Perfume Genius - the performing name of American musician Mike Hadreas - is in New Zealand for festival shows in Wellington and Auckland. Nick Bollinger talked to him and caught one of his Wellington concerts.
Perfume Genius live at NZ Festival Photo: Matt Grace/ NZFestival
The tall fair boy with the glasses and the floral jacket, standing at the foot of the stage, knows all the words. His face is beaming and he is singing out loud.
Less than a metre away from him, Mike Hadreas – the artist known as Perfume Genius – has just begun his second show at the Festival Club on Wellington’s waterfront.
Looking a bit like a mid-70s Bowie – an Even Thinner White Duke – Hadreas closes his eyes and twirls as his trio navigate the extreme loud-soft changes of ‘Otherside’, a kind of hymn for the disaffected with which he opens both his show and No Shape, his latest album.
For the next 80 minutes Hadreas holds the crowd spellbound with a set cherry-picked from all four of his albums; from the swelling synth-pop of ‘Just Like Love’ and ‘Longpig’ (from No Shape and 2014’s Too Bright, respectively) to songs like ‘Learning’ and ‘Mr Petersen’ from his solitary 2010 debut, which he performs alone at the piano.
Mike Hadreas a.k.a. Perfume Genius Photo: supplied
He also slips in a couple of unexpected covers: the nervously funky ‘Body’s In Trouble’ from the only record ever made by Canadian eccentric Mary-Margaret O’Hara, and ‘Kangaroo’ from the Alex Chilton masterpiece that is Big Star’s Third. “I next saw you, you was at the party, thought you was a queen…” The covers fit perfectly.
Partway through the set, the tall boy presents Hadreas with a bunch of flowers. Hadreas takes them graciously, clutching them to his chest while he sings the next song, then placing them carefully on top of his keyboard.
Talking to Hadreas on the day of the first show, he acknowledges the social role his concerts play – anywhere in the world, but particularly at home in America.
“A lot of America never felt safe and hasn’t for a very long time but I think people know now more than ever that it isn’t. So I like that my shows can be a place where people can go for an hour and a half and not feel the need to be defensive or to dress a certain way or present themselves a certain way, and can just be a little more free. Hopefully, that’s the feeling. And that’s what I try to do for an hour and a half too. Which is not like my standard mode.”
What, I ask, is his standard mode?
“Like everybody else, I’m weirdly self-aware and awkward and anxious. But I try to shake it off and push myself to be free for that time on stage. I feel like it’s my job.”
These days, he says, the audience informs not just his view of concerts but also the songs he writes.
“I’ve been doing it for so long now that I can’t just write for myself anymore. In the beginning I did, 'cause I didn’t think anyone else would hear it so it was just sort of therapeutic for me. But after playing shows and getting letters from people I keep them in my head when I’m writing.
“But if I start writing something universal it ends up falling really flat and connecting with nobody for some reason so I always start it from a personal place ‘cause it ends up connecting easier, I don’t know why.”
Growing up in Seattle, Washington, Hadreas stood out as the only openly gay male at his secondary school and suffered bullying and abuse.
For a number of years, he self-medicated, finally cleaning up about eight years ago. His musical career began to take off about the same time.
Perfume Genius Photo: supplied
“[As a child] I took piano lessons and I’d always written. It was more that I just grew up enough to follow through. I worked. I’d never really worked hard on anything in my life, creative or otherwise. I didn’t have much to say because I was pretty self-involved and had a lot of problems and stuff like that.
But as I got healthier and came out the other end, I had enough energy and I guess maturity – which is a corny word but – enough to actually sit down and make something whole and not just thinking somehow I’d just fall into a creative career just based off charisma or my hair” – he laughs – “or something. Something that a lot of obnoxious narcissistic young people think might happen to them.
“And it happens sometimes, you read about people getting discovered. I don’t know what I thought I was going to get discovered for, by just sitting around and drinking and doing drugs for ten years” – he laughs at himself again – “but it obviously didn’t happen until I just worked.”
No Shape is the biggest, most musically generous Perfume Genius record so far. Though the songs still visit some dark places, there’s an air of cautious hope about it, perhaps best summed up in the last lines of its final song, ‘Alan’ – written for Hadreas’s partner and keyboard player Alan Wyffels.
You need me / Rest easy / I'm here / How weird
“The last record before this one was sort of angry and focussed outward at everybody else and waving my finger at people. I don’t want to do that [again]. I wanted to make this album for me, and to uplift me and other people that are already listening to the music or already understood what I was doing. I didn’t feel the need to convince anybody or prove myself.
“And especially with all the crap going on in America you have to figure out a way to find some sort of warmth when maybe it’s not going to be given to you easily.”
Perfume Genius performs with Aldous Harding - 15 March, 8pm, Festival Playground Music Arena, Silo Park, Auckland
Perfume Genius live at NZ Festival Photo: Matt Grace/ NZFestival
