
It’s been almost two weeks since I saw Amanda Palmer performing her “There Will Be No Intermission” show in Cardiff. I’ve been thinking of little else since I walked out of St David’s Hall if I’m honest. All I know is that I am full of emotion and thoughts and empowerment and all of that has to go somewhere. I have to get these words out of me and into the world.
I have been lucky enough to see Amanda Palmer perform twice before. Once in 2005 when I accidentally caught The Dresden Dolls at Download Festival and again in 2013 when she toured with the Grand Theft Orchestra for the “Theatre Is Evil” album. The latter event affected me profoundly and I wrote about it at the time; I felt like I had seen something real, like I had been part of something important.
Honestly, I still feel that way. I can still feel the ripples of that night in Brighton in my life six years later. That said, it pales in comparison to the way I feel about last weekend.
Amanda’s “There Will Be No Intermission” show has been a watershed moment for me. There’s no way for me to be the person I was before that experience.
I’m sure that I can’t be the only one who feels this way, who hoards experiences in their heart and uses them to prop up parts of their soul. Amanda Palmer has changed my life in ways that I am only just beginning to understand, I expect that I will be finding the creeping tendrils of that night in parts of my psyche for years to come.
It would be smart now to try to explain what and why and how. I’ll do my best, but, to borrow inspiration from my other obsession, it feels largely ineffable. It’s a tall order to fill, to express the depth of the experience I had that night in Cardiff.
The show was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was part concert, part rock gig, part confessional, all incredible. I had seen others saying that the show was different from anything Amanda had done before, even Amanda’s own descriptions and warnings about what she was touring this year. I knew that I would be affected, I knew that it would be the kind of night that I walked away from with a new outlook on life, love, and the universe. None of that was a surprise to me. It was the intensity of the change that shook me, the importance of the message that stuck in my head and heart. It felt like she had looked into my soul and knew exactly what I needed to hear and how I needed to hear it.
The fact that it felt so personal to me whilst also clearly affecting thousands of other people around the world should speak to the sheer artistry and skill of Amanda Palmer. None of us are egotistical enough to believe that an internationally known musician is actually playing just for you; that would be insane. Right?
Even in a balcony seat, far removed from the stage, in the biggest venue on the tour, Amanda made me feel personally connected to her performance.
Ostensibly, this was a music event. There were songs. There was singing. There was a piano. There was audience participation. There was a ukelele. All the ingredients you might expect from an evening with Amanda Palmer. If we were building a recipe for a cake, this would be the basic sponge part; the base upon which we build our masterpiece. The basic premise upon which Amanda lured us in and with which she soothed us when it all became a little too much.
Amanda methodically and expertly laid the parts of herself out on the stage for us to examine, she gave us abstract vignettes of her life, her childhood, her marriage. She told us about Anthony and how important he was to her. She told us about her fears of becoming a mother and then how it felt to see some of those fears become reality. She told us about landing in Ireland on the day of the referendum and the great feeling of victory and community that the repeal campaigners shared with her. She told us about her childhood and the cost of piano strings versus the cost of therapy.
And she told us about her three abortions. She told us these stories in a balance that I didn’t appreciate until much later. Amanda Palmer could have told us horror stories that made us all squirm in our seats and stare at our shoes. She could have taken the teeth and claws out of her stories and kept us safe and cosy, protected from the grittiest parts of her narrative. It was so well done that I am still only just seeing the seams of her editing. She told us the truth, as we needed to hear it, whilst also considering our emotional needs as an audience. I’m struggling to find the words I need to describe what she did, it was so subtle and clever. Amanda Palmer stood on a stage with only her piano and her ukelele and she gave us servings of pain in mouthfuls that we could swallow. Just as much as we could stomach at a time. Then she would make us laugh, or play a song to brighten the mood and we could all forget for a few minutes, forget the pain, the world outside, the struggles, we could just sing together and feel something bigger than ourselves.
It’s difficult to pick out the moments that touched me most deeply or hit me the hardest.
I remember when Amanda wrote “a poem for dzhokhar” following the Boston Marathon bombing. I remember thinking about how deeply affected she must have been, to have something like that happen so close to her home. Us Brits, we’ve had generations of attacks on our home soil, it’s easy to forget that other people’s realities are different.
I remember when Anthony got sick. I remember the blog posts about him, about taking her future husband to meet him, about what an important figure he had been in her life.
