David Elms: Nurture Boy

Next to the bravado of some of his peers, musical comedian David Elms favours a softer sell. He’s a fey, clean-cut creature who simpers and mutters between ballads, edging into crowdwork that’s at odds with the soft voice and the baby-blue guitar. “Who’s drinkin’ tonight?” and its intrusive follow-up introduce a style that revels in its own stiltedness.

There’s a loose structure here, a knowingly daft play-off between two personas. David is newly graduated, newly engaged, and blithely ploughing the wedding funds into his comedy. He’s been saddled with a privileged upbringing—sent up in misery memoir parody That Really Messed Me Up—but his alter-ego, Ingel, has had no such luck.

David is supposedly a character played by this lonely creep, a tangle of daddy issues who curses his creation’s contentedness. Vaguely German accent aside, not much distinguishes socially awkward Ingel from socially awkward David. But like most of Elms’ humour, this “convoluted character comedy” (his words) proudly exposes its own conceits.

As for the tunes, Elms’ sighing acoustic numbers amble in unexpected directions. Whether he’s teasing a love song out of the phonetic alphabet or subverting romcom cliches, he always abstains from the facile couplets perpetrated by lesser musical acts.

His experiments with audience participation, meanwhile, are less dependable. There’s an inventive courtship ritual by Ingel, and an inspired call-and-response where we all play his disciplinarian father, but a later set piece asks too much of the punter given a lengthy script in the closing minutes.

A quiet revolution? Not quite, but a distinctive debut nonetheless.