I never thought I’d describe a strip club as ‘oddly atmospheric,’ but an empty strip club really is. Amid the lights, tables, and mirrors, Joe Black’s shock of blue hair introduces the audience to a charismatic and downright filthy exploration of sexuality through song. ‘Any fans in the room of anal sex?’ he asks, a clear warning that we will be expected to lose our inhibitions too.
Black mixes his own songs with covers of popular numbers in a minor key. He bounds around the stage and into the audience with his ukulele, accordion, and keyboard. His songs are absolutely debauched, full of intelligent rhymes and dirty lyrics. There is something of the secretly sad clown about him, as though his brilliant accordion rendition of Sex Bomb is a mask. He pushes his audience straight through awkward to a bizarre kind of comfort and I found myself singing It’s Raining Men straight into his microphone with him in pants and socks at my side.
Although his show is a singular experience, a kind of entertainment you won’t find anywhere else and will be fully ashamed to say you enjoyed, it does lack substance. The length is ideal; any longer and the audience might have tired of the fairly limited content. Additionally, Black’s understandable first night nerves led him to some apologetic, self-referential lines that interrupted his flow and force. But for an hour of fun, frivols and flirtation, a night with Joe Black provides a thoroughly indecent vaudevillian blur. There can be no one else quite like him at the Fringe this year.
