Anna Meredith
I would not have missed this evening's show for anything. However, twenty four hours on, I cannot help musing on how this was something of an opportunity missed
It is now two and a half years since Anna Meredith made her Norwich debut on the Friday night for Wild Paths Festival at Norwich Arts Centre, an awesome evening that opened with sets from Lyla Foy and Norwegian post-punk band Pom Poko before Meredith and her band came on stage and blew the place apart. The album 'FIBS' had just been released, and the atmosphere inside the Arts Centre was electric, the packed standing audience already hyped by the support acts, and many from a whole day of venue-hopping around the city. Needless to say, Meredith's set was a triumph.
Fast forward to 2022 and a cavernous St Andrews Hall, with its neatly laid out rows of folding chairs and even more banked seating behind that. A perfect space for orchestras, choirs and musical works on a grand scale, all of which Meredith has masterminded and performed before. What a huge shame, therefore (indeed a wasted opportunity one might say), to book Anna Meredith for just a standard band show for this, the final Saturday night of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival, especially in a year where it is celebrating its 250th Anniversary.
No dispespect to Anna Meredith. You get what you pay for, and tonight's bandshow was pretty much the same show that she and her band delivered during their November tour last year. It features almost all the tracks from 'FIBS', together with a couple of pieces from her 2016 album debut 'Varmints', and a tantalising excerpt from 'Bumps Per Minute', her exciting soundtrack to an interactive dodgem ride that you might have caught last summer at Somerset House in London. How much more exciting would our celebrations have been if that had been brought to Norwich for the fortnight? Or perhaps a re-run of 'Five Telegrams', her moving and memorable commission piece from the opening night of the 2018 BBC Proms season? How good would those visuals have looked inside St Andrews Hall, or even projected onto the building's exterior? (Admittedly the performance would need to have been pushed forward a couple of hours to make it work properly)
Whilst any visit from Anna Meredith to Norwich will always be welcomed, this, to me, was an opportunity missed. Despite this show, from the opening polyrhythmic fever of 'Sawbones' to the pulsating crescendo of 'Paramour', being a multi-layered feast of delight, the venue and this particular set were, unfortunately, a poor match. To be fair, Meredith and her band, in their pristine Abba-like white boiler suits, gave it their all, several times imploring us to leave our seats and dance. It took the pulsating frenzy of 'Nautilus' to get the first audience member to their feet, where they were gradually joined by several dozen loose-limbed revellers, all happy to make use of the unused spaces to the outside of the hall's huge stone pillars. These brave revellers became referred to by Meredith as her 'cloistered dancers'.
It was a real pleasure to see Anna Meredith and her band, back in Norwich, and I would not have missed this evening's show for anything. However, twenty four hours on, I cannot help musing on how this was something of an opportunity missed.
