Hard beats, thick bass lines, blood-curdling screams and full-fat hooks: the hodgepodge music of Bambie Thug is certainly infectious, the Irish singer who made such an impression at the last Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö with the song ‘Doomsday Blue’ and an exceptionally spectacular, dark show. The question was: would that hold up with their own concert in the small hall of the Melkweg in Amsterdam?
Well, you couldn’t really call it spectacular. Bambie Thug came on stage in a self-painted black suit with grave paint on his face, with a wooden throne as a decoration and two masked dancers who made seductive movements between vertical fluorescent tubes. The great climax in Malmö, the appearance of the Crown the witch on the big screen after a bone-chilling scream, was already forgiven: a small version of that banner had been hanging there from the start.
A bit bare perhaps and also quite short, barely an hour. But that’s not so bad: that grand production didn’t fit here anyway and it was actually cool to see that such an artist, despite the big springboard of the Eurovision Song Contest, is now building an independent career from the somewhat smaller venues. With a bunch of strong songs like ‘Bye Boy’, the new ‘Hex so Heavy’ and the dynamic ‘Egregore’, switching from pure pop to industrial, techno beats and dirty punk, Bambie Thug definitely has potential in the dark pop landscape, somewhere between Poppy, Marilyn Manson and Grimes.
Well-intentioned queer positivity
But a mortal sin: it all seemed to be sung barely live, while in Malmö we saw that the 31-year-old Irishman certainly has no shortage of vocal skills. The somewhat dull and harmless performance, certainly for an act that is so enthusiastic about non-conformity, did not make up for that. At one point the two dancers kissed, but not really, because the masks remained on – not quite a strong statement. The water pistols that they brought out in ‘Tsunami 11:11’ to spray the audience with, turned out to be filled with fresh water. Fortunately not something dirty or anything, but also nice. It was an hour of well-intentioned queer positivity full of edgy gothic and BDSM connotations, but that had to remain suitable for all ages.
When Bambie Thug came on stage, wearing a Palestinian flag and singing ‘Children Should be Laughing’ – and live too – it was touching: here was someone who had been concerned about the fate of the Gazans for a long time and had tried to make that clear in Malmö, to the displeasure of the much more well-behaved EBU. Now it was possible to do it freely, to loud cheers from the audience. But when the dancers came on stage again, holding Palestinian flags aloft above their leather skirts and glitter masks, it became kitsch again.
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