we're changing all the time
Daisy's gig
A song I’ve found this week:
“we never kneel to pray, we kneel to forgive”
I’ve never been to The Four Thieves before, situated at the last stop of a vacant overground line. I find it at the end of a string of once bustling neon-lit restaurants. A young woman rollerblades on the road, totally carefree, pirouetting in half-moon circles.
An excited promotor trips over himself to welcome me to the room. You can hear a pin drop, and I’m very clumsy, so my chair rocks heavy as lead at the back as my bag drops to the floor like a boulder. The room is a buoyant shade of dark, phosphorous blue, full of tables and chairs. Everyone is sat down. There isn’t a phone in sight.
I sit at the back with a glass of translucent blood-red liquid. It looks exactly how it tastes. I didn’t need to buy it. An artist, Jacob Norris, is playing intricate Joni Mitchell-esque, James Taylor-y chords on a classical guitar, then invites Alice Boyd onto the stage, where they perform their new song, ‘The Favourite’.
There’s something about the atmosphere of this night that maybe feels like how music must have been like back in the 70s, an endless carousel of ridiculously talented singer-songwriters pouring their souls out on stage, with captivated audiences picking apart every lyric.
It’s time for my friend Daisy to perform. She presents her hands to me, shaking, then walks to the stage clutching a beautiful old Gibson and a teddy called Rupert, placing him on a stand next to her. I take a photo of her with her film camera, full-flash. She recoils in horror.
Daisy has always been a really captivating songwriter. She used to perform as Dazey, an electronic act with a full band and intricate, maximalist production. Now, she performs stripped back, letting her songwriting self-acceptingly speak for itself.
Even though she’s really anxious, it’s undeniably charming. She’s fully herself in-between songs, charismatic and funny, and the songs themselves flow as easily as waterfalls, structures so well written you don’t even notice there’s a structure at all. Carefully arranged harmonies sung by Alice and Zha back her like a warm bubble bath, and the lap-steel guitar performed by Jacob is never overbearing, always a foundation for the bricks of the band.
Then, she plays it. The song.
I always get this strange feeling with some of my friends’ songs. There is always one song that moves me and weaves itself into the narrative of my life, and I go, “that’s it! That’s the song”. I got it with Ailsa and Pete, Emric, too, and I’m having it with Daisy tonight.
“kid me wants to go, but big me lets me know, we’re changing all the time…”
Isn’t that one of the most beautiful lyrics ever? The near-rhyming couplet of ‘big me’ and ‘kid me’. Calling yourself ‘we’, acknowledging the multiple selves existing within her -
and then there’s a lyric about Daisy’s neighbours; she’ll “never know what they’re fighting about”.
And with that lyric, I can see her. When Daisy performs, it’s like an intimate portal into her life. I don’t see an artist on a stage. Instead, I can so clearly see her in her South East London room at the back of a busy road, playing her songs oh-so-quietly in the face of London noise-complaints. I can see her stopping halfway through a song, trying out a new chord. And I want to keep the mental picture of that forever.
We’re racing towards the future now, with headlines of world war 3 and global warming beyond our comprehension. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what the right step forward is, or how to take any steps at all.
But in 2024, Daisy sat in a room in London after a few years of being beaten around by the music industry, writing beautiful songs to share with friends on stage. There is nothing too grandiose in the lyrics, just every-day thoughts about being human, which makes them the most grand of all. I can hear in Daisy’s songs that she is writing in the quiet, effusing trails of thinking that can only ever be shared in this way.
And that might be part of the stage anxiety, but that’s also part of the magic.
<3