This was one of the funkiest shows I’ve seen for a long while; perhaps even since Prince’s peerlessly funky residence at the same venue in 2007 (though nowhere near as brilliant). There came a moment, on "Deeper Underground", when everything just clicked – the bassist and the drummer were locked in a deep groove, the guitarist was doing his precisely controlled chopping thing, the percussionist was rattling his timbales, the brass section popped and squirted, the backing singers shimmied, and singer Jay Kay himself did that weird dance, almost nerdy: glide-jerk, glide-jerk. Looking around the arena, I saw a sea of blonde highlights and jiggling bodies; the place was seething.
It’s easy enough to sneer at Jason Kay, and I’ve done it often enough myself: the eco-campaigner who owns a fleet of supercars, the embarrassing early dalliances with scat singing, the stupid hats. But there’s no question about it: he’s got the funk. For this tour, he has assembled a crack band who make music that’s actually quite tricky to play look almost effortless. And his singing, while lacking such subtleties as nuance and emotional depth, is phrased with delirious ease.
Back in the day, almost 20 years ago when he first emerged, I remember Jamiroquai as a sprawling army of weirdo musicians, who produced music that was rich, bubbly and organic, featuring vintage Moogs and “ethnic” instruments such as the didgeridoo. Over the years, though, Jason Kay stripped his band’s sound down, toughened it up, down-played the acid jazz aspect and accentuated the funk-dance-disco side of things, and hit paydirt with a succession of multimillion-selling albums, launching his legendary car collection and leading to the inevitable appearance as the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car on Top Gear. For many, he was a god of the dance floor. For many others, he was the prat in the hat.
These days, though, he’s become the dill with the quills, given his current penchant for feathered American Indian-style headdresses. Wearing this, an uncomfortably heavy-looking tasselled jacket, plus unflattering trousers, he bounced and strode and stalked the stage; behind him, video screens showed a predictable array of imagery (space stuff, pyramids, that sort of thing), plus, towards the end, footage of Kay driving a Porsche and flying a helicopter. Above the stage, replicas of the planets of the solar system were suspended in a sort of random orrery.
The closest he came to balladeering was “Lifeline” (“I’ll tell you what,” he said at the end of the song, in a typically geezerish aside, “that one knocks the stuffing out of you.”). Otherwise, he and the band delivered wall-to-wall funk and dance grooves, limbering up at the beginning with the title track from last year’s Rock Dust Light Star album and moving back through the years with "Cosmic Girl", "Space Cowboy" and the like. Volume and torque were notched up incrementally until the aforementioned pitch of perfection was reached on "Deeper Underground".
Towards the end, I’d have to say that he lost the momentum a bit; I think if he’d been a bit more remorseless with the funk onslaught, he’d have had the crowd begging for more. As it was, the audience drifted off without complaint when the house lights went up. We’d witnessed an evening of brilliantly executed funk: result. And, best of all, there hadn’t been a bass solo.
Buy tickets for Jamiroquai on tour until 20 April
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Watch the video for "White Knuckle Ride"
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