I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: March 16, 2022] Girl in Red

My daughter, T., became a huge fan of Girl in Red a little while ago.  When Girl in Red announced a show at my favorite club, Union Transfer, I knew I had to get tickets.  So, I got this pair back in June of 2021.   It seemed like the show was a lifetime away.

And then it finally arrived.

Our friends had recently gone to a show there and had arrived at 5 (doors opened at 7) to ensure a prime spot.  I have been to Union Transfer dozens of times and have never arrived earlier than 7:30 and always gotten a decent spot (sometimes right at the front).

But I’ve clearly never been to a sold out Girl in Red show.  Because we arrived at 7:30 (a wee but later than I wanted to, I admit) to find a huge line outside!  (I’ve never seen that before).  By the time we got in, the place was packed!  The one okay thing about this is that we decided to get merch first since we had no hope of getting any closer.  The other okay thing was that Girl in Red fans seems to be pretty short, so even though we were pretty far back, we could see the stage pretty clearly.

Girl in Red’s band came out–five guys dressed in black–and made a U at the back of the stage.  They started playing music and Marie Ulven bounced onto the stage and just started rocking all over the place to “You Stupid Bitch.”  Swinging her hair and bounding from one side of the stage to the other.

The crowd was insane from the get go.  They screamed and yelled and sang along.  A girl behind us must have been told that it was important to shriek at the top of your lungs at the end of each song because she did so in the exact same pitch and frequency (one long, two short) after each song.  T. and I decided that she sounded like when a fox screams at night–that ear piercing, spine chilling sound. And, she was perfectly at ear level with me.  Good grief.

I knew most of Girl in Red’s album from multiple in house plays, but I clearly didn’t know what the big songs were going to be because she played “girls” third and I thought sure that was going to be a much later song.

Before introducing “we fell in love in October,” she told us that she had a new girlfriend, although they didn’t fall in love in October.

The ban left and she brought out her acoustic guitar to play “I’ll Cal You Mine.”  It was great to hear her sing without the rest of the band.

I also assumed that “Serotonin” would be the big set ender, but she played that right in the middle  It sounded fantastic.

Her band was really great, too.  Her lead guitarist was really quite impressive and her bass player was a lot of fun, jumping around.  But really, none of us were looking at them.  She did acknowledge them a few times and when she spoke to them, her Norwegian accent came out on force.  Her normal stage speaking voice is completely un-accented.  I was amazed at how non-Norwegian she sounded until it slipped out.

She talked about an old racist homophobic uncle that she had who told her to make her songs “less gay” and we all mocked him.  She said she used to think that he was old and couldn’t change.  But there are plenty of old people who are neither racist nor homophobic.  So there.

For the remainder of the show she kept the energy high.  Even in the somewhat more mellow songs, the energy remained high.

When she ended the show with “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend,” the crowd, which I didn’t think could get any more wild, ramped it up even more.  And when Marie dove into the crowd at the end of the song the place erupted.

The song faded when she got back up onstage and some people even started to leave, but she told us it wasn’t done yet, and she grabbed a water bottle and doused the front row and sang the chorus a few more times.

It was quite a show.

And even though it was kind of short (relatively speaking), it was the the perfect length for the amount of music she has released and it got us home at a fairly reasonable hour on a school night.

The stage for the show was flanked by large banks of really bright lights.  Not an expensive display, I wouldn’t think, but very effective.  And I left the show thinking that girl in red could easily be playing much much bigger venues.