crazybobbles

Finally I’m able to use the phrase “in biblical proportions” and have it actually making sense (well kinda :p). For those of you who don’t know this Emiliana Torrini chick, she’s the one that did “Gollum Song” in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (where they took the hobbits to isengard gard gard g gard). Of course we want to steer clear of the one piece of soundtrack song she did and more into her actual work. Namely Fishermans Woman and Me and Armini (I suggest you buy them if you like what you see ).

The first song I heard was “Sunny Road” and absolutely fell in love with it, then upon purchasing her album I began to really enjoy the other tracks too. They’re very sweet and relaxing, like a tranquillezed Bjork lying on a green grass hill in MORDOR. So yeah, as soon as I heard she was playing in London i immediately jumped the chance and bought tickets to see her (nice and cheap). The thing that struck me was that it was held in a church (see! biblical). I’ve seen a few performances in churches but they were usually orchestral and choir based so seeing this was going to be a first, I can already imagine the amazing acoustics it would produce, the ghostly reverbs swimming around the cool clean air (plus it will be a riot!).

Emiliana Torrini

So yeah, here I was sat in a pew looking forward to see her play, book in my hand and camera in my bag ready to take some lovely shots of her in action. Security was fairly minimal (ie one guy at the door) which meant that not only was I able to bring the camera in the venue, I was able to sit at the front of the “photo pit” (eg on the floor next to the stage) during the gig without being asked whether I had a photo pass or not (man I need to stop talking about me sneaking into gigs otherwise some event organiser is going to get me )

Emiliana Torrini turned out taller than I expected, my friends met her during Glastonbury and told me she was tiny so I was expecting someone around the 5′ 5″ variety haha, but yeah I think she’s taller than that. She wore a lovely floral dress and had a cute short haircut. It was funny how there wasn’t really a back stage so they had to walk past everyone (in a fancy red carpet mind!) to get to the stage. On with the show.

“My heart is beating like a jungle drum”

My ears were in heaven, this gig was of biblical proportions (last time I’ll say that in this post I promise haha). Her voice and the natural reverb of the church were a perfect match and it was just bliss. Since I’ve had a very tiring and energetic night beforehand watching CSS not once, but twice, it was quite a contrast to come here and watch Emiliana Torrini sing. It was almost like my aural day off/treat. So yeah, here’s a video of her singing “Sunny Road”, I brought Eve along and she did well in capturing videos once again, this time take note on how seriously still my hands are when filming the video.

and if you liked that, there’s also a video of her doing “Jungle Drum”, a more up beat song.

Black and white shot

Now I thought it was only going to be eerie angelic singing for the entire evening, but oh no, there was more. Not only did she have a lovely voice, she also had a shy but quirky sense of humour. There was a certain goofyness about her (check the Jungle Drum video where she does this goofy dance for the first few seconds). Before each song throughout the setlist she would talk or “vamp” to the audience, now this wasn’t your normal ministainer (there aint not other, there aint no gereater!) banter to the audience, she talked quite a lot during the intervals. She would explain the meaning behind each song, give you anecdotes and occasionally make fun out of the rest of the band (moaning about their ungodly amount of guitars and how much tuning was involved), throughout them she would do these very goofy faces and expressions that just makes you laugh and giggle, it was goofy and fun. Here’s one story…

Goofy Emiliana mocking the guitarist man

She pointed at a guitar the her band member was holding, she told us how she loved this guitar and explained how she got it, apparently the guitar maker contacted her and asked her if she would like to pose with the guitar for a magazine in exchange for the guitar (mmm free guitars). She didn’t do much thinking and accepted the offer, the twist was (there’s always a twist), she didn’t know how to play the guitar, so she starts mimicing these poses she had to do for the photography people and pretend how she was all nice and arty with the guitar (of course we all chuckled at her poses). The people (magazine people) then asked her to play something because it looked so nice but she obviously declined, forever hiding the fact that she couldn’t play guitar. Eventually I believe they found out she couldn’t play, but it was too late.

Funny? I dunno, it was funny then, maybe I’m telling it wrong or perhaps I need to do the poses and stuff, anyway, hopefully the photo next to this paragraph will give you an idea of how funny it was, I took that when she was mocking the guitarist on his effects pedal stamping. So yeah, I would have recorded all the intervals but it felt like one of those things that only the audience of the show should know, it was quite an intimate gig you see.

“It’s time to meet me, on the sunny road”

I can’t stress how amazing this gig was, I really enjoyed it, the atmosphere, the ghostly reverb, everything. The songs I enjoyed most were Sunny Road (a song about Loouurve), Big Jumps (about old folks!), Me and Armini (about Emiliana tripping and having some random woman enter her body (cue her pretending to possessed)), and good old Nothing Brings Me Down. Hopefully the videos and photos will give you a taster of what it was like to be at a Emiliana gig inside a church. Not many photos for this gig I’m afraid, I took quite a bit but most were samey.