Lemon Jelly

Andy Warhol would have loved Lemon Jelly. From the fine-print of the group’s work – the gaudy primaries of the artwork, the knowingly kitsch samples, the pre-show warm-up mix of synth-laden eighties hits – to the main text of the music itself, Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin, unwittingly or not, are beholden to the ephemera-embracing pop-art aesthetic.

And if a pair of vaguely genteel English producers have taken it upon themselves to conjure the aural equivalent of a Roy Lichenstein print, then this writer is certainly not going to complain. Because Lemon Jelly shows are, above all, tremendous fun to attend. It’s not the cathartic unleashing of emotion you might have witnessed at, say, a Nirvana gig back in the day, nor is it the communal exorcising of spirits you’d get at a Radiohead concert. The Lemon Jelly live experience is instead closer to the ultra dazzling, two-turntables-and-a-microphone pop culture revue that Beck specialised in circa Odelay.

Thus, when Franglen and Deakin segue from the ironic, 1950’s swords ‘n’ sorcery clip which opens the show into one of their trademark, Technicolor sonic tapestries, or playfully merge the beat from Nelly’s ‘Hot In Here’ with a sample from (I think) Harry Nilsson’s ‘Everybody’s Talkin’, the expected response is not chin-stroking post-modernist theorising, but the somewhat less high-falutin’, time-honoured ass-shake. For all its cleverness, this music comes primarily from the gut, not the head.

And if, on occasion, you wouldn’t mind a spoonful of medicine to make the sugar go down (think of how Daft Punk so brilliantly varied their template with the likes of ‘Veridis Quo’), it’s useful to take into account Franglen’s recent assertion that the ostensibly whimsical ‘Nice Weather For Ducks’ is, in fact, intended to be the sonic representation of a disintegrating mind. In any case, this Jelly manages to be sweet without being saccharine.