Andrew Bird - Patronaat, 23 October

A week ago I hardly knew anything about Andrew Bird except that Steven was a fan and I felt I should be too, from Steven’s ravings about Andrew Bird’s music. Then O and I were invited along to see him play at the Patronaat in Haarlem and I knew I wanted to go, feeling this was a show I didn’t want to miss, though I didn’t really know why. And yes, it was a show I'm glad I didn’t miss and it was very worth the trip to Haarlem, even though we got soaked on the way home.

I got hold of Mr Bird’s latest album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, and was able to give it a few listens before the show Sunday night. It almost didn’t matter though since he’s not one for album-perfect recreations of his songs live and it was good to just enjoy whatever he played, as it was then, that night.

For this tour, he is a one-man band, playing 3 instruments (violin, electric guitar and xylophone) on his own, along with singing/whistling. He used pedals at his feet to build up layers of looped violin (often plucked or strummed like a little ukulele) after which he’d throw down the violin, grab the guitar and start singing. Some songs were quite built up, with all of these layers, and then be stripped back down to just voice and guitar, while others were more quiet and moseyed around.

I wish I could do justice to his stage presence because Andrew Bird is one quirky fellow. The photo on his website somehow brings it across quite well (and I think he was wearing those exact same clothes at the show). He looked even more strange though since he seemed in need of a haircut and had quite the sticky-out bits over his ears. As he played, he could look quite intense: looking up with half-open eyelids so that you could only see the whites of his eyes; looking down over the crowd, his eyes shadowed by the overhang of his eyebrows; closing his eyes and shaking his head around. Sometimes it was a bit scary to watch. Other times it was very humourous. He had a great, weird, deadpan sense of humour (once between songs he simply announced he kept writing in his diary “Desperation breeds, dot, dot, dot”, paused, then carried on into the next song). You weren’t entirely sure if he really was serious and we were rudely laughing at him, but occasionally you’d see this little smile from him and think, nah, he knows exactly what he’s doing.

The audience was brilliant, fairly small, very quiet, attentive and loyal. A special moment came for me during a song that I’m not sure of the title, it was a slow, bluesy song, the only words I can remember are “she’s not so easy-going” or something like that. I didn’t feel that the actual song was so memorable, but somehow the performance as a whole was. I can’t really pinpoint why, but the audience seemed to pay extra attention, even though I don’t think it was a well-known or favourite song. But during it he really pulled us all in, and afterwards the audience seemed to applaud louder and longer than normal, while someone in the back yelled “Beautiful!” It was a rare type of moment, but if I could have bet on anyone being able to do it, I would bet on Andrew Bird.