Laurie Black’s beautiful and sporadic Bad Luck Cabaret is one of the most consistently excellent nights out in London, or Brighton, or wherever it is Black decides to pitch her tent filled with alternative music, comedy, performance art, and other wonderful strangeness.
Tonight [1], the big top is a seedy basement in Tufnell Park, and the guest clowns are Jamie Mykaela and John “Dark Room” Robertson [2].
Both are old comrades of Black’s from cabarets gone by, especially cabarets in Australia (Mykaela and Robertson are both from Perth).
Black herself hosts, and has some fresh analogue synths to show off. These, she plays live, a marvel in an era of laptop performers. She is rightly annoyed that this new set-up is hard to see from the audience, so most of the audience remain unaware of how damn clever what she’s doing actually is.
Black has a new album out in 2026, and judging by these new tunes, it’s going to be a cracker.
Our first guest, Jamie Mykaela, has some new material to try out, alongside her usual cabaret gorgeousness. Mykaela has the catchiest laugh in comedy, and uses the word “cunt” as expertly as a striking French fireman squaring up to a police cordon. She’s as filthy as a student duvet and has some fab new material about masturbatory privacy and algorithmic invasion. Go see her before she’s a national treasure.
We then see John “Dark Room” Robertson – or “daddy”, as Mykaela calls him – do an extremely high-energy and entirely improvised routine that breaks down the barrier between audience – as he says, you’d be pushing it to call it a crowd – and performer. Robertson has this amazing skill of immediately sussing out the energy of each audience member, and figuring out whether to go easy or hard on them, simple or surreal. A highlight here is a series of jokes and anecdotes around the band Electric Six, but there’s no point explaining it here. Like his namesake footballer, there’s genius at work here.
Finally, we have more tunes from Black herself, who invites the audience up on stage so they can see how tricky her analogue playing actually is. One guy takes her up on the offer, and for a few seconds, he’s creepily close, but moves back to the respectful distance of a nearby lampshade.
Some bloke staring at a younger woman playing synths is a slightly strange and distracting mis-en-scène, but the bloke is harmless and the artist is in control throughout.
Black very kindly mentions my own Wasp night, and gets a laugh from the fact I made her go on before a bluegrass band. But the larger point she’s making is an important one: support nights like this, full of glorious weirdness, warmth, mild danger, and possibility.
You’ll miss them when they’re gone.
[1] This was a Betwixtmas special, taking place in “the void” between Christmas and New Year. 30th December feels a wonderful night for a show, far superior to the lowest common denominator nature of NYE.
[2] Not to be confused with John “Scottish football legend” Robertson, who died on Christmas Day. Robertson was regarded by Brian Clough as a genius, and was instrumental in helping Clough’s Nottingham Forest win back-to-back European Cups.
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