Playlouder - Music is the Network

When first told I was going to see Jonathan Richman live I was confused; I thought he’d died of AIDS a long time ago. But I went along anyway because I liked that song he did about everyone dying.

Then I realised he wasn’t Jim Caroll, and that Jim Caroll wasn’t even dead, and that he was the dude who sang ‘Ice Cream Man’ – the most annoying song ever – and that I could have been at home watching Peep Show. So I kicked myself, (and Dave, who got the tickets), but decided to sit back (forward actually – balcony rail in the way otherwise) and enjoy what Shepherds Bush Empire had to offer with an open ear and unprejudiced heart. But if he plays ‘Ice Cream Man’, I thought, I am not calling for an encore.

Jonathan Richman is surprisingly not annoying live. I have vague memories of throwing my rattle out the pram repeatedly when being played a live tape of his performances when I was younger. What is this inane shite? I thought, as I vomited Rusks onto my Care Bears bib. I hope I never descent into such a fragile state of mind that I enjoy this comedic garbage, I mused, glaring at my father doing the ironing while I tried in vain to suck my feet.

But it’s funny how things change. What I hadn’t expected from this larger-than-life Massachusettsian mariachi and his no-doubt long-suffering percussionist was a show I wanted to go on, and on, and on.

Joanthan Richman has little trouble switching from the daft to the deft, from the heartstrings to the funnybones, not to mention from English to French to Italian. His tales of impassioned, sweaty young love, and the enjoyment of not-necessarily-fine table wine, and the appreciation of obscure artists are all the better for the understanding that nobody else but he could ever have written these songs.

There are a couple of (his former band) The Modern Lovers' tracks interspersed with the set – ‘Pablo Picasso’ and bits and pieces of others, I’m told by my more knowledgeable compadres – and I’m unsure whether it’s these that everyone’s really come to see, or the man himself and his playful, ever-evolving one-man assault on what is commonly-regarded as music.

Either way, he's not half bad for one who reputedly began his musical career as a Velvet Underground groupie.

Certainly there are incessant shouts and heckles for particular past tracks, which Richman studiously ignores, but if anyone’s earned the right to choose their own song to play, and then to play it again after the applause has died down, and then to play it again, but this time in French, then it’s Jonathan Richman.

He plucks and strums his way through songs, strikes dynamic poses, sits down and demands drum solos, dances dynamically and ridiculously, (sometimes simultaneously), drinks in the applause like a thirsty child, and holds his acoustic guitar sometimes like a lover, sometimes like a weapon.   

It’s just a shame he has to leave.