Broadcast, Glasgow
10th May 2023
Adventures In Limbo has been a tour to promote Saul Adamczewski’s album of the same name. Rhys Delany covers the final show for Louder Than War.
Saul Adamczewski is a controversial figure. His earliest musical breakthroughs were as the jovial indie boy band The Metros, but after getting lost in the druggy squats of London he remerged with the Fat White Family.
In 2021, Fat White frontman Lias Saoudi (along with Adelle Stripe) wrote the book Ten Thousand Apologies, detailing the life of the group in all it’s grim reality. From drug overdoses to mental breakdowns and physical turmoil, Adamczewski was central to all of this.
After years of struggling with heroin use, Adamczewski today appears healthier, happier. Perhaps this is also the answer to his recent productivity. This tour was promoting the release of his new album Adventures In Limbo (only available from the merch desk) but in the years since the last Fat White Family album, he’s produced music for the Black Lips, composed music for short films, collaborated with the incompetent publisher Morbid Books, released another Karaoke For One album, and just last month uploaded an album of drone tracks to SoundCloud.
Last night I attended the final show of the tour in Glasgow’s Broadcast. Over the last year, Adamczewski has played this venue twice already. In those shows, he played a mix of Fat White rarities, Insecure Men anthems and what are now his newest songs. Like this show, they were seated and acoustic.
For the two previous Broadcast gigs, Saul was backed by just one man with a trumpet. For this tour, he has played with more of a full band but each gig had slight variations. He’s been accompanied by vibraphones, clarinets and more at previous shows; at last night’s show, it was keys, drums, and trumpet – still fairly minimal.
The performance opened with Morbid Books leader Lev Parker reciting Wayne’s Poem, a sombre story about true romance and cannibalism, leading elegantly into the new songs of Saul. And new they were. The set opened with a song not on the Adventures In Limbo album. Likewise, there was another new tune (We Love the Queen?) played midway through.
Not every song from the album was played, but the cream was there. The Midlands, Kent and the Ballad Of Paul Sykes sound as delicate as they do on the album but have added intimacy by the low lighting and seated audience. The songs about his fellow Fat White Family members, Brain and Waiting For Adam, paint a picture of strange people doing strange things.
This collection of songs feels like a portrait of what ‘Great Britain’ has become and that portrait is both disturbed and pathetic. Pebble-dashed grey houses filled with eccentric weirdos. There is melancholy to Adamczewski’s new songs, but the occasional wry smile as he croons through the night shows a side of calm to a man who has spent many years in chaos.
~
All photographs courtesy of Through The Eyes Of Ruby. More of their work can be found on Facebook and Instagram.
All words by Rhys Delany. More of his writing can be found on his Authors Archive and he can also be found on Twitter.
[Original article published 12/05/2023 and can be found here]
Comments
Post a Comment