Miracle @ Barbican

I'm never sure that the Barbican is really the right place to see live music. I have a preference for sweaty basement clubs, with flooded toilets and surly bar staff. There's also a lost opportunity about the whole Barbican village thing, there is a disturbing Ballardian reality lurking somewhere between the concrete walkways, but it just won't be teased out, so it just ends up a polite middle class urban suburb, if you can have such a thing. However 'Ys' performed live with the LSO needed the gravitas of a venue like this, as it really is a major work methinks.

Alasdair Roberts provided pleasant support, but his stooped, skinny frame struggled to fill the huge space, and his pleasantly plucked tragic ballad updates need a bit of a re-vamp.

The Newsom band consisted of JN herself astride her imperious harp, (the main column of the beast looked like it could have been holding up the Parthenon) a percussionist/backing vocalist and a multi-(stringed)-instrumentalist, and the massed ranks of the London Symphony Orchestra. On 'Only Skin' miserabilist supreme Bill 'Smog' Callahan provided some lacklustre backing vocals, but he seemed rather over-awed by the scale and ambition of the event and his contribution was rather sheepish. This was an audaciously mounted concert, and could have proved hugely, pretentiously, over-egged, but was in fact superbly triumphant. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up so many times I was getting follicle ache. The songs with the orchestra and the mini-band seemed impossibly full and rich and beautiful. And then she did 'Sawdust & Diamonds' with just the harp, and it was even better, meltingly delicious. It's hard these days for someone to come up with something daringly new and inventive, that doesn't refer back to a million different strands of rock's rich tapestry, or that isn't festooned in knowing ironic ephemeral tinsel, and when something 'new' does happen it's so easy to be sniffy and suspicious of the artists intentions. But this is 'The Rite of Spring' or 'Ulysses' or 'Citizen Kane' it is cannonic and significant but without trying to be, it is just a heartfelt creative expression and as such, in these ultra-cynical times, is little short of miraculous.