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pineapplefulfillseveryneed · 7 days

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The Revenge Of Two Hands One Mouth - O2 Academy Bristol (November 27, 2013) by Adam Gasson

After 11 years of not finding a single photo from this show, I found these yesterday! I can not begin to express what this means to me, I nearly cried and I couldn't sleep last night. I was still a rather new fan and this was my first time going to a show in the UK, the first show I went to see with a friend, and my first time meeting that friend, too. And these above photos are SO GOOD! Not much was preserved from this show at all, there was no recording allowed (no charcoal drawings either), and to my knowledge not even the full setlist for this specific show was preserved anywhere. So better late than never, but here's what I remember (with some help from these photos!) and the things I've puzzled back together:

If there was opening music or an opening act, i don't recall, but Russell entered the stage alone. It was dramatic and impactful, and it went quiet as he gave an intense stare into the audience and did a drawn out "ahhh" into the microphone. After a little moment of quiet, it turned out the microphone had been connected to a sequencer which now started repeating "ah ah ah ah ah ah". Suspense, excitement. Russell added: "Hold, hold, hold, hold". (...I was definitely freaking out.) While that started looping on top of the ah ah ah sequence, he made stop signs with his hand as we all listened. A few repeats passed. "I'm getting mixed signals, mixed signals - mixed, mixed, mixed signals".

^ the only seconds of this show I recorded as I didn't yet know it wasn't allowed - security signed at me and I put the camera away. It was fine. (Here's a recording of it made during the US tour later that year - recording seemed to be less frowned upon at that point.)

I don't recall when Ron entered the stage at this show, whether it was during the song or after, but what a way to open! And what an amazing song choice!

The performance that left the biggest impression on me at this show though was Nicotina. It was a choice I didn't see coming, but also the way Russell sang it! Falsetto heaven. (Sadly not a single video is to be found of Nicotina from this tour. But for your falsetto heaven needs, I hope you can find a video of Here In Heaven that they also performed on this tour, because that will also kill you.)

As everyone here probably knows I am quite big on Bergman, which at the time was heavily promoted during the tours, and, the excerpts they played on this tour were different from what they played during Two Hands One Mouth! They played "I Am Ingmar Bergman", The Studio Commissary (my favourite song on Bergman), Limo Driver (but sang by Russell, and HOW!) and "Oh My God". (Here's a video of it from one of the American shows. It's extremely good. People who've been around for a while have seen me lose it over this video many times.)

The most unexpected song choice was probably Katherine Hepburn. Me and my friend had been joking for absolute months that we were going to see Sparks and they'd play Katherine Hepburn (as if that would ever happen, we were obsessed with that song though!). And here we were, and they were playing Katherine Hepburn right in front of our eyes. (What is reality.)

Falling In Love With Myself Again had me losing it over the organ sounds, always a fan of Ron on organ, and I LOVE that song. Russell sang a line in my direction (I died), and he managed to throw another line at me during Those Mysteries ...I died a few times that night. As you might expect. That was kind of the whole THOM/TROTHOM experience anyway. Lots of dying. But the variety of dying where you end up in heaven. (You're at a Sparks show after all.)

They wrote a song especially for this tour, which was not released but only ever played live: Revenge Of Two Hands One Mouth. What a thing to experience! A very dark song, but wonderful. (REVENGE! REVENGE REVENGE!)

At the end of the show Ron took a photo of Russell with the audience. I don't really remember that happening, but the photo exists and it really was not a thing they did often back then. We had been a good audience :)

Here's all the songs that were probably played that night in random order:

Your Call's Very Important To Us. Please Hold., B.C., Good Morning, Here In Heaven, Academy Award Performance, Those Mysteries, Falling In Love With Myself Again, Big Boy, Nicotina, Popularity, This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us, excerpts from The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman, Tryouts For The Human Race, Katherine Hepburn, Revenge Of Two Hands One Mouth. They likely also played The Number One Song in Heaven, When Do I Get To Sing 'My Way' and Suburban Homeboy. (I see mentions of How Are You Getting Home? and How Do I Get To Carnegie Hall? in setlists for this tour as well, which they very well might have played but I very sadly have zero memory of ever hearing those songs live.)

