King(s) at Night!

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Venue: Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, Venice, Italy
Concert date: 28.04.2007
Attendance: 0
Ticket price: 20 euros

It was a gorgeous sunny Sunday in Venice, and we were chatting with Will Oldham in the afternoon shade of the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove foyer. He introduced himself to me by his real name. For more official conversations he’d rather be addressed by his stage name, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, but ours wasn’t an official chat at all. It was completely informal and very relaxed, which is no surprise, since Will is a genuinely kind and warm person.
There weren’t many people around the theater, mostly just the concert organizers, a few of their friends, some people connected to Bonnie in one way or another, a journalist from an Italian music magazine, and yours truly. Drumming was already drifting out of the hall, and as Will mentioned, he was slowly heading off to soundcheck, where his current drummer on this last leg of the tour, which was wrapping up with this very show, was already waiting: Alex Neilson, one of the youngest and certainly one of the best drummers around, especially in improvised music.

“We’re pretty tired already, and it’s good that there’ll be some free time for rest now. But it’s really beautiful here,” Will said, and soon after we went into the hall for the soundcheck. Special thanks for that go to Enrico, the main organizer of the show, who had already given me free rein to move around and showed me this wonderful venue, which can also boast truly excellent acoustics. The hall holds around two hundred people, and a bit after nine in the evening roughly that many had gathered.
A few hours earlier, the still-empty hall was filled with the sound of Will’s voice and guitar and Alex’s drums. The two of them ran through a few songs like a well-oiled machine, playing “A Sucker’s Evening” and “Beast For Thee” in full, and since there were no big problems with the sound and they quickly got on the same page with the sound engineer, they also played “Love Comes To Me” from last year’s album The Letting Go, and then wrapped up. That was also the only one of these three songs they played at the show later, though in a very different outfit. All the soundcheck songs were incredibly explosive, while the ones at the concert covered a much wider dynamic range, from spiritually tinged numbers to stuff that bordered on free jazz, which was seriously impressive given how little equipment was on stage. You didn’t miss any other instrument for even a second, because it’s unbelievable how much emotion the two of them coaxed out of just those two instruments, their vocal cords and a few extra percussion bits that served either as standalone instruments or as drumsticks. At one point Bonnie even howled like a wolf from the edge of the stage, while Alex held little bells in his mouth and jingled them, drumming with his elbows at the same time, proving himself a truly exceptional and endlessly inventive musician who knows no limits. No wonder it was him who took the drum stool when Jandek, probably the most mystified musical persona or collective of all time, finally decided on a first live show after 27 years of recording and more than thirty albums released, with not a single concert or official interview along the way.

Before the show I asked Will how he came up with the idea of playing with just a drummer this time, since he’d previously performed with a band in a more classic format, and he simply replied that he and Alex love playing together, so that’s what they do. There’s no shortage of chemistry or communication between them, and they were very talkative too, but what they said to each other usually couldn’t be heard over the loud applause, and most of the time you couldn’t even hear what they said to the crowd through the mic! Once we just caught the end of one of Bonnie’s sentences, “no, slower than last night! Jesus!”, which set off a wave of laughter in the audience. And they were already deep into the song.
They were in a great mood the whole time, and Alex soon confessed how happy he was that their last show was right here, because it’s really wonderful, and that they were taking musical requests, at which a grinning Will cut in, “why are you asking them what to play?” and went on to say he always loves playing here (his last time was in December 2005). He also remarked that this was Alex’s first time in Venice, making him a “Venecian virgin”, which of course drew salvos of cheers from the crowd. Then Bonnie said, “Alex and I have known each other for about four years. We met in Scotland, and that’s exactly when I first got to know this song too.” “Molly Bawn”. Definitely one of those songs Bonnie plays only rarely, but with its ballad vibe it still got a hearty reaction, though not quite like his own songs did: the opening “I See A Darkness”, the classics from the days of Will’s band The Palace Brothers, a.k.a. Palace Songs, “Pushkin”, “O Lord Are You In Need?” and “Agnes, Queen Of Sorrow”, plus later songs found mostly on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy albums, such as “A Minor Place”, “Death To Everyone”, “My Home Is The Sea” and others. Lesser-known songs from rarer, mostly collector-oriented releases went down very well too, like “In My Mind” from the EP of the same name, which was obviously a request from a fan who had come from Iceland and had been following Bonnie’s European tour. As he said before the show, this was already his seventeenth Bonnie concert. He also owns every Oldham release except one, which is no small feat, since some titles are seriously rare and very hard to get (price-wise too!), and Will is known as one of the more prolific musicians out there. As the guy mentioned, he shelled out 200 US dollars on eBay for the vinyl of Viva Last Blues!

By and large, all the songs were changed so much from the originals that you usually only recognized them by the lyrics. Only Bob Dylan tends to rework his own songs this radically. And since Bonnie is well known for occasionally taking on an interesting cover (among other things, he’s recorded “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”, and on some earlier shows he played the Dolly Parton / Whitney Houston hit “I Will Always Love You”), this time he played a cover of the evergreen Nazareth hit “Love Hurts”, dedicated to “a beloved person who sadly isn’t here today, Dawn McCarthy”, who accompanied Bonnie on previous shows.
The biggest cheers from the crowd, who were in great spirits for the full two hours the show lasted, probably went to a sort of wreath, or medley, of two interwoven songs, which they played as the closing number of the night. They started with “Even If Love” from the mostly acoustic album Master And Everyone, then after the first chorus radically changed tempo and melody and, without stopping, launched into “New Partner” from Viva Last Blues, or rather the slightly more modern version from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy Sings Greatest Palace Songs, on which Will re-recorded some of the best songs from his earlier albums in Nashville, country style. After a few minutes they repeat the trick, return to the original melody and tempo, and finish off “Even If Love”.
Words fail me, except maybe: masterful! To borrow the title of one of Will’s songs that sums up the whole evening perfectly, “A King At Night”, except this time there were two kings of the night. And that immodest royal title is one they truly deserve.

Setlist

01. I See A Darkness
02. In My Mind
03. Lion Lair
04. Another Day Full Of Dread
05. John The Baptist
06. Pushkin
07. Strange Form Of Life
08. Wai
09. Cursed Sleep
10. Love Comes To Me
11. A Minor Place
12. Madeleine Mary
13. Love Hurts
14. The Seedling
15. O Lord Are You In Need?
16. May It Always Be
17. Molly Bawn
18. You Have Cum In Your Hair And Your Dick Is Hanging Out
19. 64
20. Master And Everyone