View from the Green Room: The Day of the Jack L
Jack L performed at Theatre Royal
Jack Lukeman is pure theatre and the packed Theatre Royal is buzzin’ with kidults. The wish-they-were-thirty-somethin’s-again, who started a love affair with Jack Lukeman around the turn of the millennium and have never stopped loving Jack’s anarchic brand of singing.
When Jack enters, it’s pure theatre. The keyboard and drums begin to pound out the beat, the audience are on their feet and The Mall is throbbin’.
Clappin’…foot-stompin’…cheering.
And then through the yellow smoke that hangs in the stage frame, it’s Jack. Black dress coat with a massive ruby brooch and a crooner hat as he opens his gig with a trademark ironic title “Authentic Fake”, that reaches back to his first album of “Broken Songs”.
Nobody owns a stage like Jack. His connection with his audience is beyond intimate. There’s an immediate bond between singer and watcher that goes way beyond audience. We’re all part of the Jack L world now. Intimates.
When he leans forward and whispers the words in a musical conspiracy, everyone is involved. He constantly involves his audience. Jack rehearses the claps, the choruses, the whispers. But no one rehearses the connection because that’s primal, visceral and comes from the soul.
The lyrics drip down a smoke-filled rear-screen projection of colours that constantly alternate over record sleeves… I gave up on dreams and regrets/I gave up smoking but not cigarettes/Chocolate eyes, chocolate eyes...This is the poetry of magic days with magic ways. And everyone wants an in to Jack’s music-box.
”Open Your Borders” reaches on many meanings now and needs no comments from Lukeman because the lyrics say it all… Open your borders/And let me in/Cause I wanna be there when your walls start crumbling … Somehow it all seems to make sense when Jack sings.
Jack is never slow to laugh at himself. He claims his “Happiness” album was a best-seller because it came free with the Sunday Indo before he launches into the title track.
Jack’s deadpan telling of a Johnny Cash ballad has the house rocking with laughter as Cash’s C&W tale of “The cowboy who couldn’t cry” reaches down rabbit holes of misfortune … his dog was run over, his wife up and left him, got sacked from his job, lost his arm in a war, novel was refused, his movie was panned, his big Broadway show was a flop, got sent off to jail, you guessed it, no bail, beaten, bullied and made to make license plates… Lukeman reminds us all of just how precious an asset we have in the acoustically perfect Royal.
Without amplification on occasions, we hear every word of Jack’s lyric and there’s an immediacy that is sacred. His lyrics wander into Keats’ promise that ‘beauty is truth and truth beauty’ and the music and singing carry the message home.
When he sings “Metropolis Blue”, his entire frame carries the narrative. His “The King of Soho” demands as much noise from the audience as humanly possible. I’m sure there were deaf people in comas in Scotland complaining.
“The Port of Amsterdam” reminds me of a magical night on The Mall when Jack L sang Jacques Brel. He’s repeating the Brel concert in October. Check it out on his website.
Jack L sells out every year. I’m not surprised.
