My all-time fave performances on Jools Holland
Here in no particular order, apart from the last one which is clearly the best, are my top ten performances on the BBC music show, Later…With Jools Holland.
At number 10, it’s Adele, back in the days when she was curvier, performing her number Chasing Pavements. She has oodles of charm and this song is pure New Year’s Eve..
At nine, it’s the first performance on Jools from Future Islands, whose lead singer clearly decided to just effing go for it, and gave us some incredible chest thumping, metal growling, ice-skate moves, and hair-stroking gyrating at the end. Best last few seconds of a performance on Jools.
At eight, here is experimental rock outfit Battles, with their song Atlas. Who is this band? Where did they come from? Where did they go? I don’t know but this song is a fucking techno stomper from the 23rd century.
At seven its KT Tunstall. This was the first time I’d seen anyone use a loop pedal and I remember holding my breath going, ‘what devilish wizardry is this??’ She nails it.
At six it’s Christine and the Queens — also her first performance. I love bands’ first performances, when they are shooting up into stardom and they appear from nowhere and slay. Like Athena, it’s like she’s born fully formed, already knowing exactly who she is as an artist. Best group dance routine on the show. So fucking cool.
At five it’s Radiohead with Paranoid Android. What strikes me about this is how incredibly weird they look. Thom Yorke looks like something from a Harmony Korine movie and Jonny Greenwood looks like he’s just checked out of the anorexia ward. But man, does his guitar make amazing noises. To have one genius in a band is lucky, to have two is just spoilt.
At four it’s Amy Winehouse — I know, I know, this wasn’t on Jools Holland, it was on the Brits — Mark Ronson had a sort of showcase of his acts, with Adele starting and then Amy Winehouse just blowing everyone else out of the water. This performance makes me cry, it’s so good. What a voice, what charisma.
At three it’s Bjork with Bachelorette, the song she wrote about her break up with Goldie. How could you ever break up with her??
At two it’s Arcade Fire’s first performance on Jools. They burst in like a gang robbing a bank, and take no prisoners! Boom! A truly euphoric song about young people waking up to mortality. Best chorus: ‘Now here’s the sun, it’s alright! (Lies, lies!) Now here’s the moon, it’s alright! (Lies, lies!)’
And at number one it’s….Gnarls Barkley with Crazy! A different version to the single, and I think better, with a robotic clunking beat like the one used in Donna Summer’s State of Independence. Just an unbelievable performance. What I like about Jools is you get to see the other acts checking out the performance, and 3.24 in to this, you see one of the other artists (Chris Martin??) just losing it at how good this song and this performance is. And rightly so.
