(Deutsche Grammophon)
The ex-Pulp frontman and pianist check in at Hollywood’s infamous Chateau Marmont for this beautifully bittersweet song cycle
Hearing Jarvis Cocker’s lascivious Sheffield mutter can still produce a contact high, particularly in those who came of age with Pulp. Within a few seconds of the title track of this 16-episode song cycle, we find Cocker settling into LA’s showbizzy Chateau Marmont and contemplating the room’s piano – the glamorous assignations it has witnessed, their bittersweet flipsides.
If you half-remember Pulp’s This Is Hardcore, this is familiar territory for Cocker – actors doing drugs on the baby grand, shaking their money-makers, while other gilded lives come crashing down behind closed doors. Jarvis sets up the decadence and then punctures it. “Help yourself to pretzels,” he offers. Later he’ll note that “no one ever got turned on by the Whole Earth catalogue”, with an almost imperceptible guffaw.
It’s wonderful to have this most self-aware of thigh-rubbers back. He’s in the excellent company of piano man Chilly Gonzales – writer/arranger for Feist, Peaches, Daft Punk and fellow Canadian Drake. Once, Gonzales was a rapper; here he tinkles the ivories with elegant restraint, his discretion the better part of valour (and tips in the lobby).
Despite a presence on 6 Music and Radio 4, Cocker the solo artist has been absent for eight years, and – considering the accelerated dog years we are all living – it feels like longer. As Pulp’s anthem Common People attests, he is one of pop’s greatest bullshit detectors. Here, though, he is not so much tearing down the temple as examining the corbelling like a buildings regulations inspector. There’s less glitz than strange half-lives lived between bouts of room service. Cocker and Gonzales aren’t so mesmerised by Chateau lore (John Belushi overdosing, etc) as they are by the semi-famous marinating in glamorous desperation, the old-school Hollywood lifers ordering “ice cream as main course”.
The lie of the silver screen is probed from many angles. Howard Hughes Under the Microscope finds film historian David Thomson passing judgment on the rich kid turned mogul. Thomson’s jaded transatlantic drawl crops up more than once, a perfect Greek chorus.
A Trick of the Light is the album’s money shot or, if you prefer, its dramatic crescendo. Cocker is far from the first to point out the cruel ephemerality of Hollywood’s illusions. But here, his embittered protagonist rues the duped cinephile’s remove from the action. “I wasted my life on a trick of the light,” he sings. Room 29, Cocker and Gonzales conclude, is where you finally face yourself – alone.
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