Music Arcades: David Thomas Broughton: The Complete Guide to Insufficiency

Later this month, I'm going to my second Shhh! Festival. If it lives up to the first one I went to, it'll be a treat. I've already raved about that event once, in connection with Larkin Grimm, but as I said then, even she paled in significance when followed on stage by David Thomas Broughton. So here's another excerpt from the blog post I wrote in praise of that day.

I'd heard David Thomas Broughton's name (I'm a big fan of David Thomas, of Pere Ubu, so DTB's name catches my eye) but never heard him and didn't know what to expect. His stage presence was the first hint: back to the audience, jabbing at his effects switches as he started some loops going. And the face, Buster-Keaton-like, completely expressionless. Next there was the voice, which seemed unconnected to the body from which it issued. Half Nashville-Skyline-era Dylan, and half Scott Walker. But none of the hints prepared me for what started about 15-20 minutes in. Describing the details would be difficult and probably ineffective, but many of us were, by turns, genuinely concerned, scared, amused, moved and transfixed for the next I-don't-know-how-long. For some of the time all we heard was a looped vocal, with improvised responses from the back of the venue from Viking Moses and Larkin Grimm (and others? it seemed like there was a loose choir of wailing and chanting around the room, and I guess anyone could have joined in). DTB himself walked into the audience and continued singing unamplified, pausing only to bang a glass on the table behind me. I can't remember seeing anything on (and off) a stage quite like this for the theatre of the performance. The closest comparisons I can think of would be Jarry's Ubu plays, or the best bits of Forced Entertainment.

The Complete Guide to Insufficiency is the CD I bought at that show. It came as a self-assembly kit: unfolded card cover, brown paper sleeve note, the CD itself, and a plastic envelope to hold them all together.

After that first performance, I was so overwhelmed that I took every opportunity to see DTB again, including five times in 2007. Since the performance depends so much on drama and surprise, the diminishing returns were kind of inevitable, and I took a break for a while. But I saw him in July this year. Here are my notes

I'd had a brief conversation with DTB outside the venue: "Sorry for interrupting, but what time are you on — and could you tell me where the entrance is, please?" That kind of thing.

At the end of his encore, DTB stood in front of the pillar that I was leaning against, just a foot or two away from me, facing the stage. Then he turned to me, and said, "Are you slow clapping?" (I think he meant giving him a slow handclap?)

"No, of course not!" I half-laughed and half-grimaced. "That was lovely." Pause. "Where are you going then?" (It had been announced that this would be DTB's last show for 'quite some time'.)

"Just away."

I laughed again, "OK!" Subtext: if you want to be like that about it…

He leaned in towards me. "No, it's just, my girlfriend, you see, she works for the Foreign Office. She's being posted to North Korea…"

"Really — I didn't know we had diplomatic relations with North Korea."

"Don't tell anyone." It was just at this point, as the conversation ended, that the penny dropped he was just having a laugh at my expense.

The show is still about failure, and lots of it, but I didn't feel it had the dimension of pathos that it had when I first saw him. There was, however, one neat moment of improvisation. DTB had left a small device emitting a car alarm noise about three yards into the audience. After a while someone threw it back on stage, narrowly missing him. At first DTB did nothing, just kept playing for another minute or so. Then with a flourish he took off his guitar, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and dusted himself down before running into the audience to the spot where he'd left the device. He accosted first one person to ask if it was them who'd done the throwing, then another, looking vicious. When the second owned up, he broke into a smile and headed back to the stage. For a while he conducted a search for the device, still emitting its siren sound. After a few minutes he shouted, off mic, that the thing had fallen under the stage. A few minutes later, he dusted himself down again before crawling under the stage to retrieve and disarm the device.

I see that, after Shhh! 2006, I went home to watch the highlights of Paul Collingwood's highest test score on the last Ashes tour. Four years on, it's a different story for the team, and Colly bows out.