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Rad Review of Gigs
Words and pictures for a discerning gig goer
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Keiji Haino and Apartment House at St John's Church, Bethnal Green, 14/3/24
A sign over the door as you enter St John’s of Bethnal Green says the church was burnt down in the middle of the nineteenth century, but was then re-built. It’s now falling down in the twenty-first century and is trying to raise money to re-build itself again, partly by playing host to Keiji Haino, amongst other artists, in a world where the rituals and artefacts of traditional christianity now seem as outlandish as some of the artists now making use of its space. There’s paint peeling off the walls but a set of strikingly modern stations of the cross give a hint that this church is very much of the here and now.
Some of the Shoreditch faithful filing in and taking their pews (still fixed to the ground unlike many other churches looking similarly to exploit commercial or community opportunities - Archers fans, you’ll know what I’m talking about) notice, ahead of an 8:30pm start that they were warned would be sharp, that Keiji Haino - at least we assume it is he, in trademark bugged dark glasses and flowing grey locks - is blowing a hairdryer on his tambourines near the altar. Looking on nonchalantly are a quartet of classical musicians, The Apartment House, as if to say “Yeah, he does that”. This is the last night of a three-day residency by Haino organised by Cafe OTO.
On the dot, Haino, a sort of modern-day Stoic who eschews all drugs, meat and alcohol and, I’m informed by a sort of Haino devotee sitting behind me, has been known to abandon a show if he sees someone drinking in the audience (I hope he doesn’t spot one of the many craft beer bottles perched on the pews), springs into action, grabbing his warmed-up tambourines and prostrating himself on the floor (not quite on the altar, but not far from it). The scrapes and the clatter of the instruments fill the silence of the old building - it has excellent acoustics. Haino gets down on his haunches then jumps into the air, his silver locks flailing around him. He brings forth a range of noises to which the word “tambourine” doesn’t do justice (They are more correctly perhaps tambourins?). After about ten minutes, the quartet joins Haino with surprisingly conventional baroque-sounding accompaniment.
Other pieces descend into discordant and abstract noise with Haino, now sat on a sort of wooden throne, shrieking and moaning animalistically, but these are interspersed with covers of Summertime and Strange Fruit. Neither are what you would call straight, but you can hum along.
None of the pieces performed end on a note or a chord that signals to the audience that they can now start clapping and every time there is an awkward silence. Each time, someone (presumably one of the organisers, or it might even have been one of the quartet) begins clapping and the rest of the audience follows suit. Occasionally a member of the audience starts clapping but no-one joins in and they shrug and give up, embarrassed. Wikipedia says there’s a Japanese concept of “Ma”, or silences in music, which perhaps some of the audience are aware of, but I think it’s more a sort of timid reverence for this art-rock high priest that might, two centuries ago, have been shown to a visiting bishop.
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Cassie Kinoshi, seed. plus NikNak. Barbican, London 8/3/24
On the eve of International Women’s Day Cassie Kinoshi performs her biggest headline show to date, to debut a project Offerings, commissioned by Serious and highlighting the forgotten role of women in jazz during World War Two when the male bandleaders went off to fight. She is unequivocal about them being overlooked. “Britain is racist,”she says.
She celebrates the emergence of all female bands on the circuit at this time such as Hilda Ward’s Lady Syncopators and Evelyn Hardy & Her Ladies Band.
Before this we are treated to pieces from new album "gratitude", to be released on the 22nd of this month and first premiered live in 2023. Her erstwhiles, 10 piece seed., featuring Ezra Collective keyboardist Joe Arman-Jones, are teamed up with the London Contemporary Orchestra and DJ NikNak to produce a sound rich in orchestration, Blue Note and African rhythms.
Inspired by her mother’s gratitude book, where one thing to be thankful about each day was recorded, but at a deeper level about mental health and community, three of its four movements are performed here, each contrasting in mood and giving prominence to a different instrument. It is also designed to be a reminder of the perennial struggles of gender, race and class and Kinoshi also rails against institutions preventing artists speaking out on political issues.
