FRANKIE COSMOS

CHAPTER ELEVEN: FRANKIE COSMOS/LINA TULLGREN AT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL, ISLINGTON – 22/10/19

This is funny. Everyone’s sitting down. Or at least everyone near the stage is sitting down. It reminds me, somehow, of the ‘90s. That’s the kind of thing people used to do in the ‘90s. Just sit down wherever. But I haven’t see people do that for years. I take a seat near the front. It’s quite dark - darker than usual - and I can barely see to write. I have to write almost blind and hope for the best. 

  Also, another observation, more people seem to have friends here than at most of the gigs I’ve been to recently, and they seem younger and cooler, and just appear to be having more fun than the normal kind of people I encounter. And then there’s me, writing in the dark, not young or cool, but still having fun. I am enjoying this.

Suddenly, everyone stands up as one. Something is happening. 

  There’s something about LINA TULLGREN that reminds me of a snake. I think it’s the way they sway from side to side, and survey the room as if it is a potentially hostile presence. 

  They are accompanied by a man wearing jeans and an extremely white t-shirt. He has one of the most sensible haircuts I’ve ever seen. He plays a clarinet and a synth, and later a saxophone, unobtrusively, yet supportively. When he isn’t needed for a couple of songs he sits on the floor at the back of the stage and looks on obediently. 

  The music proceeds at its own pace; it rushes for no one. It is not showy; nor is it trying particularly hard. I find it quite hypnotic at first, but then the noise of people talking snaps me out of it. People at the back are talking quite loudly, entirely oblivious of Tullgren’s efforts to entertain them. 

  “I’d like to thank the people in the front few rows, which is all I can see,” they say. “You’re being really quiet and I appreciate that. The rest of you, I can’t see you but I can hear you.” There's something almost menacing about them. They’re like a character in a movie that would plot revenge on you if you pissed them off. 

  Their guitar cuts out during the last song leaving the accompanying man with nothing to accompany. They get it working again but the spell has been broken. The song ends. “Thank you,” they say. “Bye.” 

It’s a very different kind of crowd to what I’m used to. Just in front of me two young men are chatting up a couple of young women. The young men are from Minnesota, and are incredibly clean-shaven. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such clean-shaven people. An almost unforgivable air of optimism emanates from them. One of them is holding a huge plastic cup of beer. The cup really is large, unusually large; it is so large he has to hold it with two hands. Make of that what you will.

  All of a sudden I feel lightheaded, and I start to worry about passing out. I used to do that at gigs all the time when I was younger. I take a deep breath.

FRANKIE COSMOS begin without any fanfare. They start with the first song off their new LP, which for some reason I can never remember the name of, and it sounds just like it does on the record, not a note or a beat out of place. 

  Most of Frankie Cosmos’s songs are short, so short in some cases that they’re over before you’ve even registered they’ve begun. “That’s it,” says singer, Greta Kline, after one particularly short song. The songs, though short, are immaculate things, like noticing that the moon is particularly bright one night. 

  “Did anyone come to see us in April?” says Kline. There is a cheer. “Thanks for coming back. And thanks to all the new faces.” I didn’t go in April. I guess that makes me a “new face”. Not that I feel much like a new face, surrounded as I am by all these fresh-faced young people. I feel like an old face. Wizened. Sinister, almost.

  There’s a kind of slacker charm to the whole thing. At one point Lina Tullgren and their man saunter back onstage, sing a couple of lines, and then saunter off. They walk really slowly, like they’re trying to pretend that it’s not really happening. 

  “I’ve just realised I’m actually playing a show,” says Kline. “Am I acting weird?” 

  “Weirder,” shouts someone in the crowd. 

  “You’re perfect,” shouts another. 

  “We love you,” shouts someone else. 

  There’s one encore, which is fine. Two would have been pushing it.