CityLife

Esser

ESSER’S quiff stares out at the audience eyeball-to-eyeball as soon as it strides on stage straddling a human body.

It’s something amazing to behold, never a hair out of place even when it’s riding that bucking bronco we call a dancing body.  

The man as a whole is also striking. He looks like a bone fide pop star of old, Elvis Presley maybe, Buddy Holly possibly, Joe Strummer in the later stages of The Clash for sure, but the shiny buckled and badged army blazer hints at something more 80s…Rick Astley?

I’m not sure. He has that intriguing freak quality too. As if he is an outsider who has accidentally found himself on the inside. A loser until he wandered on stage and became an icon.  

It’s impossible to imagine that he could be anything other than a musician, but it begs the question whether good or even great music needs such a gimmick before it’s given a fair listen.

I’m not sure about that, but I know that his star would not be rising so quickly if he did not have such an image…it would be a harder path to follow.  

But if that’s what it takes for groovy music to find a platform to reach a wider music then that is fine… fine for me and fine for everyone else. 

Minature symbol

Groovy, because the whole thing makes you want to dance like a monkey with a miniature symbol.

Whether he’s playing dirty electronica in the manner of Late of The Pier with Headlock or going for olde Latino ballroom with Satisfied he makes you want to move, especially when he lapses into ska backbeat.

But the variety of genres in one set proves more than anything how the lack of any overall dominant musical style makes for such an exciting current musical climate.

The best thing about The Clash was that they jumped from genre to genre, and in the final year of the noughties that has spread to music as a whole.  

He sums up the now perfectly - playing with the past, unencumbered by the present, playing with music like it’s a toy, and making the near future look exciting and weird at the same time.   

So with Esser, that difficult debate of style over substance is irrelevant as he has both. Great show then... as I'm sure you can tell.

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