89. Perfume Genius
Royal Festival Hall
10 June 2015
Perfume Genius, AKA Mike Hadreas, landed on my radar around the time the Too Bright album began earning praise so breathless you’d think it had cured a disease. To be fair, it was an arresting record: raw, poetic, weirdly shimmering. So naturally, I wanted to see it performed live. What I hadn’t quite accounted for was the fact that, in a rare moment of profound misjudgement, I decided to bring along my friend whose musical tastes embraced a wide variety of genres, provided they all had the word “metal” in them.
This particular gig was at the Royal Festival Hall, a venue where the clientele discuss Chantal Akerman boxsets and the price of oat milk. To lure my unsuspecting companion into this art-pop ambush, I offered dinner at Skylon beforehand, which worked, albeit with the air of someone bribing a child to take their medicine.
I’d read an interview with Hadreas in the run-up to the show in which he described the venue as “a weird assembly hall,” before promising to make things “uncomfortable, for me and for you.” This could be “interesting” I thought, conveniently ignoring all the red flags that were desperately trying to get my attention.
Clad entirely in black, stalking the stage in heels like a glam-rock Nosferatu, Hadreas launched into a set that was less performance and more psychological warfare. What might have registered as vulnerability on vinyl translated live into a form of theatre so intense and shrieking that I began to wonder if we were participants in an experimental sound installation sponsored by the Ministry of Defence.
At one point, a technical glitch interrupted a song, forcing Hadreas to pace the edge of the stage, glaring at the audience like a gothic meerkat. “This one’s a bit whingy,” he told us when it restarted. It was. So was the next one, which he announced ominously as “the nasty song” before whispering “Let’s play the nasty song” to his bandmates like a villain in a camp horror film.
That was our cue.
No words exchanged, no glances needed, we rose silently, in perfect synchronicity, and slipped out into the night like escapees from a sonic gulag. Passing a poster for The Samaritans Helpline on the way out, I briefly considered calling them.
We ended the evening somewhere far more comforting: a bar with cocktails and no performance art. The kind of place where no one whispers, glares, or shrieks whilst writhing on a silk-draped piano. Which, after what we’d just endured, felt like a warm embrace.