Reggie Watts had to play an early show at Latitude because he was doing the Royal Festival Hall in the evening. As I walked through the already-pack comedy tent the ratio of bemused to amused faces changed dramatically. Outside the tent where fans were watching his set on the video screens, there was an air of polite dismay. Who was the weird man with an extravagant afro saying “daddy, where is my heroin?” in a childlike voice.

But then i’ve seen Watts a few times and still can’t quite pin him down. To call him a musical comic doesn’t really do him justice. Half the time he is singing like a Motown legend the other half he is breaking into a cockney accent like he has just come from a Hackney housing estate.

His chat is equally unpredictable. He tells everyone that Oasis are headlining tonight. He explains that in the future we will all be holograms and he breaks into scientific gobbledegook and I’m not even sure if he knows what he is talking about. Nobody else does, that’s for sure. 

And yet somehow it is all brilliant. Inside the tent the audience was tranfixed as he shittled between the front of the stage and his various bits of technical equipment. The technique of looping vocal samples to create soundscapes is a well worn trope in both music and comedy but few do it as seamlessly or epically as Watts, who is a veritable Phil Spector of looping.

The styles change as often as the subject matter. One minute he sounds like Bobby McFerrin, the next he is singing about how the druids built wonderful hedges. At times he even seemed like an old vaudevillian act, messing about with the microphone stand like a knockabout comic.

Did I mention it was excellent? By the end of his show pretty much everyone was converted. People usually get up to walk somewhere else after a Latitude comedy performance. Here they got up to give Watts a standing ovation. 

More Latitude Reviews here.