Ezra Furman. Photo by Eleanor Petry
“You seem like a rowdy northern crowd if that isn’t too much of a stereotype.” From the roars of the boisterous crowd, they relish Ezra Furman’s description.
Record shop in store shows can be strange events. Audiences tend to be more restrained as they are often clutching CDs or vinyl, precious cargo compared to the pints precariously balanced at more traditional gigs and not so casually to be tossed aside. Inevitably, there will be a focus on the new album being promoted which may not be familiar to most of the audience. My main experience of in store shows were lunch time mini sets at the London Rough Trade in Neals Yard during the early 1990s. For every precious memory such as seeing Pavement wedged to the side of record racks performing to an invited audience of fanzine writers, there are absolute horror stories such as Palace Brothers in the same venue with Will Oldham completely inaudible. In contrast, the Liverpool Rough Trade venue is a purpose-built separate room adjoining the record shop.
The audience is the most pleasing hotchpotch I have seen in a while. While the men who conform to at least two of the three Bs (bearded, bald and bespectacled) and too often make up the archetypal indie audience are present, there is a good gender and age mix, a variety of styles with glitter and glam, lustrous hair being shaken vigorously to the music. Furman makes a charismatic, magnetic Pied Piperess ministering to her bunch of misfits as well as leading a six-piece band.
Her set begins with ‘Sudden Storm’ and ‘Jump Out’, two cuts from the new album ‘Goodbye Small Head’. However, there is a welcome willingness to delve into her recent back catalogue with ‘Forever in Sunset’ from 2022’s ‘All of Us Flames’ appearing next with Furman describing the journey and jokingly referencing how most of her songs take place on vehicles. Live, the fragility of ‘Veil Song’ gains greater emphasis and album opener, ‘Grand Mal’ is radiant in its torment. While Furman describes her pride in unleashing an album that she has been inhabiting for a long while and performs six songs from it, it is disappointing that one of my favourites, ‘A World of Love and Pain’ does not make an appearance.
Surprisingly, four tracks from 2018’s ‘Transangelic Exodus’ are performed including ‘No Place’ with its keyboard fanfares and Furman’s urgent delivery whipping up a storm and the tender ‘Psalm 151’ which gets a more ragged treatment. The set builds to its crescendo with a raucous ‘Power of the Moon’ and a gorgeous, on the edge ‘Love You So Bad’. The mood is elevated further with the cover of ‘I Need The Angel’, its ‘Born to Run’ like anthemic quality making for an epic ending to ‘Goodbye Small Head’. When it feels impossible to surpass this moment, Furman succeeds by returning to ‘Transangelic Exodus’ for ‘Suck The Blood From My Wound’, a song that perfectly encapsulates the raw physicality of her music. Finally, an anguished crowd sing along to ‘Can I Sleep In Your Brain’ before it transforms into the punk raucousness of ‘Calm Down aka I Should Not Be Alone.’
Outside, it is only 9pm and still light, a slightly discombobulating post-gig experience. Ezra Furman’s work is done: the audience’s temporal lobes are flooded, their emotional wounds healed, safely facing the night refreshed and revived.
I was editor of the long-running fanzine, Plane Truth, and have subsequently written for a number of publications. While the zine was known for championing the most angular independent sounds, performing in recent years with a community samba percussion band helped to broaden my tastes so that in 2021 I am far more likely to be celebrating an eclectic mix of sounds and enthusing about Made Kuti, Anthony Joseph, Little Simz and the Soul Jazz Cuban compilations as well as Pom Poko and Richard Dawson.
