Reverend Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir
I first came across Reverend Billy back in the mid-nineties. Radical performance artist Bill Talen was starring in a one man show in New York, off Broadway in the heart of Greenwich Village. “I was a Tourist in New Times Square” was a scripted lament for the seedy, dangerous but authentic New York of old, which was rapidly being sanitized out of recognition. Railing against the Disneyfication of 42nd Street, this was a razor sharp parody of an evangelist preacher which, from the start, felt like a character bigger than the play. Shortly after, as if to prove the point, he formed a choir - gospel in tone, but of secular inclination - which started to congregate in downtown Greenwich Village, singing in protest at a society obsessed with consumption. Prankish activism followed, most notably in Disney Stores and Starbucks, but also in banks, and museum and sweatshops, where the Reverend’s form of non-violent protest would habitually get him arrested.
These days, quite where Reverend Billy starts and Bill Talen ends is uncertain, but the howls of protest are completely authentic, as evidenced by the choir’s full throttle performance at the Norwich Arts Centre. Thirteen members of The Stop Shopping Choir (the membership runs to over forty) had been crisscrossing the UK in a bus for ten days by the time they arrived at their final date in East Anglia, but there was no sign that their exhausting schedule had taken a toll. From the moment the choir entered the auditorium, singing as they walked through the audience to the stage, the set was packed with vitality, good humour and prodigious vocal talent.
It has been ten years since the choir last came to Arts Centre, and there has been a noticeable shift in their concerns. Although maintaining that the “Devils” remain the same – consumerism, militarism, banks – the songs placed a far greater emphasis on ecological issues and the implicit connection between the exploitation of people and planet. While no doubt sincere, there was always something a little hokey in the condemnation of Starbucks and Disney, with the loss of neighbourhood spirit and cultural authenticity dealt with by satire and absurdity. This time round we witnessed an altogether darker examination of the imminent threat of climate change.
Reverend Billy’s ursine figure, standing resplendent in all white suit and cowboy boots, looked upon his flock with a beatific smile as they sang of the horrors of the “Shopocalypse” to come. As “The End of the World” moved on to “The Promised Land” the evening was suffused with evangelical furore, notwithstanding the underlying secular message, while “Public Space” – a eulogy to protest – was accompanied by some of the most frenetic, and marvellously shambolic, dancing I have ever seen.
Content to act as master of ceremonies in the first half of the performance, the Reverend then came into his own - it was time for him to deliver his sermon. Touching first on their BP protest at the British Museum, he quickly moved on to the phenomenon of Trump. As one eccentric New Yorker talked about another, there was something touchingly parochial in Billy’s analysis of Trump’s inexplicable rise to power. Rather than be angry, he was almost apologetic, as if he and all the other liberals really should have kept a closer eye on Donald. More in sorrow than fury, he condemned the complacency of the left as much as the madness of the right, in a profoundly insightful commentary on uniquely American issues than nevertheless affects us all.
All of which makes the evening sound terribly earnest, when nothing could be further from the truth. As Billy’s sermon came to a close, there was time for one more number. The audience first held hands, then waved them in the air, and them clapped in time, as the choir stepped down from the stage and danced in the aisles in a revelry of hope and positivity, before leaving Norwich for their home. Let’s hope it’s not another ten years before they return.
