There are artists you see once and there are artists you follow. Nick Cope has become the latter for our family. Last summer it was Leicester Square Theatre. This year, Epsom Playhouse, grandparents in tow. If this is becoming an annual pilgrimage, there are worse religions to have.
What Cope has always understood, and what sets him apart from the entire field of children’s music, is that kids deserve the same craft and creative seriousness that we’d demand from any other songwriter. These aren’t novelty songs dressed up with animal noises. They are proper tunes, built around the textures of everyday life, strange and funny and occasionally profound in the way that only the very best pop writing manages to be.
This year’s show threads a running mystery through the whole hour. There is a box on stage. Nobody knows what’s in it. Cope keeps going back to it, the room shouts its guesses, an item gets revealed and then comes the song. It is a masterclass in building a room, the kind of instinctive crowd craft you normally associate with veterans of much sweatier venues than this.
Beyond the songs and the beautiful animations that play behind him, is watching how a child grows into this music over time. Our son was more familiar with the songs this year and it was a beautiful yardstick to think of the comparison between the years. The grandparents, encountering Cope for the first time, were gone within about two songs and were especially appreciative of his dad jokes. That cross-generational reach is not an accident. It is the whole point.
Nick Cope is operating at the very top of his game and he is doing it in rooms that are nowhere near big enough for what he deserves. We’ll see him again this summer.