Piano Magic

An unprecedented, magical and slightly unsettling location provided the perfect setting for what Glen Johnson himself, in a relaxed chat after the show, called the most incredible venue he's played in fifteen years of live activity.

The place is the Grave, the enormous natural cavity roughly sixty metres deep, into which Giovanni Anelli first descended in 1938, thereby launching the exploration of the underground complex of Castellana; a breathtaking setting, both for its sheer scale and for the majestic presence of calcifications slowly deposited over millions of years, testifying to the natural vitality of a seemingly inert material, but also for the frightening legends handed down by popular tradition and for the very symbolism of a "descent into the underworld" inherent in man's venturing into the depths of the earth.

Staying on theme, there's also the English reading of the word "grave", promptly picked up on by Glen's wit, which only confirmed in advance how fitting a choice it was to host the tormented, spectral music of his Piano Magic in such a setting. Credit for the choice goes to an association of dedicated enthusiasts from Castellana Grotte, who nurtured the idea of organising a small festival inside the town's symbolic landmark in the Murgia area near Bari; that idea became a project, which secured a share of public funding following a call from the Puglia Region, thanks to which the Feedback Festival became a reality — three special evenings, free of charge and limited to 250 attendees, in which the only point of the Caves connecting to the outside world saw its cyclopean, water-carved vault fill with the notes of music equally far removed from the ordinary (the other two artists featured in the festival were John De Leo on September 30th and Spiritual Front on October 14th).

The first bit of magic of the evening arrives well before the concert's scheduled start time, in the surprising sonic response of the environment to Piano Magic's music: darkness falls over the Apulian town, whipped by the first autumn wind, as from the chasm opening onto the cave's abyss one hears rising up hazy percussion, electric piano notes and the enchanted vocalisations of Angéle David Guillou. The two lifts that will carry the audience down are stopped at cave level and cannot be called back up to the surface except by "staff", so the very few onlookers have no choice but to peer over the edge of the pit to watch the soundcheck from a dizzying aerial vantage point above the artists rehearsing. And indeed, even from this rather unusual observation point, the harmony of notes and words created by the figures that, from so far away, appear little more than tiny dots comes through remarkably clear and crystalline: an excellent omen for the actual concert, and proof that, thanks also to the excellent work of whoever handled the amplification, the sound doesn't get lost in the enormous void nor is it in the least undermined by the irregularity of the rocky walls.

The feeling is confirmed a couple of hours later, when the "hall" begins to fill up with the lucky spectators, brought down in small groups for this extraordinary night-time opening of the cave. Admiring, curious glances are the order of the day, both from those already familiar with the Grave and from the many spectators drawn by the uniqueness of the event from various parts of Italy (Rome, Bologna, even Cagliari): a glance at the rocky "dome", another at the solemn shapes of the limestone concretions, the worried acknowledgment of the cold and the ambient humidity, wonder at the spectacle of nature and equally at seeing such a setting fitted out with a stage, coloured lights, a sound system and a few rows of chairs. All the elements of an ordinary concert would seem to be there, in short, were it not for the extraordinary nature of the place, to which the band decided to conform, offering a set already billed as "very very acoustic".

Glen Johnson's recent acoustic leanings had, moreover, already found expression in the latest, extremely limited release under the Piano Magic name, namely those "Home Recordings" through which some of the songs written over more than a decade were reworked in a bare, minimal key, largely unplugged. That the shape of the evening would echo that of the home recordings was thus fairly likely, while it was much less predictable that of the fifteen songs eventually played, only three had already been given the "acoustic treatment" on that precious CD-R.

It's around 10pm when the band takes the stage, with line-up and instrumentation apparently at full strength; but the opening notes of "You Never Loved This City" are enough to reveal the tenor of a set in which, understandably, priority will be given to some of the songs whose original versions were already more acoustic, slow or atmospheric. The guitars are mostly arpeggiated (Franck Alba's often taking on Spanish-tinged tones), Jerome Tcherneyan's drums are tasked chiefly with producing austere, resonant rhythms, while Angèle's keyboard functions for the most part as an electric piano.

