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I was fortunate enough to get an invitation—or a special CD single in lieu of a ticket—to attend the Dar gig last night, which I believe was billed as a press preview although I spotted few journalists, unless they coincidentally were already huge fans, which is possible. I thought I’d give you a verbose taste of what it was like to be there—though I was left in a somewhat frustrated situation so you might come cross the odd moan! Still, I am all too aware of how trivial these miseries truly are.

Some might wonder whether it’s right to attend entertainment events whilst the world is still reeling from a tragedy that seems more like a plot of a Superman film where the villain somehow succeeded with his evil plan than reality. [The September 11 atrocities in America, of course] However, another argument could be that, when faced with such a strong reminder of the uncertainty and sometimes suddenness of mortality, you should make the most of your life while you can, and we also must defiantly show that those terrorist acts will not stop us from carrying on with our lives. I think we all could use a bit of cheering up; a few hours where a smile might visit our faces will not erase the overriding mourning, shock and sorrow that no doubt will continue for years to come, but who better to help us strive towards recovery than an amazing American folk (-ish) singer.

I know many cringe at the word, but frankly Dar is so ‘cute’ that her mere appearance in the room makes everyone smile. My only sorrow is that I did not get a clear view of her owing to a silly mix-up.

The Kashmir Klub is a marvellous tiny (usually free) non-profit making live music club—the size of a big master bedroom really--in the basement of a restaurant near Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum at Baker Street. The club is friendly, their website is welcoming [http://www.kashmirklub.com/ --as yet they have not archived Dar’s performance], the staff are all good-humoured and seem happy to be a part of the venture. Although I have almost gone there many times before, I was, as the Master of Ceremonies (MC) put it, ‘a Kashmir Klub virgin.’ That was a shame, as it meant I relied upon the instructions from the eastcentralone letter enclosed with the invitation CDs, which said that the doors opened at 8pm, so my Kiwi friend and I (an American who has lived in London for about 12 years) killed time from 6.30pm by eating in the fine restaurant just above the Klub. At 8pm, we went downstairs (they didn’t check our CDs that we’d been carefully carrying around all day in the end, but ticked our names off a guest list, as though we were almost important!), only to find that the doors had opened much earlier and we could have had the exact same meal served to us downstairs, and because we hadn’t, every single table and chair in the room with the stage was already taken. The only standing room was a single corridor of space on the peripheral through which waiters and others were busily passing, from where you could barely see the tiny stage through the pillars, and frankly we were feeling a bit too old fogey-ish and exhausted to begin standing for several hours at that stage.

Eventually, we reluctantly chose to sit in a little side room--well, it was not really a room, it was more like sitting in Fred Flinstone’s closet with no door. A cave, really, coming off the side of the main room, but without any line of sight to the stage, with cushioned benches on the two perpendicular walls, a worryingly low concrete-ish ceiling, and a little television monitor showing the stage, but so badly lit that it was difficult to make much out. We thought we’d sit in there to try and gain some strength back during the opening act, then leave the cave to somehow stand and watch Dar perform, but instead we ended up trapped in the cave by latecomers who stood to see Dar and blocked our entrance/exit (couldn’t be helped—there was really no room for standing), though I doubt they saw much of her either. So in the end, most bizarrely, we ended up seeing the concert on the poorly transmitting monitor whilst listening to Dar play in the adjacent area, out of sight. Still, Dar live is brilliant even if she’s out of sight, so to speak. Any of you who watched the live webcast may have seen as much as I did!

First up was a woman called, I think, Jen Charlton, accompanied by Paddy Neil. She sang in a Tammy Wynette- type country manner, fairly likeable acoustic country songs (if you like country, which I don’t really much) whilst playing the acoustic guitar, with Paddy playing various instruments, especially the mandolin very loudly and lap steel guitar (which I always dislike, I’m afraid) marvellously well. But the songs were too twangy for me, like old-fashioned country. Shortly after they finished playing, six people joined us in our now crowded cave, and I did not realise at all, but my friend told me at the end of the concert that the party included the singer and guitarist we had just seen on stage.

During the interval, a friend of Dar’s was selling the two CDs that aren’t yet available in the UK (but thanks to an American friend, I have had Green World for a year and have the live CD coming to me when it’s released). The MC took the stage and reminded us of the Klub’s policy that no one talk during the performance, that talking should take place within the bar area only, and there were signs posted to that effect. How thoughtful and sensible, I thought. It must be awful to be performing your quiet acoustic songs and have the people in the front row chatting the whole time. Mobile phones were also to be switched off, but for some reason, someone left theirs on the silent/vibration setting (were they really going to answer it and chat during As Cool As I Am?), which kept interfering with the sound system, although Dar kept playing nobly whenever the interference kicked in.

