With hair long enough to strangle somebody and the expression of Cabanel’s ‘The Fallen Angel’, Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw seems to embody a new kind of rock-star; one who sees themselves as prophet, not performer.
Shaw flickers from side to side like a flame afraid of being put out. Her thin hands reach for a conclusion she can’t find. She looks up with wet, barely-dammed eyes as she sings the lyrics to ‘Gary Ashby’ – perhaps the band’s most easily accessible song – like she’s forgotten she’s performing to anybody at all.
Dry Cleaning are an acquired taste, but not without their moments of spiked adrenaline. Songs like ‘Stumpwork’ and ‘Viking Hair’ bring a little excitement to the set: she cuckoos and hoots until one’s ears pick up like static, even if she remains a bird still unwilling to leave her cage.
It's a kind of anti-performance; a refusal to do what the rest will. Dry Cleaning’s lyrics are pulled from anywhere – whether that be signposts off the M25 or biographies of Princess Diana – and it can feel like a kind of sonic over-stimulation; a mix of curiosity and confusion.
At times, the show echoes the engagement one has in a stranger’s one-sided phone call. One’s enjoyment of the show, perhaps, depends on whether the feeling that rouses is, ‘oh, if only I knew what they were going on about!’ or, ‘don’t they realise we have to listen to them, too?!’
Perhaps it’s easier to enjoy the show when one thinks of it as performance art rather than a gig. It does, after all, feel more Yoko Ono than John Lennon. Then again, perhaps it’s easier to find a show that doesn’t feel like being spoken down to; Britain’s current wave of speak-sing groups may have begun with Sleaford Mods, but it doesn’t end at Dry Cleaning.