Something green and powerful was sprouting, growing roots in the autumnal streets and pushing up towards the future.

But while Bono and Bob Geldof knew they were never going to go hungry themselves,

“I always wanted to be a gatherer, and I became a musician because it seemed like the only way to get people to gather together.”

it doesn’t even have to be good!

“I think this is it, Jack,” she said. “A revolution.”

In one, her life will continue as it always has, she will make music and watch her son grow up. In the other, she will retreat to a fortified compound to eke out subsistence farming in parched soil.

briefcases and smiles

“Can’t help you.

She paused, sipped her drink.

Foreigners come shooting, and the police do nothing.

It was hard to forget the legacy of communism in Prague, which knew its dark side better than most places.

WB_wombat_top

The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was born out of war in 1922 and euthanised itself in 1991.

It’s hard not to draw parallels.”

especially if food crops begin to fail

the scale of the task.

“So, if I stand still, but five hundred people fly to see me, is that better for the environment?” she asked.

“Yes, you don’t want land, you want other people,”

Even if he’s okay, he might be living in a lawless dystopia.”

The day after Antwerp, I woke from dreams of being trampled by animals made of smoke to find Amanda’s crew watching Greta Thunberg on their phones.

But safe in the corridor, guests could pretend all was normal.

more ways than one

This will not be enough in the 21st century.

we just wanted a nice evening out and to hear some songs.

There were tears on my cheeks.

“I don’t think that’s quite ‘on message’ for Amanda,” I said, but I wrote it down anyway.

A man in sunglasses, hitherto silent, spoke up calmly. “Nothing will change until we start killing the rich. We need to kill bankers.”

mental to-do list

This got an easy cheer,

the link with women’s reproductive rights was not immediately apparent to them

A sea of silent faces looked back at her uncertainly

all leaders are imaginary

same tunes

morning

dozen

I was reminded of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses five hundred years ago, which had triggered a complete upheaval of the European social order. Along with centuries of war.

‘fuck o’clock in the morning,’

Or perhaps there would not be a meeting.

no people around

‘normal people’

What mattered was people’s growing fear that society was spinning out of control, and nobody was at the wheel.

I suspected that it didn’t matter if it was true or not in the immediate sense.

the police lined up to buy cakes at the bakery.

how my writing was actually helping the planet;

What are you doing to help? How are you contributing?”

It seems to be getting darker and darker outside, and nobody seems to know what’s happening.

beneath that was a more general anxiety, expressed in lines Amanda would repeat every show as she tried to justify her work to her audience and herself.

Hannah Gadbsy, Nick Cave and Bruce Springsteen

many people are looking

questioning of the value of her own work

Amanda Palmer understands climate change in the abstract.

But in the course of this tour, I found dozens of people suffering the same lonely madness of pretending everything is okay as our biosphere collapses.

We know we should intervene, but we don’t know what to say, so we stare into our soup instead.

It is the guest sawing off their arm at dinner.

elephant in the room

Climate change.

continent was ablaze

That same feeling fuelled Amanda’s confessional concerts,

Further afield, they were marching in Algeria, Bolivia, Catalonia, Chile, Ecuador, Egypt, Haiti, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.

these were not isolated events

I was not expecting to encounter neo-Nazi parades through suburban German streets or to witness a two week occupation of central London by grief-stricken environmentalists.

or in Iceland’s case - whenever the Hell’s Angels dropped by.

And on every single step there was just a very small misunderstanding, but all these steps in a row led to a further widening of the opinion and cultural gap in our society.

Here were people, on the internet, engaging with weighty issues in good faith.

I didn’t know enough about Austria to know, and nor, I was sure, did Amanda.

“You think this is a joke?” he said.

I’m a mushroom farmer

“Yes. I mean… officially… ”

her cleavage just bewilderingly proclaimed NAZIS

A dozen young white women in black suits, shades and ties, topped with jaunty green berets and with a green sash across their chests.

wall of flesh

BECAUSE OUR FANS WERE TOO SAD!

Subul manning the merch trailer in Graz

details of why someone wrote “I LOVE IBIZA” on her thigh

australians, same thing

Someone handed Amanda a baby

It was all very punk.

Christ-like

dressed universally drab

pink cocoon of femininity

rural purity

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go smoke a joint by the water.”

“Shock, initially. Followed by jealousy, curiosity and disgust, all mixed together.”

like diamonds

I imagined the pushback I might receive, lurking in the toilets with a tape-recorder

one of the few political issues which cleaves across the Left

When you are sometimes making political statements and sometimes riffing on your emotions, is it a bit much to expect your audience to keep track of which is which?

quadruple entendre

self-consciously

Ah we need to chop your clock off tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock

And yet transphobia is one of the most frequent of the many attacks made on Amanda

On the contrary,

As someone who has known Amanda Palmer for a long time, I can confidently state that she is not transphobic.

She didn’t mean it unkindly, but I recoiled terribly.

Subul on the bus in Limerick

“These men join the lifestyle thinking it’s going to be Motley Crue in 1987, and it’s not, and they take it out on everyone because they don’t have the partying they think they were promised.”

She just strides through spaces like she has every right to be there,

Wandering its halls, I mused on how much access to space is a function of privilege.

notable for its location

White.Gold.Wind.Water.

It just doesn’t have a very strong bass line.

worshipping the sun

The strumming of a ukulele told me I was in the right place.

Vienna is a city of gold and white, on such a scale that it feels like it was built by a departed race of giants.

In a rare confluence of moral and economic motivation,

so-called refugee crisis

To explain why Amanda Palmer was looking at a bum in Vienna, you might go back to the late 2000s, when drought in Syria exacerbated volatile food prices, raising tensions that by 2011 exploded into civil war.

Everything is connected, and every beginning has its own beginning.

A woman pushed forward, fumbling with her belt.

“Good. I’ll beat them out of you with a bloody fist,” said Amanda with a grin, then retreated to her bunk.

Amanda dropped at the airport in Stuttgart to fly to London for Ash’s 4th birthday

“on the board,”

It was a Black Freighter of our very own, sporting a tattooed crew of many nations and firing its cannons at the patriarchy; and with her big boots and commanding voice, Amanda was every inch the pirate captain.

mirrored ceilings that had probably witnessed more than they cared to

reproductive rights and fascism have a strong relationship.

drank up the language

a German man

It was burned in 1938, as part of the Kristalnacht vandalism, then bought up in a literal fire sale by the city.

it was one.

whispered words

they walked out smiling.

shaman

“Amanda, I’m sad!” shouted an audience member. “But it’s cathartic!” cried another voice in the dark.

If I have a job

abortion and murder.

whispering into the microphone

tiny human alive

The show lasts for three hours, and the only reason Amanda doesn’t push it longer is that the concert venues in Europe have curfews.

Subul Lodi backstage

I could see how it might appeal to Amanda.

precocious lighting designer

In The Lord of the Rings

In late 2019, Western societies are at their most precarious moment since at least the Second World War.

Embedded journalism. Unpleasant memories of Iraq went through my head.

“like Almost Famous, but with fewer drugs and more abortion”,

well-received by her fans

Like a stand-up set, if stand-up lasted for three hours and made people cry.

She changes her mind.

And Amanda, the elephant at the center of it all, marches on and trumpets her opinions to the sky.

“Ah, she is a philosopher.”

In Austria, she is deeply associated with jam.

She’s the artist whose lyrics can either save lives with their loving empathy or mock a community’s trauma, depending on how you interpret them.

loudest mime band

“Compassion is very complicated. When I was fourteen years old, a man tied me to a table in his basement.”

ukulele

There Will Be Some Introspection —