ANGEL OLSEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN - ANGEL OLSEN AT HAMMERSMITH APOLLO, HAMMERSMITH – 11/02/20

It’s my birthday today. Thanks. Usually when it’s my birthday I don’t tell anyone and I just act like it’s a normal day, and I enjoy the feeling that I’m keeping some sort of secret from everybody. It makes me feel special, in a kind of sad way. But this year I decided on a whim to tell everyone I came across that it’s my birthday. I even bought cakes for my colleagues at work, and they said “Happy birthday!” and asked me how old I am and I said “Forty-one” which suddenly sounded really old, and I felt like I was dragging this great burden of years around with me.
 
On the way to HAMMERSMITH APOLLO, there’s a huge orange moon hanging low in the sky. “Wow,” I say, “that’s the biggest moon I’ve ever seen.” Birthday moon.
 
We – wife and I – arrive just in time to get through the airport style security checks, get a drink, go for a wee, and take up position at the back of the hall before the lights dim and the music begins. 

Hammersmith Apollo is huge and ANGEL OLSEN loves it. “I frickin’ love this place,” she says. It’s the biggest venue she’s ever played, she tells us, and she’s clearly enjoying herself. “It feels really good up here,” she says. It’s a really vast space; almost too big for its own good. But Olsen’s voice does a pretty good job of filling it. It’s a powerful voice, that’s for sure. It reminds me of something. A few years ago, wife and I went to the Twin Peaks festival, which was being held in the old town hall in Crouch End. At the festival, as well as seeing one of the most embarrassing musical performances I’ve ever seen in my life, by the actor who plays James Hurley, we saw an owl show. The owl show consisted mainly of a succession of owls flying around the auditorium, their graceful flight filling the empty space above our heads. That’s what Angel Olsen’s voice reminds me of. The owl show.  

  But it’s not just epic string-laden indie rock, and soaring vocals that remind me of owls, there’s some banter too.
  “Marry me,” someone shouts out, at one point. 
  “What do you do for a living?” says Angel Olsen.   
  “Finance,” comes the reply. 
  Some people laugh.
  “That’s not funny,” she says. “Finance is a serious business.” 
  Then there’s this whole little skit before they play Shut Up, Kiss Me, her radio friendly unit shifter, in which Olsen pretends that they are about to play a new song. “I was sitting in my hotel room,” she says, “thinking about this show, and I started crying, and I just wrote a frickin’ song. I was really inspired.” She makes a little performance of showing the band the chords, and then they play the song, which is the only moment of the gig that approaches a singalong.
  She plays a few other “old” songs. “This is from an album called Halfway Home,” she says before one such. “You probably don’t know it.” She seems to assume that most people won’t know her older songs, like we’re all a load of Johnny-come-latelies. Well, I am, to tell the truth. I only really got into her music quite recently. I don’t know why, but I never got into it before.

  Towards the end she introduces the band. Two of them are called Emily, which seems entirely appropriate. They are, somehow, almost exactly what you would expect from a band with two Emilys. 
  Olsen ends the set alone, unaccompanied. “This has been a really good day for me,” she says. “Let’s do it again sometime.”