Alanis Morissette: the review

Alanis Morissette: the review

28 June, 2012
by: Lowri

I'm broke but I'm happy.

Alanis Morissette's 'Jagged Little Pill' was released at the perfect time for a certain number of thirty-somethings. I was fifteen. It was heartache and flared jeans prime-time. 

We would listen to it together while drinking taboo and lemonade, admitting that we too would feel weird being treated like a princess. That we also knew how those Catholic girls could be. That we knew all about being wined, dined and sixty-nined. And of course we'd go down on him in a theatre!

We collectively scratched our nails down someone else's back in our fantasies, hoping our imaginary exes could feel it, dreaming of a day when we could be that cutting, hoping that we would have lives that exciting, and be brave enough to be that 'perverted'.

So news that she's playing a gig in Brixton leads to excited reminiscing, each of us digging out our 'Jagged Little Pill' memories, thrilled to be revisiting the worn but still tender places in our hearts reserved for the kind of girl-glory Alanis incited. There is much passing round of lyrics, tingles at our desks while we listen to that album and remember how poignant it was to us all.

There is no support act at Brixton Academy – it's purely 'An Evening With Alanis' and for this I'm glad. Concern circulates that she might play a lot of her new material. But we needn't have worried, Alanis delivers every track we require, and the front-left pocket of devotees collected tonight belt out Every. Single. Word. 

You know you're at a pop concert rather than a 'gig' when people in the front row call security 'cause you 'pushed in'. Oh dear. They don't like our singing. They don't like our effusive displays of Alanis love. Or our dancing. 

I was imagining a mosh full of women about my age, laughter, a sense of tongue-in-cheek unity as we mocked our own past obsession. But these women have got SO SERIOUS. Instead of lighters, there are hundreds of iphones aloft, so these women (and some men) don't watch the nymph as she careers around the stage in person, but on a tiny screen. This is sad. What are you going to do? Go home and watch it there? Enjoy it more when you've posted it on youtube?

Alanis darts about, all shiny, swinging hair, holding her hands to her heart and repeating 'thank you so much', genuinely touched by how much we all clearly love her. Her new songs are a mixture of rocky Batman-esque numbers or slow hand-waving ballads. Very nice – but not why we're here sorry darling. The hits are what we want and what we get: You Oughta Know, Head Over Feet, Ironic, Hand In My Pocket, You Learn, Thank You. And we don't care if all her harmonica solos are the same, we are in pure nostalgia-land, dancing in that special place: remembering who we used to be.

After the requisite pretending-to-leave-the-stage-only-to-return, she sings a fantastic rendition of One Hand In My Pocket. When she sings that line, the whole crowd singing with her; 'And what it all comes down to my friends, is that everything is just FINE FINE FINE', I am nearly back there, could be holding hands and singing my heart out with that scared, hopeful girl I was back in '95.

You brought it all back Alanis. And everything is just fine, fine, fine.

Click here for more gigs at Brixton Academy.

Lowri