The movements are performed to a visual backdrop from GURIBOSH featuring tides, echoes perhaps of seed.’s 2019 Mercury nominated Driftglass. Since then Kinoshi has produced music for theatre productions at the National Theatre and The Globe as well as the London Symphony orchestra.
There are sounds of nature and celestial aural tweaks like the heyday of jazz fusion and optimistic, uplifting poetry from Belinda Zhawi.
Each of Offerings has the original voice or music of the resurrected musician as an intro or coda and the three pieces culminate in a wild frenzy of tuba playing, not unlike the work of Charles Mingus.
Musically there is little that is new in this work, but it is beautifully conceived. It’s Kinoshi’s ability to synthesize different genres that marks her out and seamlessly blend in extra dimensions like spoken voice. Barbican’s audience takes a while to warm, but this is from inhibiting respect for decorum not inclination and, by the end, the ensemble is ecstatically received. The only disappointment is the length of the show, just over one hour.
Words: Adrian Cross; Pictures: Richard Gray
A full gallery of pictures can be viewed up to three months after the gig here.
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Xylouris White
Cafe Oto, London, 20/12/23
You know there are going to be earthquakes at a Xylouris White gig, that their mystically hypnotic power might open up fissures in the floor. Jim White can boom the bass drum with the earth flattening intensity of John Bonham. It inches it’s way towards the seated section of audience at Cafe Oto, as if stealthily fleeing the battering it’s receiving from White; like the technique in horror movies where the spectre appears much closer than is humanly possible with each frame.
In the intimate salon that is Oto you sometimes wince and start, as if at a public flogging. However White is a vaudeville flogger, a unique and compelling percussionist. His left arm ascends and curls like a magical CGI creature materialising into the air and comes flying down at the snare. His right drumstick sluices across the cymbals, another tick in his wizardry. He stares out at the audience, not with haughteur, contempt or a craving for appreciation, but serene single-mindedness, his features reminiscent of Donald Sutherland.
He would be able to maintain gravitas even if he was dressed as a wrestler. It’s easy to fixate on White’s flamboyant presence, but his partner, Giorgos Xylouris, sometimes becoming red in the face, as if struggling to keep pace with the Australian drummer, is a highly skilled vocalist and laouto player in his own right: the laouto being a Cretan lute. It’s usually an accompanying instrument, but deployed by Xylouris in a solo capacity. His lyrics are rooted in nature and the traditional rhythms of Mediterranean life.
This is rock mingled with folk in beguiling, thrilling combinations. It bears the imprint of White’s work in The Dirty Three with Mick Turner and Warren Ellis of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. He has also collaborated with PJ Harvey, Cat Power, Marianne Faithful, Bill Callahan and Beth Orton amongst others.
The pair first met in Melbourne in 1990 when Xylouris was touring with his father and have since produced five studio albums. They have a recognisable groove, but are constantly re-inventing and adding adornments to their music.
The first of two sets opens with Second Sister, an instrumental from April’s Drag City release The Forest In Me. It has a flamenco flavour. Telephone Song from 2019’s album The Sisypheans, also has the raw intensity of flamenco’s cante jondo. ‘Soar on a single wing and should you conquer time…’ Giorgos sings.
Black Peak from the 2016 Bella Union album of the same name has a breakbeat reminiscent of electronica, similar to that deployed by Manchester jazz trio Go Go Penguin, and a delirious riddle of a laouto line. Hey Musicians! is a foreboding, hymnal call to arms. Xylouris whistles through its latter bars. The Feast is a composition about killing a hundred animals. “Everyone’s probably vegan in here!” quips White. It starts slowly before the pounding hooves of White’s drums are on the stampede again.
The Forest in Me is largely a set of minatures coming in at two minutes or less. Night Club has delicate, haunting rhythms and Xylouris on a single stringed instrument. It’s accompanied by a humorous ancedote from White about his brother leaving a scarf at Taylor Swift’s house, which she didn’t return. Latin White is dedicated to film maker Rebecca Marshall, a recent collaborator on videos with the duo. It’s reminiscent of a folk dance and White takes up guitar for it. “Not that hard after all,’ he says wryly. Red Wine, another instrumental from The Forest In Me, flows like the fly past of a flock of geese.
