Gig Review: Jockstrap At The Barbican

Jockstrap & the monstrous death of genre.

‘Well that was…. Great?’ a group of girls mused in the Barbican toilets, following electronic-duo Jockstrap’s first show of a two-night bill in The Barbican. The tickets had sold out almost instantly, and sly comments in their latest NME interview regarding the night’s adventures (‘It’s gonna be a surprise, we’re not going to tell anyone, but it should be good’) imbued it with a theatrical pressure. For Guildhall graduates Georgia Ellery and Taylor Syke, 2023 had been an unbeatable year: a Wembley opening set, catapulting to a Glastonbury stage, a US tour, and a Mercury Prize nomination. How would they close the year of new heights – with a whimper, or a bang? It turned out to be, much to everyone’s surprise, with a monster, a greyed hulk strutting rhythmically to the closing tunes of the night. Though the set was sonically impressive, little attempt to analyse this curious character has been evidenced. In answer to the baffled toilet queue, then, this is my attempt to do just that.

How did the duo get us there? There was always going to be something laughably confusing about the amalgamation of high and low culture – electronic-dance tunes and two twenty-somethings singing about dirty city life, captured before the seated sophistication of the Barbican’s velvet red hall, the attendants standing stiff and serious. It took a little while for things to warm up; the duo entered the stage, and Georgia had some issues with her acoustic guitar, before launching into the soft opening of ‘Neon’, which built gradually into echoey, falsetto-ridden ‘Debra’ and filled out into the seductive dissonance of ‘Jennifer B’. Free from the violin she plays in the band Black Country, New Road, Ellery shimmied across the stage in a free-form way, punctuated only by flailing arms dizzying about her head. One notable highlight was their rendition of ‘Angst’; Syke jumped between equipment and instruments to here find himself at the harpsichord, wonderfully accentuating Ellery’s timeless, emotive vocals. ‘Greatest Hits’ followed, twisting cheeky piano and catchy melody. The timbre of their sonic picnic gradually thickened – ‘Pain is Real’ heavy with a wall of EDM, ‘Concrete Over Water’ flirting with an elegant flute.

And then, so quick was the set, came the rock monster. At a suitable half-way point, Syke had mumbled a half-hearted list of thanks, during which two confusing comments surfaced: ‘this is one of the last times you’ll see us for a while,’ he remarked almost dejectedly, as if breaking up with a friend, followed by ‘we’d also like to thank costume’, despite his plain t-shirt and Georgia’s cute, simplistic dress. Finally, the latter comment began to make sense. Here was their brainchild – a larger-than-life rock monster who stalked across the stage, appearing to the opening bars of ‘The City’. One reviewer has suggested that the monster’s only purpose was to demolish the formality of the space and get everyone up and dancing, but Ellery’s poetic, shoe-less twirling could’ve done just that. We danced along, human, monster and sprawling music joined together. As the final bars of ‘50/50’ rang out in the concert-hall-cum-disco-dancefloor, the rock monster fist-bumped the front row whilst the rest of us shuffled awkwardly towards exits. Was that really it? What the heck did it all mean?

So then, my own interpretation: as Telegraph’s reviewer Kate French-Morris noted, ‘The City’ purposefully plagiarises its lyrics from the 1984 postmodern cult classic Blood and Guts in High School by punk feminist Kathy Acker. Ellery is on record with AnOther magazine noting her interest in the ‘angry, shocking’ nature of Acker’s monster in the novel. Lucky for me, I deal in this language; Kathy Acker’s words ‘NOW EAT YOUR MIND’ are tattooed on my arm after falling into this exact wormhole during my undergraduate degree. Question and resist everything, says Acker; if we examine this monster in its original context, then, what are Jockstrap telling us?

The monster comes from a dream sequence in this novel which collapses the larger narrative so that the reader (the reviewer, the audience?) cannot predict what comes next. Jockstrap are therefore staging our expectations, derived from social norms, to expose their farcity. It’s fitting that Ellery plays house with this monster on stage, as if becoming the traditional female form (housekeeper, carer, not-male) to render it obsolete, to reject all outmoded forms, gendered or otherwise. The reception to these shows has confirmed this subliminal critique, as reviews from both The Times and The Telegraph have used the first few sentences to suggest her attire is responsible for the daring atmosphere. ‘It was as Georgia Ellery strapped a pinny around her green party frock to make a jam sandwich for a hungry stone giant advancing groovily across the Barbican stage that Jockstrap, in performance as in music, became limitless’... Must it be projected femininity, and not the internal life of the music, that emboldens their success as ‘limitless’ experimental pioneers? We might also notice that both reviews are behind a paywall, limiting the reach and accessibility of their music and forcing it in a certain box with a certain demographic. 

The monster interrupts both the structure of Acker’s novel and the coherence of the set, spinning an anti-narrative to necessitate confusion. All logic systems must be challenged. Jockstrap are gleefully aware that they’re non-committal, not willing to please easily. Syke’s first curious comment becomes understandable as a rejection of industry pressure and celebrity culture, playing away from the hands of fans. This sentiment is repeated in their interview with NME, on the topic of their break; ‘We’re not going to be not doing anything’ Syke remarks, this double negative indicative of their mysterious, mischievous riddling. The confusion we are faced with this rock-monster works as a metaphor for their discography – as the new 2023 remix album splutters and chops in a self-flagellating repetition – and their genre – pop-folk psychedelic classical no-wave jazz, perhaps, if one was to try? Rock-strap, then, is a rejection of the binary of classification, the cultural expectations of sexist celebrity culture and the predictability of easy listening. As Acker’s monster collapses the expected world of the novel, so too does this monster break down the music scene at large, spinning a counter-narrative to fickle reviews (perhaps like this one) and expected trajectories. If we are talking in terms of spectacle, hyperbole, and symbolic resistance, I’d call this the death of genre, stomping its stoney feet all over polite society.