Jarvis is more than happy to take the middle road
HE may have spent almost half his life down south – before moving even further away to France – but Jarvis is still Cocker the north.
Tickets for his first Sheffield concert since Pulp split several years ago were sold so quickly the venue organised an extra show for last night - strangely taking place before the original planned date.
The venue may be called Plug, but his career certainly hasn't gone down the drain. The days of selling out stadiums may be long gone, but the constant intrusion of those heady times did him no good anyway and he seems to have now reached a happy medium.
Introducing himself to the first-night crowd with the traditional Steel City greeting "Nah then," the skinny singer was on a home banker from the start.
"I haven't seen you lot for ages ... you never wrote," he continued.
We might not have done, but he has. As explained in interviews, as soon as he thought he had finished with the music business and decided to settle down to a life of married domesticity in Paris, he suddenly recovered his muse.
The result was a solo album, which, although patchy, has propelled him back into the public consciousness, winning him a nomination at the previous night's Brit Awards.
Although he didn't win – because, he claims, the organisers had given Sheffield's quota of awards to the Arctic Monkeys – he did appear on stage presenting an award to someone else. When Cocker returns to the city of his birth, there are inevitably lots of on-stage hometown references.
You always get the feeling that if he just stood there reading random selections out of an A-Z a substantial number of the crowd would go home happy.
For those who do not know the city it may have been mystifying, but a lot of his wit comes across in the delivery rather than what he is actually saying.
Last night's landmarks ranged from the obscure – Hastilar Road South – to the non-existent nowadays – Tiffanys nightclub, Beaver Hill School.
However, he has not totally lost touch with what is happening nowadays, giving us an explanation of how his poetic 'drivel' ended up emblazoned in large steel letters on the side of student flats near the aforementioned nightspot, and a diatribe about the new water features near the train station – "like the Niagara Falls".
In between the chat he also sang some songs, ignoring his previous incarnation to concentrate on solo stuff, with even the weaker numbers from the album coming across well thanks to his performance skills and an excellent band made up of Sheffield musicians including his old Pulp cohort Steve Mackey, ex-Longpig Simon Stafford and Ross Orton from the Fat Truckers.
Jarvis plays at Plug again tonight.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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