Beck Shows How It’s Done

As always, Hot Press was right in the thick of the action; our resident sharpshooter Kathrin Baumbach's gallery can be found here.
The return from self-imposed obscurity of Beck Hansen has been an endless joy. Last year's Morning Phase album saw the California polymath successfully explore tingling blues balladry, and go on to win a Grammy – and a bonus Kanye stage invasion – for his troubles.
His new live show widens the focus, with acoustic moments taking a back seat to the rugged, ragged funk-pop which, through the '90s, established Hansen as a twitchy innovator on the margins of the music industry yet somehow always orbiting the zeitgeist.
Now in his early 40s, Hansen remains supremely lean and understatedly magnetic. At the RHK, he wore a dorky Pharrell hat and skinny trousers and somehow looked like the coolest guy you'd ever clapped eyes on. This was particularly the case when he stepped outside the guise of soul-baring singer-songwriter and embraced the part of jitter-bug MC, showcasing his breakneck flow on 'Hell Yes' and the perennially awesome 'Loser' – a valentine to self-deprecation (though, crucially, not self-loathing) that arguably set the tone for the eye-brow arched early '90s as emphatically as Nirvana's Nevermind.
There was a great video show, suggesting something Kraftwerk might have dreamed up if they'd been raised on late '70s American culture detritus. And the sprawling band was superlatively tight, cranking out a protean throb as required, and playing loose and breezy when Beck demanded it.
He was unusually chatty too, revealing that he had driven from Cork that morning and was, as ever, smitten with our landscape. Come again, dude? "Where I live it's all desert – that's where they film the cowboy movies," he elaborated, perhaps sensing our bafflement. "You come over here and it's amazing."
That was as goofy as it got. Beck was otherwise too busy delivering sinuous crossover pop to bother with platitudes: 'Black Tambourine' was a juggernaut of white-dude funk, 'The New Pollution' a poison-tipped broadside against consumerism dressed up as obsessive-compulsive kraut-rock.
The twinkling wit constantly bobbing beneath the surface of his repertoire was, meanwhile, most discernible on 'Sexx Laws', a song that asks you to picture Benny Hill trapped inside an early Prince album and on 'Think I'm In Love', which stretched its legs and segued into a laid-back tilt at Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love'.
Who could resist? A perfect show for a summer evening…