With at least half the audience dressed like Bad Seeds in dead men's suits, it's plainly a good night for self-mythologising dirty old men at the Festival Hall. First one to step up onstage is Jarvis Cocker, possibly making the first moves of a solo career. For his opening trick, he smashes a wine bottle over his head. For his last, he will karate chop a plank of wood in half. In between, he will put aside stuntmen's props and concentrate on music which is even sleazier than that which made his name.
There's a faint hope that Cocker should mock the conservatism of the Festival Hall's idiotically-titled current season, The Song's The Thing, and play a noise set. As it is, he unveils a handful of new songs and two Lee Hazlewood covers, most of which draw on the crap-encrusted electro menace of Suicide and leave Pulp's rabble-rousing anthemics far behind. It's much more Hoxton than Sheffield Sex City, in fact, though there's still plenty to love: Cocker barking "Doe a deer, a female deer" to a grinding tune highly reminiscent of Suicide's 'Ghost Rider'; guitarist Richard Hawley taking the mic for what is, roughly, Roy Orbison doing the Mary Chain's 'Just Like Honey'. Oh sure, Cocker upholds the Damon Albarn Memorial Side Project rule by playing melodica a bit too much. But in general, this is fine - and brilliant for baiting the alt-country bores in the audience.
Lee Hazlewood, at least, understands. "Jarvis Cocker is just a gas, and not because he sang two of my dumbest songs," he explains, paying homage to a fellow connoisseur of filth. An outlaw who never really fitted in with the country music establishment's officially-endorsed concepts of outlawdom, tonight Hazlewood is dressed in a black cap and shades that make him look more like a tour manager than a rebel legend. The trademark drooping moustache has long gone. The voice, however, is still remarkable; rich, crumbling, fathomlessly experienced. And his songs remain pretty great, too: playful and elegaic tales of drink, gambling, prison, French whores, German pub crawls, birthday blow-jobs, growing old and many other unrepented sins.
For the most part, it's terrific. As Hazlewood himself points out when introducing 'My Autumn's Done Come', these are songs to grow into, that suit age (he's 73) better than faked experience. There are great versions of 'Rosacoke Street', 'If It's Monday Morning' and 'Pray Them Bars Away', a tremendous obscurity in 'Soul's Island' and a handful of new songs from the recent 'For Every Solution There's A Problem' set - notably the brilliant 'Dirtnap Stories' - that fit in perfectly. It's too late now, mercifully, for this old dog to change his style.
The problem comes with his band. Wisely selected from the ranks of The High Llamas and Stereolab they may be, but when the keyboard players try to reproduce the cavernous arrangements with tinny synth strings, the majesty of these songs and their strange atmospheres are immeasurably cheapened. And when Hazlewood acknowledges his old partner Nancy Sinatra with a menacing take on'These Boots Are Made For Walkin'', they respond with weird and stilted blaxploitation-style funk. One last reinterpretation works beautifully, mind: 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On' slowed down to a horizontal come-hither, a reminder that Hazlewood's trump card has always been a kind of blunt sexuality that's at once comic and threatening.
It's seedy climax to a seedy night. Hazlewood stalks off, smoking, to talk dirt with his lanky soulmate, Jarvis Cocker. But for the rest of us, faintly soiled by the whole experience, there's only one thing left to do: now, we'd really better wash our hands of the whole affair.
