Jarvis Cocker - Live @ EartH, London

It is Halloween’s late afternoon in Hackney and the streets around Dalston are buzzing in anticipation of the night. Skeletons, witches’ hats, cobwebs, candles-pumpkins, icons of pumpkins: all the usual Halloween paraphernalia. As a kid raised in South-Europe in the 90's,

Halloween is something that started happening when I was already an adult, so it never really resonated with me, but this is London and nobody cares if I am dressed appropriately for the night or not (I am not). Something else that nobody notices in the crowded street is a short queue in front of a red door, if the two Goths didn’t walk away so fast, they would have noticed a tall guy near the red door holding an album with a really familiar cover, a photo of a wedding with the figures of a certain, soon-to-be-idol brit pop band, cardboard shaped into the collective photo. The guy will get his autograph, I’ll discover a few days later thanks to an Instagram post, and I will feel jealous for a second.

 

 

But now doors are opening and we smoothly flow inside the venue. The EartH, short for Evolutionary Art Hackey, is a brand new place, sandwiched between a Turkish restaurant and, I think, a Turkish bath, a few steps away from the Dalston Kingsland overground station. It was once an art deco cinema, the redevelopment kept the basics of the structure: stairs where once were the seats and a pit just in front of the low stage, populated now by a small and quiet crowd. The ceiling and the walls have been maintained in a state of dereliction, everything screams the intention of incorporating the past of the venue into the current decoration in order to offer a more authentic experience.

It is quite early, music wouldn't start for another hour, but I have been waiting for this show for a few years now, so a couple of hours more aren’t gonna kill me.
The fact is that I have been constantly missing out on Jarvis Cocker. I was slightly too young when the Pulp exploded and way too distracted when they came back, but since I moved to the UK Pulp lyrics became one of the tools that I have been using to understand this country. Sometimes it works. Mostly it is just wishful thinking when I am too depressed and I contemplate to move back.

And it is not just Pulp, I have been missing every Jarvis Cocker incarnation since years, despite he embarked in so many different projects over the course of the years. From his solo albums to last year work with Chilly Gonzales, to the many DJ sets that he often plays around, to last spring’s first mini leg of his new project JARV IS that sold out in seconds despite being barely promoted. He is carefully flying under the radar with this new project, but this time I got him. I giggle. And I keep giggling in self-contained excitation now that I am here, despite the atmosphere is not really buzzing with electricity – in fact, we could have shown up an hour late and it would not have made any difference. The pace of people arriving makes me think that I am possibly the only person in this room that has never seen him live. There is a sense of intimacy, as they are about to see an old acquaintance that most of the crowd know very well.

 

Photo by Rachel Lipsitz Photography

 

Audiobooks

Support is offered by a duo, Audiobooks. Their aesthetic is extremely self-conscious, possibly a little bit too self-conscious: skinny, black-haired white dressed singer counterpointed by a tall dude with long silvery hair wearing a cape sitting behind the keyboards and synths, I will discover later that he is David Wrench, an extremely well-known producer. Evangeline Ling, the singer has that kind of catching unconventional beauty that is rewarded in the fashion industry but at the same time she is incredibly good at commanding her body on the stage, the songs have a raw, wild energy that is fascinating to witness and almost dangerous, as she might suddenly jump among us average middle-aged middle-class concertgoers and start screaming in our faces.

 

On the contrast, the initial moments of Jarvis’ set shows an almost more artisanal dimension, less too-cool-for-the-art-school-kids'. A tall figure emerges from the fumes. It is a dude dressed up as a Pharaoh. I did my homework and thank to a deep dive on youtube I know that the opening song says something on the line of ‘sometimes I am Pharaoh, sometimes I am Chaplin’ and I am not surprised at all when a Chaplin-like figure enters the stage too. The Pharaoh is almost in front of me when I notice he wears wellies, the illusion is slightly broken by this point, but who cares, the slim, unmistakable figure of Jarvis Coker is making his entrance.

 

Photo by Rachel Lipsitz Photography

 

JARV IS

The thing is what are we expecting from Jarvis Cocker on stage? A lot of his recent non-Pulp non-headlining projects have a soothing, sober almost nocturnal quality. They seem serious. He is serious. He a public figure, he narrates books, he speaks and writes about Brexit, he goes to demonstrations against Brexit and Sheffield’s tree-felling scheme. Which version of himself is this JARV IS project about?

