DAVID CROSS & DAVID JACKSON | LIVE REVIEW
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Sun 1 July
The cliché of progressive rock musicians being po-faced and humourless is, like most clichés concerning the genre, wildly inaccurate. Indeed, you could find myriad counterexamples in the output of King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator, two British bands who rose to prog prominence in the early 1970s – and when David Cross and David Jackson, two former members of those bands, take the stage as a duo you’re fair bombarded with jokes and patter.
Cross – not to be confused with the American comedian, he tells us at the beginning – plays electric violin, as he did on three of King Crimson’s best regarded LPs. Jackson played sax and flute for Van Der Graaf Generator through most of the 70s; both have kept their musical peckers up in subsequent decades, largely away from the limelight. This date and attendant tour follows a collaborative album, Another Day, recorded with a bassist and drummer and a masterclass in jazzy instrumental prog chops. While their setup here is more stripped back (the only incidence of beats is a drum machine-backed number which follows a riff about having “any human beatbox champions in the audience tonight?”), the pair do dip into the album during their two 50-minute sets. Going Nowhere is about depression, albeit with an absurdist approach – lengthy bouts of voice manipulation and sound collage might have tested the patience of more trad prog heads in attendance – while Come Again finds Jackson in full jazz-rock flight, blowing two saxes at once in a manner apparently cribbed from Roland Kirk.
Bookending the whole night, meanwhile, there are two selections from Starless Starlight, a 2015 collaboration between Cross and King Crimson bandleader Robert Fripp which takes a brief piece of mid-70s KC music and spins its into a whole album. There’s a relatively swift burst of improv, which the pair flag up in their primly self-deprecating way – Python-esque, I find myself thinking, or maybe Gilbert & George in their twin bowler hats – but which highlights their snappy interplay and skill for wordless lyricism. There’s a distorted, dirge-like thing which appears to be interpolating Molly Malone and there’s a shoutout to local comedian, prog rock enthuiast and audience member Ted Shiress. We get an encore even though the lights have gone up and it’s just about the polar opposite of a dour showcase for elderly blokes’ tekkers.
words NOEL GARDNER photos NOEL DACEY PHOTOGRAPHY