Pages From Chaos: A Homage to William Burroughs
QEH, London SE1

Molloy Woodcraft
Sunday June 19, 2005
The Observer

Vintage stills and film of William Burroughs play above the stage as guitarist Marc Ribot opens tonight’s tribute, part of Patti Smith’s Meltdown Festival programme. He coaxes strange drones from his guitar using a fan, then his playing slowly widens out into a clattering flamenco.

The music heads off into the realms of jazz and dies down to a minimalist fug as comic-book supremo Alan Moore begins reading his increasingly fast-paced beat biography of Burroughs.

Ribot switches to shimmering electric delay for Sinclair’s odd musing on the author’s relationship with London, sparked by his first encounter with him. It’s fond stuff, but surreal and funny.

Patti Smith takes to the stage to do a reading from Burroughs’s The Wild Boys. Ribot sets up a dirty, messed-up blues stomp and the homoerotic prose becomes slowly more rhythmic until, finally, Smith breaks into a climactic growling song. Next, she catches up a clarinet and starts skronking and stomping as Tilda Swinton reads the same passage in more muted manner.

Swinton starts the second half of the show with Burroughs’s bitter, funny ‘Thanksgiving Prayer’ before pianist Matthew Shipp comes on and is joined by Jason Pierce of Spiritualized. Big jazz chords roll out, followed by bursts of strange energy as the latter pulls atonal noises from the strings of his guitar.

Things continue in this vein, building to Smith’s extraordinary reading of Burroughs’s moving, retrospective introduction to Queer; she ends up on her knees, bellowing disjointed phrases, punishing the clarinet. Spaced-out, almost shamanistic intensity. Burroughs would have approved. And just what Meltdowns are meant for.