Destroyer – Heaven, London
Plenty of sax appeal as Dan Bejar oozes smooth in London
Words Tim Burrows
Photography Tim Boddy
Is the saxophone the key instrument to drag us out of the inane/insane fight to the bottom that constitutes livin’ in 2011? Don’t get your hopes up, but as Destroyer’s Joseph Shabason squeezed and blew and threw his sax on around on the Heaven stage, I dreamed of a day in which all those indie rock guitarists contributing to the deadening of things through their merry-go-round guitar lines are forced to pick up one of these and make a grown up noise. Despite its return to prominence through Planningtorock’s W and others, the sax is an instrument so belittled by associations with Kenny G et al that all mention of it must come with tongue firmly wedged in cheek. It is an ironic approach that boxes away its role as the closest musical equivalent to shagging and/or shitting, giving it the honour of being the most down and dirtily “human” of all woodwind.
What of Mr Destroyer himself? While the smooth funk outfit played around him, Dan Bejar, fuzzy-haired and dressed all in white, was dead-centre: a mystic in the old school sense, i.e. intoxicated, and slowly reaching pissed-up clarity with the aid of the containers of alcohol lined up in front of him on the floor of the stage. He frequently ducked for a swig — a can of Red Stripe here, a plastic glass of wine there — before rising to stare intently into the middle distance and deliver the trim, sharp lines to these incredible songs, largely taken from album-of-the-year contender Kaputt.
During songs such as the gorgeous title-track, ‘Blue Eyes’ and ‘Savage Night At The Opera’, Bejar delivered lines that seemed to dance around and through the funk jam, but never above it. Nearly 40, he grew up in Canada hooked on British indie, and while there was the 1980s Orange Juice/Talk Talk/Bowie vibe here, watching this “well-drilled band + poetically-conscious and out-on-his-own frontman = brilliant gig” equation played out on stage, I also couldn’t help thinking of The Fall and Pulp, so-called “indie” bands who dragged themselves up through verve and lyricism, while still retaining the shades of shonkiness (or is it honesty?) that means they’ll never quite cross over into the stage-managed upper echelons of pop – something that keeps them down there amongst the fight.
The set closed, as Kaputt does, with the lyrically-epic piece of hushed up disco, ‘Bay Of Pigs’. “Listen, I’ve been drinking /As our house lies in ruin / I don’t know what I’m doing / Alone, in the dark / At the park or at the pier / Watching ships disappear in the rain…” So, depressive disco, then — but not self-pitying. Bejar has made sumptuous funk-poetry out of his predicament, which he knows might be some of his audience’s, too.
Read a Destroyer interview here
