Christopher Owens delivers beauty at the Brudenell
I saw him bound onto the stage, five foot five, as nervous as an introvert best man, unnecessarily fumbling open mouth organ cases, and I saw him leave a giant. That’s the power of performance art.
I’ve seen times when the spotlight squashes a performer like a rabbit in the headlights before an oncoming three-wheeler. And I’ve seen performers skittishly wander under it and make it seem like candlelight that flickers to the whims of their majesty. Christopher Owens was the latter, even if he never knew it himself.
He strode onto the stage in baggy shorts, with pallid legs the complexion of an Alaskan Vampire in illuminous alien socks, and he strode off, having shared all his internal vulnerabilities, a mammoth of modern pop songwriting.
In a performance that spanned his entire career to date, including an unreleased track to boot, the former Girls frontman was in stirring style. Surrounded by nothing other than flowers and an empty Belgian beer crate, Owens’ careworn showing was a perfect statement in support of the old adage that less can be more.
His guitar might’ve even remained in the same tuning all night, and his voice barely broke above a gentle, lived-in croon. But given what this tour represented: a man finding his feet again after a series of hard knocks, to put it perversely simply, the stripped-back nature, and rise from nervousness to eminence, was a fitting allegory for all he had overcome to be there.
“I swear this is gonna work,” he uttered at one point. Ostensibly, this was a remark related to the fact that he had selected a mouth organ in the wrong key to accompany a track as an experiment, but you could read more into it than that. It did work, and I think it will.
Picking up where the support act, Nicholas Grant Band, left off, he delivered beloved sweetness. His poetic, honest songwriting didn’t just speak for itself. By the end, it was roaring. Behind a veil of hair, Owens was orating, searching for gentle peace. And about 120 people in Leeds left feeling a little more empowered because of that.
Owens certainly did, filled with artistic zeal, he plonked himself behind the Common Rooms’ upright piano afterwards and serenaded the stragglers with an impromptu encore of the most unplanned sort. He had found his feet, and he was growing in stature. In a true poetic sense, he clearly finds beauty in things, and you can’t keep a performer like that down for long.
