When I was 14 Courtney released her first ‘Double EP: A Sea Of Split Peas’ and she instantly became my favourite musician. A vision came back to me during her concert of my father showing me one of my tweets at 16, a quote from History Eraser (“In my brain I/ Rearrange the/ Letters on the/ Page to spell your name”) and asking me what was going on. It’s a Courtney quote DAD! I knew all the quirks of her live performances from youtube, her touring schedule, and what I could glean from her songs and her instagram of her personal life. That’s why, when I sat in my fold-out leather seat in the middle of the Palais on Saturday, I was surprised to realise that this would be my first time actually seeing Courtney Barnett live.
I saw her once playing rhythm guitar with Jen Cloher at the NGV, but never her own songs. I had so analysed her live sets from youtube as a teenager that I’d constructed in my mind a memory of her on stage playing all my favourite songs, but this was only a fabrication. Finally, after a decade spent with her songs in the back of my mind I would be hearing them in the flesh, in St Kilda no less, a suburb where I had lived for almost a year and a half, and would be returning to for the first night since I moved out this February.
Underneath the ornate arched stage of the Palais she arrived with Lou Reed’s ‘New Sensations’ playing through the house speakers wearing all white, her band and her team of Auslan interpreters in black, and began her set with ‘Stay In Your Lane’ off her most recent album. The room was full and smelled of perfume. The mixed crowd remains seated for the opening song. Next they play ‘City Looks Pretty’, the lead single off her second full length album, a song which features an extended guitar solo from Courtney which she played with immense passion, flailing around the stage, improvising over the song’s central riff. She’s a big Lou Reed fan, and her tasteful disregard for tone and rhythm pay homage to her noise-rock influences.
She is often mischaracterised as an indie artist, an ingenious sleight of hand on her part. Her everyday, spoken vocals and her gentler moments of strumming mask the strange arrangements and melodies of her songs. If she yelled they would be considered punk songs, abrasive to some of her fans who appreciate her millennial relatability. But this is her great strength, she, like all great visionary artists, is able to mask the strange abstractions of her art behind a veneer of pleasant aestheticism. She can appeal simultaneously to everybody because her work is good at multiple levels of interpretation.
She plays her breakout hit ‘Avant Gardener’ and a few brave patrons boldly leave their seats to dance, and by the end of the song almost the whole crowd is on their feet. A few stubborn spots remain seated, blinded by the dancing bodies in front of them, and the set enters a new stage as the band begins to play ‘Small Poppies’, an extended jam track off her first album-proper ‘Sometimes I Sit And Think And Sometimes I Just Sit’. For 8 minutes the bass and drums loop the same simple pattern while Courtney builds slowly up to a crescendo, before gradually bringing it back down again, concluding the song to almost complete silence. She loops a fragment of her guitar and struts around the stage as her pedal board drones, changing her guitar and finally singing the first lines of ‘Depreston’, eliciting the crowd’s strongest reaction of the night, along with ‘Elevator Operator’, which she calls “maybe my most Melbourne song”.
She left the stage momentarily, returning alone to the stage for her encore of ‘Mostly Patient’, a diaristic ballad off her new album. Then the band joined her for ‘Canned Tomatoes (Whole)’, a favourite of mine, followed by the hits ‘Pedestrian At Best’, and ‘Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party’, for which the group of younger millennials in front of us jump and mosh together with a violence rarely seen in the Palais auditorium, and the older couple next to them take a big step the other way to avoid a stray elbow, and the crowd filed out of the splendid Palais into the pouring St Kilda rain, and the nearby pubs swelled with gossiping concertgoers.