She has always been an open book, and now Amanda Palmer has written one. Tonight’s gig is largely to promote The Art of Asking, the cult star’s recent memoir and manifesto that her fervent fans propelled into the upper reaches of the New York Times bestseller list.
The book suggests that Palmer is a mass of contradictions, and it’s an impression this show does little to dispel. Barefoot at a grand piano, the personality-plus performer laughs at the irony that she is hammering out her commitment-phobic anthem Ampersand while six months pregnant.
She can be earnest and luvvie yet also acerbic and brilliantly subversive. After strumming her ukulele while musing on the topography of female pubic hair in Map of Tasmania (“Grow that shit like a jungle!”), Palmer riffs on cystitis with guest star Caitlin Moran; their quickfire banter suggests the pair could become a 21st-century French and Saunders.
It’s not all so jovial. Palmer notoriously became a public hate figure when she invited musician fans to play with her band unpaid after she raised $1.2m via her Kickstarter campaign. Alone with her uke, she reflects on this unforgiving trial by media in Bigger on the Inside, a song from the end of a tether that is brilliantly cathartic and humane.
Back behind her piano, she maps the death of a love affair via a couple’s sleeping positions in The Bed Song, an open wound of a number that could be a gothic Cole Porter, then ends a big-hearted evening revelling in the melodrama of the Smiths’ There Is a Light That Never Goes Out. In a music industry short of original thinkers, Amanda Palmer is the real deal.
• At Limelight, Belfast, 14 June. Box office: 028-9032 7007.
