There Will Be Rainbows by Kirk Lake

Author:Kirk Lake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.3

Through the early part of 2002, Rufus took to the road to continue promoting the Poses album. It was his biggest solo tour to date and his band included Martha and Teddy Thompson, with Thompson acting as opener on most of the tour except for twin New York shows that were shared between Martha and Antony and the Johnsons.

Before embarking on the tour, Martha had been working hard on new songs. She had started to record some more tracks, was playing the odd solo club date in New York at small, supportive venues like Tonic, and was building up the confidence to try to make a debut album. In the meantime she released another EP.

The Factory EP included four tracks, one of which (‘The Car Song’) had featured on her cassette album and another was a sweet version of the standard ‘Bye, Bye Blackbird’. Of the two new songs, ‘New York, New York, New York’ is a languorous lament with a hint of Billie Holiday in the vocal line. It’s at least half a good song, but as the title itself hints, by going one New York beyond Liza and two beyond the Sex Pistols, it’s overlong and eventually fades away into soporific jazz. The title track, however, is superb and by far the most accomplished track that she had released to date. ‘Factory’ is reminiscent of Mazzy Star or, more accurately, Melanie singing with Hope Sandoval’s first band Opal. Lyrically obtuse with references to transvestites, poor souls and open-sored destitutes, the song manages to remain uplifting among an air of regret and loneliness and becomes almost beatific with the lyric shifts from sun, sun, sun to run, run, run, seemingly embracing every beautiful loser in New York.

Martha had looked upon her earlier tours with Rufus as being great for her experience and to help make her a better musician, but she couldn’t help but feel she was being taken advantage of. Before agreeing to take part in the Poses tour, she made it clear that there were some rules to be laid down. ‘I said that I would do it again if he was nicer to me on stage and he didn’t make me feel like a clown,’ she revealed to the Guardian years later, when her insecurities had been allayed by the warm reception her first record eventually received. At the time of the tour she had felt slightly exploited, the butt of the jokes. ‘I became a character, a puppet. Rufus is very funny, it’s charming. But I wasn’t going to hurt for the benefit of a laugh. He was torturing me like an older brother does–like suffocating your younger sister under a blanket and thinking it’s funny…I wanted to do my own record when he said, “I need you to put your thing on the backburner.” I said, “I’ll do it but only because I love you, but you can’t make me feel like I only exist because you exist.”’

Martha’s discomfort at being Rufus’ stage stooge

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