The club was sold out—yet maybe contained only 70 or so people?--and full of a notably eclectic mix: dreadlocked female students carrying a pushbike safety helmet, hippies from another age, clear country fans, casual intellectuals, a woman in a white mini-skirt and fishnet knee-his, and several Joe and Jane Bloggses. And me in my stern Maggie Thatcher suit, having come straight from a long day at work, with my lovely patient friend.

When the MC introduced Dar at about 9.35pm, he said how the Klub was grateful to her making the effort to get here after the tragedies in America last week and the subsequent difficulty with (and fears about) flights, and thanked her for bringing her wonderfully positive spirit. Of course, we all cheered, even those of us in adjacent caves.

Dar came on stage, donning a sleeveless bluish top with a plunging neckline and an interesting busy necklace of apparent Egyptian influence, with her long hair pulled back at the top but loose around her shoulders. And she was, as I said, very cute! She always seems to have one of those bubbly personalities that lights up rooms and caves whenever she nears them. She commented that, when she had seen so many familiar faces in the audience on her way in, she decided to ditch the set list and just play, a decision she was already regretting.

She began playing The Babysitter’s Here, always a fun number and thus a good introduction to her for the Dar virgins in the audience (who were well camouflaged if they existed). All was going wonderfully, then mid-way into the song—though I now wonder if I imagined it--she seemed to miss a few lyrics, and then barely pausing, she appeared to substitute the actual words (perhaps ‘I can’t wait to give her the card’) with ‘I can’t think of the chord, I can’t think of the chord’ to the tune and everyone just laughed along with her, as she carried on playing the song just fine.

When she finished—of course to thrilled applause—she began to talk about her next number, a ‘tragi-comic ditty.’ She began speaking of the importance of conceptual art at her university, so we knew what song was coming….Those of us with the CD single for this song (the entry ‘ticket’ to this show) have heard the introduction to the live version that is also included on the single, which was still amusing—and yet this was a slightly different version. Part of the joy of seeing (or simply listening from a cave) Dar live is her wonderful talent for relaying humorous anecdotes and telling engaging stories, and it is amazing that she doesn’t seem to repeat exactly the same ones, with all the times she plays live. That truly is a remarkable feat.

This version included a tale of her touching base with a former fellow student, who was now a conceptual artist in Seattle. Her surprise that his art had become so ordinary and narrative when he described his current project to her as being about Thomas Jefferson building Monticello for his wife became more relaxed when he then added something like ‘and in the background, you can see an agonising guy trying to play Brian Wilson music whilst attempting to overcome his depression brought on by the injustice of the world today’, which of course relaxed her enormously and confirmed that he was still an artiste. Everyone in the audience continued chuckling when she said that, after leaving University, she and her friends were surprised to learn that this female icon of a conceptual artist that they had long admired was known to the rest of the world as a woman who broke up ‘some band’. With that, she launched into a brilliant, uplifting performance of I Won’t Be Your Yoko Ono, and she was in excellent voice, not a crack anywhere.

After that brilliant performance of the first single of her ‘new’ album, she muttered that it was risky to do this as she might be met with silence, but did anyone have any requests? I must admit that, whilst I am usually the shy, quiet and retiring type at these things, and though I might be shouting in my head ‘CHRISTIANS AND THE PAGANS!!’ or some similar title, I rarely actually manage to vocalise them. However, after reading a brief review of Dar’s previous night’s gig in Stoke Newington on, oddly enough, the Boo Hewerdine list (I’ll ask if the author would mind me forwarding it to you), where he said how much he’d regretted not bravely calling out his favourite tune, I had decided to be firm and avoid later regrets by preparing to shout proudly, though I hadn’t decided yet which song. However, there seemed little point in shouting at the top of my voice at this stage, as Dar would not hear me; the only people to hear me would be my seven fellow cave-mates, and they would just stare at me oddly as I created such a racket. So I wimped out and remained quiet.

