Good Grief: Sufjan Stevens, alive in London

Sufjan Stevens at London’s Royal Festival Hall (3rd September) seemed to present a perfect opportunity for such an evening - a nice comfortable seat, a glass of wine, maybe another at the interval, and some sad music performed by very talented people. I looked forward to thinking only my thoughts, both about the music, and about whatever else my mind would stumble across using the sounds as a springboard.

But Stevens isn’t so much the kind of musician who attracts fans and as much as he does devotees, and though I’m certainly the former, before this gig I was definitely not the latter. They were present here in number, and dominated the first half of the evening even more than the music (almost entirely lifted from Stevens’ splendid Carrie and Lowell LP of earlier this year).

The audience wanted a communal experience, but what Sufjan related to us was a very personal one, what with him treating us to the entirety of a record based around the life and, more accurately, the death of his troubled mother Carrie, the continued presence of his stepfather Lowell, and the repercussions the upbringing he was given by the pair still have in his life and work.

It’s not a universally relatable tale, no matter how much people want it to be. Maybe ‘communal’ is the wrong word – people seemed to want to be Sufjan’s friend, to help him through this, and perhaps the best setting in which they could hear these songs was not performed in these radical reinterpretations by a band of master musicians in one of the country’s best-sounding environments, but to have them whispered gently by Sufjan directly in to their ears as he holds back the sobs. You know, like they heard it on the record.

There were so many People Having Feelings in the room that I found it drowned out any I might have had of my own. Thankfully, approaching the first half of the night’s show on a purely musical level was still very rewarding, if not the transcendent experience that seemed to be being enjoyed by everyone with their eyes shut, air drumming around me.

Carrie and Lowell, a very quiet record, sounded massive. Its skeletal songs were stretched in all directions, in to sections with choreographed dance moves, ten (fifteen? Twenty?) minute long drone hallucinations performed by Nico Muhly on an organ to the back of the stage that I’d never seen in the countless times I’ve come to gigs at this venue but is so massive it was probably the first bit of it they built, and twinkling electronic dalliances that suggest that Sufjan has a more than passable party album in him somewhere, or at least something that sounds a bit like a more interesting, modern day Belle and Sebastian.

Though the arrangements shifted, what didn’t change is the subject matter, which is death, death and more death, the death of people you’ve never met, who lived lives and died deaths in their own specific way, which is not your way, but theirs and theirs only. Of course, if you’ve experienced grief you can take comfort in hearing tales of the grief of others, as a welcome reminder that you’re not alone in your experiences. I’m lucky in that little in the way of true grief has touched my life, and I’m terrified of the day it does. But what I took from it was insight, rather than comfort. I might come back to it for that, one day.

But, as it turned out, Carrie is buried but not quite dead. Having not spoken a word to the audience all night, Stevens ended the first part of the concert by telling a long series of jokes about her and Lowell's preoccupation with mortality, in a low, almost gravelly voice a world away from the dazzling, semi-whispered falsetto we’d been treated to in song for the previous hour. He was hilarious; his comic timing as good as any stand up I’ve seen in years, his material just as brave. Everything he said about his parents – such as them only giving their kids birthday cakes with candles in the shape of question marks – was, most likely, a load of fibs. But his long-deceased mother came to life in his fiction, growing an extra layer of humanity not afforded to her by the relentlessly downtrodden album that detailed her demise and legacy. Not everything is black or white. Everything is both.

Stevens told us now nice it was “to be in a room so full of life”. And at that point, I felt it too. I’ve never seen the mood in a place lift quite like it. I felt ready to acknowledge my own thoughts and feelings on grief, having previously deemed myself not experienced or emotionally intelligent enough to join in with whatever it was everyone else was so clearly subsumed by. The whole thing was much more rounded than I gave it credit for. I left the fan behind me, and became a devotee. Ready for grief. Or at least, more prepared than before. My loved ones are still forbidden from going anywhere.

• Photos by Jason Williamson. See the full gallery here.