On The Sisypheans’ Forging Xylouris sings of the earth trembling underfoot and ‘the wrath of the world forever increasing’. Though not in this evening’s sets it’s a neat summation of the extraordinary timbre and transcendance in the duo’s music, leaving the Oto crowd appreciatively buzzing to its core.
See see our full photo gallery click here.
Words: Adrian Cross; Photos: Richard Gray
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Michele Stodart
St. Pancras Old Church, London, 30/11/23
Michele Stodart has a CV in the rock world second to none. Bassist and vocalist in the The Magic Numbers, festival curator and promoter, actress in Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis’ Yesterday and musical director at the UK Americana Awards.
But there’s nothing aloof about her. Here she is baring her soul at the intimate St Pancras Old Church ‘inviting in the darkness’ as she says, by way of explaining the title of Invitation, her third and first album in seven years. The theory being that it is in the ‘listening and learning that we can transform’. It’s fitting that Stodart extirpates some of her demons in a church named after the Roman Christian martyr, whose name in Greek means the one that holds everything.
She says it’s important to surround yourself with people who ’lift you up’, the implication being this principle guided the composition of her backing band, which features singer songwriter David Ford on guitar, Andy Bruce on piano, Holly Carter on pedal steel and Emma Holbrook on drums
The first set is a run through of the album that culminates in Drowning, expiating quietly, like a last breath at its end. There are the tranquil, comtemplative, healing melodies of Undone and Come Dance With Me and the strolling blues of These Bones. The highlight, as it is on vinyl, is the desperately poignant Tell Me.
The songs, whether acoustic, piano or violin-led do indeed feel transformational and often slow burn to a crescendo. After the interval Stodart introduces new compositions including collaborations with Ford and special guest and singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams, who quips “I was enjoying this amazing gig now you’ve spolied it!” for a song called Lucky Ones. Brother Romeo, lead singer of the Numbers, is in the audience, and whoops flit appreciatively around the chapel like swallows on a serene, intermittently playful, night.
The full photo gallery, where you can buy prints, can be seen here.
Words: Adrian Cross; Photos: Richard Gray
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Joanna Sternberg
St. Matthias Church, Stoke Newington Pitchfork Music Festival, 10/11/2023
Joanna Sternberg prefers to make music alone, tour alone and gets through a performance by not looking at the audience. One of their songs charts the perils of lugging all their instruments around the New York subway. Yet they connect deeply with their audience through a lack of pretension, striking, often hymnal melodies and spades of charm. Songs are frequently paused for amusing asides and sometimes re-started.
Sternberg belongs to a genre, sometimes unhelpfully coined as outsider music. They are very much in the tradition of Daniel Johnston, another whose music brims with complete authenticity. Like him Sternberg takes us to some dark places in their life, but does it with wit and uplifting, deeply humane tunes. As the cliche goes, seamlessly touching a chord within all of us. In truth, they are really an insider. Sternberg lives in Manhattan Plaza, an inter-generational residence and hangout for artists going back to Tennessee Williams and Richard Burton. Their grandmother was a famous cantor and actor in Yiddish theatre. Sternberg learned classical piano as a child, went to jazz school and can also turn their hand to double bass, gutiar, violin, drums, banjo and mandolin.
This is their first time in London, at an intimate and near full St. Matthias’ Church. The set opens on acoustic guitar with the punchy riffs of the acerbic ‘People are Toys To You’ from this year’s Fat Possums release I’ve Got Me. Sternberg quips about their “moody, depressing little songs” as they segue to the album’s title track, then on to perhaps their most perfectly realised composition, ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Sternberg switches to piano for a sequence of songs with a gospel feel, beginning with ‘Mountains High’ and including ‘Neighbours’, about living in a high rise building and not knowing whether to say hello to people. There is the Regina Spectoresque ‘Drifting In a Cloud,’ documenting the initial elation and subsequent nightmare of being prescribed Zoloft.
