2/4/14 – Perth, Australia, Fly By Night Club

2/4/14 – Perth, Australia, Fly By Night Club

Setlist (incomplete):
Wolf Among Wolves
Great Expectations
From Fur City
Names
The Greatest
I Dont Blame You
Good Woman
Tonight You Belong To Me - Eddie Vedder sings and plays ukulele.
The Needle And The Damage Done - Eddie Vedder plays guitar.

This is the 11th performance of the year. Mick Turner opens.

Wow!! A third performance of ''Tonight You Belong To Me"!!

Last night at Cat Power's show at The Fly By Night in Freo. It was towards the end & we thought she was almost finishing up when she pulled Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam on stage to play to a mesmerised crowd. Didn't see that one coming, something I'll never forget!

It came so left field, no one knew he was there and she just snuck him on the stage at the end! Everyone had to pick their jaws up off the floor!

Tonight You Belong To Me:
http://statigr.am/p/648781755687540608_8575164

The Needle And The Damage Done (also with Eddie Vedder):
http://instagram.com/p/kAi3uLwErP/

Damn you Australians, you lucky #$%^`s!!     

Comments from a fan at the Pearl Jam forum. 
http://community.pearljam.com/discussion/229660/eddie-at-cat-power-in-perth

Can confirm Eddie was at Cat Power tonight. I know this because he sat in the seat directly in front of me and my wife (she took a sneaky shot). So he sat there for 2 hours in front of us totally incognito. My wife had written a note on the back of her business card asking if we could meet after the gig (she was going to place it on the vacant seat next to Eddie) but it was too late because before she put it there Ed was called upon stage for the last 2 songs 'Tonight you belong to me' and 'Needle and the Damage done' After that we had no chance as several people rushed towards him as he exited through the side door.

So disappointed I didn't tap him the shoulder and show him my tattoo on my leg. Would've bee a subtle gesture saying thank you. I love your band!

Hard call to make cos you don't want to annoy him because he was enjoying the show. Was nice when I recognised the intro to 'the greatest' and whispered that to my wife and Eddie overheard and turned with a smile and expression of 'Yes! Great song!'

Don't think Chan was drunk. However her anxiety levels were through the roof. She apologised several times through the evening. A couple of times when she apologised Ed sort of gestured as if to say, 'What for?' She did fumble through a few songs but she is so sweet anyone can forgive her for that. I felt the two hours flew by.
Can't wait for Friday and Saturday night.

Review
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/music/a/21300334/review-cat-power/

It's possible no one foresaw Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder joining Cat Power on stage this week. But that's exactly what happened in Fremantle on Tuesday night, in a rare treat for concertgoers. Perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising - Vedder was in town for the Big Day Out last Sunday and is performing two sold-out shows at Riverside Theatre this weekend. He also sang backing vocals on Cat's 2003 album You Are Free.

Nonetheless, after two hours of stark and intensely personal singer-songwriter fare, it was the last place you'd expect to find a Big Day Out headliner. Vedder played on two songs, including the closing cover of Neil Young's The Needle and The Damage Done, which was quite something. Cat, aka Atlanta, Georgia's Chan Marshall, sang "Every junkie's like a setting sun" with a conviction as telling as on her originals. It also drew intriguing parallels to Pearl Jam's closing song two nights earlier when Arcade Fire's Win Butler joined the band to cover Rockin' in the Free World - also a Young song.

Marshall's set had otherwise been an introverted experience, traversing mostly deep cuts from her albums up to The Greatest, usually joining five or six song medleys into suites. The brief crowd interactions were mostly indiscernible mumblings, like shyness cracking at the seams to reveal a troubled soul. But when everything clicked into place, moments of magic filled the air, as on Great Expectations, From Fur City and Names.

Just as impressive was The Dirty Three's Mick Turner opening the show. His solo, post-rock instrumentals saw the talented multi-instrumentalist pull a dead ringer for Jim White's drum sound on a drum machine, use a loop pedal to build layers of his signature guitars and run both a drumstick and a violin bow across his guitar strings. The result might be described as "The Dirty One", Turner replacing Warren Ellis' violin leads with more compelling lead guitar parts than his day band allows.

