"I can't rise above the church"

Saw Kristin Hersh last night at St Cecilia's Hall, which is a museum for musical instruments most of the time.

The show - KH reading from her memoirs, accompanied by her own guitar, and punctuated with live excerpts from her songs - is called Paradoxical Undressing, which is the hypothermia sufferer's act of removing clothes/ blankets despite the cold.

It was... moving. She really can write like hell, not just lyrics but prose that just grabs and rattles and shakes. It was sunny when I walked in; rain drummed on the glass ceiling during the second half of the show. I'm not big on performance, but this was powerful and twisted my head backwards and made me look.

So, fragments of the last fifteen years’ listening...

- stumbling into 'Not Too Soon' on The Chart Show: assuming TD was the group's frontwoman: a tiny KH strumming rhythm, almost off-camera.

- The Real Ramona, my first ever album, bought with Christmas vouchers from English relatives.

- a live version of 'Mania' tearing me to pieces on a walkman in a blazer in 1993. Downstairs at the Sauchiehall Centre food court, if memory serves.

- 'Cry Baby Cry' done acoustically on a bonus disc. "I'm not ever getting out, I'm always getting sicker."

- playing Hips and Makers for my cousin while we studied. "Bit depressing for me," he says.

- "They can no longer move: I can no longer be still."

- Stealing 'Touching Like Spacemen' for a title of an undergraduate work.

- a gig at the QM, having driven a hired car down from Mull or Inverness or Wester Ross for hours through the black rain. KH blank-eyed and screaming into the middle-distance, her sound almost metal, alloy.

- appalling excitement when the Muses' debut was reissued with demos: almost choked with anticipation.

- "How do they kill children, and why do I wanna die?" Touché.

I’ll add to these, but they’re all from the past. I don’t feel things as deeply as I used to.

Call me. Call me.