An audience member's letter to Life!

Reply from the Esplanade management

Despite a truncated set, I am David Sparkle’s Baybeats 2005 show went down as one of the most memorable performances in the history of Singapore’s largest annual “indie” music festival. Fans were talking about the event weeks after and an audience member even felt strongly enough to write to the national press about it. At the heart of the matter was a bureaucratic absurdist drama that began when a half-hearted drizzle ate into ten minutes of the band’s allotted half-hour set. For a foursome known to play lengthy, Mogwai-styled instrumental rock pieces, twenty minutes is not a lot of time at all; and as their second song began trundling past 11pm, the Esplanade’s stage manager appeared by the side of the drummer with an authoritative scowl on her face, gesturing reprobatively at the band to stop playing. When the band headed, instead, towards another climactic section, the crowd got in on the action, clapping and cheering alongside Zahir’s crashing drums and rallying behind the band to Stick it to the Man–or, perhaps more appropriately in this case, to Stick it to the Ultraman, as the stage manager affectionately came to be known by due to the churlish figure she cut, with arms akimbo and icy glare. Expectedly, many were annoyed with her, as she seemed to exemplify the sort of despised tunnel-visioned bureaucratic inflexibility found in government institutions of this country. Yet, relistening to those tense minutes, I do think we should all be a little kinder in our judgement of her; after all, with the structural twists, rousing climaxes and electric air of “Apocalypse of your Heart”, it’d be difficult not to be caught up in the drama–in a way, let’s just say that the music made her do it.

mp3: I am David Sparkle – Apocalypse of your Heart (live at Baybeats, Jul 16, 2005)