:30pm. So I was cursing the fact that it was still 40 minutes before I'd see any live music. My legs were aching, my back was aching, hell it must be my age!

Thankfully Amanda Palmer came on and introduced Bang On.

She had seen them performing at the Edinburgh Festival and had asked Katie and Dave to open for them. They make a great sound using unconventional instruments, which is essentially anything that will make a noise. Yes, I've never seen guitars played like that before. Bang On apparently played for nothing. Not even getting money for transportation, so a huge bucket, bright orange naturally, was passed around and I dumped a handful of coins into it.

After a quick set change DeVotchka were on next. Their web-site is having a make-over but they do have a MySpace page.

They have something of an eclectic sound. It’s kind of gypsy folk music with an eastern European kind of feel to it. What is surprising is that they come from Denver Colorado in the US. I, personally, have never seen an accordion being played on stage before let alone a tuba. They played their own material and, I think, ‘Venus In Furs’ by The Velvet Underground & Nico, because I spotted the “shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather” line.

AlexandrA was on next and she performed ‘air ballet’ on a red silk rope 12 feet in the air. I was thinking, whilst watching her twisting and swinging from this rope, how does someone practice that? Not because I want to, but because you just couldn’t attach a silk rope to the roof in your garage and start hanging around.

After a quick set-up The Dresden Dolls finally walk on stage, hand in hand throwing flowers into the crowd. Behind their respective instruments Amanda and Brian start to play ‘Sex Changes’ from the new album ‘Yes, Virginia…’. I must confess that when I listened to the CD for the first time it didn’t really sink in. I remember feeling disappointed. But after repeated plays the music really does get under your skin the same way that the last album did. They played ‘Backstabber’, ‘Dirty Business’, ‘Mrs. O’ and ‘Mandy Goes to Med School’ from the new album. ‘Coin-Operated Boy’, ‘Half Jack’, ‘Girl Anachronism’ and ‘The Jeep Song’ from the last album. As well as ‘War Pigs’ and two other cover songs that I didn’t recognise. There are no doubt a few songs that I've missed.

I sang along and smiled and bobbed my head along with the music. I had a great old time. Amanda hit the keyboard keys so damned hard. That can’t possibly be the same keyboard that she punished when they supported Nine Inch Nails, can it? Brian, the drummer, was just a sight to behold, part of the reason why I was slightly to the right of centre. He just hits the drum-kit so hard you wouldn’t believe. Throwing his sticks up in the air and not even bothering to catch them. He does make a hell of a sound from what must, for drummers, be considered a minimal kit.

Everyone sang along to ‘Coin-Operated Boy’ and I tried valiantly to sing all of the ‘skip’ part but gave up about 4 repeats from the end. That was just through fear of passing out. There was practically a mosh pit when they played ‘Girl Anachronism’. I never thought that I'd see so much flailing hair tonight. Because of some curfew they couldn’t play for much longer. They were about to play the last song when some people behind me started shouting. Even I couldn’t work out what they were asking for. Amanda and Brian could decipher the request and they played ‘The Jeep Song’ as if their lives depended on it.

The show would have been perfect if they had dropped the two cover songs that I didn’t know. Only because there was a noticeable lull. Some people did sing along but obviously I wasn’t one of them. So I really wish they had played two of their own songs instead. ‘First Orgasm’ is one of my favourites off the new album. I mean I don’t think they even played the new single ‘Sing’. But maybe they were going to do that before ‘The Jeep Song’ was unexpectedly moved to the top of the playlist.

One thing that always bugs me is the fact that people go to concerts and stand completely still. They don’t sing or respond to the music in any way. Hell they don’t even applaud between songs. Which I think is a little disrespectful in a way.

One girl, who looked about two months past twelve, just stood there smoking her cigarettes. If you want to do that you can do it in any pub or pedestrianised town centre in the land! Just stay away from concerts.

A boy in front of me had his arms around his girlfriend for so long that I thought he was just using her for support. Then again maybe he was. Quit being so damned possessive!

The other thing which spoilt the proceedings for me was the drunken idiot(s) who shouted out during the performance. Amanda and Brian just ignored them, and rightly so, you don’t want to give the knuckle dragging Neanderthals any kind of attention.

