Tuesday nights at Meow are always a bit of a mystery. Never more so than when that Tuesday night falls slap bang in the middle of the summer holiday season. So with a good portion of the capital’s gig-going population either out of town, or just as likely suffering from some sort 0f post-Festive (or post-Festival-of-choice, even) hangover, it was a pleasant surprise to see a fairly decent turnout for Nabihah Iqbal’s Aotearoa-debut outing last week.
I estimate the crowd was
something close to a couple of hundred, which made the venue lively enough, at
about half-capacity. We were “warmed up” - stifling heat aside - by Wellington
duo, Japes, who may ordinarily be less a duo and more the solo project of one Mia
Kelly. It was all very low key, with Kelly and friend (Lochie Noble?) serving
up morsels of intimate dream-pop moments for about 20 fairly compelling minutes.
What was less a pleasant
surprise, and more of a disappointment, for me anyway, was the fact that Iqbal
arrived on stage without a band. Just her and a guitarist-come-saxophonist. She
later apologised for that scenario, saying she couldn’t afford the expense that
comes with a full-band tour. Which is probably fair enough considering the pre-tour
logistical uncertainties she faced as a mostly under-the-radar artist in this
part of the world.
But it meant that the
layers of shoegaze brilliance found on last year’s Dreamer album were a little compromised
by the use of background tracking, making it less rock n roll and more
lightweight karaoke. That’s not to say that those tracks didn’t work well
enough, because they did, it’s just the sense that they could all have been a
hell of a lot more.
The Dreamer album, which
provided Iqbal with something of a global breakthrough in 2023, was her main
point of reference throughout the one-hour-plus set, with versions of the title
track, ‘Sunflower’, ‘Gentle Heart’, ‘Lilac Twilight’, ‘Closer Lover’, and naturally,
the wonderful ‘This World Couldn’t See Us’, all taking pride of place.
We also got ‘Zone 1 to
6000’ from her 2017 release Weighing Of The Heart, and a pretty great cover of
The Cure’s masterpiece ‘A Forest’ as the penultimate song before a one-song
encore.
Iqbal was very chatty,
offering what felt like stream-of-consciousness musings about her life and the
state of the world between songs. A fully qualified barrister, a literary nerd,
and an unrepentant social activist, the London-based Iqbal seems like a very sincere
and humble sort of individual, and at various points she expressed genuine
surprise to be on stage performing such personal songs to a group of complete strangers,
some 12,000 miles from home.
Such warmth and the sense
that everything was mostly unrehearsed - and executed as well as it could be - wasn’t
quite enough for me to get over my initial disappointment about there not being
a full band, but it did help, and as I left the venue I reminded myself that it
doesn’t always have to be about big production and rock n roll to be a good
night out. And sometimes, relatively low key Tuesday nights at Meow have their
place.
Casting aside my own live-performance “issues” expressed above, here’s the official clip for Iqbal’s excellent ‘This World Couldn’t See Us’ from last year …
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