By Saoirse Pira
It was already shaping up to be a perfect day in Manchester – deliciously warm, no-jacket, late-spring. Armed with cold pints, hands marked with star-stamps, we made our way down to the basement of Soap, to a room basked in deep blue light, most aptly describable, without a hint of pretentiousness or irony, as intimate. The stage was ready, washed in magenta, with drums, a set of guitars, a keyboard, a microphone wrapped in a keffiyeh. The small space filled slowly, some arriving in pairs, some alone; standing idly, making anxious conversation – When did you find her? Isn’t it crazy, she’s here? England in summer always has that feeling of heaving towards greatness – the sun comes out and everyone is waiting for something to happen. In our own little world, there, so were we, suspended in a waiting we knew would lead us to our own slice of greatness.
As the room filled, the opener, Bells Larsen made his way to the stage. He played acoustic guitar, careful, considered. He was letting us in, it seemed, and the audience obliged, listened. He played a song of love and loss and change, ‘514-415’, afterwards explaining the lyrics, ‘When we met, I was a girl / Since then so much has changed / Now I could be your lover boy / You’d still look at me the same.’ He told us about the record, the album he’s spent the last year touring, how he recorded the vocals pre- and post-transition, harmonising with himself. It was beautiful, he was beautiful, and we were primed for softening. Perfect pieces falling into perfect place.
By the end of Larsen’s set, the space had filled marvelously: full, but not crushing, a fact I feel compelled to self-indulgently put down to the strong moral character of the crowd, by virtue of their good taste. In that delicious lull between opener and main act, our open-hearted contemplation gave way to that wonderfully jittery anticipation. Then, Eliza and her band walked onstage and, without ceremony or preamble, launched straight into ‘Better Song’. If Bells Larsen had spent his set drawing the room closer, ‘Better Song’ pushed it right back open. It’s the first track on Good Story, the record she’s been touring, which confronts the pull towards self-mythology, the impulse to string together a narrative from a life, making it art. In the wake of her debut album Going Through It, in which McLamb excavated her life’s experience and hurt, Good Story deconstructs that impulse. It poses that crucial question: where is the end of the road, when a life has been made narrative – where do we go from the story? For now, at least, we go here: to warm alive bodies moving, dancing; to guitars that heave, oversize the room, wrap us all under some heavy communion of excitement and feeling. From there, they move seamlessly into ‘Suffering’, opening with a lullaby-like piano figure. Eliza sings the first lines with a side-eyed irony, poking self-aware fun at her own tendency towards melancholy, ‘Poor Maudlin child / So wise beyond my years / Sigh here’. It’s a song that plays with the ways we can, and so often do, become attached to our own misery, holding our suffering less as a burden than a pillar of identity. We have, for whatever reason, found ourselves at the mercy of a conviction which dictates that incredible pain is the noble door to genius, and so suffering should be directed towards artistic creation accordingly. Of course, this cannot be true – there is nothing romantic about suffering. And this, McLamb makes clear, as the song lurches into its chorus, and the band follows suit. The audience shouts the lyrics back, and we’re a room full of people engaged in this dance of irony. But, as all good irony is, this is an irony engaged directly with feeling. Coming to terms with the compulsion, the only way out is through.
From there, the set moved easily. Eliza McLamb has this wonderful, grounded quality as a performer. She is embodied, assured, picking up and setting down acoustic and electric guitars when necessary. It all felt natural, whether more rock or folk-adjacent, it was all feeling – it was just a question of whether the feeling called for dancing or swaying. I joked later that I felt God at the Eliza McLamb concert in Soup, Manchester. Of course, I try to be funny, but ultimately I meant it. So many people feeling so much in one place. There’s something about music – no wonder all religions have song. Oh, and it is just so good to dance. And to dance to ‘Forever, Like That’, sing in unison along to ‘While it’s good to get a grip / It’s better to let go of it’ – to remember, to let go. Slow down, stand careful, watch Eliza sway, hands behind her back, singing ‘Mausoleum’. Back to dancing, stupid, uncaring, because they’re playing ‘Modern Woman’ and singing ‘I want something to feel, I want anything that’s real’, and I feel, and this is all so real and I don’t know what to do but dance – which is fine, because that is really all I have to do.
Between songs, Eliza spoke about the record, the tour, Manchester, how easy it is to find vegan food in England, how much she likes it, how lucky she feels to be able to tour here. I feel lucky, too, in the pulse of the room, laughing and cheering as one part of the audience-whole. I feel so incredibly, ineffably lucky, when she moves into ‘Girls I Know’, and within seconds I am holding my friend. I am here with Immy, experiencing in motion what has always, since the first listen, been to me the song of us. It’s a song about friendship; love when you are young and unwell, love when you are grown and better. When we met, we were so young and so unwell, spinning out in different directions, and ultimately it was a friendship that had to end. And for years that was it, and in those years we got better. We reconnected a few years later, drinking-age now. We met in a pub, and over outrageous mixed drinks, I told her she should listen to Eliza McLamb, her music, the podcast Binchtopia. I saw the UK tour announcement when I was on my way into class, I have never forwarded something on so fast. In seconds, a reply, mutual incredible excitement. She said I must stay with her, we can have a sleepover – she had been at university, living in Manchester for the last few years. I was on exchange studying in Prague for the year, I would have to get a plane. A few months later, then, I did, and so there we were. We hold each other, Eliza sings a few meters away from us, and it all washes over me, ‘We all meet in a new place, where nothing feels as good / And nothing feels as bad / That’s the choice we made’. My whole young life spreads out somewhere in invisible space, and nobody has ever been so lucky. To be young and in pain (‘When everything kicked in / When our bodies lost the fight’), to be older, to be happy. To be with my friend who I love so much, my arm around her, able to see her live, ‘smiling to herself, talking and eating well’. I look at my friend, the woman she is, the girl that I knew. Everything I have ever felt collapses into love.
As the concert comes to a close, Eliza lets us know that we’ve reached the point where she would usually leave the stage, the crowd cheering, and come back to play an encore. She says she finds this indulgent, and so instead stays put, plays ‘Salt Circle’. It’s the title song from her 2022 EP, and she plays it because this is her first time overseas, and so the first time most of us would have heard it live. I don’t think I’ve ever felt a room swell so much with feeling. Warm bodies so close together, hearts beating and voices catching and all singing, ‘I’m always gonna feel it / I’ve spent enough time trying not to believe it / I’m always gonna feel the way I do / And I do feel it all, all the time’. At the end of the song, as the intro to ‘Getting Free’ plays, Eliza calls out from the stage, “Keep your heart open.” I keep the love in my heart, keep my heart open. The girl next to me is dancing so zealously, and it’s my ticket to dancing with as much enthusiasm. There’s music to dance to and a life to apply it to, and Eliza is singing, ‘There’s so many ways it could have gone down / Pretty much all of it easier than right now’, and it’s all true to me now. My life is before and after me, and I’m in it, in the present, at the center. ‘When it’s just me and the world, I make a place I can find escape from / Running down the street, away from what I thought I wanted / Getting free.’
When the show ends, Immy and I stand eagerly at the merch table. We buy matching tour tees, and make our way to the bus stop, and most of what we have to say boils down to ‘Wow.’ We get back to her house, change into our new t-shirts and old pyjama bottoms, start a show on the TV, fall asleep on the sofa before the episode ends. It was a perfect day in Manchester. All I know is love.
Featured Image: Saoirse Pira