Leeds City Varieties 19/02/07


There’s nothing quite like sitting in a theatre with lager-filled plastic cups, entertained by a grumpy Scottish bloke with ginger hair and capo-clamped acoustic guitar. Middleton’s satirical musings tell the ironic story of an inherent solidarity between songwriters who sit alone in their bedrooms penning tales of woe. The audience are surprisingly still, perhaps due to their deep contemplation of Middleton’s bittersweet lyrical message, although most likely a result of the allocated seats. As a consequence the atmosphere is strange, but only reiterates the notion of binary opposites that Middleton’s music exploits.

There is a glorious paradox between morose sentiment and major-key chords omnipresent in songs like ‘We’re All Going To Die’ and ‘A Brighter Beat’, where the apathetic ‘Fuck it, I Love You’ beautifully alludes to an anti-romanticism of twenty-first century love: “Fuck it, I love you, there you go/Three little words on a mobile phone.” In an age where the text message has superseded the love letter, this half-arsed admittance seems, depressingly, appropriate.

Middleton’s performance also takes a suitably ‘no frills’ approach. Bereft of the density of sound found on record, his slightly stripped down versions demonstrate the true fragility that lies behind the beats. As an artist he offers us something different from the mainstream singer/songwriter clan: he’s a realist, he’s intelligent and he doesn’t have a whiney voice



www.malcolmmiddleton.co.uk

www.myspace.com/malcolmmiddleton

 

Laura Coffey