Music / Art Rock
Review: The Residents, St George’s
Well this one was a long time coming … but certainly worth the wait. In their 50 years as a determinedly weird US musical outfit The Residents have only rarely toured the UK, and when St George’s announced this gig in 2021 there was an immediate flurry to get tickets. But barely had the confirmation emails come through than the original date was cancelled, rescheduled to February 2023. Now, here we finally were, expecting the unexpected as the lights went down.
The Residents (photo: Tony Benjamin)
And, of course, they didn’t appear – or at least not for the first half of the evening. Instead there was an 80 minute black and white feature film Triple Trouble about a paranoid young priest turned plumber, plagued by memories of his dead mother and pursued by a conscious and malevolent fungus. As with the band’s music, the film combined technical proficiency with an arbitrary approach to style or content and included bits of music videos and tantalising glimpses of the aborted 1972 film project Vileness Flats that first drew the Residents collective together.
Two of The Residents (photo: Tony Benjamin)
And then, of course, they did appear, predictably anonymised in leopard print face masks with matching suits, black hats and shades with little lights on, and hit into a downbeat deconstruction of Hank Williams’ Jambalaya via the laconic gravel vocals of ‘Randy Rose’. The band for tonight was a four piece – guitar, synths, drums and Randy – and whether any of these musicians actually played on the original 1978 recording of Duck Stab (their classic album at the heart of tonight’s set list) was questionable – they would be in their 70s by now, after all. But that hardly mattered, because what did happen was properly Residential through and through, a sequence of deranged pop-rock moments that managed to both comply with and subvert the rules of conventional songwriting. And there was a fifth presence – the digital projector standing centre stage maintaining a continuous stream of visuals, many featuring the famous eyeball heads from their earlier days.
is needed now More than ever
The other two of The Residents (photo: Tony Benjamin)
And so it unfurled with meticulous beats, stingingly deliberate guitar and sumptuous keyboards interweaving or swapping roles, the pacing vocalist laid back, perky and furious by turns. There were singalong moments, like the infamously catchy (Here I Come) Constantinople balanced by onslaughts like the insane Laughing Song or the cosmic murk of Weight-Lifting Lulu. They seemed to be masters of the tropes of rock music until you remembered that this came from them nearly 50 years ago, and thus they actually wrote the script back then that innumerable imitators and admirers have subsequently embedded. That said, it still sounded freshly original and very much The Residents’ own, so God bless them, whoever they are!
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
