One of the shows I'd really like to have seen was Laurie Anderson's United States show in the early eighties at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. But I was late to the party, and first got to see her a quarter of a mile away from Riverside at the Odeon on 24 May 1986.
This CD reminds me of that evening because that's where I first heard several of the Strange Angels songs. From memory: The Dream Before, Babydoll, The Day the Devil, and maybe one or two others. The Dream Before opened the show, first with Laurie perched on the side of the stage singing and playing melodica. Then she wandered up and down the aisles of the Odeon, taking small objects from her pockets and dropping them into eager hands. I got an AA battery, which I carried around with me for months afterwards. I imagine it's still in a box in the attic.
While The Dream Before was and remains a great piece — I quoted it in my original letter — the rest of the 1986 show left me disappointed. Something about the choreographed backing singers didn't fit with my idea of Laurie Anderson. With hindsight I realised I was missing the point: that when Laurie left the stage and played us a video of herself performing Reverb, it wasn't just that she couldn't be bothered to perform it live; she was pointing to the (deep breath now) mise-en-abyme of "the time" and "the record of the time".
I guess I was in the middle of my finals at the time, and I enjoyed the cod psychology of the homunculus in Baby Doll: "I don't know about your brain / but mine is really bossy". But I wasn't sure about the attempts to mimic Motown in the presentation. I'm still not. Overall Strange Angels seems like Laurie's experimental flirtation with being a 'proper' recording artist, one who makes her money from album royalties and playing venues like Hammersmith Odeon and Dominion Tottenham Court Road. I'm glad that, in recent years, she's mostly gone back to making money from commissions from arts organisations and playing in theatres.
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Around a year after that Hammersmith Odeon show, a fellow tenant in the house where I was living saw the Laurie Anderson poster on my wall. Her friend lived downstairs from Laurie in Canal Street, NYC, so she gave me her address. Over the next couple of years I sent her a couple of postcards from holiday locations — Lyme Regis and the Isle of Coll are the two I remember. I was particularly pleased with myself for the Coll one, because the photo on the postcard was of the letter box where I posted the card (there aren't many on the island, population 164). I thought that was dead reflexive and old-media-savvy.
And then her next album, Strange Angels, came out, featuring a song, Hiawatha, with the line, "Keep those cards and letters coming". Well, I just knew I was the inspiration for that one, and bathed in the reflected glory of my contribution.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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