Leith Theatre
Neil Cooper
Five Stars
The Jarvis Cocker
approved Extinction Rebellion stall outside Leith Theatre is doing great business
before the man himself comes wiggling through the red mist, throwing shapes on
a centre-stage platform like a living statue. With his backside stuck out,
Cocker gazes into a mirror for the opening Pharaoh, his string-bean frame and
1970s perma-brown threads cast in a heroic hue.
“Have you taken Leith of
your senses?” Cocker asks wryly once he’s done by way of introduction to his latest
concept. He quotes from Claude Debussy, born on the same date as the gig in
1862, and peppers his between-song banter with further bon mots from fellow
celebrants, including Dorothy Parker, John Lee Hooker, Carson McCullers and Ray
Bradbury.
The glam racket of Further
Complications gives way to the Can-like groove of Children of the Echo, the
song’s mythological intent aided by the celestial backing vocals of harpist
Serafina Steer and violinist Emma Smith. With Cocker’s former cohort in Relaxed
Muscle, Jason Buckle, on keyboards alongside bassist Andrew McKinney and
drummer Adam Betts, the short-lived duo’s back catalogue gets a show with Mary.
Like Big Julie, which comes later, the song is laid bare as a kind of northern
English chanson, knee-deep in melodrama and absurdist hysteria.
The diabolical gallop of
this year’s Must I Evolve single casts Cocker as a deadpan Hamlet, with Steer
and Smith’s nagging “yes, yes, yes, yes” chorus egging him on alongside Smith’s
frantic fiddle. A mirror ball shines down for In My Eyes, a Bidduesque inner
city disco homage that bridges slow dance smooch and Proustian ennui. House
Music too captures the clubland contradictions of solitary torpor and
collective euphoria.
Running The World is an
even more necessary anthem for the common people than it was when it first appeared
more than a decade ago, while Pulp’s His n Hers sees Cocker throwing sweets into
the crowd and going walkabout to offer balms of wisdom for troubled times. A
final Elvis Has Left the Building acknowledges his own guru-like status, confirming
once and for all how the geek may yet inherit the earth.
The Herald, August 23rd 2019
ends
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