Meanwhile, in the real room with the real audience, a couple of people immediately answered Dar’s call for songs, any of which she would be happy to perform. ‘Travelling’, someone suggested. ‘…Except that one’, Dar replied. Another suggestion was made, and Dar deadpanned, ‘These are songs that I don’t know.’ She then agreed to do Travelling Again (Travelling 1) after all, provided the audience helped her (so I hoped that my theory that the audience was full of fans rather than unknowing journalists was correct). Dar bubbled over the idea of this New Age-type experience, with the audience channelling to her, allowing audience participation in that it was their job to remember the lyrics. She played Travelling beautifully, having said it was an appropriate number to perform then, or in the words of the artiste, ‘an interesting time to be jumping into a certain puddle.’ The performance actually was perfect, until she paused for a second, saying ‘more pain, more---what?’ and the audience tried to channel as instructed but failed by suggesting the lyric from another verse, until someone finally channelled properly and Dar managed to continue, barely having paused. The lyrics of the song, including ‘And you are the ghost town, and I am the heartland’ and ‘What am I reaching for that’s better than a hand to hold?’ with Dar’s poignant performance left me actually thinking ‘wow’ (again I kept that inside my head rather than jumping up and frightening my cave-mates with a well-deserved enthusiastic shout).

Dar began to introduce the next song, something about her time at University and writing a paper about a performance artist, and drawing a parallel between the gentrification of the neighbourhood and gentrifying her inner self. Sadly, I missed a lot of the story because whenever Dar spoke, my cave-mates, apart from the now weary one I brought with me, took that as a cue to begin reminiscing about their own lives, sharing their stories and getting so excited they became downright rowdy. They did this throughout the evening, which meant that I missed a lot of what I came for (wasn’t it bad enough that we couldn’t even see her?) and that surely there was no way that Dar could not hear all that noise, conversations over her own and mad laughter at inappropriate places. Frankly, I could not believe they could be so inconsiderate and rude, particularly as the club had even specifically signposted and mentioned several times their no-talking policy which states that talking should be reserved for the bar area, out of respect for the quiet acoustic artist. They became so noisy so frequently, and were smoking seemingly hundreds of self-rolled cigarettes at once, which made our eyes stream and contributed to us missing some of the songs as we coughed madly—it seems there is little ventilation from teeny concrete caves, particularly when the only opening is blocked by tall fans outside, we really spent more time concentrating on them than on the marvellous Ms Williams, which was infuriating.

Imagine my shock when my friend told me after we left that night that the two of our cave-mates, probably the noisiest, were the opening act and the man who accompanied her. I should state that I did not realise that and it might not be true, but if so, I am absolutely astonished. Opening acts, of all people, should be supremely sensitive to how horrid it is to attempt to perform to an audience when some people aren’t bothering to listen at all. I’m sure the singer thanked Dar for letting her warm-up for her before she left the stage, but she did not seem too grateful in our cave! Perhaps they were just happy and got carried away, but it was torment to be with them.

Anyway, pardon my bitter outburst! The story I mostly missed seemed to focus mainly on how Dar was trying to fit in better with her neighbours and friends who practised New Age-y type therapies and self-examinations, when she realised that it would just be easier to fake it by buying a big coffee table book on aromatherapy and display it in your house for your guests to see, so if she had enough money, that is what she would have done. Spring Street from her latest album, which she then performed, is apparently about that! The more Dar gives these informative introductions to songs, the more I realise that I am so far away from the wavelength of ‘artistes’ that I feel an ignorant fool! Fortunately, anyone can enjoy Dar’s songs even without feeling as enlightened as one can be. I suppose that makes them more valuable, as you can continue to enjoy them as you progress through different levels—somewhat like a Playstation game, I suppose! Always a challenge, always pleasurable (not that I’ve ever played computer games, not since Space Invaders, but that’s what I hear.) When I first played Green World last year, I thought the lyrics to Spring Street were, typically for Dar, brilliant, but whilst I thought it was highly appealing, I became somewhat lost in the multi-layered vocal tracks on the album. Performed live without any tinkering, it was stunning. In its raw form, it seemed more passionate.

By this time, people who, perhaps like me, were too shy to shout out requests had resorted to scribbling away on pieces of paper and passing them to her. At Neil Finn concerts, the audience throws paper airlines down to him on stage, and he tends to remark with admiration on the finer engineering constructions. The Kashmir Klub would be too intimate for paper planes. Dar was on a stage just a few feet from the lucky people with tables and almost on the same level; it was as though she were playing in someone’s (Fred Flinstone’s?) living room whilst they were having a dinner party.