After seeing them last year I knew that The Dresden Dolls wouldn’t disappoint, and they didn’t. The new material is on a par or better than the last album and they always put on a great show.

Now, does anyone know were I can buy a bowler hat?

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eGigs.co.uk – photos by Kirsty Umback

10:30 in the morning and I was off on the tube to Whitechapel to visit The Royal London Museum.

The museum is tucked away down Newark Street behind, what appears to be the main hospital building. I went to see the exhibits they have about Joseph Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’). I had bought the David Lynch film on DVD and knew that Mr. Merrick had spent the last years of his life at the hospital under the care of Frederick Treves. The museum itself is very small, much smaller that I thought it would be or could judge by the photographs on the website. The articles concerning Mr. Merrick are very interesting. Photographs, a log that recorded his arrival at the hospital and one of his hoods that appeared to be a large cap with a ‘veil’ which looked as if it was made from sack cloth. I'm not sure if it’s an original or a reproduction. There was a photograph of Joseph, the one with him in his Sunday best, but this was a reproduction. It was all very interesting but wasn’t going to use up the rest of the morning, so it was back on the tube to Westminster.

I wanted to see the Saatchi Gallery, which is located in County Hall. I had read the book by Damien Hirst and knew, from my visit to the Sensation exhibition years ago, that Charles Saatchi was an avid collector of his work. Having paid my £9 and looked around, I was a little disappointed. I had hoped that the gallery would contain pieces from Sensation as well as The Triumph Of Painting exhibition. Certainly not worth £9. I don’t think that there were any artists that I had heard of. No wonder there had to be people outside on the banks of the Thames trying to get people to pay them a visit.

It was then off to Regent Street and my favourite store in the land, the Apple Store. I only wanted a little dock for my iPod shuffle and thankfully that is all I left with. I could spend thousands in there: 30 inch monitors, dual processor Power Mac, Power Book, iPod photo, iSight camera. I could end up being very broke but very happy. One of these days I tell you, when my Uncle Ernie remembers where I live. The place was full of tourists checking their emails. Just about every available screen had some mail web page open in dozens of different languages.

Anyway, I was getting hungry so I bought some sandwiches and sushi and went back to the hotel for a nap.

London Astoria

I started queuing at the Astoria a little later than the previous night so I was about 10 feet further back. The same drunk was there, the same t-shirt sellers trying to convince us all that the t-shirts inside were being sold for £30’s. Thinking about it now the time seemed to fly by. But at the time is seemed like an age. I'm just not the most patient of people. Luckily the queue started to move nearer 6 o'clock than the previous night. Before you’re allowed in you have to be checked to ensure that you aren’t carrying any knives or anything. There was a chap there with a video camera filming people as we all walked in. I remembered, from the night before, that this same guy had been on the right-hand side of the stage filming the action. I only found out afterwards, from reading internet forums, that this was Rob Sheridan, the guy who helped Trent to piece together the ‘And All That Could Have Been’ DVD. I also knew that he made the video for ‘The Hand That Feeds’. With any luck I could be on the next Nine Inch Nails DVD. Fat chance really considering that I look like a forty-something computer geek.

Once inside I wandered upstairs to the merchandise stall to buy a t-shirt.

After the previous nights fun and frolics I had toyed with the idea of watching the concert from upstairs. But it just didn’t seem right for some reason, so I headed back downstairs. A young french couple wanted me to take a picture of them on the stairs. And I thought I'd travelled along way to get to this concert.

I bought a can of Red Stripe and stood on the left side of the mixing desk. The amount of equipment in that small space was amazing. 15 inch Power Books, a LaCie hard disk drive, AirPort Express and LED digital counter. I can’t think what they were using the AirPort Express unit for. The digital counter was being used to synchronise video and audio I think. The actual mixing desk was a little further along in the centre of the booth, the chap at the desk behind me seemed to be working some of the lights. In fact the guy with the grey pony-tail and beard came down from the stage and stood next to me talking to the man at the desk. I managed to eves drop and heard that they had a problem with midi controllers or something. The man with the beard said that he had just finished doing the programming for the set and that he was going to grab a bite to eat. He walked back to the stage carrying a PCMCIA card. I don’t know which of them was the Rob Bennett that Trent mentioned on the web site. Rob had designed the lights for this tour as well as for ‘The Downward Spiral’ tour.

