Chilly Gonzales
Royal Albert Hall, London

CHILLY GONZALES is a unique artist who has always managed to plough his own furrow. Dropped by his record label in 2004 after handing them a solo piano album (in complete contrast to the dancefloor rap they had signed him for), he went on to release it independently, whereupon it became his bestselling album to date.

He has remained independent ever since, leaving him free to experiment and change direction as he sees fit — often in the middle of a song, as it happens.

His latest album, Gonzo, throws down a self-therapising gauntlet to his fellow musicians, posing the stark question: can you be as arrogantly vulnerable; fearlessly iconoclastic and recklessly genre-busting as this, and still rock the party — all in one go?

The music is interspersed with much thoughtful and comedic storytelling and philosophising. At one point, he expertly breaks down the end of the golden age of internet freedom, when independent music could find an audience without the need for exploitative and controlling “middle men.”

Where once the demands of the “radio single” created the straitjacket into which artists struggled to contort themselves, today it is the Spotify playlist that is dictating output, with swathes of composers now slaves to the algorithm.

The problem, of course (as Mark Fisher has written about extensively), is that the algorithm “rewards facelessness” and can only ever demand the reproduction of what already exists. Creativity, innovation and risk-taking — the very things capitalism claims to promote — are in fact exactly what gets filtered out.

Gonzales, however, is an optimist who loves to enjoy life (“The glass, like this room, is half full,” he quips) — and for him this tragedy is simply a source of more hilarious raw material for his songwriting.

“I hate it when my ears are not surprised/ that’s when you know the composition’s compromised … there’s nothing faker than seeing you playing on a glacier,” he opines in the glorious Neoclassical Massacre, a mea culpa for the genre he inadvertently helped spawn.

Gonzales has a rich history of collaborations, and it is easy to see why. Many of his pieces, to my ears, feel like songs without a song, almost there but just in need of a killer vocal line or soloist to finish the job.

Drake, Feist, Daft Punk and Jarvis Cocker have all benefited from collaborations with him, and the latter joins us for two tracks tonight. Cocker’s presence is particularly fitting as he, too, is a man who has always ploughed his own furrow — his band Pulp doing so for almost 15 years before anybody really took any interest. The two of them stand as a remarkable tribute to the value of sticking to your guns, come what may.

In an industry that punishes innovation, Gonzales is one who somehow manages to keep slipping through the net. And thank God for that.