If you could hold your attention from Mike Hadreas’s blisteringly charged music, he might have a stellar reputation for the enviable outfits he slips into, and his sensual ability to dance. Tonight is no exception: a shiny gold jacket contours his tiny torso, shorn, when the heats gets too much, for a sleeveless vest and some balletic contorting – not so much lost in his music as feeling every last flicker of its burning emotions.
A 35-year-old from Seattle touring an album of such force and power that its heft seems constricted by a roof, the artist known as Perfume Genius is rarely generous in his public self-appraisals, a theme which takes a particularly self-uncaring turn early on here. Hadreas claims people have likened him to Gollum: actually, he qualifies with feigned relief, things have improved a notch recently, with one observer saying he resembles “the actor who plays Gollum.” Jake Shears, of the Scissor Sisters, would be a more accurate near-twin, but Hadreas’s music holds messages and melodrama firmly in the fold of Kate Bush and Prince.
‘Otherside’, the opening track of new album ‘No Shapes’, begins with delicate piano and lullaby lyrics, swiftly followed by an epic crash of noise, like thunder sweeping into a bay. Fear, anger and suffering pervade Hadreas’s songs, even in the face of trying to turn things around: “how long must we live right, before we don’t even have to try?”, he asks longingly, before a beautifully dark take on ‘Body’s in Trouble’, his cover of the 1988 song by Mary Margaret O’Hara.
Hadreas has an uneasy relationship with his own body, partly because of the harrowing experience he revisits on ‘Mr Paterson’, about a school teacher who let him smoke weed and “made me a tape of Joy Division” in exchange for sexual favours (his abuser killed himself a year later). At times, his howls of anguish seem like they might overwhelm him, even if it they make for an astonishing performance.
It’s almost a relief to watch him ease up on ‘Die 4 U’, a song about giving yourself fully to someone else (Hadreas has also said it’s about erotic asphyxiation), when he holds the microphone to his chest and gyrates to electric keys over a barely-there beat, fading to a twinkly, jazzy echo.
The longer the set goes on, the more this haunted artist seems to fleetingly distance himself from his demons, even if his confessional lyrics suggest a figure who might never come to terms with his own existence. He leaves in a cloud of euphoria, but a little of his magic remains: in front of a watchful bouncer, fans pose with that gold jacket, discarded and crumpled at the front of the stage.
Perfume Genius, The Old Market, Monday 6th November 2017
Words by Ben Miller
Photos by Fran Moore
