The Sydney Opera House: landmark, icon, home to 95% of Australia’s seagull population, and the venue of previously 10, now 11, live Ben Folds shows. Tuesday night heralded the final night of Folds’ Paper Planes tour, promising an intimate gig with nothing more than our maestro, a gigantic Steinway, and stacks and stacks of paper.
A (good) artist normally gets as much back as they give to the crowd, and the atmosphere is a direct consequence of the feeling in the room. With that in mind, it’s quite difficult to have a party when you’re sitting down. It’s also quite difficult to make people want to party when you’re one man and a grand piano, but it’s something Ben Folds does at every turn with aplomb, and this gig is no exception.
Act One is Folds curating a setlist of comprised equally of solo tracks, Ben Folds Five classics, and audience participation, with not a paper plane in sight. It’s part comedy gig, part story time, and fully awe-inspiring. Folds is intimate, but engaging, and before you know it, we’re all playing along and testing out our vocal range with four-part harmonies. He plays beautifully, erratically, stomping his feet along with the beat. It’s utterly charming.
He often forgets the words and is jokingly chided by the audience, whose loyalty is evident through their perfect repetition. We faithfully play the part of Regina Spektor on ‘You Don’t Know Me’, and play the part of the prompter when the lyrics to his more obscure numbers escape him.
Folds jokes about the length of time he takes to introduce his songs, and the length of the introductions of those introductions. He muses who else amongst musicians has this trait, perhaps Bruce Springsteen, or Tim Minchin? This is the perfect set-up for when Tim Minchin himself appears to play out to the interval on piano and vocals for ‘One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces’, with Folds on drums.
Post interval, we all returned from the bar with our hastily assembled paper planes, each carrying a song request scribbled on tickets, receipts, napkins, or whatever else could be scrounged (true blue fans however had come prepared with giant aircraft). The stage was flooded with the origami offerings of anyone with a decent arm and a well constructed glider, ten of which became the setlist. My lack of upper arm strength or engineering background saw my request for ‘Hiroshima’ go sailing backwards into the upper boxes, but so is life.
If we showed our loyalty in the first half by our singing, we put that to shame in the second by selecting tracks so obscure that Folds himself barely recognised them. It a testament to his career spanning over 20 years that makes that feat possible, and to his likeability and character that we not only didn’t mind, but we adored it.
Whilst the lack of ‘Brick’ felt almost deliberate – too well known, too cliched – we were treated instead to a beautiful rendition of tear jerker “The Luckiest”. “Still Fighting It” felt poignant, rousing, and bittersweet as he left the stage to no encore.
Ben – let’s make it 12, shall we?
Natalie Lines – On The Town & Theatre Now
