Album Review

Tim Key – With A String Quartet. On A Boat

• 17th Dec 2010

He’s been a busy boy Tim Key. Among many other things: Kafka on stage, We Need Answers, Newswipe, the voice of milk products for the lactose intolerant and currently in Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge in which he plays Sidekick Simon. Now he’s turned up with his own comedy album.

In the iTunes age the comedy album is an anachronistic concept but one I warm to on instinct – more especially as it is also available on vinyl. To even produce one is to immodestly put oneself in the company of Not the Nine O’Clock News, Richard Pryor, et al. In an odd way this album is the yin to Bill Hicks’ yang of Rant in E Minor, except in Rant the music was just an adjunct to the comedy. Early on Key is quick to explain away the concept behind this concept album and it revolves around spare end of tour cash, a string quartet, a floating studio and a bloke in tracksuit.

Key’s free-verse, off-kilter subjects, vocalisation of the marginalia, and general laying bare the creative process, all serve a subtle performance style. He is constantly removing the fourth wall – if you can do that on audio. On the album he often lets his studio interloper, Basden, in on the trade secrets of editing. This master/pupil relationship over the course of the album forms the hook for the poems. Whilst obscurities such as the FF price category for gift cards, name drops to Michaela Tabb, snooker referee, and the oddities of road etiquette make up the main substance of Tim Key’s poetry oeuvre, the form has just as much a part to play in the comedy.

It’s not all whimsy and lightness either. Before commencing the poem The Trouble with War, Key acknowledges that “There’s a train of thought that war is gloomy.” He also drops the c-bomb in Chess and uses the arcane word Jonnies in The Doctor’s Cabinets, probably in a self-conscious attempt to give himself a rebellious edge.

The fact that this, a comedy album, has come along at all is remarkable but to my mind Key has taken the comedy album somewhere it’s not really been before and despite the conceit of an artfully chaotic affair, the ‘concept’ hangs together very well indeed.