This tour had a real air of mystery, possibly even more so than Two Hands One Mouth, as the lack of existing footage definitely adds to it. But luckily some of it *is* out there, and I am so grateful for these photos :) On top of the songs I especially mentioned above, I would also advise people to look for recordings of Tryouts For The Human Race and Popularity from this tour, because the arrangements are probably not going to be the way you expect them to be. And as you might expect: B.C. is stunning live. (I could start a whole rant about Good Morning and Suburban Homeboy live but I think I sufficiently screamed about both in my personal notes on THOM the year prior.) Final note: I know Russell had some sort of dance move for Big Boy because me and another friend couldn't stop talking about it for months. I don't remember what he did, but both THOM and TROTHOM were wonderful for Russell dances <3

#I really needed to get that out of my system and onto the blog :)#I may do one of these posts for all shows I've seen at some point.#(I know I've yet to put my notes from 2023 on here and I've been working on them!)#sparks #sparks (band)#russell mael #ron mael #the revenge of two hands one mouth #trothom #bristol #november 27 2013 #2013 #10's #i was there #I put the whole story under a read more so that you don't have to deal with that if you just want to look at photos :)#tour notes

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withhertea · 5 months

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Maisie Peters: coming of age

With heartfelt songs of crushes and overcoming heartbreak on her number one album 'The Good Witch', 23-year-old Maisie Peters deftly captures the agony and ecstasy of youth. Here, she discusses her friendship with Ed Sheeran, the ups and downs of being online, and how she mines her personal life for inspiration.

By Charlotte Manning

It is Halloween when I sit down to chat with Maisie Peters. It almost feels too perfect a time to take a deep dive in and around her summer album release The Good Witch, packed full of spooky connotations and an exploration into, well, witchery. She promises that “some effort” is going into the costumes for tonight’s Bristol gig, teasing: “You’ll have to just wait and see.”

This is a pop star who is used to being very much online. She’s wearing a non-serious T-shirt bearing Robert Pattinson’s face, and one of the first things I’m shown is a cat meme that I — also chronically online — have seen dozens of times before. “It’s been the most mental year of my life,” laughs Peters. “Everyone keeps joking that my eyes are getting smaller and smaller. I’m giving… Have you seen that cat meme? It’s like, ‘I’m awake, but at what cost?’ (She quickly searches for it on her phone.) This is what I’m giving right now. I sit across from people and give this tired cat that says, ‘Awake, but at what cost?’ And that is me.”

The 23-year-old is the recipient of The Breakthrough Award, supported by Volvo, at the first Rolling Stone UK Awards. It’s a category stacked full of young, rapidly emerging talent, including names such as Olivia Dean, Shygirl and Wunderhorse. But it’s Maisie who is this year’s stand-out. She played Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage the day her second album dropped, and when it quickly shot to number one in the UK Official Charts, Peters became the youngest female act to achieve this feat in nearly a decade, plus her UK tour culminated in a sold-out date at Wembley Arena. It doesn’t really get better than that, does it?

“We drove into Glastonbury and listened to the album; it had just come out, it was really cool and special,” she recalls. While her gigs often feel like a party, she had even more to celebrate this time around. Peters and her band stayed in a very apt “fairy-castle hotel” near the world-famous festival and decided to simply spend the album-release weekend living their best lives at Worthy Farm. “We played the show. It was kind of crazy because the new album came out that day. Imagine working on your job, and it’s the biggest weekend of the year? All systems go. This was the biggest week we were going to have.

As I approach the O2 Academy Bristol via a slightly dodgy backstreet later that rainy evening, there are hundreds of buzzing fans queuing, who, like me, are largely girls in their twenties. I end up feeling pretty under-dressed in my reliable straight-cut jeans and ribbed crop-top gig combo. As I enter, it’s clear that under the sea of raincoats and umbrellas, a lot of preparation has gone into these outfits. A mixture of Halloween fancy dress (mainly witch costumes, of course), alongside pleated miniskirts with Y2K-style “baby tees” (concocted by Peters, which she often dons on tour) are there to greet me. This (now very signature) look came “very naturally” to her: “I thought it would be fun if we made little baby tees with lyrics on before the album came out, to tease at the shows. People were like, ‘Oh, my God, Maisie Peters has done another baby tee.’ Then people also started making their own. I thought, ‘Well, this is cute, this is a thing!’ So, I kept doing it. People started making their own, and it became almost like a little uniform for this album. To me, that’s what style is — it should be easy, and you should just feel good.”

At one point, the crowd scream the words to ‘Mr Perfectly Fine’ by Taylor Swift as the excitement builds. I somehow feel I’ve missed the memo on this being a collective anthem among fans, but it makes a lot of sense. Swift, Peters says, is an artist she’s “extremely honoured” to be often compared to as her star only continues to rise. “I love the music that she makes. I love her records; they’re all so important to me. I’m really, really honoured to be compared to her, and to be thought of in the same frame of mind, in anyone’s mind, as her. She’s a big inspiration of mine,” she says.

From seamless guitar changes to refreshingly honest interactions with fans (“There’s nothing scarier than my romantic history… ghosts, demons, clowns. This year, I graduated from clown university”), the singer proves throughout the evening to be an absolute master of the crowd, a skill she’s no doubt developed in spades after spending time on tour with her ‘boss’, Ed Sheeran.