I remember seeing posts throughout her pregnancy with Ash. I remember when he was born. I felt connected to these moments in her life, I remembered them through the lens she gave us.
I see more now. I see how much was happening behind the scenes. I never expect an artist to bare their soul, their entire lives, and ask you to pick through it all. We don’t have the right. But Amanda was choosing to show us parts of herself, her life, her loves, her losses. She wants us to look at what she is showing us and to think, really think, about what it all means.
I think there are four main lessons that we should take from “There Will Be No Intermission”. (Writing that sentence was like a Monty Python sketch of its own, by the way, complete with Cardinal Biggins.) This is certainly what I have taken from it.
- Share our stories.
- Everyone deserves compassion.
- If you can, you must.
- Make art, make light.
A central theme that Amanda Palmer returned to frequently was the idea that we don’t tell the people around us what’s really going on because we don’t want to burden them. She provided examples from her own life where she wanted to be honest with people but was afraid of scaring them away or putting too much emotional weight on them. Every time that she made the decision to be honest about what she was going through, she was met with compassion, sympathy, love, and empathy. People want to be able to share these things with each other, we aren’t meant to keep our big feelings bottled up inside our little hearts. We just aren’t made that way. Whenever I have been honest about my past, my history of abuse, assault, and rape, I have found the same things, the people I share with don’t seem burdened by it. We all have stories to share, we all have these things that we wish we could let people know about us. By taking the step and becoming the honest person we need to be, we can encourage others to open up as well, we can show others that it is safe to share our vulnerabilities. That will make the world a better, more caring place.
When Amanda Palmer wrote “a poem for dzhokhar”, she was exercising a lesson that she had been learning for years: everyone deserves compassion. You don’t need to understand them, or agree with them, or even like them, but every single person on this planet deserves compassion. The person who raped you. The drunk driver who killed your loved one. The kid who bullied you in school. The boss who bullies you now. They deserve compassion. And not because they might have a tragic backstory, or because they have a family of their own, or because they might have turned their life around. Everyone deserves compassion. It’s a difficult truth to accept and an even more difficult lesson to live. In a world where there are so many who seem to be out for themselves, screwing over as many people in the process as they possibly can, it’s difficult to remember to have compassion. I think it’s something that we all need reminding of. You, reading this, you deserve compassion and from yourself most of all.
Amanda hid this next lesson in an anecdote about a yoga instructor. It took me a while to understand it and, even now, I’m not convinced that I understand it to its full extent. Amanda spoke about the shows that inspired her to shape this tour the way that she has; “Nanette” by Hannah Gadsby and “Springsteen on Broadway” by Bruce Springsteen, both shows that feature hard-hitting personal truths and uncomfortable moments shared with the audience. She spoke about seeing Nick Cave perform after the death of his son and the way he invited his audience to experience grief with him. Amanda said that she realised that no one was doing a show like that about the topics that mattered to her. That she wanted a show about abortion and loss and motherhood to exist. That she realised that she could do it and so she must. I think it’s about recognising your own power and choosing to use it in a positive way. We all contain so much ability, so much individual power and inspiration. If we can use that, we must. I think it’s why I’m writing this. I think it’s why I write anything at all.
Which leads me nicely into the last lesson I’m taking away: make art, make light. Life is hard and dark and scary and there often seems like there’s no justice in the world. It can seem bleak and uncaring out there. You can feel so alone, so isolated, so small. But we can make art. We can sing and paint and write and dance and make things where there was nothing before. We can create marvels. We can shine a little light into the dark places and say “look, it’s not so bad. I’m strong enough to do this.” just by making our art. Even if you only make the dark places a little brighter for yourself, it’s worthwhile.
I cried a lot during the show. Far more than I anticipated if I’m honest. Amanda Palmer hugged me twice afterwards which I can only assume was a result of how pathetic I must have looked. The show left me feeling empowered and also impotent. I was a walking oxymoron for a number of days. What value am I giving the world? What good am I doing? Is this really the best version of me that I can be? I still don’t know the answers to those questions but I am glad that I’m asking them. I know there’s a path out there somewhere that’s going to work for me, I don’t know when I’ll find it but I think Amanda Palmer gave me a map that night.
I don’t get to be the person I was before I walked into St David’s Hall that night, and I’m OK with that.
