Sebastien Tellier live review
Review of Sebastien Tellier at Concorde 2, Brighton on Jan 25th.
Sunday night in mid January is perhaps not the ideal time for a stroll along the seafront, but the prospect of multitalented Frenchman, Sebastien Tellier at the Concorde was enough to tempt us out into the rain. Tellier is perhaps best known for its controversial Eurovision 2008 entry on behalf of France, sung mostly in English.
With two successful studio albums already behind him, the Eurovision Song Contest seemed like an odd choice. Perhaps this demonstrates his eccentric approach to music performance extends wider than album production and regular gigs, if perhaps not so far into the realms of appearance – unkempt hair and sunglasses despite the near total darkness being closer to de rigueur than out of the ordinary today.
In merciful contrast to the previous night’s experience at Digital, the place is not too packed. At not much above 5’, your humble reviewer has come to expect that the back of other people’s heads is the standard view at most gigs, so it was an added bonus to be able to see anything of the stage through the crowd when the band eventually took to the stage.
I was expecting the setlist to be mostly comprised of tracks from Tellier’s most recent album, Sexuality, released in 2008 amid high expectations, in part due to Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s (of Daft Punk fame) production skills. Personally I am a bigger fan of his earlier albums, most notably Politics (2005) and his acoustic release Universe (2006) and I wondered about how the lighter weight feel of Sexuality would translate to live performance. The band started with two album tracks, Kilometer followed by recent single Sexual Sportswear, and then Eurovision hit Divine. Perhaps it was gig fatigue, or the long walk in the rain that put me in a negative frame of mind, but I was finding the band much more engaging as a live performance than I had been expecting.
I had heard reports from various sources of demonstrations of stereotypical Parisian arrogance and derogatory comments about English audiences, which unsurprisingly didn’t go down well with paying fans, but there was no hint of this tonight. Tellier was personable and amusing, if increasingly blurry round the edges as the night wore on.
Towards the end of the set he played some tracks from his earlier albums, notably Broadway, and to general celebration, La Ritournelle, which he introduced as “my best song”. For me this song is masterful, and tonight’s rendition was the star moment.
From here, the end was in sight: a long encore which mostly involved an empty microphone whilst the band played mostly unseen from behind the smoke ended with Sebastien eventually returning to his wine bottle and centre stage, where he performed an odd masturbation demonstration with the microphone stand which resulted in loud feedback through the speakers. However, you would need to be fairly unobservant to not have picked up on the sexual theme of this gig as a whole so I’m sure the audience got the general idea.
Having missed his sellout gigs in London last summer, and waited whilst tonight’s offering was rescheduled twice, it seemed for a while I was fated never to witness a live show from Mr Tellier. The Concorde as a venue has mixed results for me, but overall tonight’s performance was impressive and exceeded my expectations – 4/5
Alison Waller
