It begins with a 20-minute silent film of Naomi Campbell cavorting in a bunker in her pants. It ends with an ancient-looking Aboriginal woman voicing her fears for the future of humanity. In between is one of the more harrowing and thought-provoking sets contemporary music has to offer – Anohni’s Hopelessness, released in May, a record about all the ills of the world brought out to play in the form of an audio-visual performance piece (no old songs, no piano, no chit-chat, no encore).
There are many moments where a sudden loss of mascara is imminent. If you sneak a look around the concert hall, people are dabbing at their eyes at regular intervals as the set intensifies. For me, the levee finally breaks during Crisis, about two-thirds of the way through, a day after the publication of the Chilcot report into the Iraq war and roughly 12 hours after John Humphrys’s interview with an unrepentant Tony Blair on Radio 4’s Today programme.
“Daughter,” sings Anohni, her voice pregnant with feeling, her body and face hidden by a head to foot robe, a cowl over her head and a veil in front of her face, a kind of Star Wars take on the burqa, “If I filled up your mass graves/ And attacked your country under false pretences…. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Her repeated apology echoes around the hall. If you thought I Am A Bird Now – the breakthrough album by Antony and the Johnsons, winner of the 2005 Mercury music prize – was emotional, this gig is like that, but on a tanker-load of steroids.
It is also visually arresting, drawing on Anohni’s background in radical performance art. As her two producers – Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, on the left, and Hudson Mohawke, stage right – trigger the music from twin banks of gear, a series of images of women plays out on a large video screen: a zombified head, for the opening song, Hopelessness; women of colour, women of all ages.
They are shot from the shoulders up, and mouth the lyrics to Anohni’s songs as she sings them, making the words an inescapable highlight. Many of the women are crying, inevitably recalling all the times people have wept in pop videos, from Godley and Creme, to Sinéad O’Connor to Miley Cyrus.
Two of Hopelessness’s better-known songs are dispatched early on. Watch Me skewers internet surveillance, casting the state as an abusive father. Using reverse psychology, 4 Degrees urges the listener into an orgy of environmental destruction. They are undeniably moving, but familiar by now.
You’re not really prepared for Paradise, an unreleased tune, presumably left off the Hopelessness album. The idea with Hopelessness was that Anohni – a soulful voice most often accompanied by piano in the past – would harness some of the most respected electronic musicians of the day to build some big, commercial tunes. These Trojan horse tunes would be filled with Anohni’s despairing, angry, appalled vocal melodies about the state of the world, whose horrors – drone strikes, the death penalty, environmental catastrophe, Guantánamo Bay – overlap and whose causes feed into one another.
Paradise fulfils this brief, perhaps better than many of the songs that made the final tracklisting. It’s a huge electronic beast you might actually conceive of dancing to; a few committed souls are trying. Anohni’s elastic vocal delivery has quasi-Arabic devotional intonations. The words she is singing are hard to listen to. “My mother’s love/ A gentle touch/ My father’s hand/ Rests on my throat.”
There is, then, a lot to unpack here – not least the overlong use of Naomi Campbell as a kind of embodiment of hyper-idealised femininity. (Campbell is perhaps not someone you’d immediately think of as one of the good guys, what with her throwing phones at assistants.) Even as Anohni ropes in this vast sisterhood of performance artists to front her songs, it is a shame that she seems to be erasing her own presence.
She moves about the stage like a ghost, without making any kind of contact with the audience, sometimes kneeling before the images and singing to them, the only clues as to what is going on inside the robes delivered by her fluttering hands.
Perhaps the robes are a kind of sackcloth. Throughout the album and this involving gig, Anohni does not shy away from her own culpability: that she, and we, are implicated in the system, that her tax dollars – and our tax pounds – are paying for a lot of this misery.