The music that was being played before the show seemed a little odd. At certain points it was music but then it changed to what sounded like a narrator, of some kind, with a very English accent, reading a medical book, listing symptoms. Very odd. I don’t know if this is specific to the Astoria or if it’s part of the Nine Inch Nails show.

The Dresden Dolls played and I think their music must have started to sink in. I have since bought the CD and like it quite a bit. There was one punk in the audience who seemed to be singing along to every word.

Set List

The Frail/The Wretched

You Know What You Are?

March Of The Pigs

The Line Begins To Blur

Piggy

Terrible Lie

Burn

Closer

Reptile

The Big Come Down

Gave Up

The Day The World Went Away

Suck

Even Deeper

Wish

Hurt

The Hand That Feeds

Starfuckers Inc

Head Like A Hole

Nine Inch Nails came on with Trent playing the keyboard parts to ‘The Frail/The Wretched’. This was a better move than the previous night as the crowd knew the tracks and became suitably pumped up straight away. I honestly can’t remember much more about it. I was singing my little heart out on the tracks that I knew and listened attentively to the songs that I didn’t. I was glad that I had chose this spot as it was up on a box so I had a good view of the crowd and the stage. I was thankful that I had a rail behind me as it did get really squashed as the gig went on.

The show ended, as it had the previous night, with ‘Head Like A Hole’. Everyone just went mental. When the band left the stage, and the lights went up, people still thought that there was going to be an encore.

I can honestly say that even if the Astoria looks a little like a flea pit from the outside the security people, and the staff generally, really know what they are doing. They were passing water out before and during the main event and anyone crowd surfing was quickly taken care of.

Even now I still can’t quite believe that I've seen Nine Inch Nails. I've been a fan since the ‘Broken’ E.P. and have been a fanatical collector of their music since. Just about anything that bears Trent Reznors name. I can remember when I received the email from the mailing list, saying that the tickets were going to go on sale, that I had second thoughts.

I've read on internet forums after the show that people at the front, against the barrier, had actually seen Trent smiling. Alas, no photographic evidence of this exists.

Related Links
Concert photos by Flash Wilson

I had downloaded the video for ‘The Hand That Feeds’ and just couldn’t get the song out of my head.

London Astoria

I arrived in London at about 1:00pm and walked down Tottenham Court Road to where I thought the Astoria was located. I'd never seen it before but had a vague recollection that I had walked past it last november, on my last visit to our nations capital. It does not look in the best of shape. It looks like it hasn’t had anything done to it since the days of Queen Victoria. I thought, “What the hell are Nine Inch Nails doing playing here!”. Of course the really hardcore fans, or those without hotel rooms to go to, were already queuing at a quarter to two. I headed off down Denmark Street to find the Travelodge and somewhere that sells sandwiches and bottled water.

I waited in the hotel room until 4:30pm before making my way to the queue down the side of the Astoria. Everyone was in good spirits, as you can imagine. A drunk and the t-shirt sellers kept us amused. The doors where supposed to open at 6:00pm but there must have been some sort of hold up as I'm sure that the queue didn’t start moving until at least twenty minutes past the hour.

The inside seemed so small, just an empty space in front of the stage. It’s more like a club than a theatre and certainly nothing like the stadiums that Nine Inch Nails are used to playing in. There was a sort of metal cage around the mixing desk. The balcony had small tables and chairs and of course another bar. I managed to get a spot that was about 5 people back from the centre of the stage. A great spot, at least that’s what I thought at the time. I was used to all the jostling and jumping around after seeing Rammstein in february.

There seemed to be some kind of technical hitch as members of the road crew were checking The Dresden Dolls equipment and seemed to be replacing a power cable. Finally, at about twenty minutes past seven The Dresden Dolls came on. Of course I had checked out their website before hand but hadn’t had a chance to listen to their music. Their setup is really simple: Amanda Palmer, plays keyboards and sings, Brian Viglione, plays drums. I was suitably impressed. Not exactly the kind of music that grabs you straight away, as there doesn’t seem to be any really catchy choruses, but after a couple of listens the music does start to sink in. I was particularly impressed with Brian’s drumming, he really hit his kit damned hard, he just seemed to be a mass of flailing arms. Amanda sang with as much venom and bile as she could muster. No one really noticed that they were playing ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath until about 30 seconds in, then everyone sang along. I wonder if anyone else noticed that she had changed the name on her keyboard from Kurzweil to KurtWeill.

