Jarv Is at the Roundhouse — vocal flamboyance but restrained amplification

“We’ve got all night to get reacquainted,” Jarvis Cocker said at the outset of his band Jarv Is’s 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 Cocker’s 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, “She’s a Lady”, from the Sheffield band’s 1994 breakthrough album His ‘n’ Hers. Murky red lighting, a thumping snare beat and scything synthesiser riffs accompanied Cocker’s tale of grimy libidinous desire, a sardonic reworking of Gloria Gaynor’s break-up anthem “I Will Survive”. “Yeah, I guess I kind of missed you whilst you were away,” Cocker intoned at its conclusion.

“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 Cocker’s 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 Anderson’s 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 shop’s 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.

★★★☆☆

roundhouse.org.uk