So, Dar read a note to herself and then turned to the audience, beaming, and said ‘Awwwww, it’s so sweet! They put their song request, and then in parenthesis, they put which album it’s from!’ Everyone laughed. She then proceeded to discuss her elementary school days, announcing that her best friend since the age of 6 was in the club that night, and she had vivid memories of their bus stop and such clear memories of those schooldays. I’m sure she then shared a truly hilarious story with the audience in the real room, but those of us in the adjacent teeny cave were ‘treated’ instead to an eruption of laughter and chat about the schooldays of each of our fellow cave-dwellers as they compared notes of their pasts. This might surprise you, but my friend and I would have preferred to have heard whatever Dar said. Anyway, the probably endearing tale led Dar to sing The End of the Summer, which was beautifully performed, although it’s never been one of my personal favourites. For some reason, someone who was actually not in the cave with us spoke quite loudly suddenly during the song (perhaps answering the phone whose vibrations occasionally disrupted the sound projection?), but Dar was a trooper and kept going without a feather ruffled.

The cave noise then became unbearably amplified again, but I did manage to sift through enough of Dar’s every few words to realise that she was discussing how she found that she ‘was 25 and sort of becoming my mother’ (how terrifying that would be for so many of us, I thought to myself). She somehow managed to combine the pine needles and shells that her mother kept on a windowsill with her mother’s thoughtful response about whether she believed in God (pause…’yes’). Dar used the poetic phrase ‘windowsill of my mother’s tiny wonders’. She eventually ended up referring to someone who burst into tears at the grocery store when offered, as you are in the Land of the Free where they actually bag groceries for you, ‘paper or plastic?’ The choice of bags—paper supposed to be better for the environment—would cause said woman to burst into tears because, just a few years before, no one cared about the environment. Dar said she was excited to sing this song and launched into the wonderful The Blessings. I have to, yet again, declare my absolute ignorance as I had no idea that the song was anything to do with shells and pine needles and grocery bags, but just heard the parts about friends being supportive or otherwise when a relationship ends. Hmmmm. Memo to myself: must take a refresher course in interpreting magnificent lyrics and trying to ‘get’ deeper songs. In any case, I always enjoy hearing this tune, and Dar performed it faultlessly—until the end when she skipped a line and filled it with ‘Da-da-da-da’ and a bit of a giggle, which added much character to the song, of course!

Dar then spoke of a film called Dinner and a Movie where I believe she said she was asked to submit a song for the soundtrack, with a choice of putting either the sex scene to music or the plant-potting scene to music—a difficult decision. When she heard another song speaking of ‘the Amazon running between my thighs’, she figured that not only would that probably not be so appropriate for the plant-potting scene, but it would be hard to top as accompaniment for the sex scene, so she opted to set the former to music. Farewell To the Old Me was the result, and she began strumming away at a long introduction to the song, before suddenly stopping and saying that she could not remember the first line, so she thought she’d better sing another song. Then she apologised and carried on with the song after all. It was a gorgeous, soft number, truly great. It could only be improved by editing out all the talking that had been going on in my cave.

Upon reading another request note, Dar excitedly said ‘Oh, good! Good!’ but didn’t let on which song it was just yet. She first explained that she had once been trying to be a Buddhist, and all she could think of was that she was such a bad Buddhist, to the point that ‘I’m such a bad Buddhist, I’m such a bad Buddhist’ became almost a mantra. She then said that she’d had a vision of a cloud and all across it were written the words ‘I have to see a therapist’. She said she didn’t think she would be here without therapy, and then paused to remark that that statement presented a sort of chicken and egg situation. She then dedicated this song to Emily and Chris, and poured herself into a masterful version of What Do You Hear in These Sounds?, which is pure magic live. In fact, it first caught my attention on one of the Lilith Fair albums as the studio version, whilst still delightful, just didn’t have the same witty effect somehow.

She said that the next song was sort of a companion piece to the previous one and it involved a fear of suburbia and the conformity and keeping-up-with-the-Jones that required. She spoke of the fine art of learning how to ‘piss off the system’, something she claimed to endeavour to learn more about every day. She said that this song, After All, was one she sang to remind herself to agitate. The rendition was wonderful.

Just as I looked at my suffering friend who looked like she had sunk into despair, with streaming eyes and a choking cough to mirror my own thanks to our high passive smoking intake (inevitable in clubs but the problem with the cave was lack of any other air), and started to realise that being at a Koncert at a Klub where you Kould not even see the artist perform left a lot to be desired no matter how devoted you were, I guiltily realised that I should offer to release her from this torment, and was just about to suggest that we leave early. I know, I know, how appalling to even entertain the thought, but things really were uncomfortable and we could hear so little of Dar over the cave voices and could see nothing of her, so I started to think I might get a better view if I rushed home to watch the live webcast. I don’t wish to fault the Kashmir Klub, which seemed to be perfectly charming full of unusually friendly staff, but the evening was a bit different that we’d expected.

