Conchita WURST’s ‘Pure’ — WURST’s Top 40 Best Live Performances (#40)
Note: I’m kicking off this Conchita WURST series today as a run-up to WURST’s ‘T.O.M. — Truth Over Magnitude’ album release concert at WUK, Vienna on November 2nd. Because that will allow me to feature 3 songs from the Top 40 list each week, right up until two days before his concert.
Look for the songs I choose on Thursdays, Saturdays and Tuesdays thru October 31st.
There will not be a long explanation as to why I think these songs are WURST’s Top 40 Best Live Performances. Except that, they are performances I like, and songs I thinks he sings well. (Oh and yes, Conchita/Conchita WURST/WURST are interchangeable — “Same voice, same brain, same heart.”)
Here goes….
(#40) — Conchita Wurst’s ‘Pure‘ — WURST at World Bodypainting Festival, Klagenfurt, 12th July, 2019
‘Pure‘ has been in my top Conchita songs from the first time I heard it. Conchita has never sung it live as often as other songs.
Here, though, it’s WURST singing ‘Pure‘ and doing so in such a way, if I had known this was the level of emotion Tom Neuwirth could reach down inside himself to find once he divested himself of Conchita, I would have asked him to put her away four years ago.
Because, in this live performance, WURST could have chosen to go for a more melodramatic telling. Instead, he chose a quiet and simple unfolding of the emotion in that song.
An emotion that is written on his face and in his eyes as he sings, and that makes you see vividly the pain he has gone through, and the disappointments he has experienced.
Disappointments caused by people who told him he was only ‘good enough’ if he re-made who he was into what they wanted him to be. Pain when he realized, as he did this, he not only didn’t recognize himself, but he hated what he had become.
The first time I saw WURST singing ‘Pure‘ live at the World Bodypainting Festival, it made me cry.
Related reading: 100 Best Things Conchita Wurst has done since she won Eurovision (#100-91)
(A big thanks to Sanni Jo for filming the performance!)