Yoko Ono's gradual shedding of her Beatles-ruining stigma and acceptance as an avant garde pop icon has reached breakneck pace of late. Following projects and performances with Japanese electronic experimentalist Cornelius, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and Lady Gaga, she curated 2013's Meltdown festival while left-field luminaries including tUnE-yArDs, Beastie Boys and Wilco's Nels Cline queued round the block to contribute to her 15th solo album, Take Me to the Land of Hell, her third since reforming Plastic Ono Band with the help of her son, Sean, in 2009. Come her 81st year, kitsch has turned to bona fide cult.
Hence nights like these, when her art leanings borrow a contemporary edge from her admirers. Introduced by her 1965 film Cut Piece, in which a New York audience was invited to scissor away chunks of clothing from a motionless Ono, she performs her more experimental songs and spoken-word pieces with an improvised backing from Cline and Mercury prize-winning tabla virtuoso Talvin Singh. The songs are structured loosely around Ono's childlike poetry of feminist oppression, anger, loss, abandonment and eternal hippy naivety – "we're going to cover this Earth with our love!" she howls during Rising as though she's still stuck in that bag in 1969. But they build into primal therapy freak-outs of quite staggering dexterity, Singh tapping primordial moods from his tablas and Cline stretching and mangling impossible notes as Ono has a blazing row with his guitar.
Ono's voice is the least refined instrument here – part art, part orgasm, part coughing fit – but as she groans, screams, speaks in tongues and does impressions of a laughing motorbike, leading the music by her mood alone, it's always with passion and conviction. This tiny fireball in black hat and shades, her fragile figure crammed with idealism, tragedy, endurance and cultural import, is an art happening in and of herself, and tonight she entrances far more than she irritates.
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