“He’s a praying mantis,” said the girl next to me, “but sexy.” True enough, even if Mr Bruce is a gangly long-limbed performer rather than an actual insect. I’ve seen him twice this year already, and he’s completely compelling on stage and as a dancer who moves like no one else out there.
The first time was last week at a party or wake to mark the sad selling-off of Rosemary Works, a hive of studios in Islington where the entertainment included punk power-pop band Sabre Tooth Tiger and a girl who did a burlesque show dressed as Queen Elizabeth. Gloriana disrobed and shook her stuff, then Mr Bruce appeared. This time he was without his usual partner DJ Chucks. Mr Bruce shouted out numbers to the desk, apparently from his iPod. During a breakdown of technology I asked at the mixing desk who the hell he was and he came up behind me and murmured, “We call ourselves the Correspondents.”
At that point I couldn’t tell is he was using the royal we, or whether it was actually the co-respondents, as in shoes and divorce cases. What was impressive, in what seemed to be a more experimental set, was his utter commitment to performing. I had to find out more.
Perhaps unfortunately, the enigmatic Mr Bruce like everyone else has their footprints on Google. It’s hard to remain a mystery. The band are a big hit at festivals, having gone done a storm at Bestival and Secret Garden, and their original USP was mixing swing jazz and hip-hop. The dance moves could be explained as post-modern Charleston, perhaps.
Whereas the Rosemary Works crowd were hardcore art hipsters, of a type you can find in numbers in Berlin and Brooklyn, last night he played to more upmarket and drunk crowd at the Café de Paris in the West End, coming on after midnight.
With Chucks inevitably in the background knob-twiddling the show is entirely focused on Mr Bruce (pictured above), who comes onstage in a black cowl, which he takes off to reveal dance shoes, and a kind of harlequin sans-culottes Joker look. He sings numbers with an air of jazzy divine decadence like “Washington Square” (see video, below) or “What happened to Soho?” (Where did all the reprobates go? - Mr Bruce wants to know), which was released as an EP. A clever new single "Cheating With You" slyly shifts tempo mid-song. Although they have already been performing a few years, they have yet to release an album, perhaps being content with cult status.However, they do seem to have hit the Zeitgeist as an antidote to double-dip recession with their echoes of Twenties cabaret and, indeed, Cabaret, I would happily cast Mr Bruce as the creepy MC in a stage show of the musical.
Watch the Correspondents perform "Washington Square"
What’s more impressive is that having hooked the audience in, they take a convincing musical tour with some drum and bass, some hardcore jungle, via dubstep and a strange track with some unearthly, maybe African, spiritual singing. This is the more original and gripping material which may be difficult to focus on an album but suggests that the band are way more than some novelty act like, for example, Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer, who performs what he calls chap-hop, raps about cricket and comes Straight Out Of Surrey.
Mr Bruce is undoubtedly a bit posh, but then let’s not hold that against him. It makes a change from every rapper on earth pretending to be street, and gangsta. Mr Bruce is perhaps, in Nik Cohn's expression, more tricksta.Mr Bruce also does superbly rapido scats in his spats. There are numerous girls trying to feel him up on stage and there’s a gratifyingly insane audience response. The Correspondents leave the audience, and me, wanting a lot more.
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