The night ends with the poignant ‘Don’t You Ever’, from 2019’s first album Then I Try Some More, influenced by ragtime. This is about the fraught process of becoming comfortable in the body, not to mention addiction. Then on to a brand new song, ‘The Love I Give’, which Sternberg descibes as a “little passive,aggressive song”, that still feels imbued with a warm, generosity of spirit.
Musically, Joanna is their harshest critic. If not, that would mean “they really hate me!” she cries. As Matt Sweeney, producer on I’ve Got Me, said in Rolling Stone, though they depict intense struggles Sternberg’s songs ultimately feel like victories, fitting in this sense for a church, and delighting an audience whose whoops may echo in the cloisters for some time.
Words: Adrian Cross; Pictures: Richard Gray
See the full photo gallery here.
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Porridge Radio
Shepherds Bush Empire, 03.11.2022
Porridge Radio pounce on the Empire’s stage to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song and it’s as if they’ve migrated from their true selves for the initial numbers. Even the jauntiest of their New Wave-esque songs have a darker undertow on 2020’s Mercury nominated Every Bad and May’s ingeniously titled Waterslide, Diving Board and Ladder to The Sky (after the subjects of some of lead singer Dana Margolin’s paintings). Yet, oddly, the gig takes on the flavour of a gaily bopping Sixth Form disco as Give/Take, Circling and Jealousy are surprisingly bland, in spite of the Brighton band’s tireless energy and enthusiasm for live performance, exemplified by Georgie Scott bouncing at the keyboard.
It is not until mid-set that it feels we’re back home. Margolin went on record in the New York Times in the Spring to say she loved to sing her thoughts aloud so as to ‘hear them and understand if she agreed with them’. And to repeat those thoughts over and over. Things really lift off with Birthday Party and its fifteen seven times repeated line ‘I don’t want to be loved’. It’s these existential howls that whip the audience into a maelstrom and drag us much closer to the texture of the studio recordings.
The cropped haired Margolin is adept at elliptical statements such as ‘I don’t want the end and I don’t want the beginning’; on the first of a couple of tracks that resemble Nick Cave gothic stompers, the latter being the final song of the night ‘Sweet’. This features the evening’s support acts, Alaskalaska and Memory of Speke, mobbing the stage and indulging in some comic crowd surfing, dressed in judo suits and lab coats and looking, no doubt intentionally, like extras in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Margolin denies any design to the name Porridge Radio, that it’s a purely random juxtaposition of two unrelated words, albeit both items can be side by side at the breakfast table of course. And Porridge Radio have been accused of being all things to everyone and not settling into a particular genre. This has always seemed unfair as the the group does have a distinctive style and is honed into a recognisably driving groove for the final third.
Even if Margolin does lapse into niceness overkill with the unworkable request of asking those lofty to ensure that someone more vertically challenged behind them can see, the evening ends feeling like good ‘ol rock ‘n’ roll.
Words: Adrian Cross
Photos: Richard Gray
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Peter Hook and the Light, Joy Division: A Celebration. Brixton Academy, 10.07.2022
Beyond all this good is the euphoria
A greatest hits night at The Brixton Academy, with its ceiling that resembles the lunar surface, is in keeping with the music of Joy Division, but for some fans, will have Ian Curtis turning in his grave, as the band’s bassist continues to tour the back catalogue, following his classical re-boot with Manchester Camarata in 2019.
Even a nuts and bolts celebration of Joy Division seems a contradiction in terms, especially in the height of midsummer, as the performance, after a brief aperitif of New Order, essentially charts the trajectory of a troubled singer’s odyssey to suicide as The Light segues from Warsaw material to the albums Unknown Pleasures and Closer in full.
So little at first glance stacks up in the enterprise’s favour. And there is also the challenge of reproducing live those two albums which are masterpieces of studio production, singularly crafted in 1979 and 1980 by Martin Hammett of Factory records. There was further grist to the sceptic mill as Hook’s voice failed to carry on occasions and the sonic intricacies and depth of space in tracks such as Insight and Wilderness were lost.
