NL.10 — Hurray for the Riff Raff

21 May 2024, Amsterdam

I was supposed to be the musical one. In our relationship.¹ But it was Heidi who —one afternoon, from decent speakers in a coffee shop she almost never visits— was stopped in her tracks by an extraordinary voice and song.

One’s romantic partners should be “a little rock and roll,” my friend Jay has said, “without trying.”

Hurray for the Riff Raff emerges from folk music’s depths and various byways.

And in Alynda Segarra (now based in New Orleans) this band may well feature one of Rock/Americana's finest singer-songwriters. “This is a violent time to be a human,” Segarra told The Guardian in late 2021, before speaking of difficult paths, and insisting on the presence of love and beauty all about. “How do we stay present, how do we intensely feel joy?” they ask, “and not just the crushing weight of it all?”

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I associate Hurray for the Riff Raff with torrential rain, even sizeable hail stones. Both times I've seen Hurray live it has rained cats and dogs.

The first time was on a side stage at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival on 11August 2018.

A few photographs of the band's memorable performance (under a canopy) on that occasion don't capture how sodden we in the audience became.

But it was summer.

And the music was so good that no one cared.

“Pure rock star,” remarked my friend (other) Ken after his first experience of Segarra.

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Fast forward to 21 May 2024, and Hurray for the Riff Raff’s show at Tolhuistuin, a fabulous venue just a short ferry's ride away from Amsterdam Centraal.

Cue the rain, and even some of the aforementioned hail.

Dutch bicycle commuters are unfazed. “We're not made of sugar,” they don't bother saying, their full rain gear materialising as if out of nowhere.

As for us damp concert-goers, we hurry from the docks, drenched,

but soon to be rewarded . . . .

Segarra and company draw on a distinguished back catalogue, but there’s no mistaking that this Amsterdam show —part of a Euro tour that has already jumped back across the pond to North America— is about performing their new work.

“We have a new record,” Segarra faux-announces to an audience well aware of this detail, “and we’re gonna play the . . . whole . . . fucking . . . thing!”

And so they do, with smatterings from their past tunes interpolated, particularly as the close of the show draws nearer.

“Buffalo” rides a gentle slide, steel . . .

Through a raft of perils and extinctions.

So much of our world going, gone,

and yet there’s a breath of hope. There is poetry.

“Some things just take more time.”

Hurray has long garnered attention. But it helps to be even a little more noticed. When Segarra speaks on stage about the reception of their inward-spinning latest record, The Past is Still Alive (23 February 2024) — alluding to the press, the interviews, the tour all over, the rest— the expression they choose, a couple of times, is “life-changing.”

The place is packed, enthusiasts of all ages who know the songs.

Even the woman beside me —who, having inquired pre-show about my research (into the sixteenth-century Spanish world) and then rejected my attempts not ‘to go there,’ has cut me off quickly with an “I'm Protestant”— even she is beside herself, dancing.

I later learn that my friend Ed —a fellow fellow, like me out on a pass from our dreamworld, from our sanatorium— spotted me. Up front, my sopping Blue Jays cap pulled down low, next to the bopping Protestant.

Let the vantage I enjoyed, a few photographs, capture Segarra’s wonderful insistence, capture what they might of a magical show.

* photographs by Kenneth Mills

** my love and thanks to Bob Brown for laying on the Edmonton Folk Music Festival on this and many other occasions. And also to Heidi Victoria Scott, Jay Clark Reid, Ken Gurr, and Ed Schwarzschild who, in their own inimitable ways have contributed to whatever I’ve been able to do here.

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1. I was the one who'd listened to music constantly, growing up. The child who'd danced in the living room before my father said something, and made me self-conscious. Danced to pretty much anything. My parents’ records. It was me who'd holed up in his early-adolescent room with a Spalding tennis-racket-guitar. Rocking out to Elton John's Greatest Hits. Mouthing the song's words, fashioning some gestures, imagining the eyes of my classmates on me alone —'Oh how we underestimated that snivelling runt,’ they'd all think in unison, ‘is that a cover or one of his own songs?’ It was me who'd worked a string of shitty jobs, and then raided meagre student loan after meagre student loan, that I might assemble a modest vinyl collection. Me who'd learned to play and even sing a little, me who'd sought out live music wherever he lived. Don't even get me started on my ex's and my beautiful sons: I have musical progeny, and have kept an ear to the ground of sound still . . .