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From the grandeur of high-tech performance Laurie Anderson has pared down to a minimalist stage presence, writes Phillip McCarthy.
Laurie Anderson is striding down a corridor in her two-floor studio in Lower Manhattan that is lined with batteries of sound processors and mixers. It is an array of hardware to break the stride of even the most amateur techie but, when it does, Anderson makes it clear that she would prefer to stay on course for her upstairs sitting room.
"Yes, Lou put those in when I was big on all that," she says, barely pausing. "Lou", by the way, is Anderson's long-time partner, Lou Reed, and "all that" is a part of Anderson's career when the embrace of multimedia was more intense.
It would be big news if Anderson - avant-garde for two decades in everything from composing to ventriloquism - had given up on electronic synthesisers and high-tech effects. And she hasn't. But she has taken back her stage act from her inner geek.
Upstairs, Anderson explains that she began to rethink her devotion to ever more complex technology two years ago; at the time things had got so high-tech with her last performance venture, Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, that she had not been able to tour it.
The show - inspired by Herman Melville's novel - was well received, where it played, but it involved loads of wiring, elaborate sets, split-second cues and enough gadgetry to rival an evening with, well, Moby and it deprived her of any spontaneity.
"It was too big," she says. "It was really the elephant in the living room phenomenon. I put it together and I was like 'wow, what have I done here? I can't move it anywhere. I can't take it anywhere'. We were going to take it to Australia. Then I found out how much it was going to cost to ship that set. We even thought about trying to rebuild the set in Australia. But even that was going to be a lot. So I learnt a lesson about keeping your vision within your means.
"I was working on the wrong scales because if I can't go around and put my show on, what's the point of all the bells and whistles. So I thought, get rid of all this stuff, no multimedia, no back-lit pictures. Just a few little props."
Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Anderson is sitting on a chair with her bare feet crossed under her elbows on the wooden seat; the dead giveaway that we have a yoga practitioner in position. The feel of this part of her lair is more homey.
There are family photos on the wall, art books on the tables and the floor beneath her is strewn with toys belonging to her terrier, Lola.
Anderson likes the fact that Lola resembles the dog-with-the-gramophone logo of the old His Master's Voice record label. Not that her output of recorded music over the past couple of decades appears on a label quite as mainstream as HMV; she is more the staple of boutique-style labels although she did once have a Top 40 hit, O Superman, which still sends a flutter through her determinedly cool audiences.
Because almost everything Anderson has done since O Superman has had a trail-blazing feel, her audiences, in America at least, have pretty much taken to her back-to-basic approach. There is less eye candy in her new performance piece, Happiness: its most elaborate gizmo is an electrically lit mouthpiece that she uses at strategic moments.
Happiness is built to travel and will make it to Australia in February. It is a minimalist creation in which Anderson, 55, interweaves song and stories, going back to her roots in one-woman shows: alone on stage with violin and keyboard.
It is a seemingly eccentric collection of stories - her two-week stint working at McDonald's, white-water rafting with a bunch of squabbling Buddhists and environmentalists, and boarding with an Amish family in Pennsylvania - that add up to Anderson's characteristically dry take on reality.
Happiness is a loaded word, particularly in America where it figures in the constitution ("the pursuit of") along with freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the right to be armed to the teeth. She uses it with a good deal of irony.
"I was basically culling for new material," she says. "So I started making these weird trips early last year, partly because I was bored with what I had been doing and partly because I wanted to put myself in different and maybe uncomfortable situations.
"People ask me, 'Are these stories autobiographical or are you just making them up?' No they are very much for real. I'm trying to be, lately, more of a journalist. I am finding that what really happens is much more revealing than anything I could make up, especially these days. I'm sort of resolved to looking at the way things are, rather than the way I think they should be. So the genesis of this piece was to escape my preconceptions."
In the retelling, Anderson has been pretty rigorous about not getting in the way of her story; even when her observations don't necessarily support her thesis that our love affair with technology is actually making us less connected to the real world.
You might expect a vegetarian of liberal persuasion to take a pretty dim view of life behind the mechanised counter at McDonald's and be a little awestruck by the wholesome simplicity of the Amish lifestyle. But she says the McDonald's in Manhattan where she worked had a lot of "camaraderie and fun", while the Amish family she stayed with were bordering on being dysfunctional with repressed anger.
"My co-workers at McDonald's were mostly students and retirees like me, and we joked around a lot," she says. "We were fast. We were proud of what we were doing. And frankly it was a great experience for me to be able to give people exactly what they wanted. I mention in the show that the Amish people seemed to be choking on their own goodness, which I guess is harsh, but hopefully they won't hear about it on television, radio or certainly the web."
Anderson was still putting the show together - while doing her other stuff, such as touring in support of her previous album, Life on a String - when the September 11 attacks occurred. She was out of town on the day but she lives 10 blocks from the World Trade Centre. For months after she got back, the steady soundtrack of life was the rumble of trucks clearing debris from the site day and night and then the odd sensation of living near the city's prime tourist attraction.
Partly because she was trying to bring a reporter's eye to the piece - and partly because it was all unfolding on her doorstep - the whole September 11 tragedy has been a kind of overlay to Happiness. In the early performances, it was the enormity of the event but Anderson is now at work updating the piece for Australia, bringing a quizzical eye to the way the fallout is being exploited.
"I see it a bit like remaking my front page," she says. "My dilemma is that I originally wrote it last fall when we really were all living in the present. Who knew what was going to happen next? But to come from that to be on the verge of attacking Iraq is truly bizarre."
Anderson being Anderson, Happiness is not the only thing she has on the go at the moment. Recently she gave a series of concerts in the part of town to which the Manhattan avant-garde that she helped pioneer has migrated: Brooklyn. At a performance space called St Ann's Warehouse she was accompanied by a four-piece combo.
Perhaps the evening's unexpected bonus, though, was the uncredited guest star halfway through the set; in tight pants and a red jacket Lou Reed bounced on stage with his acoustic guitar and upped the decibel level of the evening a few hundred per cent.
"If anyone had fallen asleep, I bet they woke up when he came on," Anderson says. "And if anyone was thinking before, 'this is a very girly evening of song and banter', I suspect Lou would have given them reason to think again. I kind of liked the change of pace. It went from being a sensitive-girl show to a rock 'n' roll arena show in the space of few chords. Then he was gone and they were back to the sensitive girl show."
They hardly ever perform together, she says, because their performing styles are so different. Anderson likes a coherent structure, whereas the man who wrote Walk On the Wild Side just goes for it. As you would expect.
"I mean, we're rarely in the same city so it's not possible even if we want to do it," she says. "We did a concert in Italy once where we sang each other's songs. I think I must have done OK. He's not a shy guy; he would have told me if he didn't like the way I did them."
It is probably symptomatic of the free-form synergy of her relationship with Reed that both have an interest in eastern asceticism. But Reed's eastern philosophy of choice runs to the rather more aggressive martial art of tai chi.
"I remember seeing him do this manoeuvre with his hands and his arms," she says. "So I said to him that it looked very elegant. And he said, 'well, you can't do it right if you're thinking about decapitation'. I was shocked, but then I often am with him."
And these days they might disagree a bit on just how much amplifier to use in the living room.
Laurie Anderson appears at the Melbourne Concert Hall on February 15. Bookings through Ticketmaster 7 on 1300 136 166 or via www.ticketmaster7.com
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