Cokelike wrote:2/4/14 – Perth, Australia, Fly By Night Club

The Needle And The Damage Done - Duet with Eddie Vedder

A tribute to Philip Seymour Hoffman?

^ I think this was mentioned somewhere, yes.

20 Pictures
http://www.spaceshipnews.com.au/photos-cat-power-fly-night/

Review
http://www.spaceshipnews.com.au/live-review-cat-power-fly-night/

Renowned for a career plagued with as many personal hardships as musical triumphs, Chen Marshall (aka Cat Power) has developed an infamous reputation for leaving a trail of rough, often underwhelming performances in her touring wake. That famed tendency that left little doubt in the minds of fans gathering outside Fremantle’s Fly By Night on Tuesday night that a show billed as ‘solo, intimate and up-close’ had as much potential to be a glimpse of her Power’s talent as it did an anxiety riddled train wreck. What transpired was a combination of both, but few could have predicted the fascinating collision of raw gift and fragile demeanour culminating in such a haunting, personal and unforgettable live experience, and that’s even before Eddie Vedder took to the stage.

Grappling against the thick heat blanketing what is essentially a big tin shed, eager spectators who arrived early were lucky enough to grab prime seats for opening act Mick Turner. Going solo, the jack-of-all-trades wasted no time showcasing his omnidirectional musical prowess, looping a series of sporadic drum samples and jarring chords before turning a violin bow to his guitar with melodica in toe. The effect was a room-engulfing aesthetic of distance and space that seemed to mix with the heat, forcing a polarisation between those that were pulled into the sparse, unusual desert of his tracks, and others that were pushed toward the bar for a chat.

After what seemed like an endless wait, a timid, flustered-looking Power entered the sweltering, red-hued stage, armed with the first of many husky apologies and a guitar. It’s at this point that the gig becomes difficult to properly distill. On paper it was shoddy; a mismanaged mess overrun with technical difficulties as Power struggled to maintain composure. Songs were started and dropped sporadically, running into one another as her fingers shook in an effort to find chords. Nervous ticks were abundant – a shaking head or signalling for more volume while asking her sound guy, “do you hate me?” – while profuse apologies and inaudible rambles constituted most of what little audience interaction there was.

Yet through the shakiness, the mistakes and the apologies, there was something incredibly resilient about Power’s performance. It wasn’t as if she had been laid bare; she was laid bare. With only a guitar and piano to hide behind, her anxiety become palpable – a troubling tension which absorbed the audience with skeletal fragility. In her quirks was the helplessness of watching a tragedy in which you already know the ending, and in her voice the conviction and sadness of a lonely soul playing in an empty room. Even old favourites like ‘I Don’t Blame You’, ‘Good Woman’ and ‘The Greatest’ were delivered with such astonishing power that they became almost unbearably personal.

But just as the air’s stickiness and the length of Marshal’s already hour-and-a-half-long set began to take its toll, the night had one more unbelievable surprise. With little introduction and a ukulele in hand, the audience was almost too excited to cheer that when-semi bemused onlookers realised that emerging on stage next to Marshal was none other than Eddie Vedder. The pair launched into bittersweet duet ‘Tonight You Belong to Me’, well aware that they were delivering something special and extraordinary to the crowd. Content to take a back seat, Vedder’s presence seemed to calm Marshal as they began the set’s closer, a cover of Neil Young’s ‘The Needle and The Damage Done’. An ode to heroin and loss that led to his break down, Young’s classic couldn’t have been a more fitting end with Marshal simultaneously filling both roles: the lost and those left behind, as she swayed uncomfortably to the distant strum of Vedder’s guitar.

