If you’ve ever battled through one of their often atrocious novels, you’ll know it’s tough for comedians to be taken seriously. For Matt Berry – star of Toast of London and the man who angrily rebuked accusations of sexism at The IT Crowd’s Reynholm Industries with “now hold on a minute, sugar-tits” – it’s virtually impossible. Every hoik of his eyebrow is comedy gold; his melodrama villain’s enunciation alone could win Perriers. Yet here he is, five albums into a sideline as a po-faced 70s prog revivalist, signed to Acid Jazz Records and playing a 2,000-capacity venue that, you sense, doesn’t quite know if it’s meant to be laughing along.
After all, Berry and his six-piece backing band, the Maypoles, can’t actually be evoking Yes, Mike Oldfield, the Moody Blues and Genesis’s Supper’s Ready without a shred of irony, can they? Berry once co-wrote a spoof of Jesus Christ Superstar called AD/BC: A Rock Opera, so are we really to take Solstice – a nine-minute slab of druid atmospherics and Tubular Bells tinkles, like Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge played straight – at face value? He is famed for vainglorious roles, so surely this is an elaborate character work designed to mock arrogant actors’ formulaic trad rock ambitions, right?
Very, very wrong. Besides a moment in the synth duel section of the endless Snuff Box when Berry responds to his keyboardist’s church organ fugue with chunks of Abba and Gary Numan’s Cars, all humour gleaned from his music is purely unintentional. Fronting the sort of band you’d usually find playing residencies in Dorset village pubs under the impression it’s still 1971, he expects legitimate appreciation of lengthy prog-funk jams about fishing and wildfowl that are about as welcome as Donald Trump, or Mexicana folk rock songs such as Medicine, which sounds like a cross between La Bamba and David Brent’s Free Love Freeway. Indeed, the Maypoles smack of a genuine version of Brent’s Foregone Conclusion, a painfully derivative vanity project that belongs in a basement jazz bar supporting 30 Odd Foot of Grunts.
There are sporadic glimmers of inspiration. Berry promises to “mess with your nether regions” ahead of an intriguing instrumental psych brew of trombone, synth, clarinet and dub bass. Toast of London theme Take My Hand is a graceful Petula Clark pop twirl, dedicated to Brian Blessed and Toast’s Clem Fandango. His between-song banter has far more power, wit and charisma than his vapid vocals. Ultimately, though, we’ll remember the dreadful encore of a cruise-ship cover of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer – sung by Berry’s guitarist, Mark Morriss of the Bluetones – and The Pheasant, a plodding, genre-hopping result of listening to side four of The Who’s Tommy twice and thinking “easy money”.
