I still don’t know how to explain to anyone who isn’t emotionally attached to Cocteau Twins what it meant to see Elizabeth Fraser sing live. There’s no useful scale for it. I saw Liz Fraser. In the same room. That’s basically the paragraph.
MA mentioned that some of their usual setlist and visuals couldn’t be shown in Singapore, so they had prepared a different set for the show. The politics were still very much there, while the visuals took aim mostly at Palantir, Trump and the US military. The more explicitly anti-Israel material from their usual show was absent, given Singapore’s tightly controlled political environment and its official position on the Israel–Palestine conflict.
And then, of course, they ended up flying a Palestinian flag on stage, which may have turned this into MA’s last Singapore show, lol. Apparently they were detained afterwards, questioned separately, passports held and all. A very Singapore ending to the night.
A friend messaged me afterwards saying he regretted not going. My first response was basically: yeah, but it was expensive. And as Indonesians right now, casually flying to another country for a concert is a pretty wild privilege. If you can afford it, sure, you can always fly somewhere else and see them. But that’s exactly the point: why should access to art, whether making it or simply experiencing it, be this much of a privilege?
Also they randomly played Avicii.
What a deeply strange, unicorn night.