John Maus – The Dome, Tufnell Park
Grimaces, gurns, hipsters punching the air... and a whiff of suspicion
Words Jeremy Allen
Photography Erika Wall
John Maus has vajazzled my brain. Ne’er have I seen anything like this before, not in this context. Those other times, where an imposing presence on stage had threatened to unleash the Holy Ghost, have all but been forgotten. Gesticulating wildly, Maus delivers his songs via a backing track, while he grimaces and gurns and flexes his neck muscles, intermittently punching himself in the face and pulling his own hair. The delivery of the lyrics are but a triviality, a mere sideshow, the words lost in a fug of delay drifting off through holiday camp-style tannoy speakers into the cavernous hall. We are not seeing John Maus as much as we are seeing his intensity. Man, does he have a raging aura.
Poor Maria Minerva, you had to feel for her. She’d pitched up on stage, a lonesome presence, brave yet ultimately unable to reach out to the crowd. Sophisticated mixes rose from her laptop interspersed with intriguing bleeps and glitches, yet not enticing enough to deter the crowd from talking right through her set like a bunch of rude fucking philistines. And Gary War had fared no better, but then he was rubbish.
And then on comes Maus, to ‘Quantum Leap’ from the excellent We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, and something strange happens. Hipsters, suddenly energised — possessed, even — begin punching the air. They’re going bat-shit wild. Maus screams the most emphatic scream, tensing every muscle and straining every sinew and bouncing up and down like some bionic baby that doesn’t like to be fucked with. And since when did hipsters punch the air anyway?
He plays great song after great song from a laptop on the floor and yet that hardly seems important. It’s like when Andrew WK arrived with his idiot agenda, to party hard. That was it. Maus too seems like a totem of these times, a raging figure of confusion and bewilderment, his minimal set-up complementing the supposed age of austerity. Tonight combines the euphoria of a rave with the hysteria of evangelism, and while it’s not an experience that’ll be easy to forget, there’s just the faintest doubt in the back of our minds that we’re all being hoodwinked.
