First time at Marble Factory - seems like a cool venue.

Hubby's picture.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CV8sGN2s8mv/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

As astonishingly good as everyone has said. I started to panic in the encore when I thought they might not get to My Legendary Girlfriend, but there were 4 songs in the encore this time. I was very brave and went down the front right in the middle - never done that before at a gig as I am not very tall and panic in tight crowds, but it was a very civilised crowd that didn't crush, that's not to suggest they were in any way unenthusiastic, there were a lot of highly excitable people there. Our local gig going hero, Big Jeff (@bigjeffjohnsart),was overwhelmed when Jarvis had heard of him and dedicated Big Julie to him. Jarvis just looks so, so happy to out and about again and on stage. No fights with photographers or feedbacking amplifiers tonight, just a hugely joyful occasion for everyone involved.

-- Edited by Fran on Saturday 6th of November 2021 11:08:36 PM

Fran wrote:

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As astonishingly good as everyone has said. I started to panic in the encore when I thought they might not get to My Legendary Girlfriend, but there were 4 songs in the encore this time.

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I was in the Marble Factory last night and I also filled with panic when the 3rd encore song wasn't My Legendary Girlfriend! What a set, easily the best i've ever seen him do outside Pulp.

Review from the Roundhouse. By the same writer who did the recent feature on him and also presented the Sky Arts Songbook episode JC did in 2009.
For all his history with the subject, a bit surprising that he doesn't recall She's A Lady as a Pulp song...

Jarvis Cocker review tackling serious subjects with elan
Roundhouse, NW1

Jarvis Cocker live at the Roundhouse in London

Will Hodgkinson
Wednesday November 10 2021, 12.00pm, The Times

(4 Stars)
Ever since he told the story of a Greek woman slumming it at St Martins College on Pulps Common People, Jarvis Cocker has been celebrated for an ability to turn meandering thoughts into song. One nation under a roof. Aint that the truth? he mused on House Music All Night Long, a tale of being stuck at home on a Saturday night that, although it predated it, captured the realities of the pandemic. This concert was supposed to happen in May 2020, he said after the song ended. At that point we didnt know it should have been titled House Music All Year Long.

Cocker was celebrating his return to the live arena after so long away, and despite a sense of occasion laser beams, a big sound from a tight backing band, a display of Cockers unique dancing style that makes him look like a mechanical toy on a conveyer belt this was definitely not a greatest hits set. The only Pulp song was the pre-fame fan favourite My Legendary Girlfriend and the bulk of material came from Beyond the Pale, Cockers 2020 album that placed him as an absurdist, provincially minded inheritor to Leonard Cohens brand of observational philosophy.

Always I am watching, he sang on Sometimes I Am Pharaoh, which he wrote from the perspective of the living statues you find outside tourist attractions. On the frantic Must I Evolve? he crammed in the ascent of humanity, with the bands harpist, Serafina Steer, and its violinist, Emma Smith, trilling yes, yes, yes, yes to the question of the title.

Cocker is very much an entertainer with a sense of ironic distance, but every now and then he went deeper. He explained how Swanky Modes was about his memories of living in Camden in northwest London in the early 1990s, in a freezing cold house with a drug dealer whose two whippets used to climb into his bed and relieve themselves in it. There was real menace in a line about a heroin addict shooting up on a canal towpath, muttering, Why dont you get on this? to passers-by.

When Cocker dissolved into cries of anguish during Aline, a cover of a French 1960s ballad that featured in Wes Andersons new film, The French Dispatch, you felt his pain over Brexit which, given that his son and ex-wife live in Paris, is a personal crisis. Hands across the ocean . . . will you join in? he asked the audience as Aline reached its tormented climax. It was the highlight of a concert that found Cocker, the eternal showman, tackling serious subjects with elan.

inspirit wrote:

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She's A Lady from Birmingham and Manchester.

I love the dynamic arrangement of this, the drums are so strong, and it's nice to hear a Pulp song live where the violinist plays in time with the rest of the band. The pizzicato bit at 2.20 (B'ham), and the lyrical line afterward, is wonderful.

I'm sad that I didn't get tickets, and piecing together the set on youtube is the best I can get. I was worried about a mask requirement (make me panic), and hints of a vaccine passport requirement (I have no smart phone). I'm often contemptuous of smartphones, and the chronic use of them at gigs, yet some of these recordings are fairly good.