The place was so small that you could see the road crew re-stringing guitars at the side of the stage during The Dresden Dolls set. Everything seemed to be crammed onto the tiny stage. Including a big bank of lights at the back. The chap that appeared to control them looked like a young Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top. He had a long pony tail and of course a long beard, both silvery grey, and a NIN baseball cap on backwards. In ten years time that’s what I want to look like.

One thing that I did notice was that Trent’s microphone stand had some kind of rubber strip running down the right-hand side. I had watched a member of the road crew pressing it at certain points along it’s length while he was testing the microphone. I never did figure out what it did.

Set List

Love Is Not Enough

You Know What You Are

March Of The Pigs

The Line Begins To Blur

Piggy

Terrible Lie

The Collector

Closer

Home

Gave Up

With Teeth

Even Deeper

Hurt

Wish

The Hand That Feeds

Starfuckers Inc

Head Like A Hole

The lights dimmed again and the band walked on stage. When we could see Jeordie White everyone yelled, “Twiggy!”, including me. Even playing for A Perfect Circle and now Nine Inch Nails it will take along time before he is recognized as more than Marilyn Manson’s old side kick. Of course the biggest cheer went up for Trent Reznor. Even I couldn’t believe he was actually there and I was seeing them play England for the first time in along time. His guitar roadie passed a black Les Paul to him before he strode up to the microphone.

I knew the set list from the shows in Fresno, that they played before coming over, so I wasn’t surprised to hear two new songs to start with. I think everyone thought they were good and the crowd was bouncing up and down but being unreleased they weren’t songs we had all listened to over and over again. I wasn’t until ‘March Of The Pigs’ that everyone went suitably mental. The security guys behind the barrier were already handing out cups of water that were being passed among the crowd. A huge chap in front of me kept pushing me, and the people behind me, back so that his thinner mate didn’t get crushed. At one point he started to wave to security but they mustn’t have seen him. About five minutes later he had had enough and he hauled his mate over the crowd and he was passed over peoples heads before the security grabbed him and led him away. This huge guy wanted to do the same so I helped to lift him up and over the crowd. I was a little uncomfortable to say the least. If the crowd just stayed in one place then I would have been fine for the rest of the show. Instead everyone seemed to be pushing left and right. Of course your upper body is squashed against those around you so that when you do move away from the vertical your feet have nowhere to go. I'm sure I felt as if all of us were going to fall into a huge sweaty heap at any moment. I think I stayed near the front for as long as I could. I sure didn’t want to leave the same way as the other two, over the heads of the crowd.

I think during an instrumental break in one song Trent sprayed us all with a couple of litres of water. Which was a welcome respite from the heat and humidity but, being a spectacle wearer, it fogged up both lenses. So I couldn’t move my feet, my body was moving 2 or 3 feet from the vertical in all directions and I couldn’t see. At the end of ‘Piggy’ Trent came down into the pit at the front and everyone pushed forward, if such a thing was possible. At this time I started to move back. Pushing back with my feet, then turning and making my way to the bar.

Never has a cold can of lager tasted so good. I stood at the bar for a while, drinking from the can before I moved a little way into the crowd. Of course I could still see the band and was still singing my lungs out during the old songs.

The music was building up to a climax. From ‘Hurt’, ‘Wish’, the new single ‘The Hand That Feeds’, ‘Starfuckers Inc’ and ending with ‘Head Like A Hole’. During that last song the entire place exploded, everyone was singing or bouncing up and down to the music. The band walked off stage, there was no way even they could top that. The stage lights went up and the road crew started to dismantle a few things on stage. I knew there wasn’t going to be an encore so I was one of the first out. Off to Sainsbury’s for some liquid refreshment, non-alcoholic, still drenched in sweat with my ears still ringing.

Related Links
Concert photos by Flash Wilson