CityLife

Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins
The Lowry
January 16, 2010

OVER the tannoy at the Lowry, the pre-show announcement revealed that Henry Rollins’ show would have no interval and was due to finish at 10.15pm (it started at 7.30pm). Whoa, should have packed a lunch and some full strength Pepsi.

Though it’s not surprising really. If any performer is capable of lasting the course, it’s Rollins. This is, after all, a show from one of the most intense performers of the last few decades.

Rollins is famed for his angry stage persona, cultivated in the Eighties as frontman of punk outfit Black Flag. Though he’s spent some time since they spilt in 1986 performing music with his own band, these days it’s spoken word performances that he favours.

Though often humorously told, he doesn’t refer to them as stand-up, thus releasing him to talk about anything he likes without the pressure to be funny. His humour may be, as far as he’s concerned, inadvertent - but he certainly has a point to his rhetoric.

He’s not unlike a somewhat wide-eyed Mark Thomas or less bile-fuelled Doug Stanhope. The result is utterly compelling and the two and three quarter hour show flies by.

Inspiring

Rollins opens with an emotive description of the joy felt on the night that the US finally voted in its first black president, but he continues to note how shamed he is by how it has brought out the racism in some of his fellow Americans.

So his advice for all is to travel in order to shake off narrow mindedness - and travel is certainly something that Rollins spends as much time as possible doing.

Rollins bowls around the world with an infectious enthusiasm and incredible fearlessness. His curiosity and concern for people of all cultures spurring him on. Since his last visit to Manchester he’s seen the luxury of life in Saudi Arabia, attended a music festival in the Sahara and been disappointed by the turnout at the 25th anniversary event of the disaster at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India.

It’s also that fearlessness that leads him to visit a slum in Delhi and break into the Union Carbide factory and take pictures of the 610 tank from which the deadly gas escaped.

It’s an inspiring almost three hours. Now, where can I book a flight to Kabul…?

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