-- Edited by inspirit on Thursday 11th of November 2021 09:51:01 AM

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 On that very issue, I received a 25 page document about covid requirements and policies for tomorrow's gig in Sheffield! You need proof of a neg LFT and double vaccination proof.

It seems to be up to individual venues to do their own thing. I was expecting some sort of check on Saturday for Jarv Is in Bristol, but there was nothing. The venue is an extension of night club Motion for gigs and their website is shared, said you had to show proof of vaccination to get in, but I suspect that must just be the night club. I have a feeling places open after midnight, i.e. clubs, are legally required to check but other than that they do what they like. 

Fran wrote:

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the phone epidemic can still be pretty dire. Ideally, someone, maybe from the band or the venue, could be detailed to produce a video or two that would be made available and ban the personal phones altogether.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/covid-pass/get-your-covid-pass-letter/ 

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 I was at London Palladium tonight and had to put phone in a sealed pouch.  Was nice not having performance disturbed by phones, though I did have a front row circle seat.  

Eamonn wrote:

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I thought you were too ill to go to Suede?!

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No, I got ill when I was out.  I was feeling fine at 6pm, but very ropey by 9pm.  Luckily show finished at 9.30pm.  CoViD booster jab that morning.

Financial Times review of Roundhouse gig. It's rare Jarvis gets less than four stars from a live write-up but there's some really good descriptions here..


Weve got all night to get reacquainted, Jarvis Cocker said at the outset of his band Jarv Iss Roundhouse show. He phrased it like a comical chat-up line, with raised eyebrow rather than come-hither look, arm propped on the microphone stand as though draped across a mantlepiece. With his glasses and 1970s suit, a dialectical contrast between tight fit and flapping flares, the former Pulp frontman cut a reassuringly familiar sight an improbably groovy polytechnic lecturer leading the most popular course on campus.

The show had been rescheduled from May 2020, when Jarv Is were forced by the pandemic to cancel the tour accompanying the release of their debut album Beyond the Pale. Blending archness and wildness, psych-rock abandon and sophisticated rhymes, its songs are Cockers best since his Pulp days. But a somewhat subdued atmosphere illustrated the difficulty of resuming the thread of a disrupted conversation.

They opened with a Pulp cover, Shes a Lady, from the Sheffield bands 1994 breakthrough album His n Hers. Murky red lighting, a thumping snare beat and scything synthesiser riffs accompanied Cockers tale of grimy libidinous desire, a sardonic reworking of Gloria Gaynors break-up anthem I Will Survive. Yeah, I guess I kind of missed you whilst you were away, Cocker intoned at its conclusion.


Cocker brought out his stage moves © Redferns
House Music All Night Long was the first Jarv Is song of the night, one of several to be performed with guest singer Naala. The music was sturdy dance-rock, less scintillating than Cockers rhyming of claustrophobia with disrobing ya. A new song followed with the working titles of Slow Jam or Bad Friday, a slow number that finds its groove as it progresses. Another new track was Aline, a cover of a 1965 French hit by the singer Christophe, which Cocker sung with unbridled Gallic drama. It features on his soundtrack for Wes Andersons new film The French Dispatch.

His Jarv Is bandmates Serafina Steer on keyboards and harp, electronic musician Jason Buckle, drummer Adam Betts, bassist Andrew McKinney and Emma Smith playing violin and guitar formed a curving line across the stage. Cocker brought out his stage moves, a kind of corduroy-jacketed vogueing with extravagant armography and preening shapes, only impeded by monitors and equipment. His vocal flamboyance, an act of display going from sonorous voice-overs to possessed gasps and cries, was dampened by rather restrained amplification.


The best moments were like a switch being flicked. Sometimes I Am Pharaoh was a powerful drone-rocker that hinged on a sudden pause before exploding back into life. Swanky Modes based a Pulp-like act of bittersweet observation around a former clothes shop in a nearby street to the Roundhouse (the shops owners, present in the audience, received a shoutout from Cocker). Must I Evolve? was a comic epic linking cave art to acid house raves, with Smith and Steer as an admonitory backing chorus. In a sometimes tentative evening, its evolutionary message rang out clearly: life goes on.

*** (Three stars)