One day, I’ll come out of my shell, I’m sure,” says Aldous Harding. She does not seem to be speaking to anyone in particular; her words seem directed mostly at herself. A few minutes later, she repeats those exact words as if she hasn’t said them before. Aldous Harding—real name Hannah Harding; her stage name is presumably taken from the author of Brave New World and even now produces a brief mental ripple of confusion every time I say it out loud—is from New Zealand, and this is the second time I have seen her. My dear friend Andi is with me; this is the third time she’s seen her. Harding is just that sort of singer, the kind you wish you could see every year.
Harding is playing at a small Phoenix lounge, but I keep feeling I’m back in the early ‘90s, a time I am increasingly persuaded was the last truly magical time I’ve lived through. Hints are everywhere: Something about the solemn, ghostly atmosphere reminds me of the setting of Nirvana’s Unplugged; the red curtains that frame the band, meanwhile, are straight out of Twin Peaks. This is just a daydream, of course, not rooted in any kind of reality outside my own head, but that sort of free association seems perfectly suited to the world of Aldous Harding, who seems to have one foot in the world and one foot out of it. She walks the stage with the dreamy deliberateness of a creature moving underwater.
This venue couldn’t be better suited to her. Thus my annoyance at the fellow about six feet in front of me who keeps bobbing back and forth like he’s at a different type of concert; thus the audience’s growing and palpable disdain for the people who keep shouting things at Harding, “You rock!” and that sort of thing. Like they’re trying to be helpful. While it works at some shows, it seems grotesquely inappropriate here because Harding doesn’t respond. She gazes out at the crowd with a peculiar expression—part curiosity, part revulsion—every time someone yells something. Finally she explains, in halting words that won’t quite form themselves into full sentences, that talking to the audience distracts her from the music.
There is something alien about Harding, a primal otherness that leaps out of her deepest self and seems to shape every movement she makes, every syllable she forms. You wonder if she would be just as happy without an audience. She rolls her eyes, grins, grimaces, makes faces that seem to have nothing to do with what she is singing. After one song she stares at us with unnerving intensity for a long time, like a sailor who’s spotted a storm on the horizon. It’s hard to imagine her living in a house, like other people; I picture her tending a small garden on an asteroid, like the Little Prince.
In the last match he ever played, Bobby Fischer insisted that a soundproof glass wall separate him and the crowd; his fragile mind couldn’t tolerate the sound of regular people making their revolting noises. Harding seems to be retreating in front of our eyes into her simple but, often, unfathomably strange songs, which she sings with a feral intensity that belies her voice, a serene and stable instrument that could easily have been used for much more ordinary purposes.
After a while you start to notice everything else—the drummer who, at one point, pulls out a trumpet and toots on it a bit; the piano player who every so often stands up to give Harding a turn at the keys. She moves from instrument to instrument, now standing, now sitting, smiling harder the more deeply she is allowed to plunge into the music; somehow she seems more of a star the further she pulls back into herself. She sings about birds a lot, and perhaps that’s apt; birds are near us one second and gone the next, friendly and solitary, alert and still, the only surviving members of an ancient family that once ruled the world. So it is with this visitor from another world, who eventually will leave the stage without a word.