The opening triptych, rounded out by "Soldier's Song" and "England's Always Better", stays true to the choice of a repertoire already well suited to the setting, marked only by the alternation between guitar-driven and piano-driven songs. With "The Nightmare Goes On", however, the atmosphere turns darker and more ritualistic, the lights shift to violet, while the rhythms echo martial propulsion, marking time over the uniform synth carpet: the inevitable Dead Can Dance echoes of the original are thus heightened, opening the doors to a shadowy nightmare that takes on a whole different flavour underground.

The first surprise then comes with the incredible reworking of "Deleted Scenes", of which Glen Johnson feels the need to point out how different it is from the pronounced synth backbone of the track found on "Disaffected", and the fact that this is only the second time it has ever been performed live in acoustic form.

After a brief bit of banter following Glen's own hesitation over the opening part of "Part-Monster", a spectral lullaby even back in the days of the album of the same name, it's time for two of the finest reworkings collected on "Home Recordings", namely "Dark Ages" – with Angèle's voice truly magical and perfectly at ease on the song written for Vashti Bunyan – and "Incurable", one of the possible mission statements of Piano Magic's music, whose piano-and-voice version's clarity doesn't fail to send more than a few shivers down the spine.

The other surprise is an early preview of the title track of the band's forthcoming album, currently being reconsidered, "Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet", a song about the hopes of a would-be suicide (thus also well suited to the history of the place), heavily cadenced and obsessive, and delivered at times by Glen in an unprecedented, boozy baritone register.

From the future we move to the distant past, that of "Low Birth Weight" (1999), from which "The Fun Of The Century" is exhumed, presented in a strange version vaguely reminiscent of the drunken dance of "Golden Brown" and fitted with a long, ethereal coda. It's the prelude to the close of the standard set, which after a subdued "When I'm Done (This Night Will Fear Me)" culminates in a touching "Vacancies", slightly slowed down and stripped of the electric emphasis of the original found on the EP "Dark Horses", so as to bring out even more the sweet, assured vocal nuances of a chilly Angèle, who even in this most unusual live setting proved once again to be among the finest female vocalists around.

After the customary break (even shorter than usual, there being no backstage), the closing encore is entrusted to the two songs that, in turn, sealed with understated grace what are perhaps the English band's finest albums, namely "Disaffected" and "The Troubled Sleep Of Piano Magic". For both performances, the line-up that returns to the stage is stripped down to the bone, with only Franck Alba's acoustic guitar accompanying the respective singers, first Glen for "You Can Never Get Lost, When You've Nowhere To Go" and then Angèle for the deeply sweet and meaningful "Comets", whose lines "you just don't have to wait for the right time, because like comets il could be the last" can't help but be linked to the uniqueness of the occasion.

But it still isn't over, despite the goodbyes and the first signs of the audience filing out, because a fresh round of encouraging applause spurs on the band's evident wish to linger a few more minutes in such a once-in-a-lifetime setting; so there's time for one more song (the fifteenth of the night), that half-spoken, half-sung "No Closure", dug up from "Artists' Rifles" as a farewell to an evening in which the enduring stability of stone and the impalpable fleetingness of notes met and balanced each other perfectly. And yet, looking closely, just as the dripping process shows that the rock of the Castellana Caves is living, ever-changing matter, so too does music prove capable of carving emotions and images into memory; this is probably exactly what many of the lucky visitors were thinking, once they were whisked, by lifts that felt all too quick, from the cold bowels of the earth to "see the stars again" beneath a sky that, in truth, seemed to promise rain and autumn.

As expected, no music could have been better suited than Piano Magic's to be performed in such a solemn place, so charged with atmosphere. After all, the bond between the English band and these mysterious underground caverns – both physical and of the soul – lies not only in the atmospheres and demons that Glen Johnson continues to exorcise through his music, but also, as he himself noted with his subtle irony, in the band's enduring status as an... underground act. For one (unforgettable) evening, in more ways than one.

Photos by Enzo Totaro (on this page) and Fabrizio Grassi (home page and gallery)

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