Vedder aside, it was a show that truly left its calibre up to the ear and eye of the beholder. For some it was a revelation to see the rawness and honesty of an artist on the brink of emotional ruin. For others it was a messy set of piano tinkles and blubbering, but as Power thanked the leaving crowd for their “patience and validation… of me,” one thing universally accepted was the banner description: ‘Solo, intimate and up-close’.

http://flybynight.org/little-visit-eddie-vedder/



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Review + Picture
http://www.coolperthnights.com/articles/Amber%20Fresh/714



So I went to see her play in Fremantle, Cat Power. A man was playing before her. Everyone was noisy after the first little while of him playing. He used loops – like Shania Twain ‘that don’t impress me much’ – but I was impressed by the feeling of the way he used the drum pads, and from the feeling that he was experting sloppiness in a way. It’s hard to be precise when you’re playing with a loop pedal, but it’s harder to be free, and he was being roughly free. I didn’t know who he was when he was playing, I just listened, some of the time with my hands up to my ears like a kitten put in a human’s body, but then pretending to be a kitten again. But on the way to the bar, my friend told me who it was and I go “Oh, of course.” Mick Turner, from the Dirty Three.

Well, Chan Marshall came onto the stage and immediately I lost my cool. It was a very hot night and I’d been watching the sweat bead on the face of the man beside me, the sailor* (*not really a sailor), and I’d been fanning myself with a copy of the Spirit Level EP from my handbag, and fanning the sailor too although he said “The heat and me get along just fine,” with what might have been a sideways grin, but yeah, straight away I lost my cool. When she came out I started to talk to myself in a kid’s voice but under my breath “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness” and I put my head in my hands a few times, to shield my eyes for a moment to get my wits back, but then would look up again through my fingers and say “Woh, oh my goodness, oh my goodness.” Why is this? It’s because her voice is made of glass. Thick glass, and we’d all come to the show waiting to watch the light shine through it. To see it submerged under water and find out what it would look like there. To maybe see it crack and then magically glue itself back together.

She played song after song after song. All the songs, for over two hours, just for us. She smiled into the crowd, she shook her head at any mistake, she said “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” even though she’s been an adult for so long, but really when I looked at her and into her, I saw that she’s one of the ageless people. Perpetually child like. She has seen a lot, felt a lot, but she keeps her child inside her and mixes it in with the adult. When she played a Bonnie Prince Billy cover I giggled to myself as she swung her leg underneath her kind of like her, but also kind of like him, the Bonnie Prince, the only other person I ever lost my cool about. When she played a song about the snow the whole room was with her, the whole earth was with her. It’s true because every body in there felt it. There was light filling the room. There were trees, snow, wood huts, soldiers, sailors, heartbreaks, rivers, fish. Everything there was helping her sing and she was singing through everything.

Three quarters of the way through it was too much for the sailor. He turned his face to me with wild eyes and said “I have to go!” He slipped out like a heavy hearted lumberjack muscular fisherman into the night but without leaving a shoe or anything, but leaving me to have again a singular focus on this one woman in front of me. It was incredible. It kept going and going and going, like a sustainable garden that you don’t even have to tend or a multiple orgasm where time is relative and also with multiple universes theory mixed in, meaning that each moment can last forever. I’m using these images very loosely, like a dhoti. All I mean is that she played so very many songs and that it was a wonderful surprise. That’s all I mean.

And then the last treat happened. Eddie Vedder came out. He came out looking like a beautiful man from the street, in running shoes and ankle socks or no socks, with skinny legs and shorts, with fluffy hair that he hadn’t spent a whole lot of time in front of any mirror trying to make right. He was so nice, next to Chan in her barefeet and enormous inside out t-shirt to hide her body that’s becoming older and wider as she becomes more and more wonderful and closer to being with the earth (but still another half a life at least). Eddie had a ukelele and they posed for photos, side hugging and then they did the songs. Chan lost some of the words of the first duet somewhere in her mind and it was a little big shambley but everyone was enraptured. And then they sung ‘Needle and the Damage Done’ by Neil Young just to make it even more sink right the way into us that “You are getting something special!” But really, their hearts were turned to one another at this time, not to us. Turned to one another and their own friends and their own families and their own big fish dreams.

Hmmm… What could be better than seeing Cat Power and Eddie Vedder together on stage? Maybe seeing Lyndon Blue and his sister on stage at the Moon, playing violins together, one wearing hot pants and red lipstick and a croptop and the other in tan cinos. But that’s a story for another (eternally recurring) time.