Mother Teresa’s face appears on a white sphere floating above the pulpit of the Union Chapel. Her mouth starts moving as she tells us, in a high-pitched American accent, the story of a dream in which she was in a train crash and then felt sorry for beavers who had been skinned for their fur. Below, the musicians of the Residents look up reverentially at the projection. Three of their number wear checked suits and white bowler hats, faces hidden behind oversized bird beaks and goggles. The singer, Randy, is dressed as a cow, complete with horns and a snout.
The Residents have disguised their identities since they emerged from the wreckage of the American hippy movement of the late 60s, rarely communicating with the media and then only via a spokesman called Homer Flynn. Even without the outfits, their bewildering back catalogue is one of wild conceptuality. It includes mangling the Beatles’ Hey Jude on Third Reich & Roll, a record that satirised the commercial music industry by reimagining it as a Hitlerian endeavour, and Commercial Album, which, with 40 songs all of one minute in length, was anything but. Theirs is an exploration of the American grotesque that arguably has more in common with David Lynch than any of their musical peers.
Tonight, the strange menagerie on stage radically reworks tracks from across their history under the title In Between Dreams. It’s an exploration of the suggestive subconscious, which, in the Residents’ hands, can only mean nightmares. Despite the fact that this feels a more low-key production than recent tours, the stripped-back intensity in the chapel setting follows such a fine line between terrifying and unselfconsciously daft that the eeriness is heightened.
In addition to the vision of Mother Teresa, the sphere above the altar flickers into life three more times with disembodied heads. We see John Wayne wistfully imagining a ballerina, Nixon dreaming that during Watergate he was a blues bandleader “with Kissinger on piano”, and a clown who looks several shades of pale beyond the grave sorrowfully wishing he was a cowboy. Its ghoulish appearance is followed by The Black Behind, a track made of thunder and shrieking harmonica, like Dylan being sucked from a train into a plains tornado.
The music interspersed around the dream vignettes is a cacophony of electronics, shredding electric guitar, and Randy’s vocals. He has a uniquely unsettling ability to switch, in the space of a line, from the uncannily melodic tones of a tired and emotional vaudeville singer to a 50-a-day weirdo whose house you’d tell the kids to avoid. Baby Sister ends in a bloodcurdling scream, yet a take on James Brown’s It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World feels almost heartfelt in its bombastic rock pastiche.
The Residents have always added a curious sense of soul to their subterfuge, even as they make a nightmare of the iconography of the American dream. Tonight, with ghostly apparitions, sound design and lyrics, is a fevered reel of the American west, showbiz, Hollywood, the circus, the railroad, and rock’n’roll. It’s an excursion through the Residents’ diabolical imagination that gives the lie to the notion that there’s nothing more boring than other people’s dreams. Penultimate number Tourniquet of Roses ends with the refrain “there is no more to say” barking out of the speakers as, looking around furtively, the bovine Randy scampers off towards the vestry.