Fortunately, just as I was about to commit the sacrilege of actually leaving a Dar concert so early, after waiting so many years to ‘see’ her live again, our cave companions suddenly left—well, only after discussing for a while whether they should leave their bags in the cave with what I suppose they deemed to be suspicious looking characters (us) and guess where other members of their party had gone and whether they should take their drinks for them. You can imagine how this all truly enhanced the seemingly far away performance of After All. But when they finally exited the cave, which was no easy feat, we felt like celebrating and could actually hear Dar!!! Then two members of the human door at the cave opening decided to join us in their place, and they had this strange idea of just watching the monitor quietly and listening to the music and enjoying it, and didn’t smoke or talk or roar with raucous laughter at all—it was all somewhat disturbing, that sort of weirdness. A man also joined us, and though he initially spoke with one of the others to establish, from what I gathered, who that was on stage and whether she was the headlining act tonight (could he be that elusive journalist?? Or just someone who had walked in off the street after they stopped manning the door?), he settled down quietly. So we loved our new cave-mates and, thanks to their model behaviour, managed to enjoy thoroughly the rest of the concert. Although, bizarrely, during Dar’s introduction for her supposedly penultimate song, people in the real room started talking, whilst my new cave mates watched in silence.

Whilst Dar tuned her guitar after receiving another request (and it wasn’t me shouting out or scribbling on the note, honestly—I’d have had to stuff it through the monitor screen), she explained that this was a traditional Christmas song with an element of the unexpected arrival of the lesbian pagan niece. So quite a lot like Silent Night, huh? She pounded out The Christians and the Pagans on her guitar, and the audience was gleeful and absolutely roared with approval at the end of the tune.

Dar then said that she’d wanted to finish with a particular song that, unfortunately for many of us, did not appear on most US versions of The Green World. She first paid tribute to the people who had so sweetly and coyly passed her little pieces of paper with requests on them. She then recounted that some people on earth have a greater sense of the environment, feel more at one with nature, and she liked to call these people…’Canadians’. She said she shared their vibes, and just before she began performing a magnificent song, Oh Canada Girls, she had to struggle to speak over some loud conversation—was it our recently departed friends now in another part of the club? Fortunately, that didn’t last. She managed to say that, if we agreed to overlook the title, she would like to dedicate the song to us. Then she briefly strayed into topical political discussion by stressing to us that millions of Americans believed in the peace process, even before this terrible calamity happened, and did not want a military solution as a reaction to last week’s atrocities right off the bat. She suspected that television interviewers must these days first establish that a potential interviewee had had a lot to drink before deeming them okay to be interviewed for international television, and she just wanted us to understand that many Americans were pacifists and the situation was perhaps not being accurately portrayed by the American press. That got loads of applause from the packed club.

The song was absolutely gorgeous, with lovely and soothing steadily trickling guitar framing smooth, glorious vocals. It’s enough to make me want to buy another copy of the album, but poverty will prevent me from doing so in the near future, I’m afraid.

Dar then reminded us that she would be back in the UK again in November, and sadly, she then left the stage.

By then it was almost 11pm and my friend and I both had to run for our last respective trains. I hope you don’t think less of me for choosing to miss a bit of Dar’s concert over sleeping on a park bench; it was a wrench, I assure you. As we ascended a few stairs to the exit, I looked back and caught my first genuine glimpse of Dar (who had returned to the stage) that night—as opposed to on a dodgy TV screen. I just knew she was going to perform As Cool As I Am now that I was leaving, and sure enough, that’s what she began to play, but we had to leave then anyway. I hope someone will tell me what other gems I missed.

Despite the trying company in the immediate area—and I really don’t wish to be so harsh and evil but we did feel we suffered unnecessarily on the night as we went there to see and hear Dar and ended up doing neither for much of the evening—it was a wonderful concert. I feel lucky to have managed to get a ticket to it.   Dar, if it was your opening act and her friends making such a lot of noise during your set—and I must stress that I can’t swear it was, it was my friend who told me that (I never recognise people)—then I understand that she’s playing at Dingwall's next week, should you feel inspired for some reason to take along a few very noisy friends and have a good natter at the top of your voice. J

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