After signing with Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man Records back in 2021, Peters has now released both albums under his label. The pair have a strong friendship, and she recounts an afternoon they spent watching Star Wars movies earlier this year during “the craziest one-day trip of my life” in New York.

“We did America, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Europe… It was crazy,” she says of the experience. “I learned so much. I see videos of myself from the first Irish shows, where we began, and it feels like a different lifetime, a different version of myself. I just felt like a different person before this year. I’m so grateful that he took me around the world and believed in me.”

To nobody’s surprise, she marks her territory as the “number one Ed Sheeran fan in the world”. It would be hard to argue with that claim at this point. “He’s so generous and kind, and he’s really talented, and he’s smart,” she continues. “It’s a privilege to get to tour with somebody like that, someone that’s also just so good as a human being. It’s the easiest and the best thing because he’s so lovely.”

Sheeran would later appear at her Wembley show to perform his own breakthrough hit ‘Lego House’ together in a gorgeous full-circle moment: “He let me play his Wembley, so I figured I should let him play mine,” she tells the crowd on her final night. This is a sentiment she jokes about again during her Rolling Stone UK cover shoot, teasing: “It’s great to be able to support up-and-coming artists.”

At her Rolling Stone UK cover shoot, Peters’ warm persona lights up the room. She takes turns to chat to everyone in between being snapped, and answers questions to camera with ease, often checking the prompting notes she’s made on her phone. The soundtrack of the day is purely Girls Aloud — later that day it’s confirmed the group will be having a revival. How perfectly… witchy.

Speaking of witchiness, sophomore album The Good Witch was written about a surprisingly short period in Peters’ life, and its contents again prove how well she can connect with her audience. “I really do write for the girls,” she observes. “I really made a whole album based on a relationship that lasted for one month and maybe two weeks.” The record is a painfully familiar look into the heartbreak, frustration and unpredictability of a short-lived romance, yet she provides drops of joy and growth in equal measure, meaning a sense of hope always remains at the core, never allowing the sadness to win. “I wrote this album about that time in my life. It depicts the same six months with, give or take, a few different songs.”

But she doesn’t always write that way: “As I get older, I’ve tended to draw on my own life more frequently, but that’s not necessarily always chronologically accurate. I’ll write about something that happened four years ago like it was yesterday — it doesn’t matter to me. I am The Good Witch; I make what I want out of the things that are happening.” Peters has also remained adept at turning fleeting moments into the basis of a whole track. In 2022 fan-favourite release ‘Cate’s Brother’, she recalls meeting her housemate’s brother for the first time and quickly developing a huge crush. This led to intense lyrics, “And my heart went ‘Love him, he’s the one, and we shall wed,’” she sings.

The album and its subsequent deluxe version —released in October — touch on literary inspirations, including influences from the world of Greek mythology and fantasy, alongside a dose of religious imagery too. ‘The History of Man’ is a prime example, dotted with Biblical references: “So Samson blamed Delilah…”. Elsewhere, ‘In Guy on A Horse’, one of the deluxe tracks, Peters compares herself to Joan of Arc, depicting an elevated version of herself, as she criticises an ex-partner’s habit of looking down from his high horse.

“It wasn’t conscious. I wasn’t mood-boarding all my different literary inspirations or anything like that,” she explains, but there is an element to The Good Witch that acts as a conceptual album of sorts. “I got to write in that universe, which I loved. ‘The History of Man’ has some Greek mythology in it, and then ‘Wendy’ is essentially about Peter Pan. I was dancing around these universes.”

Gender is another theme very present throughout much of the record, with Peters viewing her journey between debut You Signed Up for This to The Good Witch as “giving girl-to-woman”, having done a lot of growing in the past two years. “There are a lot of threads and themes that look at gender and in what it is to identify as a woman and what it is to know men, which sounds a bit dramatic,” she says. “It’s funny because if you were to count the most used words in The Good Witch, they are the words ‘obsessed’ and the word ‘man’. I don’t know what that reflects about me, but it’s something to think about…”

The extended album closes with gorgeously nostalgic ‘The Last One’, which very nearly made it into You Signed Up for This. “‘The Last One’, I wrote for my first album, but right at the end, so it didn’t make it. It feels like such a closing track. But ‘Tough Act’ became the closing track on my first album, so that was done [and] dusted.” She believes some songs can have extremely specific destinies in that they must be placed at certain points on a record “or it’s not going to happen”. She continues, “Sometimes I write a song, which I know is either the title track of the album, and it opens the album, or it will just never come out — ‘The Last One’ was one of those songs. But I love that song, and it feels really special it now gets to close The Good Witch.”

