131. Courtney Barnett
Moore Theatre Seattle
21 April 2016
Garden leave. The euphemism for being paid not to darken your employer’s door while they quietly change the locks and erase you from memory. I’d just walked away from a firm I’d called home for nearly fourteen years. Life sometimes sends you signals that it is time to leave, and a vast majority of people tend to ignore them, trading familiarity, and inertia, for what should be necessary change. However, I heard and listened to those signals. Call it escape. Call it mid-life crisis. Whatever it was, and I am still not completely sure, I suddenly had three months to kill.
And what better way to kill it than by finally ticking off Seattle, the soggy Mecca of plaid-shirted self-loathing and feedback-drenched guitars. I’d worked for US firms for nearly two decades, toured their cities ranging from the mad to the bad to the downright dangerous, but Seattle had always eluded me. Given its, and my, music affinities, this felt like an insult.
So, ticket booked, hotel sorted, and most importantly, a Grunge Tour pencilled in. The latter being a one person outfit that my pal had also been on and raved about, although securing their services was a little retro; there were no flashy websites or slick marketing for this tour service, it was an email address on an AOL web page in a garish yellow-on-purple colour scheme and had all the hallmarks of a venture that is either going to end with a rollicking good time or you waking up in a basement, stripped for parts and fashioned into a skin-suit. Luckily, it was the former.
My grunge tour guide was a former Seattle-sound scenester who claimed to have dated a member of Alice in Chains, although she was light on details, so I put this down to lending an air of authenticity to the tour experience.
She drove me round the holy relics of Seattle rock in her van: the flop house where Eddie Vedder first mumbled his way into history and where Ten took shape, and, just before the inevitable trek to the house in which Kurt Cobain shot himself, the Moore Theatre as the site of the legendary “Lame Fest” in 1989, where Nirvana and Mudhoney played to a crowd that had no idea they were about to be kicked in the teeth by cultural history.
The Moore is a marvel, one of the first whose balcony’s cantilevered steel girders, a controversial and risky bit of architecture at the time, have, remarkably, withstood earthquakes, floods and countless terrible support acts. Charles Moore himself sold the joint in 1914, retired to Florida, built his own town, only to watch it flattened by a hurricane. He ended up broke and dead in a San Francisco hotel in 1929. Proto grunge, it turns out, wasn’t the saddest story connected to the place.
Whilst nosing about the place, I spotted Courtney Barnett was due to play there. A quick shuffle on the phone, a ticket procured, and suddenly my grunge nostalgia tour had a twist of modern day. Barnett’s debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, had charmed me with its pot-boiler tales, sardonic wit, and knack for turning the mundane into something magnificent.
Live, she’s a different beast. The cartoonish humour of the album was ramped up by actual cartoon animals and comic backdrops, but when she turned the volume up, the songs spat venom. Guitars roared, songs buckled, and hidden darkness came clattering out from behind the breezy one-liners.
By the end, with “Pickles from the Jar”, she’s howling “Christopher!” and the whole Moore Theatre roars back “Walken!” in unison before being tipped out into the drizzle, grinning like idiots.
Seattle, to me it was a bit like Shoreditch with a vitamin deficiency. Once a bohemian playpen where artists, chancers and amateur philosophers could doss about over black drip coffee and argue about why the opening track on Trout Mask Replica employed 5:7 polytonal rhythms, now slowly being embalmed by the creeping advance of Big Tech.
What was once a cultural stew of record shops, vintage guitar dens and half-baked cafés draped in tie dye has been rebranded into Google-funded kombucha pop-ups with Amazon drones whirring overhead. The same old story: the innovators experiment, the corporations swoop, and the place ends up mulched underfoot. Yet, under all the newly minted Trader Joes that bump out old neighbourhood booksellers, there still lurks a feint heartbeat of patchouli oil-scented anti-establishment spirit and Courtney Barnett was a perfect soundtrack to it that night.