A Better Time To Meet

Watching Big Thief in Belgium on the cusp of Covid

I moved from South Africa to the Netherlands - the country of my maternal grandparents - mid-2019. There are many things that I treasure about living here but as someone who once hitchhiked from Umhlanga Rocks into Durban as a teenager in the early eighties to watch a punk band I was mad about, near the top of the list is this: if you really want to see an artist that you love and the only show that’s scheduled in the country is sold out, well you can take a train to another land to catch them there.

Album cover for Big Thief’s 2017 album Capacity

I had missed out on getting tickets for their Amsterdam show and so it happened that I found myself traveling from Rotterdam towards Brussels to see Big Thief. It was early March 2020 and, as you might guess from the date, it was no ordinary show, turning out to be the very last concert that I saw before Covid restrictions wrenched live music away from performers and their audiences for what felt like - because it was - years. It was also one of Big Thief’s final shows before they were forced to abandon their world tour, leaving fans in Japan, Australia, Canada and their home country America disappointed. The abrupt end came when Denmark went into lockdown precisely as the band finished playing the first of two shorter shows at Copenhagen’s VEGA venue - the decision to split the evening into two arising from the Danish authorities' earlier request that limited audiences to 1,000 people at any one show. In a gesture that transmitted a warmth that defied the night’s cold air, the band’s Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, James Krivchenia and Max Oleartchik turned up outside the venue to play a tender, five-song unplugged set for those who had been waiting their turn but were now forbidden from gathering inside. You can watch this never-to-be-repeated performance here.

As the train eased its way through the still winter-stained fields and cities, I kept a check on my email because, in the days leading up to that Thursday, I couldn’t ignore the no longer ignorable shiver of anxiety in the talk that a lockdown was on its way. What was unimaginable mere weeks earlier was now a frighteningly sudden prospect.

But the cancellation notice never came and I was soon at Ancienne Belgique waiting to see the band take to the stage. I had travelled to Brussels on my own so, although I really wanted to, there was no-one to turn to and ask if heading towards the front of the stage was a good idea. Not because of the usual things - pushing, moshing, being unwillingly drawn into catching a crowd surfing singer - but because social distancing was being loudly and broadly put forward as a way to contain Covid. At that moment, I became acutely aware of how close everyone was to me in the 2000 capacity hall. The feeling of a collective warm breath on my neck was uncomfortable, mildly alarming even in its conjuring up in my mind of a virus descending, like floating particles of lethal dust in a sunbeam.

When the show began, however, all thoughts of infection and pandemics were pushed aside and I soon found myself standing close enough to experience why Lenker is an extraordinary front person, a singer who has the ability to raise the hair on your flesh through the transmission of an intensity that appears to emanate from an unseen, fiery, internal furnace. What was especially revelatory from that close-up position was her guitar playing which I’d imagined was secondary to Meek’s but turned out to be as expressive as her voice, her instrument held close and unfashionably a little raised towards her chin, like George Harrison’s early Beatles days. You can easily see her guitar playing gifts in her Tiny Desk (Home) Concert filmed later in 2020 and featuring songs off her two solo records, songs and instrumentals. Like everything Lenker does it’s worth your time.

Lenker is a prolific songwriter and Big Thief’s 2020 world tour was in support of the gift of a double punch delivered by the release of two albums, less than six months apart, the year before. Their Ancienne Belgique set opened delicately with “Magic Dealer”, the closing song on the first of these records, U.F.O.F., before the band moved backwards in time to play the title track off their 2016 debut, Masterpiece, a tender, billowing song about grief that, on its release, presented perhaps the most persuasive demonstration of Lenker’s songwriting gifts. It was followed by a pair of songs off Capacity, Big Thief’s second album which I love not only for its music but also for its cover - a photo of Lenker’s young dungaree-clad uncle cradling her as a baby, an ordinary family snap that holds all the mysterious eloquence of a long ago painting. One of these was “Shark Smile”, about a doomed car ride, that is a vehicle for a voice that - at least for me - feels like it has tumbled from heaven to earth. Listen to her phrasing on the song’s chorus - “And she said woo, baby, take me / And I said woo, baby, take me, too” - and I would be surprised if you didn’t feel the same.

