Review – The Bedroom Philosopher
The Bedroom Philosopher jokes that if you don’t like his songs, he’s a comedian, and if you don’t like his jokes, he’s a musician. He’s both and more – four albums released since 2002 and considerable airtime on Triple J, and a series of successful performances at both musical and comedy festivals. He’s a writer too, with a rash of regular contributions to publications all over Australia, a book published in 2012 and a second on the way. (He also holds four quite ridiculous world records. Look it up.)
The Philosopher and his band the Awkwardstra only had the one Adelaide show, so if you missed it, you missed it. (Sorry!) He plays a couple of favourites from the old days as well as some newer material, does a reading or two from his new book, stages a heartbreaking and very funny love story between two laptops, and finishes the night off with a profoundly bizarre number about cats.
With a successful career that’s lasted over a decade, The Bedroom Philosopher is a performer who’s almost too comfortable on a stage. He’s droll and self-deprecating as only a hipster who makes fun of hipsters can be, and will gladly make his own onstage shortcomings the focus of his humour. Done well, this is a tactic that can endear you to your audience. But when you forget the lyrics to one of your well-known songs (twice), and in a separate song stop several times for clearly ad-libbed jokes about having forgotten what chords to play, it stops being cute in a hurry and starts feeling lazy and self-indulgent (and not in an ironic way, either).
He starts the show with a joke that if you don’t like his show, it’s “performance art – it’s bad on purpose!” The problem with a joke like that is it puts pressure on you to prove it wrong. Pointing out the mistakes you’ve made does not fix them. “I’ve lost all the momentum I built up,” he jokes, after doing just that in the second song of the night. Yeah, you have. Now what?
Maybe the man was jetlagged or travel-weary – he did mention that the Awkwardstra had only flown in that morning. Maybe he’s tired of performing and looking to move permanently into writing. Maybe it was just one of those nights. Regardless of the reasoning, there was a lack of commitment to the performance that overshadowed the Philosopher’s famously witty and well-written material. The die-hard fans in the audience would have loved him (as die-hard fans generally will), but this seasoned performer is much better than the show he put on.
