words: António Carvalho (edited by Raquel Pinheiro)
photos: António Carvalho
Attending a concert by Canadian singer-songwriter Sean Nicholas Savage is like discovering a hidden gem. The modest stage of Lovers & Lollypops seemed too small for everything he delivered in just over an hour.
His exuberant presence, his larger-than-life poetry, his attention towards the audience, his virtuoso and expressive voice are just parts of a larger whole that is difficult to describe. His electronic pop, heavily indebted to the eighties, reveals itself as confessional, honest and with a dose of apparent naivety, where joy and melancholy, loss and gain, mystery and revelation, pleasure and pain coexist, sometimes within the same song.
Whether in ballads or upbeat music, the classic themes of love – the euphoria of passion, the discovery of the other, the broken hearts – are dominant and served in catchy and well-crafted melodies, like many of the pop classics. Sean’s excellent technical mastery of his voice, including a delightful falsetto, doesn’t take away any of the moment’s authenticity, as if he were pouring his heart out and offering it to the audience.It was almost impossible to take your eyes off this magnetic, barefoot figure.
Besides the privileged ones in the audience, Clara Phends on synthesizers and Max-Elie Laroche on electronic drums joined him in this brief, intimate journey. Sean covered a representative sample of his prolific discography, with some emphasis on his latest album The Knowing, a record he is very proud of, so he told me after the concert.
He even granted a request from the audience, performing half of Chin Chin, and finished with one of his favourites, the single It’s Happening. Thank you, beautiful freak!
There’s a photo gallery of the concert on our Instagram
Mondo Bizarre Magazine 