Her favourite lyric of the entire album comes from the song ‘Yoko’, dealing with misunderstandings that followed after Peters left a relationship she really hoped would work out, relating this to the common misconception surrounding Yoko Ono’s part in the break-up of The Beatles. “‘Yoko’ is one of my favourites, and I always wanted that to be on the album, but she didn’t quite make it. There’s a lyric in that song that’s my favourite lyric from this whole album: ‘You have a phone, you should have called’.”

While the two LPs in her discography may seem quite different on the surface, she feels there are many similarities. “I always say they are sister records to me,” she explains. “Even the Deluxe really emphasises that because there are songs on there that I wrote for the first album. The Deluxe is a good way to tie up any loose ends, I guess, and to make sure everything I wanted to say from those years, hopefully, is out. I mean, there’s always more things I want to say!”

Elsewhere, Peters’ online persona is generally an incredibly positive one, having created a space in which her fans clearly feel extremely comfortable, seen and safe. However, this hasn’t made her immune to her fair share of negativity on the internet too, something she’s experienced more this year than ever before. Yet she still manages to deliver a witty response to the not-so-nice comments she’s been on the other end of. “You can say with a wry smile, ‘At least I’m relevant,’” she smiles. “It’s really difficult, and you get bitten twice as hard when you’re someone that is online,” she says. “You’re engaging, and giving yourself to people, and then, suddenly, the mood changes, and people don’t like you, or don’t like what you’ve given them. You’re like, ‘But I was just trying to create, or I was just trying to show you this new song!’ It feels very personal, even though you try to turn it off.”

Through any negativity, Peters remains incredibly self-aware, and doesn’t seem to hold any resentment towards those directing the vitriol her way. “These people don’t know you. It’s normally a teenager tweeting, and good for them! I was a teenager tweeting once too. We’ve all done it. As long as I shall live, there will be teenagers tweeting, as they should.” Still, she admits it’s hard to not feel that she’s being “personally attacked”, and the comments have taken their toll at times. “People forget I’m still a person that’s seeing this. I’ve experienced that this year. I’ve found it really difficult. When you’re touring and away from home, and you’re really tired and running on empty, and then you just see X, Y and Z on TikTok or on Twitter about yourself, it really takes it out of you.”

Being present on the internet has been central to Peters’ career — she started out by posting videos of herself singing on YouTube when she was 15. But this year, she reached new peaks of online fame when her ‘There It Goes’ video went viral on TikTok in early autumn, painting a very relatable picture of the aftermath of an intense end-of-summer breakup in a vast city like London. Fans latched onto a couple of specific lines, “I’m doing better / I made it to September / I can finally breathe”, and “The comedown of closure / The girls and I do yoga / I wake up and it’s October / The loss is yours”. Fans started producing their own visuals to the track in cute clips which soon flooded the app.

“Everybody wants something to take off on TikTok or to have a moment, but it was so fun that this moment was so organic,” she reflects. “What started happening was actually just this wonderful, sweet, pure, wholesome thing where people were using the sound, ‘I’m doing better / I made it to September,’ to round up little edits of their life and all the great things in it.” Peters admits she “couldn’t believe it” when she realised the song was going viral. “To see all these videos showcasing love and friendship, healing and growing and people just being themselves, I was like, ‘This is so cool.’ I’m so pleased and happy that was the moment, that’s what took off, because it’s so beautiful and lovely.”

In what Peters calls a “cliche” answer, it’s her parents she immediately shouts out when asked who she wants to dedicate The Breakthrough Award, supported by Volvo, to, as they have been by her side on her incredible journey since she was a teen. “They drove me to pubs to play when I was 15,” recalls Peters. “My dad would come with me when I was busking so that if anything shady happened, he could be there, but he would also pretend not to be my dad, he’d just loiter around. They’ve always just been really supportive, so yeah, I would like to dedicate [this award] to them.”

On what’s next after this whirlwind year, Peters has a clear objective: “I’m going to bed!” she declares, itching to spend some time at home. “I haven’t spent more than two days at home since July. I’m going to be in London, just walking around, so say hi if you see me. God damn, I hope I’m in my rest and relaxation era.” She plans to spend the coming weeks “cooking meals and going to exercise classes” and generally doing very little. “Is it the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory grandparents who are in bed all day? That’s what I’m going to channel. I want to collect my thoughts a little bit. Then in the New Year, that’s when I’ll start making some more music. I have some thoughts and ideas [for the third album], but we’ll have to see what happens. Life takes you in surprising places sometimes.”

Taken from Issue 14 of Rolling Stone UK, our Awards Issue. You can buy it here.

Words: Charlotte Manning Photography: Lewis Vorn Fashion & Creative Director: Joseph Kocharian Styling: Luci Ellis Hair and makeup: Elizabeth Rita Styling assistant: Chessie Lulli

#maisie peters #rolling stone uk

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