I’M USUALLY a big fan of not knowing much about a show – or indeed a film – before you go in.
It stops you projecting your own thoughts and ideas onto whatever is being presented, which can negatively impact your enjoyment.
A case in point would be me having a soft spot for the Jack Reacher films having never read one of the books before seeing the movies, while hardcore fans simply couldn’t see past the fact wee Tom Cruise was more than a foot shorter and a hundred kilos lighter than the character was written.
But I’ll make an exception in this case.
Ostensibly this is Michelle’s story of creative resilience in the 13 years since she was “cancelled” in 2013.
The problem is, Michelle seems to think everyone is intimately au fait with the minutiae of what happened, and never actually addresses it head-on, opting instead for a more oblique approach.
In short, she was recorded making what appeared to be a lengthy anti-gay tirade during a show, and the bootlegging and subsequent dissemination of that effectively torpedoed the Grammy-winning singer’s career.
You can perhaps understand why she’s reluctant to elaborate on what happened.
The lack of clarity is a major issue, especially since her career was launched by what was basically another unofficial bootleg, and when she refers to a bootleg you’re never quite sure which one.
Shocked’s position appears to be that she knew she was being recorded that day in San Francisco in 2013, knew exactly what she was saying and was using some extremely homophobic language to make a point.
Not that she says the last part of that in the show.
Now, in light of that, you could see this show in one of two ways. One, she is finally getting the chance to put her side of the story over or, two, the less sympathetic might think she’s trying to reframe the narrative in a more flattering light ie. getting her excuses in after the fact.
We were also asked to vote for truth or reality at the beginning, and that would dictate which version of the show we would see. I’m still in the dark about all of that.
A further complication is that this is all wrapped in polemic against AI, the internet and social media, at one point she talks about this “military-grade weaponry being used against civilians”, as well as an argument that the only guaranteed free speech is copyrighted.
Alongside the cancelling stuff, crammed into an already overstuffed hour, that sounds like so much conspiracy theory claptrap.
That said, the fact the damning bootleg was illegally posted on YouTube by a Google employee, in Shocked’s opinion in order to help promote their new Chrome browser, while not being a smoking gun certainly gives off the whiff of cordite.
These are her only UK dates this year and when she strapped on her guitar in between audio clips and reading from cue-cards and gave us her trademark Texas folk and blues, you could see she is an electrifying storyteller and performer and the crowd lapped it up, singing along.
Shocked claims to have “brought down Google” in the legal wrangling after they “targeted” her during her blacklisting but, ironically, that was the search engine I used to fill in the gaps on the train home after seeing what could – and should – have been a much more compelling and coherent show.
Michelle Shocked’s Bootleg This!, 20.30, Gilded Balloon Patter House: DoonstairsAugust 5-20.
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/michelle-shocked-bootleg-this
