Pitchfork London 2025: Laurie Anderson

The fifth edition of Pitchfork Festival’s London edition was brought to a close on Saturday in Chalk Farm’s Victorian trainshed turned music shrine, the Roundhouse. Shortly after doors had opened, the programme began downstairs in the Studio with Irish electronic artist Elaine Howley’s chilled lo-fi voice-over tracks relaxing us into an evening of open-mindedness. She was followed downstairs by London producer and vocalist Lauren Duffus and HI label founder and producer Beatrice Dillon. However, we unfortunately missed both as we instead headed upstairs to the main space for the evening’s three main acts.

First on stage in the cavernous main hall was Irish shoegazer Maria Somerville, performing alongside a bassist and drummer/percussionist. This set, heavy on second album ‘Luster’, veered from sparse dream-pop instrumentals to much darker, heavier reverbs all melded via vocals lifted straight from a folk tale.

The evening’s next performer, Lonnie Holley, has a tumultuous life story as if from the darkest fiction. One of 27 children, abandoned at eighteen months, witnessed death up close as a child, incarcerated as slave labour. Holley survived and funnelled this trauma into art. The soothing process of sculpture eventually morphed into a desire to record poetic music in his sixties. Today “was [his] sermon, and we were his congregation” as he understandably questioned the “why?” of humanity and invited us all to do the same. This reflection, still somehow given from a perspective of hope, led perfectly into the evening’s headliner, Laurie Anderson.

Anderson’s set was more a musical lecture on twentieth century American literature than a conventional gig. The set began with her band, SexMob, diving from the intro through a satisfying cacophony of violin-driven drone into opening track Big Science. This was before the first of many spoken word interludes, which soon grew to become the main element of the set. Expertly arranged, these segments flowed perfectly with the music and provided the narrative for the evening.

The first began with a quote from Bob, an old friend of hers from Chicago. Now better known to the world as Pope Leo XIV (or Pope Bob, if you’re Anderson), his words “we don’t rank love” set the scene for an exploration of the human condition through personal stories and global connections. Barely grazing contemporary US politics, she expressed hope that Zohran Mamdani will prevent her adopted hometown of New York from being portrayed by the “statue of bigotry”. Anderson used this message to talk of the positive power of multi-cultural cities and the connections between these and how she now speaks of travelling to London or Berlin, rather than the UK or Germany. On this theme of openness, she implored the audience to “look out of the window, it’s a lovely day” and former bandmate Arthur Russell’s ditty which followed felt more urgent than ever in today’s insular society.

After a musical segment, which included a gorgeous cover of late husband Lou Reed’s Dirty Blvd – another swipe at inequality and racism – and her own Beautiful Red Dress (both, incidentally, from 1989), Anderson returned to her lectern. This time, her darkly comedic streak shone through as she talked the crowd through a badly AI-generated photo album. Apparently shown in lieu of her own art “not going very well”, but really an excuse to poke fun at big tech, this portrayed her grandfather Axel Anderson’s apocryphal journey from Sweden to the US in 1882. As per family lore, images showed an 8-year-old travelling across frozen Europe solo and disembarking in New York harbour, before marrying and becoming an entrepreneur at the age of ten. The reality, only recently discovered, was much darker. His mother died and his father had him interned at Red Wing Prison. Extraordinarily, as it would happen, the day Anderson discovered this she was taking part in a celebration of Bob Dylan which included his song about that very same institution.

A cover of Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall led into Bodies in Motion, the songs at this point the breathing space between Anderson’s personal tales of a life led whilst consciously aware of history happening at every turn. Another touchstone of US and global history was brought to the fore through a childhood memory of her uncle, having survived WW2, staying with her family and screaming every night for three years. After all, It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You, It’s the Hole. She proposed that this war turned a land of small towns into a factory for war, one which has only grown since into the military-industrial complex and today’s mega-corporations.

Political cynicism continued with The Size of the Con, suggesting that one day the performance would end, and the audience would turn around to collect their coats and go home. Only for there to be no coats, no home.

One further cover, this time of Lou Reed and Metallica’s Junior Dad led into an ode to her father and the collective disaster of memories lost forever if they’re not shared, by poetically quoting her own World Without End:

“When my father died,
we put him in the ground.
When my father died,
it was like a whole library burned down”.

We should be grateful that Anderson has noticed how many threads in history have intertwined with her own life in scarcely believable fashion. That she’s found a hopeful, earnest, engaging, brave, and funny way of sharing these with the world through her own art.

How she’s managed this can perhaps be explained by her favourite quote from a Buddhist teacher: “Try to practice how to feel sad without actually being sad. Instead have a really, really, really good time”. Surprisingly, but perhaps appropriately, the encore consisted of a group tai chi session before Anderson stated her (and Reed’s) three rules for life:

1. “Don’t be afraid of anybody.
2. Get a really good bullshit detector and learn how to use it.
3. Be really tender.”

Sound advice we can all take with us to re-build personal connections in this fractured but beautiful world.