During a recent Boston performance of Laurie Anderson's new show, Homeland, a rather extraordinary thing happened. Anderson had just launched into a catchy little number about the recruitment practices of the US army and their gory consequences on the battlefields of the Middle East. "Let me blow up your churches, let me blow up your mosques," she intoned sweetly, against a surging electronic backdrop. "All your government buildings, 'cause I'm a bad guy."
About halfway through, protests began to ring out across the auditorium, then a conspicuous and well-heeled contingent made a dash for the exits. "I was literally shocked," says Anderson, back in the sanctuary of her cavernous New York loft overlooking the Hudson. "With everything that's been going on, it has been impossible to avoid putting politics in this work. On the one hand, I was pleased I was provoking a response. But before I was pleased, I was very surprised. I thought, 'This is not at all controversial.'"
Perhaps the audience revolt had more to do with Anderson's current status, achieved over an astonishing four-decades-long career, than with the actual content of Homeland, a 100-minute musical appraisal of everything from the Iraq war to the excesses of billboard advertising, which has its UK premiere at the Barbican at the end of the month.
It's generally forgotten that she began her career as an avant-garde sculptor and performer in 1970s New York, where mass walkouts were a nightly staple.Among her earliest wild and wacky works are a symphony for car horns and autoparts entitled An Afternoon of Automotive Transmission, and As:If, in which she stood on stage wearing skates frozen into large blocks of ice.
Almost single-handedly, Anderson coined the notion of multimedia performance, culminating in her eight-hour opera United States I-IV, a scathing treatise on Reaganite America, where she forged music, storytelling and pioneering visual projection techniques that have now become standard. She is the world's first hi-tech poet, says collaborator and friend, the artist Jene Highstein: "You've got to remember that when she was starting out, we didn't even have fax machines."
Anderson, slight and wiry, with her electroshock hairdo seemingly conveying perpetual if pleasant surprise, calls Homeland "one-third political, one-third from an odd dream world, and the rest music". It is, she says, "inspired by the fact that there is very little information in America: I am very aware that the media has totally failed us. The journalists have become entertainers, so I thought we should take the next step and ask, 'Why don't entertainers become journalists?'"
Homeland's lyrics certainly have the ring of a hard-hitting article. Take the lyrics to Only an Expert: "And if a country tortures people/ And holds citizens without cause or trial and sets up military tribunals/ This is also not a problem/ Unless there's an expert who says it's the beginning of a problem." Given that Homeland is a Laurie Anderson show, there are also whimsical numbers such as The Underwear Gods and a beautifully poignant song concerning her childhood in Chicago.
At the age of 12, all of these lofty parental ambitions were almost dashed by a serious accident. "I was showing off doing a flip from a high board," says Anderson, "and I wound up missing the pool and landing on my back. I was paralysed. The doctors said, 'We're not sure you are going to walk again.' That was the first time I realised that adults are idiots." She took two years to recover, during which time she read the entire works of Jean-Paul Sartre.
After dropping out of medical school on discovering she "hated the sight of blood", Anderson arrived in New York during the heady year of 1966, intent on becoming an artist. Even in the riotous downtown scene, she cut an unusual figure. Her first works displayed a delicious playfulness: O-Range involved 10 people in a stadium shouting stories through megaphones; for Object, Objection, Objectivity, she took pictures of the hobos and addicts in the streets near her apartment.
By 1975, with As:If, she had moved on to what we would now recognise as a Laurie Anderson performance: a mixture of short stories, music and technology. Anderson was now armed with the tools necessary to create her magnum opus, the hugely ambitious United States I-IV opera. "All of my friends in the downtown music world seemed to be writing operas," she says. "You'd be walking down the street, see a friend and say, 'So, how is your opera going? Yeah, mine's coming along too.'" The work consisted of four parts: Transpiration, Politics, Money and Love, all critiquing life under Reagan.
Expecting to circulate the record only among her friends, she pressed just 100 copies. But then it was played on John Peel's radio show. "All of a sudden," she says, "everybody and their mother was singing that refrain, 'Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.' One day, I got a call from London with an order for 20,000 copies of the single, immediately followed by another 20,000 by the end of the week. I looked at the cardboard box of records, which had almost run out, and said, 'Listen, can I just call you back?'"
O Superman reached No 2 in the UK, establishing Anderson as the avant-garde underground's first pop superstar. She signed to Warner and released her first album, Big Science, in 1982, followed by Mister Heartbreak in 1984. This is how many people still remember her, preserved in aspic as an eccentric 1980s pop phenomenon. Yet, Anderson's work away from the pop limelight has been, if anything, even more creatively dynamic: Stories from the Nerve Bible, 1992's classic Anderson evening of music-infused storytelling; Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, an ode to Melville; and The End of the Moon, her last show in London, based on her time spent as Nasa's first (and last) artist in residence.
The show has little of her trademark back-projected hi-tech wizardry. "Those things get in the way of the music," she says, an almost sacrilegious statement given her body of work. "Every music show has to have those visuals. I'm getting totally distracted by them. I just wanted to make something dreamy and musical and multimedia-free." In their place is a narrative drive reminiscent of her early downtown shows. She insists there couldn't be a better time to be a storyteller. "We have an extremely story-savvy government here," she says. "Take the way George Bush recently retold his Iraq story about the evil dictator and weapons of mass destruction.
It went over just fine because it really doesn't seem to matter whether it's a true story. It matters whether it's a good story, with evil people and a plot. And then, with Hillary and Barack Obama, you have another wonderful story. It doesn't matter who wins, because kids and young people have gotten interested in the story and they will be different as a result. And, given that it's an election year and Bush will be leaving, we'll soon move on to an entirely new story. America is a good place for stories".
