Festival Music
Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales
Kings Theatre
Nicola Meighan
four stars
SHEFFIELD'S pop poet laureate Jarvis Cocker has always had a way with a couplet. But one of his latest – “Everything was harmonious, everything was melodic / Now you're a lonely widow and your daughter's alcoholic” – is not an 80s Yorkshire kitchen-sink chronicle, but rather an ode to Mark Twain's daughter, Clara. She's one of many stars and ghosts who've passed through the doors of Hollywood's Chateau Marmont, now immortalised in song thanks to Room 29.
An album, a show and a state of mind, Room 29 is devised and explored by renaissance man Cocker with Chilly Gonzales. It gives a voice to that hotel room – its inhabitants and reveries – via sex and drugs and grand pianos; glamour girls, bathtubs, torch-songs and bell(e) boys.
The album's lyrical, vintage tributes to Hollywood dreams and faded grandeur were coolly, wonderfully brought to life for the first of a three-night residency at Edinburgh International Festival. Cocker variously played the rakish professor, the screen god, the rock star, as Gonzales and the Kaiser Quartett conjured widescreen magic of their own.
Gonzales' self-proclaimed genius bears noting: the electro-bard and pianist has collaborated with Drake and Peaches, and bagged a Grammy for his contribution to Daft Punk's Random Access Memories. On record and especially live, he and Cocker make for a wry, enlightening and warmly dramatic duo.
We were, they explained, all in Room 29, and transported us there via audience interaction (Jarvis shimmied among us) and some terrific theatrical ruses – from small screen sorcery on Daddy, You're Not Watching Me, to a show-stopping take on A Trick of the Light, in which a beautiful woman rendered us spellbound. Howard Hughes would have been proud.
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