ONE advantage of allowing your songs to be used in adverts is that you can afford to pay for two shadow puppet artists to go on tour with you. The result: a visually stunning, very theatrical gig where the images projected live on to a screen above t
he stage almost outshone what Leslie Feist, officially the star of the show, was doing.
Feist's visual team had come up with a different set-piece for every one of her songs, complementing the Canadian singer-songwriter's lyrics using torches, paints, and cardboard cut-outs. Sometimes these were frivolous, sometimes terribly sad, such as a painting of a sailboat on an ocean gradually submerged by waves, hand-painted on to it as the song progressed – a fairytale told via the medium of auto-destructive art.
The thought that went into the visuals is a tribute to Feist's own attention to detail too, of course. She began the show solo and silhouetted behind a screen, harmonising with herself using a loop pedal. From then on she deftly switched between full band accompaniment and solo spots, and guitar and piano. She's not great at stage patter – as she admitted herself, after spending ages blethering to Canadians in the audience at the expense of everyone else – but she's a consummate musician, her bluesy, distorted guitar adding sharp teeth to her usually mellow, inoffensive hum-alongs.
Musically, Feist is a peculiar proposition, part Norah Jones, part PJ Harvey. She experiments, but she also gives the crowd what they want – namely a set almost entirely taken from current, breakthrough album The Reminder. The biggest cheer, inevitably, was for 1234, the bouncy song from the ad, but it was quieter moments, such as The Park and Limit to Your Love, that were most affecting. Somehow, with help from the visuals, it all hung together.
The full article contains 312 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
