union chapel

London, United Kingdom

Aug 24, 2000

2 Comments on “union chapel”

  • esbs

    says:

    as much as i tried, i couldn’t control the ridiculously high expectations i had of this gig. i was so certain it was going to the best thing in the world ever, i was, at the time, worried that it wouldn’t have a chance of living up these expectations. i’d also hyped this gig so much, and persuaded people from all over the world to come, and i was slightly nervous that something was going to go disastrously wrong. anyhow, it all began to unfold at around 5pm, when me, bjorn and some other friends wandered along to the venue. we wanted to get there early to meet up with the band and also to start handing out our little home-made ads for the site. unfortunately we got a call from georg saying the band were so short of time they had to soundcheck all day solidly and couldn’t meet anyone. so we sat outside the venue handing out our ads to the growing numbers of people arriving. it was really nice to meet people from our messageboard and stuff, so a big thank you to those you did come and say hello. so we carried on (despite being attacked by a camera wielding storme, who was determined to get close up pictures of us all :P ). the queues grew longer and longer and the amount of people desperately trying to find tickets got bigger and bigger. we managed to hear some of the soundcheck and could make out viðrar vel til loftárása being rehearsed, which heightened our excitement even more.

    finally the doors opened at 8pm and we all rushed down to the front to secure the front row. the front row was totally taken up by our group of people from the site and the egroup, which was nice. the venue was just mindblowing. there is no possible way that there could have been a more fitting venue for sigur rós, and for a gig of this importance. at the union chapel (which was looking much more impressive than i remembered it to be) you sit on proper church pews and the stage is where the alter would be. the stage looked so beautiful. the huge old style candles looked wonderful and we quickly spotted that they’d got a grand piano in for the gig, as well as the string section. by this time we could hardly control our excitement..the anticipation was almost too much. i’d been to plenty of sigur rós gigs before, but i just knew that this was going to be totally unique. we spotted jónsi standing over by the side and i went over to say hello. he wasn’t impressed with my rather pathetic handshake and advised me to try again. then a certain finnish person, who will remain nameless, ran over to greet jónsi just a little enthusiastically. he then asked if he’d be willing to pose for a photo. jónsi agreed and then as the photo was about to be taken, he asked jónsi if he could kiss him. jónsi agreed and the photo was taken, perfectly.

    the venue was filling up fast, and suddenly it was time for the band to come on. the lights dimmed and avalon could be heard through the p.a. the four icelandic girls comprising the string section took the stage. after a while they began a very slow, almost frightening, rythmical, chaotic bowing of the strings. it built up more and more and then began to die off until it was almost silent. sigur rós then took the stage. they began with a reworking of von. as far as i know it was the first time this song had been played live. by now the strings had become beautifully melodic and soothing. im not going to try and describe the songs themselves because it wouldnt do them justice, and i’m sure there are people that can make a better job of it anyway. i will tell you that they played olsen olsen, svefn-g-englar, viðrar vel til loftárása and hafssól (accompanied with strings and piccolo). georg used a drum stick to vibrate his bass strings in hafssól which resulted in a supercool effect. they then took a short break before coming on to play the now familar set of new material, including the wonderful e-bow, death song, nýja lagið and the astonishing final ‘pop song’, which is definitely more akin to godspeed you black emperor! and mogwai than to the more typical sigur rós material. a stunning way to finish a quite remarkable concert. at the end they received a complete standing ovation, and when they returned to bow, jónsi was visibly close to tears.
    (paul mcallister)

  • esbs

    says:

    tim russell
    the french novelist stendhal suffered from a psychiatric condition (subsequently known as stendhal’s syndrome), which caused him to break down uncontrollably when faced with extreme beauty. had he lived long enough to see sigur ros, he would probably never have recovered.

    sigur ros, you see, are lost in music. their purpose is not to inform, agitate, or even to entertain, they blur the boundaries between rock band and orchestra, and when they are as good as this they make the rest of your record collection seem somehow trivial. in short, this is music so beautiful, so intense, so damned perfect that it practically breaks your heart. it’s probably a good thing that most of the audience can’t understand the lyrics or the lovely union chapel would have flooded.

    tonight’s first set, consisting of the majority of the stunning “agaetis byrjun” album, is quite simply the best live performance i have ever witnessed. backed by a string section, the complex ebbs and flows of the music take on an even greater intensity, lifted to new heights by the venue’s remarkable acoustics. singer jon’s voice is astonishing, a lark in human form, and he simultaneously coaxes from his instrument the kind of sounds not heard from a guitar since my bloody valentine’s legendary “loveless” tour back in 1992. “svefn-g-englar” lasts for 10 minutes; they could have stretched it to 2 hours and we would neither have complained nor probably even noticed.

    the second hour-long set consists of new material, some of it disappointingly more conventional in structure than “agaetis byrjun”‘s ever-shifting soundscapes, some of it occasionally veering close to radiohead’s more experimental work, but all of it utterly rapt. singer jon wipes the tears from his eyes after one particularly spine-tingling vocal performance, and there isn’t a single person in the church who doesn’t know how he feels.

    afterwards i feel like stendhal; exhausted, awestruck, close to tears, astonished that people still can create something so fresh, so different, and so beautiful out of guitar, bass & drums. shamefully ignored by a british music press obsessed with mor careerists like coldplay and the shallow, materialistic top shop soundtrack of uk garage, sigur ros are the most musically revolutionary band to play these shores since 1988-model public enemy, the young gods and the aforementioned mbv. iceland has taken them to its heart; if we are as clued-up as we like to think we are then we should too.
    (tim russell)

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