Review: Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, August 2nd 2007, The Point, Cardiff

Critics, when discussing this duo, like to sidetrack themselves on to discussing the unlikelihood of the pairing in the first place. It seems that from coast to coast, Lanegan and Campbell look out across an audience of people scratching their heads in surprised delight. I can’t deny that down the pub, beer in hand and everybody talking over everybody else, I have found myself in the midst of the very same tangent, and the inevitable progression to fantasy pairings. As a result am longing to hear KD Lang’s album with Rob Tyner, or the long lost tapes of the Mercury/Ol’ Dirty Bastard sessions. And the thought of Nick Cave and Duffy singing together complete with video where she sings her lines only when Cave allows her sopping gasping head out of the toilet bowl just fills me with want for a glorious alternative dimension. Sit in a pub and bring up the topic – your night will fly by.

But to spend your time dissecting this particular partnership will bear very little fruit. The album they made together, Ballad of Broken Seas, is an understated record, moments of beauty bookend moments of idealess number crunching where only the charisma of the two vocalists carry it through. It is far less entertaining than any Belle and Sebastian record and less engrossing than any of Lanegan’s solo efforts to date, but it offers something more to any fan of either artist. It is a worthy record and it translates well to the live forum, each song benefiting rather than suffering from the potential of the fuck-up. Lanegan, who I have seen live before as a solo artist, is a solid and granite-like as his vocal, barely moving from his Talos impression throughout the night. But I interpret this as ‘presence’ – some wouldn’t. I remember having a similar argument after a Tricky concert in the mid 90s when he spent the whole gig with his back to the audience. Maybe a dick, maybe, but that is not my concern. I want attitude and someone who clearly thinks he is better than me and someone who if I was pressed I might agree was better. That is fine with me. And then there was Ms Campbell. As opposite to the death-voiced ex-heroin addict as Miss Brodie would be had she taken the stage. She even plays the cello on a few songs, making Lanegan look more like the devils of Du Pre than blues-folk cohort.

There is little on stage chemistry, despite interview protestations that they get on incredibly well, like long lost siblings. I don’t imagine I’d look particularly comfortable on stage with my sister either, if truth be told, so the reviews, it could be argued, that labour this point show up a weakness in journalism rather than a weakness in their act. They are certainly solid, and it soon matters little that they barely make eye-contact throughout the performance. If they had done, would the show have been better? Would the material have been more loyally served? Well of course not; these songs are about disjointed relationships and mismatched earth-dwellers. This, I suppose, is theatre in music without the light show or people on roller-skates dressed as cats. The characters stand in front of us like Rapunzel trying to ignore Mephistopheles as she gets on with spinning her spool, like Rebecca in one novel trying to ignore the existence of a man eating crow in the back of her creator’s mind. They survive in a long line of iron and wine pairings, and they do it with an authenticity that shames those of us who criticise them for it.