Duae Divae

Once upon a time I corresponded, via the intermediary of her agent, with Diamanda Galás. I wanted permission to use some of her lyrics in a compendium of Gothic culture I was putting together. ‘Ah yes, this is the gentleman who wrote that lovely piece about me … Of course he can use it’, she said, purring away, I liked to imagine. Phew. I’m not sure what she’d make of this.

I first came across Diamanda Galás in the form of her very uncharacteristic ‘speed gospel’ album from 1988, You Must Be Certain of the Devil, which I picked up at a second-hand record store in Oxford. That recording is pretty accessible, but I swiftly discovered how challenging the rest of her output tends to be. Nevertheless, I could hear a genuinely prophetic voice in her concern for people with AIDS and mental illness, or the victims of genocides the world preferred to forget about.

In case you don’t know, Galás’s masterpiece is the Plague Mass of 1991, a scarifying but spellbinding examination of the malign relationship between religion and disease which uses liturgical texts to align the bodies of those who suffer sickness with that of Christ in the Eucharist. I see it as a Christian meditation of profound meaning and importance. I’m also slightly and scandalously tickled that when I lent it to a Goth music journalist friend to listen to in 2000 she turned it off after ten minutes saying it was ‘the most disturbed thing I’ve ever heard’. I saw the diva herself perform in London in 2001 and again two years later: I felt as though I should have a medal really, with a bar for the second occasion.

My impression was that Diamanda had gone off the boil in recent years. I watched a couple of recent concert videos on Youtube which suggested that the famous multi-octave voice might be getting a bit ropey as she edged through her sixth decade, and failed to find anything new that she may have been doing (actually there was a bit, though her publicity seemed to be somewhat neglectful, and she is still performing – this year more than most). So I hadn’t given her much thought of late, though I continue to pray for her in recognition of her at-least-once-prophetic role.

I had no idea until very recently that Ms Galás had expressed any opinion at all about PJ Harvey. But, in 2009, I see, she remembered back to 1995 when ‘There were friends of mine, drag queens, calling me saying “there’s somebody who’s dressing like you, wearing your hair, studying your vocals, wearing your makeup.” At first I said “I don’t want to know, I’m working”, but then I went to one of her concerts. And I’m telling you, if you’re gonna do me in drag? You’d better be taller than me. And tougher than me. And you’d better be a man.’

Oh dear. It reminds me a bit of what Ms G said about Patricia Morrison, then of the Sisters of Mercy, another very inappropriate comparison: ‘she’s so much taller and fatter than me [I think poor Morrison is 5 foot nothing] and she dresses so badly’. But then you can find film of PJH being terribly snarky about Kylie Minogue. It’s more than a little perplexing that charismatic women musicians feel the need to scorn one another so and, even when they’re outspoken feminists, to enlist gendered imagery to do it.

The Blessed Diamanda’s friends were somewhat misinforming her, anyway: although she and Polly share an interest in extremity and therefore both inhabit corners of the great Gothic continuum, there’s barely any other correspondence between them on any level, musical, thematic, stylistic, or personal. That To Bring You My Love moment in 1995 marked the sole point of convergence, and that’s because they were both looking to something beyond them rather than one to the other: a Goth-girl visual rhetoric that stretches back into the past as far as Theda Bara and the Marquesa Casati, and ultimately to Romantic and Symbolist depictions of ‘fatal women’ in the art of the last quarter of the 19^th century. Ms Galás might relate her black ensemble to culture and heritage (‘ever since the age of 12, my brother and I dressed like this. All my relatives in Sparta have these immaculate white houses, and then they come out and it’s black, black, black in the middle of the day’), but, really, no Pelopennese peasant woman ever looked like that. Maila Nurmi may have done, but she was Finnish. One reviewer in Uncut’s recent Polly festschrift says that in the mid-90s she began copying ‘Diamanda Galás’s rictus-grin’, but that’s not what Galás herself took exception to, and frankly as a singer you have to make some fairly funny faces to get the sounds out. She still does that, twenty-odd years later.

Never someone to love so much as to admire from a safe distance, Galás has not merely obscured the truth about herself but actively distorted it, making it hard to warm to the person that might lay behind. She invented a lesbian vigilante squadron, the Black Leather Beaver Patrol, which she would periodically claim she led, and gleefully informed one interviewer that ‘everything I tell you will be lies anyway’. So when the genuinely moving truth poked through the surface – the death of her brother from AIDS, as well that of as her best friend – you didn’t know quite how much salt to take it with. Was she really married to that best friend, or was that another piece of embroidery? Has her father really died in a road accident at the age of 91? That there might be a gap, or several gaps, between appearance and reality seemed very probable from an exchange in the correspondence columns of avant-garde music magazine The Wire in 2000 after someone questioned whether Galás could have studied the subject she claimed at the ‘Scripps Institute’ in California, at the time she claimed. This provoked a frosty, detailed, and clearly furious response from the singer, quite different from her usual dramatic and expletive-laden statements; but a very curious one, which, according to how you interpret the dates she gave, implied that she was an undergraduate at the age either of 14 or 10. Neither of which is likely.

This 2011 concert in Barcelona tells you everything you need to know about my current issues with Ms G. There is no mistaking the virtuosity of her piano-playing or vocalising; in that, in fact, lies the issue. The texts she musicalizes and the songs she covers tend to be overwhelmed by what she does to them. The first number, ‘Anoixe Petra’, is a gorgeous 1960s Greek laika song which she strangles with arpeggiation and vocal gymnastics (it led me to the original, much more moving version by Marinella). There are often absolutely luscious introductions to the songs (her version of ‘O lieb, so lang du lieben kanst’ a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath set to music by Liszt, is a case in point) but then the Galás-isms start and the text is swiftly crushed beneath the pyrotechnics. Vocally, it isn’t that she can’t sing gently and intimately, but she steers away from it into a snarl that sounds impossibly comic more often than I suspect she intends. The set concludes with that melancholy standard ‘Gloomy Sunday’, in a significantly more mannered form than the recorded version on Malediction and Prayer (1998): this is an artist of unimaginable talent becoming, perhaps, misled by her own ability.

It’s all frustrating, because when you read Galás’s offerings about life and art, as in the 2013 lecture assemblage of poetry and essays, ‘The Mouth of the Crocodile’, it can be both interesting and moving, and you can see her point notwithstanding the uncomfortably violent expressions she sometimes employs. But despite her insistence on musical radicalism and the pointlessness of standing still artistically (exactly as Polly does), truth be told, she hasn’t shifted very far at all, continuing to deploy the same weaponry she’s been polishing for the last thirty years – unless there are subtleties this non-musician can’t appreciate. ‘Anoixe Petra’ in the Barcelona concert contains elements that are exactly the same as the wonderful performance of ‘Keigome Keigome’ on Malediction and Prayer. I know what she’s trying to do – to capture the incantatory and exorcismatory qualities of texts as a form of activism, as part of a conversation between the dead and the living, and a call to arms, which is all entirely admirable. But I’m not convinced the exercise really achieves that. Sitting at the piano, she’s entering the world of these texts, but can anyone else follow her?

A very interesting-sounding project on the extinguished cultures of the Near East, ‘Nekropolis’, never emerged, but Galás’s website mentions another work in development, Das Fieberspital, so I will do my best to keep tabs on that, and see what transpires. Her significance and worth transcend my queries, and I’ve been sadly neglectful of what she has to say.