Guilty, Guilty, Guilty:
On Trial, on Tour with Diamanda Galás
Reviewed by Darius Roberte + Rachel Cobcroft
Guilty, Guilty, Guilty is a program involving the re-interpretation of songs of love and death, including bittersweet pieces penned and performed by Johnny Cash, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Edith Piaf, John Lee Hooker and Hank Williams. Notably, Diamanda Galás performs a few of her own compositions, sourced primarily from her Malediction & Prayer and The Singer albums. Here she speaks and shrieks of guilty pleasures and tempestuous torments, at times revealing the broken heart of Galás, shining singularly like a black diamond.
Black light, black blues, a dark irony and an iron lady of noirish sensibilities looms into view - she walks on stage in a purposeful flair of black sweeps. Eschewing the spotlight, turning her face from the [increasingly divided] crowd, here are the rough hues of a rough-hewn Diamanda Galás. She launches into Johnny Cash's ‘Long Black Veil’ at the black grand. ‘Nobody knows but me’ is the refrain of darkest tragedy and loneliness. Briefly pausing after the clapping dies down, she begins slowly to belt out her own work 'Do You Take This Man?' Sostenuto octaves swell, evoking an accompaniment to a suggestive silent Russian film. Through dark descending steps of doom, she squawks violently in a haunting falsetto as the vibrato of death. The side illumination of punctuated and punctured lyrics ‘Love was a crime… I am guilty of knowing you… guilty of loving you… guilty guilty guilty’ conjure the scene of trial and interrogation, setting the context of the one-night-only concert.
Galás gives an impression of white noise in a black voice as the shards of her piano convulsively explode. How can she sustain these shattering cataclysms and sonic power surges? It all ends soaring and growling. The screaming from the crowd attempts to emulate her ex voco trails, still reverberating around the QPAC walls. With the Concert Hall organ alight in metallic blue, shafts like the daggers of heaven suspended above her distortion, Diamanda's own composition 'My World is Empty without You' hits these blue notes, enhanced by the sweetest crooning. With the chorus, ‘I try to hide my face’, she scrapes and rises, scratching the skin of the auditorium. Through chord-driven loss, single-note repetition and Lynch-like impressions, her piano embraces the dissonance. Is this the Eraserhead of love songs?
Red-lit from below, Galás quickens her pace for Screamin’ Jay Hawkins's ‘Frenzy’. We’re induced into a bloody bodily frenzy of Moussorgsky-esque chord structures, where a honky-tonk waltz of death and rock & roll 12-bar black-death blues emerge. We come to see this as some Latin border-town ghost-town ghost-dance Mexican bandit breakdown as we descend into delicious, digitised hell.
Diamanda's 'Baby's Insane' is like Chopin on the chopping board. The organ is now a garish pink, and heaven is temporarily happy – or is it sanguineous? Through Smith & Wesson chord pounding, we are ‘covered in blood’ in a wild parlour house, a classical bordello scene, trotting through the wreckage of Janis stagecoach Joplin and ragtime dust. Here, Scott and Janis Joplin jostle, wrestling in ghostly form through the deserts of psychosis. Giddyup giddyup - Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes that bends? Trail-blazing blues traditions are asunder with rich wild-west atonality. The song's pictures spill out – covered in blood by straight razors, baby’s insane!, hide the knives!, and don’t miss the bus – there are many cities where a man can age! These are the cities of the night.
With fractionated blues cascading ‘spare me… spill me over’, this is a volcanic soundscape, a rumbling journey over pianistic terrain. Galás hits the keybed flat, interspersing with operatic trills down low. Endure, injure, despair and spare me, bear and bare me! These are her angular evocations. The violent block forms bring to mind the music of Iannis Xenakis, couched in the ancient chant forms of their mutual background. This is a rich resource both performers appropriate, deconstruct, and re-invent. The most powerful and resonantly dissonant piece in this concert sparks a walk-out by various patrons holding feeble sensibilities and a more conservative musical palette.
Then the Priestess from Hellas sings in her mother tongue ‘Time (Interlude)’ by Timi Yuro. Rose-tinted organ lights act as counterpoint to the raw emotion frenetically delivered in Greek. There is another exodus of QPAC patrons. Like frightened mountain goats on a Hellenistic Isle, they tread lightly through the narrows in search of prosaic (Prozac) refuge. Now it's brimstone blues-ings, Joplinesque again, ‘Down So Low’ by Tracey Nelson: we both fall apart. Screamin' Jay Galás (on the rebound of faded clapping) puts a spell on you. Here there are little climactic lunatic sections, with the crackle in radio shortwave, two-way radio cop car alerts. A paradise lost is stranger than fiction.
A sweet reprieve with interspersed electronic sounds, sounding a mockery of pop in torn amoral-like trills prompts further exuit or exaltation. When the herd has cleared the field, Edith Piaf's ‘Heaven Have Mercy’ comes strutting in. Galás brings Charlie Parker-like passages of fractured jazz coupled with mounting infernal fugue-like atonality (like mountaineering with Alban Berg with Moussorgsky as a guide!) What follows is a great lonely cry from the depths of her heart, ‘Lord/Heaven have mercy!’ Here are Piaf restrains of falling in love… wait, it's Waits by the grave, Doris Day in hell. Why go on when your love is gone?
After the atonal buzzards and crows of '25 Minutes To Go' have settled, there's a diminuendo into a sound reflection that embodies this, her 'last' song. The traditional motions of ending are paced through as the diva leaves the stage, but returns from the corners after much exuberant applause. Encore number one, song 13 is 'The Dark End of the Street', exuding a lyrical, hushed velvet groan. The stage then darkens completely as if to bespeak the images implied.
Encore number two, DG re-enters, turning the manuscript pages for 'Gloomy Sunday'. And fuck, what an encore! Ugly beauty, blue grit, sonorous gravel wavering in pitch but not in force. The words ‘Sadly one Sunday, I waited & waited... dreams all broken’ resound. This beautifully tortures and teases a Chopin-like funeral march. She moans mournfully and devilishly in tandem, screaming with microtonal clusters colliding. This is an audience favourite from the dark sky, as Middle Eastern cries permeate the air.
The Priestess from Hellas bows and we are left wondering what pleasures are left. We are polarised, polemicised, teased, tortured and tempted into a greater state of being.
First published 22 October 2005
(Media Culture, QUT - sounds@reviews.media-culture.org.au)
© Darius Roberte and Rachel Cobcroft 2005
© Darius Roberte and Rachel Cobcroft 2005
Diamanda Galás performed on Thursday October 13, 2005
at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.
Further investigation - Diamanda Galás
