Music review: Jarv Is, Barrowland, Glasgow

He may have played a couple of songs from his Pulp days, but Jarvis Cocker was in the mood for looking forward, not back at this Glasgow show, writes David Pollock

Jarvis Cocker PIC: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Jarv Is, Barrowland, Glasgow ****

From its formation in 2017, Jarvis Cocker’s latest band Jarv Is was intended to be a live-only project. “Live is where it happens,” he mused here. “It's an ongoing live experience, because life is an ongoing live experience.” After a couple of years, though, minds were changed, and the debut album Beyond the Pale was released in 2020, followed this year by the remix album Remix Ed.

Filled by Serafina Steer’s harp and keyboards and Emma Smith’s violin, the new songs sound diverse and lustrous, including the bittersweet, Camdenite Britpop nostalgia of Swanky Modes, the scratchy, fractious Must I Evolve?, and the rail against social media distortion Children of the Echo. Between these and a decade-and-a-half of solo recordings, Cocker almost got through the night without having to fall back on the hits he wrote for Pulp, back when he was one of the biggest pop stars in the country.

Almost, but not entirely; the set began with the tense, expectant She’s a Lady and ended on the shoegaze-disco of My Legendary Girlfriend, both minor songs in Pulp’s catalogue but classics in aficionados’ eyes. Otherwise, the sense was of forward-thinking, of new creative experiments to come. One song, a moody, somnambulant grind on which Cocker seeks advice on resurrection from Jesus, wasn’t even named; it’ll be Slow Jam or Bad Friday. In this context, the glam rock energy of Further Complications (2009) was an old classic.

Between songs, Cocker obliquely read from a list of pre-prepared “on this day” facts, eliciting perhaps the Barrowlands’ first ever cheer for birthday boy Fyodor Dostoevsky. “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for,” ran Cocker’s selected quote, before dropping his notepad in front of the “time portal” circular light and going off-script.

“We don't need to be trapped by history, though,” he declared. “We can make it.” With a most understated call for revolution in light of COP26 – “don't shit on your own doorstep, think of the postman… there’s more of us than them” – his C***s Are Still Running the World remains the great unknown anthem for our times.

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