Jarvis Cocker shares wine, chocolate, and good stories in San Francisco

July 28, 2009, at the Fillmore Auditorium

By Katherine Hoffert
Published: July 30th, 2009 | 11:15pm

With palms out to reveal drawn-on eyeballs, Jarvis Cocker took the stage at San Francisco’s historic Fillmore Auditorium to a nearly packed house. Betting he could guess the names of audience members using his “magic eyes,” Cocker proceeded to point and shoot — “Michael!” “Jennifer!” “Brad!” “Monica!” “Gerald!” “Theodore!” — until he finally proclaimed, “Now I can see clearly,” and jumped into the single “Angela” off his new album, Further Complications (Rough Trade). Touring behind a record that wrestles with ideas of aging, impossibly younger loves, and thorny sexuality, the wiry 45-year-old proved his virility by bringing a sexual tension to the stage with full force as he writhed about with salacious, elastic dance moves.

After the first song, the bearded and bespectacled Brit pulled a neatly folded set list out of his vintage suit jacket, followed by a chocolate bar. “How are your blood sugar levels?” he asked the crowd, then proceeded to pass out pieces of chocolate to those in the front and ordered that they “Break it into cubes and share!” (Sidenote: It was dark chocolate, and it was delicious.) Over the course of the night, Cocker would go on to share his wine, his microphone, and even take shots with a birthday girl in the audience.

Backed by a five-piece band, Cocker performed songs from his two solo albums, like the warped narrative “Leftovers,” with its clever opening line “I met her in the museum of paleontology / And I make no bones about it” and sad refrain “I wanna be your lover”; the asshole confessional “I Never Said I Was Deep”; the climactic “Big Julie”; the crunchy space jam “Pilchard”; and the alto sax rocker “Homewrecker!” For the slower and more pensive “Slush,” which was inspired by a boat trip to the North Pole, Cocker called on the audience to create a collective drone that would recall the ramshackle choir that howls in the background on the recorded track. As Cocker ended the main set with the raw rocker “Black Magic” from 2006’s Jarvis, a song about waking up thinking you’ve seen the light only to realize you’re still drunk from the night before, he had the crowd singing and thrusting along with him.

While there’s no doubt the former Pulp frontman can carry a pop anthem, he’s a storyteller at heart — and the observational wit in his lyrics bled brilliantly into his stage banter. Cocker took the opportunity between songs to ponder the capacity of the venue — which was curiously 1,999 and not 1,200 — and acknowledge the anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s death, crediting the composer for the history of Western music and thus everybody who was in the room that night.

When a wedding invitation was passed up to him midway through the four-song encore, Cocker broke into a cover of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” which he oh-so-appropriately followed with the anti-love ballad, “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time.” “See, I wouldn’t be a very good wedding singer. Most of my songs aren’t very romantic, are they?” he said.

For the final song of the night, Cocker took the crowd “back to the dark side,” to a guy in a discothèque who hallucinates his dead girlfriend back to life. As he described how, in death, one’s retina retains the image of the last thing seen, Cocker realized that perhaps he was a romantic person after all and closed with “You’re In My Eyes (Discosong).” As the disco ball spun round the chandeliered ballroom, local psych rockers Wooden Shjips joined Cocker and crew onstage for an epic finale that was as droney as Shjips’ opening set and as unforgettable as the night.

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For more photos from this show visit Venus Zine’s Flickr page

Jarvis Cocker official site

Jarvis Cocker MySpace page

Rough Trade Records