Gavin Friday & The Friday Seezer Ensemble

Not many rock‘n’rollers understand the idea of fighting for a stage, let alone defending it. Cabaret artists do, from Berlin to Ballymun. Gavin Friday has cabaret, or at least theatre, in his marrow. With Ich Liebe Dich, tonight’s celebration of the Kurt Weill songbook, there are no attempts to spruce up or water down the Weimar machine for popular consumption. Nor should there be. Given a repertoire that stretches from here to Broadway, it’s easy to get lost in the stars.

At times Ich Liebe Dich looked like stadium show scaled down for a smoky Christchurch basement, where high and low lifers rubbed off on each other and secretly got aroused. Of course Friday always makes over neutral venues into his own devil’s playground (this time the set design is all table service and pre-war chic) but he also wrongfoots you from the off, whether making his entrance from behind (matron) or interviewing his audience about their sex lives.

But before we go any further, a word about the band. The maestro Maurice Seezer is a light-fingered thief who is also capable of tackling the teutonically tight rhythms in the material by taking to heart Bukowski’s title, the one about playing the piano like a percussion instrument ’til your fingers bleed a bit. Then there’s Julia Palmer, a cellist who can shriek ’til you shit your britches while doing the diva in a depraved ‘Alabama Song’. To her right, Renaud Pion understands space but puts the sax in violence when called upon, while Michael Blair, veteran of Tom Waits’ wildest years, reconciles avant-garde Rumblefish-ery with the strictest march time.

But really, you have to hand it to the man Friday; he shows no fear. It’s one thing to dominate an audience willing to be dominated, quite another to face the intimacy of a club with your Ich Liebe Dich hanging out. Throughout the night the singer, in Baal black, eyeliner and mad composer ponytail, is unmistakably himself, yet a whole other bunch of guys too. Here we shake hands with a pimp Charlie Chaplin (‘The Ballad Of Immoral Earnings’), Al Jolson, a broken hearted Sinatra (‘Speak Low’), Mac The Knife, a vengeful Kosovan wretch dressed as Pirate Jenny, and a Fellini-eyed jackboot trooper singing ‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’ through a stronzophone. This was often Wagnerian in scale, but Brechtian in its send-ups of war, and by the final lap of the room, became an ashen funeral march by a 21st century Black Death cult beating their drums in a post-apocalyptic mess.

Baby it’s a Weill world. We’re just minding it ’til he gets back.