Duck, Toast, and the Sacrament Reimagined
NICK TUCKER
For all of you who have seen Bob Log III live before, you will know he defies description. For any of you who haven’t, that makes my job tricky, given that the main purpose of a review is, largely, to describe what you’ve seen. And I’m not entirely sure what I have seen.
But it was, certainly, transcendentally eccentric. Perhaps as a shorthand, I’ll start by describing Bob Log as a cross between late-period Tom Waits – the ragged discordant Tom Waits of Hoist That Rag – and Frank Sidebottom, with his large papier-mâché head swapped for a motorcycle helmet with an alien-looking breathing nozzle. Or maybe Elvis Presley reimagined by David Lynch, dark and impish. Bob wore a glittery one-piece jumpsuit beneath his silver helmet and emitted the frenzied sounds of a carnival barker on acid.
He also had stage props: a giant inflatable duck whom he introduced as his angry stage manager, then later reintroduced as a large yellow inflatable goblet for passing prosecco around the crowd – something I would describe as impractical. He also had a yellow working toaster on the corner of the stage, which was fed sliced bread throughout the show so the audience could listen to his music while enjoying the soft aroma of toast – which brings me to the music.
Without having heard it, you could be forgiven for thinking that everything described so far veers between self-consciously oddball and, well… gimmicky shit. But Bob’s special talent is that it doesn’t. It works perfectly together with the bizarre stage presence, and if anything, acts as a sleight-of-hand misdirection to show how virtuosic a slide guitar player, and effortless one-man band, he is. His music is all clang and stomp and driving rhythm with the sound of Delta blues mixed with hillbilly electronica, beneath a muffled rasping voice distorting into the microphone down the black funnel of his crash helmet.
INTIMACY AND ENGAGEMENT
The effect of this oddly funny lunacy was unique. I’d seen Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds two nights before in Brighton: they are a force of nature, but so is Bob Log III in a way you’re just not going to get from big stadium acts. There was an intimacy and a real engagement with everyone in the room. People were invited up on stage to be anointed with little gold stickers, or to take selfies sitting on his lap (as long as they had a piece of toast). They shared the sacrament of a giant inflatable duck, and everyone danced and smiled.
There was a rare sense of real joy, an ode to eccentricity and community and fun, that was both about the music and not about the music, yet only really worked because the music was so good and everything was done deftly so that nothing jarred or took you out of the moment. When it was all over, everyone poured out of The Piper into the dark summer night with the kind of smiles on their faces that only come from having shared in the strangeness of what it can mean to be human.
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