Review – Joey Arias & Kristian Hoffman: Lightning Strikes at the ICA

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It has been argued that a crucial aspect of Andy Warhol’s genius was his role as a radical permission-giver. His blank, gee-whizz affect read as cold, even inhumane to some. But to others, it was a kind of liberating carte blanche – an invitation to see what happened if one took an idea for a walk. Clearly, we can’t give him personal credit for every radical, absurd, queer, beautiful thing that came out of the Factory or, more broadly, New York’s downtown scene from the 60s to the 80s, but he did more than anyone else to set the tone.

The past year has been hard on that scene: the deaths of Lou Reed, Taylor Mead and Mario Montez hit particularly hard at a time when, despite widespread disillusionment with political and economic business as usual, great cities like New York and London remain difficult places for leftfield culture to flourish; more difficult, in certain ways, than in the Warhol era. At the very moment when queer cultural alternatives potentially have the most to offer, they risk suffocation from a synthetic real-estate bubble on the one side and starvation through the indifference of a blasé, normatively inclined culture on the other. Radical permission is thin on the ground these days, and the fibres of queer avant-garde culture risk malnourishment if they aren’t tended to.

All the more reason, then, to pay attention to Joey Arias and Kristian Hoffman’s Lightning Strikes, a tribute to Klaus Nomi that opened at the ICA last night and closes tonight. Nomi was an extraordinary figure, a powerfully talented German-born countertenor who quickly became a big deal on the scene in the late 70s by pairing his high operatic tones – very weird at the time, in both classical and underground circles, and pretty weird now – with an essentially alienating persona. He was a sort of ethereal, extraterrestrial robot Pierrot; a little bit Tristan Tzara, a little bit Kraftwerk, a little bit delicate, a little bit impervious. In his work, formal musical beauty was allied to an embrace of total otherness – yet this otherness was fascinating, beguiling, rather than threatening. Children were drawn to him – they shared a certain faith in the imaginative will. He moved from underground to international success without quite finding stability or happiness. He died, an early victim of AIDS-related illness, in 1983.

Arias and Hoffman were right there with him. Arias was instrumental to Nomi’s work in various ways, not least performing alongside him – most famously, in 1979, as David Bowie’s left and right-hand men in an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Hoffman, meanwhile, wrote the songs that would become Nomi’s trademarks numbers, catering to his unusual range in the likes of The Nomi Song, Total Eclipse, After the Fall and A Simple Man. But, Hoffman reports in the terrific documentary about the performer’s life, also called The Nomi Song, he was basically stiffed when it came to the release of his work on Nomi’s two successful albums.

This show, then, which mainly comprises Arias and Hoffman delivering those songs most associated with Nomi, exists in a kind of conversation with the past. It isn’t a tribute act – Arias is a remarkable enough performer in his own right that I can’t imagine it ever crossed his mind to try to imitate Nomi, or that it would work if he tried. Though they share a kind of alien glamour and a phenomenal ability to sing in high registers, the performers aren’t very alike in on-stage presence, Arias being altogether looser, earthier, more permeable to the moment. He ad libs mentions of fanny and foreskin before the first number is through, which wasn’t exactly Nomi’s style; nor can you imagine Klaus namechecking on stage the “Institute of Contemporary Farts”. And it isn’t an especially informative show – if you don’t know much about Nomi as a person or a performer going in, you won’t come out especially enlightened, which is perhaps a missed opportunity. I’d have liked to hear more about the pair’s last visit to London.

But mostly, Lightning Strikes is about activating the music, giving it its due in performance and connecting it to the future. There’s a frisson of joyous validation in seeing Hoffman play live the songs for which, at the time, he didn’t get his due. Arias, as always, cuts an otherworldly figure, the sleeves of his sheer black shift melting into capacious, leopardskin-lined wizard’s sleeves. It’s that voice, though, that really means business. A breathy, almost staccato opening to The Nomi Song sweeps up into those whistle-register notes that threaten to shatter glass and more; a pounding beat underlies the insistent, perhaps too insistent pleas of A Simple Man; and, as the back of the stage fills with bright-hued visuals that might be aerial photography of another world or a glimpse inside mutant cells, there’s no question that this is not a museum piece but a suite of vivid, urgent material, delivered in intensely close quarters.

For such familiar material, there can be a surprising roughness to the delivery: there are fluffed lines, some uncertain patter and occasionally a song seems to be getting away from the singer (Total Eclipse comes to mind). But some other covers expand the evening’s horizons: You’ve Changed, from Arias’s signature Billie Holiday set, always pricks the back of the neck, while for Cream’s White Room the reverb is turned up to 11, creating a real-time soundscape of high-pitched intoxication.

There was no surer sign of the night’s liveness – it’s existence not as a dead tribute but a live recalibration – than a truly bonkers interlude in which a young audience member inveigled her way on stage. Aged 20 and possibly not entirely sober, she made her appreciation known and, when Arias extended an inch of interest, she grabbed a yard, hoiking herself on stage, writhing on the floor and spreading her legs before an audience that was left in little doubt that she wore no underwear beneath her black hose. Coming within range of the mic, she unleashed a pretty mean burst of whistle register herself before reeling around the star. This had all the hallmarks of a disaster in the offing yet Arias was gently encouraging. She lay docile as he sang Sex Is Beautiful (from Cirque du Soleil’s adult Las Vegas show Zumanity, which Arias hosted) and at the end of the song joined him in a genuinely moving back-and-forth. “Sex is…?” he breathed. “Beautiful,” she replied. Several times. Then she was gently escorted from the stage.

What could have been a train wreck was the highlight of the night thanks to Arias showing respect and engagement to an inappropriate but enthusiastic newcomer, all the while continuing to demonstrate his passionate engagement with the art of decades past. And this, to me, was the real essence of the enterprise. Arias and Hoffman seem here not to be gatekeepers of a preciously guarded artistic estate, but in the business of transmitting valuable work to a new generation. Also crucial in this aspect was the inclusion of the fantastic Bourgeois & Maurice as both opening act and backing singers. It’s not just that their beautiful outfits – all black acute angles – evoked Nomi’s look; it’s that their presence helped to fortify those fibres of cultural transmission, reaching back through Arias and Hoffman to Nomi into the queer past while promising new possibilities for the future.

Give me a really alive performance with a few flaws over a perfect delivery that’s dead inside, every time. When things are alive, they can mutate, and you never know which mutations will be hindrances and which will have utility. Arias flubbed a line in the encore, which was Bowie’s Life on Mars?, referring to “sailors dancing in the fight hall”. That’s not how the original song goes. But isn’t it beautiful? Doesn’t it conjure the possibility of queer exuberance in the face of institutionalised aggression? (Perhaps the fight hall is an annexe of the war room…) Be mindful of the treasures and lessons of the past and open to the unplanned opportunities of the present and, somehow, you find that lightning strikes, again and again and again.

Icy Gays presents Joey Arias & Kristian Hoffman: Lightning Strikes, ICA, Sunday February 9. More info here.