Our greatest strength can also be our greatest weakness. Take Henry Rollins, the punk-rock god with Black Flag and the Rollins Band, now turned actor, author and most of all performer of engaged and revealing spoken-word shows. A week ago this alternative American icon was in Timbuktu at the end of a trek round Africa, India, China and the Middle East. Now he’s here to report on great wealth (Saudi Arabia) and great injustice and hardship (Bhopal, on the 25th anniversary of the Union Carbide gas leak) in a new mix of tract and travelogue.
Rollins can really talk. Standing, sculpted, in a black T-shirt on a bare stage, he doesn’t um, he doesn’t ah. “Thank you for enduring me,” he says at the end of three hours, no interval, and he’s only half-joking. Because this is a splurge. The first hour touches on everything from Ireland’s blasphemy laws to Ozzy Osbourne — “I love that man, as a fan and as a pal” — from London’s fortitude during the war to his thoughts on the BNP — “douchebags!”.
However the meat of it, the travel stories, are an hour coming. When they do, there are illuminating moments — we’re told about Sharia in Saudi Arabia, he inculcates a Sri Lankan teenager into the wonders of the Stooges, he makes an enraged contrast between the “rugged individualism” of American right-wing rhetoric and the grim realities of self-reliance in Bangladesh. The highlights are many, but Rollins has a distance to go to sort the revealing from the indulgent. We could do with more about Union Carbide, say, or China. And less about, say, his new acting job on the TV series Sons of Anarchy.
When, near the end, he visits the killing fields of Cambodia, the show snaps into focus. He’s livelier, funnier and he makes his point — “the demonisation of the intellect” was the calling card of Stalin, Hitler and Mao and it’s rarely far from the surface in his own country, too. “We’ve got to stick it to The Man, every chance we get,” he says, and manages not to sound like a teenager having a tantrum.
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Punk isn’t just about anger and energy, it’s about concision. Last time I saw Rollins, 18 months ago, he was fresher, faster, funnier. The reason? He was deep into his tour so he’d had time to polish his tales — and he was limited to 70 minutes at the Edinburgh Fringe. Rollins is an important voice, but fewer words would say more.
Touring to Jan 23. Tonight at UEA, Norwich. www.henryrollins.com