Laurie Anderson has a new take on Moby Dick. She tells Renaud Machart all about it
I caught up with Laurie Anderson in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. She was having breakfast at the hotel where she and her entourage were staying during the Spoleto Festival, an event that the Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti created as a counterpart to the Italian Festival di Spoleto.
It happened to be Anderson’s birthday. At 52 she is nudging middle age. But the few grey hairs that can be detected in her celebrated neo-punk – or neo- Warholian – hairstyle do not in any way detract from her slim figure and youthful face.
Just a touch eccentric and on occasion fey, Anderson seems to have floated down the decades almost effortlessly. Her sense of humour is delicately spiky, and her voice no more than a subdued whisper.
After being an icon of the 1970s in New York’s Soho district, where performers and artists lived and mingled, and then becoming a successful pop singer in the 1980s, Anderson today is neither a has- been nor an artiste so irreversibly typecast that she can never call herself into question.
Anderson lives in a world that is very much her own – a world that some find a little too chilly, too minimal, too way- out or too dark, but one with an idiosyncratic brand of dry wit.
But it is an immediately recognisable world. She has kept it alive down the years in the most natural manner possible. Anderson is at once dated and extraordinarily part of her time. That is probably what lends her music an ageless quality, though some try to pigeon-hole it as New Age.
So what does she like listening to? “Gypsy music, salsa.” Of course they have nothing in common with her sort of music, she explains. The question probably bugs her. What about Steve Reich and Philip Glass, with whom she shares some aspects of her musical vocabulary and, more particularly, a love of repetition? “Yes, sometimes …”
But what else? Anderson suddenly becomed animated: “Above all, not experimental music. I hate it. Those meaningless, tuneless sounds … how is it possible?” She calms down again.
Anderson now seems relaxed after two long performances of her new show, Moby Dick, which she has been trying out in Charleston before taking it to the Maison de la Culture in the Paris suburb of Bobigny this month.
“I love being here in Charleston, in this gentle atmosphere which is typical of small American towns, where people are so friendly. Take this waitress, who keeps on bothering us by asking if everything is okay. She really wants us to feel at home.
“Look at that exhibition of paintings by amateurs out there on the square. People are in contact with reality. They paint, they exhibit, they’re happy. They’re doing their thing.”
Anderson would feel more at home, I imagined, in the “jungle of the big city”, which her music seems directly to echo. “For our really big-budget shows we have to have venues in big cities, but, you know, I love nothing more than coming into contact with other audiences, and performing in small theatres.
“I regularly travel to out-of-the-way places. I take a plane, I go there with my own instruments, I’m my own sound engineer. I sing, I recite, I talk. And I leave [the] next day. I’m back in New York by early afternoon. I just love that.”
The image the public has of Anderson is that of a multimedia performance artist – a visual artist, a musician, a singer, an instrumentalist (electronic violin, guitar and electronic keyboard) and a writer.
Once upon a time she used to be an art critic. The subject she read when studying for a degree at Barnard College, which she entered in 1966 at the age of 19, was the visual arts.
Then came her exciting move to New York, where she met artists, poets and singers. She began to perform in galleries, took part in eccentric happenings, and put on her first “official” show, As If, in 1974. In 1981 a leading record company, Warner-Chappell, brought out her first disc – O Superman – which was a hit.
I asked whether the record industry had managed to “digest” her unclassifiable music. “There was that hit, it’s true, but now my producers don’t really know how to react during studio sessions. Occasionally someone takes the plunge: ‘Couldn’t there be just a little more bass there?’ And with good reason – there’s no bass at all!
“Then they get fed up and don’t say another word. Perhaps it’s better that way. I’ll stay with Warner, but my next title, taken from the show Moby Dick, will be recorded at Nonesuch, a record company that works with Philip Glass and some other less mainstream artists.
“I’ll take that opportunity to get some of the music recorded by professional singers. In the stage version the three performers who sing are first and foremost actors. They do a very good job, but for the disc, without any visual back-up, I want to concentrate on the purity of the musical result.”
Anderson’s minimal musical language suffers no approximations. She has the reputation of being a control freak. “I’m obsessed with perfection, and I check absolutely everything. It’s unreasonable, as it takes a lot out of me, and I then have to go on stage and perform. But I want everything to be just as I’ve imagined it – not just the relationship with the visuals and the pace of the spoken word against a musical rhythm, but also what I like to call the ‘rhythmical eye’, that coincidence of the general pace of the show with the visuals. The overall effect is all-important, and depends enormously on how all those elements are woven in.”
People have been surprised that they could not understand every word of the spoken text of Moby Dick (matters are not made any easier by Melville’s prose and some electronic transformations of the performers’ voices). “We had a few problems with the amplification, which is a real headache in a big theatre like the one here in Charleston.
“Language is especially a problem abroad. I don’t like overtitles, as they tend to distract the spectator. The best system is one where little screens are fitted to the top of the seats, which means that people don’t have to keep on looking up at the top of the stage, thus missing a few key moments of the action.
“I don’t yet know what we’ll do in Paris. But I’d like the actors to speak some passages in French. I’ve already tried that out, but it involves a huge amount of extra effort and doesn’t always work.”
Like many North Americans and Britons, Anderson first read Moby Dick as a child. But she was left with unpleasant memories of having to plough through page after page of tedious description, endless digressions and technical details to do with ropes, ships and fish.
When she was asked to think about the idea of doing an educational TV show on the theme of Moby Dick, she reread the book and was immediately fascinated.
“I read it five times in a row with enormous enjoyment. The language was difficult to set to music, but I found passages that had an extraordinary musical rhythm. Above all, I understood the book’s significance, which is naturally much greater than it seems at first sight. It contains a cosmic vision of life, despite its unavoidable conclusion – death. I hope that all that will become clear in the shorter, tightened-up version we’ll be putting on at Bobigny.”