Wednesday 16 June 2010

John Grant @ Jazz Café, London

Much play has been made of John Grant’s voice, and sure enough, it’s a beautiful baritone, ripe with individuality, able to express amusement, doubt and seemingly boundless sorrow with equal gravitas. All of this is evident on his soup-to-nuts wonderful, recently released Queen Of Denmark album – if less so on the albums of Grant’s former band, The Czars, wherein his vocals are less prominent and thus relatively less capable of stunning from quite such a distance.

The Jazz Café is fair bulging at the seams with the converted and the curious, the latter drawn in by a slew of five-star album reviews and the patronage of a certain Grown-up Gentleman’s Rock Monthly. Many of the converts will have reached that point thanks to the involvement of fellow Denton, Texas natives Midlake, who provided Queen Of Denmark’s mellifluous, compelling backing instrumentation and heart-rending vocal harmony.

Midlake aren’t here tonight though, Grant instead relying on a handful of sympathetic but not overbearing buddies from home. The result differs significantly from the recorded output, harmonies dialled down and showier elements stripped back to reveal top-notch songwriting in its uneasy glory. ‘Sigourney Weaver’ juxtaposes lightly witty metaphor with intensely unhappy subject matter - Grant sitting at his piano, vamping for all he’s worth - and the devastating opening line of ‘Where Dreams Go To Die’ – “Your beauty is unstoppable” – reveals yet more about the singer’s buoyant, but evidently fragile, psyche.

As the night floats on via downy clouds of vibrato (on sweet shop paean ‘Marz’) and the saturated, self-pitying sarcasm of ‘Silver Platter Club’, it’s clear John Grant is not a happy man. Oh, he can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible – and yes, there is a touch of Morrissey in his more caustic moments.

But what to do, as an audience? When someone in the crowd responds to Grant’s “I’ve written another song about the end of a relationship” with a cheery “Get over it!” (prior to Spector-flecked early set highlight ‘TC And The Honeybear’), it’s admittedly hard not to think ‘No! Please don’t – you might stop doing this if you’re contented.’ He’s an understatedly magnetic presence, as capable of calling to mind Rizzo from Grease trilling ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’ as scatology-fixated Hidden Cameras singer Joel Gibb, in his laudable preoccupation with torch song and killer ballad.

In a curious way, John Grant turns out to be a twisted kind of male Lady Gaga: a master of melodrama, an architect of pathos; ‘Aladdin Sane’-era Bowie in mufti, belting out the music of the marginalised. A lacklustre encore of ‘Caramel’ (far too close to Rufus Wainwright for comfort) does nothing to lessen the impact of tonight’s UK solo debut. One can only hope outing his innermost in public gives him some succour.

Charlie Ivens

Originally published on the-fly.co.uk