Lee Hazlewood/ Jarvis Cocker and Friends<br></br>A Celebration of Kirsty MacColl, Royal Festival Hall, London

The old, the obscure and the ridiculous

Lee Hazlewood is America's Serge Gainsbourg: the prime exponent of sexual licentiousness, brutal emotional honesty and defeated, but heroic, masculinity. The difference, of course, is that in France, Gainsbourg is a deity. In the States, Hazlewood remains a word-of-mouth cult.

You get the feeling Lee kind of likes it that way. "There's not many people who've heard of me," he confides at one point tonight, "we're a special club".

Lee Hazlewood is often more recognised for what he's done for other people (he discovered Duane Eddy, mentored Gram Parsons, duetted with Nancy Sinatra, and invented reverb by dangling a microphone into a steel grain silo) than his own works. Hazlewood is the hipster's Neil Diamond, a counter cultural hand-me-down, the guy you only hear about when you start hanging out with people who work in record shops.

In a baseball cap and mirrored shades, he looks more like a veteran trucker, unrecognisable from the porn-moustached playboy of the Sixties. If anything, though, his voice, like Jack Daniels filtered through anthracite gravel, is finer than ever.

Tonight, perched on a stool and with a whisky and cigarette always to hand, he promises "some old songs, some obscure songs, some ridiculous songs, and what the press call 'typical Lee Hazlewood songs', which means they're dirty." Well, the one that goes "I want a POA and a BJ for my birthday" doesn't take much deciphering, but there's more to his repertoire than that: emotional imprisonment ("Love And Other Crimes"), actual imprisonment ("If It's Monday Morning"), bathetic C&W comedy, and, increasingly, old age.

"I want to sing a song I wrote before I was 30," he says, "but never sang live before, because I didn't think I was old enough. You can bet your sweet bippy I'm old enough now." He then sings a jolly number that goes "Let those 'I don't care' days begin/ I'm tired of holding my stomach in". Other meditations on mortality, though, are somewhat darker: "Dirtnap Stories", a song about bereavement, has the refrain "It's like dying on Christmas day/ Before all the gifts are open".

His band, comprised of moonlighting High Llamas and Stereolabbers, do a fine job with the symphonic country arrangements, but the Kawais and Korgs aren't always up to it: would it have cost that much extra to hire a couple of violinists?

You know there's something deeply wrong when Jarvis Cocker appears in a golf visor, swigs from a bottle of Shiraz, then smashes it over his head. It's sugar glass, ho ho, and it's not the only stunt he'll pull: twice, he karate chops a piece of wood in half, on one occasion doing a daft racist Chinese voice.

Word has it that Pulp, one of the greatest British bands of the last 20 years, are about to call it a day. If this is what Jarvis Cocker is going to do with the rest of his life, he should reconsider.

Maybe he's been hanging around Shoreditch too long, but his first material as Jarvis Cocker and Friends (three blokes on bass, guitar and Moog) is, at best, early Human League meets John Kongos, and at worst, a load of sub-Electroclash balls. It's astonishing that a man cherished for his exquisite lyrics can only manage choruses like "It's gonna be a heavy night/ I've seen the future and it ain't bright" or "I tell you something and I ain't lyin'/ I rule my woman with a rod of iron", and has to resort to chanting "doe a deer a female deer" when he runs out of words. From "Bad Cover Version" to this in 12 months? At times, only those long twirling fingers remind you that it's even the same man.

Kirsty MacColl always seemed like a decent sort, plus, as Morrissey once put it, "Kirsty is a voice gradually added to a body. She has great songs and a crackin' bust." All of which somehow makes her death at the end of 1999, in a bizarre powerboat accident off the coast of Mexico, all the more tragic.

Plenty of other people think so two, because, knocking on for three years later, the Royal Festival Hall is overflowing with fans and former colleagues (of whom there are countless: MacColl must surely have been the most in-demand backing vocalist of the Eighties and Nineties).

The night is compered, enthusiastically if somewhat incoherently, by Phill Jupitus, who dares to kick off the singing himself with "15 Minutes", before handing over to the professionals. Christine Collister, Boo Hewerdine and Roddy Frame follow in quick succession, before the dazed, bewildered presence – or perhaps that should be absence – of Evan Dando wanders onstage. The former Lemonhead and slacker poster boy looks unchanged, from this distance at least, and is still the living embodiment of the phrase "pretty vacant". His duet with Kirsty on Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" was swamped by the Children In Need version, but that's the song he chooses tonight. Unfortunately, it's now impossible to hear that song without hearing Heather Small telling you that you're gonna reeeeeeep just what you sow.

One of the unexpected joys of the show, for a non-folkie like me, is Eliza Carthy. The 24-year-old daughter of folk royalty (Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson), her albums have twice been Mercury nominated, only for her to be dropped by Warners. I've rarely paid any attention to this sort of thing before, but I intend to in future, because Carthy is an absolute joy. Wearing a fabulous skirt bearing a Warholesque screen print of Kirsty's face, she first plays violin while Christine Collister sings a rousing "Mambo De Luna", then takes the mic herself for the bittersweet bossa nova of "England 2 Colombia 0". Carthy exudes the same sort of engaging joie de vivre usually associated with MacColl herself, giving a vital injection of fun to a night which, let's be honest, had the potential to turn into a bit of a funeral.

s.price@independent.co.uk