To the Astoria the other Saturday night for a concert by the new, solo Jarvis Cocker. This was always going to be a great night anyway, as our good friend Janne (who is rather smitten with Jarv and has the honourable distinction of having gone with him to a karaoke bar where he performed Toto’s magnificent ‘Africa’) was celebrating a rather major birthday.
Anyhow, I’ve been okay with the Jarvis solo record but have yet to love it as much as the best of Pulp (which, in my book, means ‘This Is Hardcore’). However, there’s nothing like being in the presence of the man himself and the live show really brings out the best in the new songs – loud and energetic and funny and bitter. Cocker starts the show by throwing a ripped up copy of the Daily Telegraph into the audience and later explains that’s because their review that morning called him “the Judi Dench of Indie Rock”. Inaccurate (as you’d naturally expect from the Telegraph) since the Jarvis on stage is more like Morrissey scripted by Joe Orton. Ironically so, in fact, since as he points out, he has to leave the stage by 9.30 so the disco dolly club G.A.Y. can start in the same venue at 10. And right on time he duly leaves with a strobe-frenzied rendition of ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath, the layers of irony as dense as an oversized French onion.
This being a Jarvis Cocker gig, and this being a room full of people who love his particularly sardonic take on Britishness and the vagaries of life, something ridiculous happens early on in the set that seems to me to sum up the rapport between Jarvis and his audience. Not long into the song ‘I Will Kill Again’, a particularly skewed ballad about a warm-hearted, friendly man with a secretive dark side, a host of red balloons is released into the crowd, which they bounce and punch to keep afloat during the song. “That must win the award for the least appropriate use of balloons at a gig,” Cocker announces, then “Are you the same ones who did that at Koko (another London venue) because they’re all left over from your Grandad’s cancelled party?”
And sure enough when I finally manage to grab one of these balloons it reads ‘Happy 80th Cyril – and surprise family reunion”. Turns out the balloons genuinely were intended for the audience member’s grandfather’s surprise birthday but he died before it was due to take place, so they’ve kept them and are throwing them into the audience at gigs - in his memory. This seems to me to sum up everything that is great about Jarvis Cocker and the world he’s written about in song through the years. Pop music would be a much duller place without him.