He walks on stage holding a mirror and looking at us through it. I’ve seen this bit too, on a video and at the time it felt slightly ridiculous. You know when you see someone you really want to like doing something that you really don’t understand? Thing is, when it happens few centimeters from your face, it feels real. So, one point for living in the moment, as he will remind us later, without openly addressing the issue of the use of phones at live shows, but obviously hinting at that.

 

Photo by Rachel Lipsitz Photography

 

Jarvis is also extremely real, which is obvious considering we are at a live concert, but so far for me the man has been an icon, a two-dimension image, a voice on Sunday night, while he is now very much here, very close and incredibly tall. When he mounts on the speaker at the edge of the stage he is so tall that his angular figure doesn’t fully fit the screen of our devices.

He is wearing his signature uniform. A suit with bootcut trousers and very worn cowboy boots. I’ve always assumed that his suit would be of bad quality, the 70’s fashion set me on the image of a range of polyester fabrics that generate electricity when touched. Instead, when seen at a closer distance, the fabric looks luxurious, elegant, embroidered with a golden décor that pairs with his golden sparkling blouse.

 

Photo by Rachel Lipsitz Photography

 

He seems genuinely happy to be here and eager to make our Halloween night special. He plays another new song (Elvis has left the building) and he throws candies, then he goes back to Further Complications, from his 2009 album. He dances. A lot. He might not be relying on the Pulp songs catalog but his weird, highly recognizable dance moves are all there. And they are a pleasure to watch. The audience dances too, slightly less gracefully. His joints are maybe more elastic than ours. For You’ re in my eyes (Discosong), a heart-breaking ballad about someone’ s boyfriend who died and comes back – a very Halloween thing-, he activates a disco ball: tiny bits of light float around the venue.

 

Photo by Rachel Lipsitz Photography

 

The following song is new too. Maybe this was not the intention, but to me it resembles a lot Do the Hippogriff, one of the three songs he wrote for the Harry Potter movie and that were played by a super band including Jarvis himself and Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead. That one was about hairy trolls and groovy creatures of the night (yes, my Spotify shuffle really likes this song), while this one is built around a question. - Must I evolve? - Jarvis keeps asking. Yes, yes, yes, his band answers. After few repetitions, it sounds almost like a manifesto, a playful and joyous attempt to embrace the passing of time. Speaking of the passing of time, I am certain that he’s getting younger song after song. He’s about 35 years old now... He’ s also very much in command of the room. He’s ironic, funny and seductive at the same time. Fat Children finds him ravaging and furious, as if he was headlining a way bigger stage. Later on, he reveals more tricks he prepared for the audience and engages in more interaction holding hands, sipping drinks. In Halloween’s tradition, he involves the audience in a round of apple bobbing.

More unreleased songs are played: Swanky Modes is about an old shop in Camden road, or better about what happened in the flat above it. This is classic Cocker’s writing, a story of a brief sexual encounter between someone that is trying to make it but obviously failing (an actress? a model?) and the narrator.

There is sex, obviously, and it is delusional and unsatisfactory as in many many of his songs. This is happening in the past, at the time of ‘VHS and casual sex’, but the sense of nostalgia is carefully balanced and the past is not any better than the present. And it is impossible not to think to other lyrics we all know very well: ‘do you remember the first time/I don’ t remember a worst time’. It is the same narrative substance, not an attempt to replicate a formula that once worked well.

 

Photo by Rachel Lipsitz Photography

 

Cunts are still running the world ends the main set. It was written more than ten years ago, and very sadly it still has all the qualities for being an anthem for the year 2018.
The encore offers a deep cut: His’n’Hers a from the Pulp catalog, another story of a sexual encounter, this one becomes another moment of interaction with the audience when Jarvis goes around, asking people of EartH what they are afraid of. The contrast with the rest of the song is pretty striking but apparently, he can with confidence swing from whispering a sex story to discussing why we shouldn't be afraid of Donald Trump anymore (cunts are still running the world, but not for too long).

There is time for the last Halloween treat: a very extended version of the Bauhaus’ classic Bela Lugosi’s Dead ends the night.

It is uncertain what Jarvis is going to do with these new songs. For now, they exist only when played live, rumors though say they might be taking the shape of an album soon, and it would be a very welcomed turn of events. Even if this wouldn’t be the case, more live shows are demanded. They don’t have to be huge or heavily promoted shows, they don’t even need to be part of a proper tour, the fact that they are unexpected makes them more interesting. But they must happen, because no matter how much he goes around repeating «I am dead... I am dead... I am dead...», the truth is that JARV IS very much alive, he belongs on stage and it would be such a waste to confine what we witnessed tonight to a unique Halloween extravaganza.