Anohni Sings Lou Reed
National Concert Hall, Dublin
★★★★☆
Lou Reed was nobody’s idea of a crowd-pleaser, and it takes sublime sorcery by the Mercury-winning singer Anohni to upcycle the Velvet Underground leader’s dark and stormy catalogue into a night of spiritually nourishing melancholia. It is a magical evening that has enough frosty sparkle to feel like an early Christmas gift and that, to paraphrase Bono, serves as a sort of homecoming for Anohni, who lives for some of the year in an ancestral family cottage in Co Donegal.
In honouring Reed, Anohni pays homage to a musical icon. But she also acknowledges a friend and mentor. As she explained to The Irish Times recently – and repeats tonight – Reed used his clout to open doors for the transgender artist at a time when nonbinary people were invisible at best, shunned at worst (leading directly to the release of her 2005 breakthrough, I Am a Bird Now).
But she also reveals that when she had her first audition for Reed’s touring band she was only vaguely aware of his legacy. Wasn’t he just another major-league rock star? She quickly learned differently, and this sell-out performance is both a love letter to Reed and a showcase for Anohni’s beautiful voice, a soaring instrument that bristles with empathy and heartache.
The set hopscotches across Reed’s career. Anohni, accompanied by a five-piece chamber band, begins with The Velvet Underground’s Jesus and takes in a disquieting Perfect Day, which she turns inside out, exposing the gory guts of a tune that, depending on the source, is either a testament to true romance or a homage to heroin.
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Among the more obscure moments is You Wear It So Well, a deep cut from Rock and Roll Heart, Reed’s 1976 postbankruptcy LP – not to be confused with Rod Stewart’s You Wear It Well, though you wouldn’t object to hearing Anohni have a tilt at that, too. A recurring theme is turmoil within families and the passing down of trauma from parent to child. It is a subject that Anohni unpacks on Reed’s Kill Your Sons and, later, in a digression in which she talks about the cramped lives, bereft of much hope or ambition, that were the lot of her parents’ generation.
The evening is subtitled Dark Blue, referring to a tour Anohni urged Reed to undertake late in his career. The idea was to recast his repertoire as a series of smoky standards that would stress the material’s vast emotional hinterland. Reed harrumphed and made the awful Lulu album with Metallica instead. He died two years later, in 2013.
The point of this concert is to give his music the creative upholstering that Anohni feels it deserves. She finishes with a song of her own, in Sliver of Ice. The title refers to a conversation with Reed, shortly before his death, in which he expressed astonishment at the dazzling sensation of ice on his tongue. Up to the end, he was open to the possibility of wonder. Anohni powerfully conveys that feeling, conjuring, on a cold night in Dublin, a deep blue ocean of warmth and humanity.
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