Trying a bit of juggling post schedules around this month – This afternoon it’s the legendary Paris concert from the Days Off Festival by Jarvis Cocker – recorded on July 2, 2022 and recorded by RFI International.
I just ran across a review of the concert from the French website Sound of Violence. Correspondent Letitia Mavrel was there and captures the vibe quite nicely:
For this first official evening, the Days Off festival takes us back to the Philharmonie de Paris following the warm-up session with The Smile at the beginning of June. And in order to perpetuate the tradition of prestigious guests, the festival begins with the charismatic Jarvis Cocker, who comes to stage the album created for the Wes Anderson film, The French Dispatch.
Tonight’s star is Tip-Top, singer from Anderson’s crazy film released last year, which covers some yéyé standards from our beautiful musical heritage. The whimsical and gently old-fashioned imagery of Wes Anderson’s universe finds in the character of Jarvis Cocker the perfect interpreter of these songs which smell of Gitane, the old leather of the 2 Chevaux and are bathed in the false candor of the baby-boomers raised in this Gaullist society that our ancestors knew well. In the large Pierre Boulez hall, Jarvis Cocker will present to the public the entire album Chansons d’Ennui Tip-Top , accompanied by the members of his project JARV IS… and supported by a string section embellishing the reinterpretations.
Beforehand, place to Lisa Hannigan , Irish folk singer that some of us know from her old collaborations with Damien Rice and also on the occasion of opening acts of The Divine Comedy.
Happy to find an audience absorbed by her compositions and guitar playing, Lisa Hannigan warmly thanked the audience, who reciprocated with a round of applause.
After a short half-hour intermission, and in near darkness, JARV IS… and his interpreter, magnificently dressed to the nines, dressed all in black with that “je ne sais quoi” of neglect that has symbolized the leader of Pulp for all these years, enter the stage. The man has little left to prove regarding his talent for composing the best of refined, mischievous, and deliciously vintage pop, regardless of the group he appears with. Tonight, the English dandy will speak in French throughout the recital, with the help of notes that his son whispered to him, he tells us. A great honor, given that the language of Molière is hardly mastered by our favorite British singers.
Thus, Jarvis Cocker reminds his audience that Tip-Top is a fictional singer taking place in the imagination of Wes Anderson, but that he himself was a great fan of French pop, which he listened to after school. Thus, the choice is all the more relevant since, like the artists whose songs he covers, he benefits from a strong dose of natural elegance and stage charisma so as not to simply ape these standards of our yéyé heritage.
Evenings at the Philharmonie are always an opportunity to take a musical genre out of our usual concert halls and reveal the full extent of its capabilities. The exercise of symphonic interpretations is not always easy. Here, by playing with a repertoire already brought up to date in Chansons d’ennui Tip-Top , Jarvis Cocker and his musicians have offered us a unique opportunity to (re)discover a whole section of our musical culture, all with that dandyism typical of our British neighbors that always dazzles us little French people so much.
You can catch the rest of the review via Sound of Violence’s website. Don’t freak out – the site has a wonderful English translation – so no excuses.
