“Welcome to a real weird time,” Father John Misty says at the start of tonight’s show. It’s a fitting introduction to his new album I Love You, Honeybear, which sees the man formerly known as Josh Tillman unleashing a sardonic chamber of belly laughs on the subject of love and marriage.
Live, the real surprise is Tillman himself, who brings the album to life with all the unpredictable energy of a drunk on New Year’s Eve. Dressed in a tight-fitting black suit – half hipster undertaker, half Vegas louche – he’s a mix of withering standup comic, energetic showboater and country-soul crooner.
The alchemy happens when he combines all three elements, like on the Glen Campbell-ish The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt (a jaunty character assassination with its hugely quoteable couplet: “She said she sounds just like Sarah Vaughan/I hate that soulful affectation white girls put on”). Or When You’re Smiling and Astride Me where he contorts his 6ft-plus frame into shapes that recall Madonna reclining on the gondola in the Like A Virgin video and reels off lines about “kissing my brother in my dreams”.
On the Randy Newman-ish Bored in the USA he flits between bold sincerity (“I grow more disappointing to you as my beauty warps and fades / I suspect you feel the same”) and singing an entire verse into someone’s snatched iPhone. With as many quips (“face punches are available at the merch stand,” he says at one point) as there are energetic, preacher-like lunges to the knees, by the end of the show you feel drunk on Tillman’s infectious charisma.
“Thank you from the bottom of my cold, dead heart,” he says as he leaves the stage, speaking to the awkward misanthrope in all of us.