The rest of the set was a carefully chosen selection from the band’s (at that time) four albums, among them “Forgotten Eyes” off the second 2019 album, Two Hands, which threads through a delicate acoustic guitar to emphasise the song’s call for compassion ("Everybody needs a home and deserves protection”) and also shows how easily Lenker can move between writing about the expansive human experience and specific humans (for instance, on the wistful “Paul” or the keening “Mary”). Songs like “Orange” and “two reverse” (an Adrienne Lenker solo song) further showed why she’s Big Thief’s songwriter, while others (like “Real Love”) demonstrated why there are few bands, except perhaps for The Libertines, that calibrate the musical balance so riskily, so anti-showbizzy, so perfectly - Lenker’s clear and unadorned guitaring and spectral yet substantial voice, Meek moving like he’s in a dance with his instrument, Krivchenia playing the drums with a hushed, open heart and Oleartchik (now no longer in the band, the Israeli-born musician leaving for “interpersonal reasons” in July last year ) in a dress, stapling down the sound with his bass.

Everything that makes Big Thief a band to adore comes together in “Not”, a towering song off Two Hands that surges like a tidal wave before crashing onto the shore with an emotional force that threatens damage. It was just nine days after I returned from Brussels that a lockdown was announced and enforced in the Netherlands. Being in the last crowd I would be part of for nearly two years, witnessing Lenker, her eyes closed, repeating, summoning what’s not there, went from being a memorable live music experience to something that was prescient and poignant.

It’s not the room

Not beginning

Not the crowd

Not winning

Not the planet

Not spinning

Not a rouse

Not heat

Not the fire lapping up the creek

Not food

Not to eat

Just recently we took another music-fuelled trip to Belgium - this time to see Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory in Antwerp. It was not the transcendent experience that was Big Thief on the cusp of a global lockdown but it was revelatory in another, small way. We’d seen Van Etten play in Utrecht in 2022, one of our first shows coming out of the Covid lockdown, a lovely but underwhelming evening. Just a handful of years later, and sixteen years into a celebrated solo career, Van Etten has released an album written in close collaboration with her band and it’s shaken and stirred her sound in new directions and given it fresh blood in live performance. Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is very much the sound of an artist playing with form, Devra Hoff (bass), Teeny Lieberson (keys, vocals) and Jorge Balbi (drummer) fully alongside the singer. Their show in Antwerp’s De Roma felt elevating, a swirling, kinetic experience of songs off the new album - like the slow burning “Live Forever” and the reverential “Afterlife” - but also Van Etten’s solo material, including “Seventeen” and “Comeback Kid”, two standout tracks off her 2019 album, Remind Me Tomorrow.

I leave you with this, dear reader.

I’ve always loved watching artists play in locations that are imprinted with a history that helps make an atmosphere before a first note has been played. Ancienne Belgique is one of these because it has been a music hall since the 1930s when artists like Josephine Baker, Charles Aznavour, Édith Piaf, and Jacques Brel began to play there. The venue’s throwback interior - balconies surround the open floor - has also been the place of some fierce performances, fights even (The Cure, on stage, 1982). In June 1978, a crowd there to see Elvis Costello was having none of support act Suicide’s electropunk pioneering sound and made it known, at one point stealing Alan Vega’s microphone. What ensued in that adversarial exchange - which ended with just five songs being played by the duo and a broken nose (Vega) - was captured by a friend of the band’s on cassette tape and became “23 Minutes over Brussels”, the B-side of Suicide’s 21½ Minutes in Berlin/23 Minutes in Brussels live album. I can’t find the release on Spotify but someone has uploaded it to YouTube and you can listen to it there. It’s wild. If you have the time and don’t know Suicide, you could also listen to “Dream Baby Dream”, their eerie (is it hopeful? Is it resigned?) 1979 song in which primitive, minimalist synthesisers and a drum machine provide fertile ground for a hypnotic vocal that gets its tremendous and lasting impact through repetition - not unlike, come to think about it, Big Thief’s “Not”.

And I also leave you with this. It is the cause for much banter in our family that I share a birthday - July 9th - with O.J. Simpson because everyone else has way more iconic, interesting and less controversial birthday twins than him. I always point out that actually I was also born - on the exact same day and in the very same year - as Courtney Love, a fascinating if complex cultural figure, but somehow it’s always O.J. who gets hauled out when we play the game that I am sure many of you also amuse yourselves with. Imagine my delighted surprise then, while checking something about Big Thief online, when I discovered that Adrianne Lenker’s birthday is on … July 9th. Take that, dear family!