When I met my wife, nearly nineteen years ago, she was obsessed with Liz Phair and in particular with the song **** and Run. I’m not sure if she was trying to tell me something….
She said she wanted to see Liz Phair live and I assumed we’d have to go to the US for that. Fortunately not! I held out through pure stubbornness / insight / belligerence / incompetence (delete as applicable) and Liz Phair eventually gave in and came to London! Supporting Alanis Morissette no less.
I didn’t know what to expect. Would Liz bring a band or would it just be her and a guitar. Would it be 45 minutes of songs I didn’t know or would it be quite good. To be fair I had Liz Phair down as a talentless screecher, rather like I used to think PJ Harvey was.
Again I was wrong. I think I knew about three songs, but Liz and her band sounded great, for the O2, at least. I could have done without all the Americanisms of how wonderful it was to be there and how inspiring Alanis Morissette had been, but Liz was right, her band were really rocking out.
Alanis Morisette
I was in my late teens by the mid nineties, so of course I was into Alanis Morisette. I got into Metal in 1992, just in time to discover it had been killed off (well pushed further underground) by Grunge and the rest of the alternative rock music scene. In the early hours of Saturday mornings there used to be a ‘rock music magazine’ called Raw Power. This was where I first heard You Oughta Know. Raw Power told us Alanis was endorsed by Flee of the Red Hot Chilipeppers and I loved it!
Alanis Morisette is pure talent. She seems to hit every note flawlessly with almost no effort and, if you weren't watching, you wouldn’t know she was running about the stage like a mad thing at the same time. If I’d had the choice, I’d have wanted to hear Jagged Little Pill all the way through and a few of the other songs as well. While the set list was not my choice, we did get most of Jagged Little Pill and the songs from Former Infatuation Junkie and the other albums sounded much better than they do on record. We know, we listened to them on the way there.
The problem was the sound of the band. When they were electric, which they were mostly, the drums and the bass drowned out the guitars which had no definition at all, unless they were playing on their own. For about three songs the whole band came to a little stage closer to the back and played acoustically and you could hear every note, clearly. How difficult would it be to get the this right all the time? But then it is the O2 and no one goes for the sound quality.
I’ve ticked Alanis Morisette off my imaginary bucket list. It was definitely 30 years too late and it made me happy that I saw Garbage in their prime.
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