Hook, of course, has every right to plough the reprise furrow, as he was not only a member of New Order and Joy Division, but central to both’s architecture and unique sound. Like Jacque Burnel’s in The Stranglers, his bass functions like lead guitar; at the base of the fretboard for New Order and nearer the top of the neck for Joy Division. Hook makes a valiant attempt to ape Bernard Summer and Curtis’ vocal styles, even as he hangs over his bass like a sullen, dispirited gorilla or a costume of one hung out to dry, rather than attempting to mirror Curtis’ onstage echoes of his own epilepsy.
At other junctures he wields the instrument as a piece of machinery that’s capable of felling a redwood, legs wide apart to emphasise its heft. This is entirely fitting for the early DIY Warsaw tracks, grandiose terrors of Day Of The Lords and the explosive chords of Shadowplay; that come surging at the audience like the wrecking of an afternoon’s peace on a deserted country highway, by the onrush of a juggernaut. Just as they do on the original recording. The magisterial New Dawn Fades is also faithfully intact. Nevertheless at the interval the ledger records Unknown Pleasures as a somewhat mixed success.
As we process to Closer, whose original tone is one of inexorable fate being played out, a fait accompli like a Greek tragedy, Hook’s macho physical posture is at odds with Curtis’ even keener mental fragility. However, besides A Means to an End, its emotional punch is consumately transmitted. The atmospheric and ethereal Heart and Soul retains the album’s clean, crisp drum riff and The Eternal is just as heartrending as on the original vinyl. Paul Kehoe captures Stephen Morris’ distinctive drum patterns brilliantly throughout the night.
The set naturally concludes with Decades, building gloriously to its climax of lyrical beauty and abject desolation. Then the horde is pulled down the Academy’s famous slope, for a rousing encore of Atmosphere, Ceremony, Transmission and Love Will Tear Us Apart that creates sheer delirium, just had as it did with the New Order coda, Temptation, at the evening’s outset.
To paraphrase Atmosphere, people like us did indeed find it easy, and we were, all said and done, by the end walking on air. Perhaps Curtis would have been posthumously cheered to have seen his brief but extraordinary contribution to the output of the post punk years still dragging forward the fans with its irresistible undertow. Salford Rules, read one of the amps. Hard to disagree on an august night like this.
Words: Adrian Cross
Images: Richard Gray
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Grace Cummings
St. Matthias’ Church, 09.03.2022
High church, glowing revelations from a new priestess of folk
Victoria’s Grace Cummings used to drum on ACDC covers for high school bands and has said it was Bon Scott who taught her about singing, writing and “knowing when to spit”. Her own songs build in tension to guttural release, with a brand of gutsy folk in the tradition of flamenco’s cante jondo, rather than 60s hippiedom. She comes across as a no nonsense Aussie country girl and is wholesomely profane in front of St. Matthias’ chancel. “If I burst into flames there’s a fridge with booze in it at the back. Just chuck it on me.” She disdains the “over serious, navel gazing” folk milieu, recounting how she broke the hushed reverence in the crowd at a festival, and drew evil glances, for cracking open a Kilkenny.
This is her first performance in London and she ‘s finding it “romantic” to be wearing a coat and scarf in the streets. Cummings’ hails from the title of 2019’s Flightless Records album, Refuge Cove. Her lyrics reveal a profound sense of place and feeling for nature. ‘Sweet Matilda’, a Mexican Summer series single, was written during Victoria’s wildfires and laments the destruction of the old Oz. She describes launching a kite over the charred landscape and its odyssey being joined by an eagle, which made her as “excited as a Jack Russell” and inspired the song ‘Fly a Kite’.
Cummings is also a stage actress. Her witty and charismatic banter forms a large chunk of the set. She is skilful at building intimacy and connection with her audience. She talks of Melbourne’s seemingly interminable lockdown where she felt starved of attention, and so, penned herself a love song. ‘Freak’, like ‘Fly a Kite’, appears on a second album, 2022’s Storm Queen. This was recorded and entirely self-produced during the extended period of social austerity. “It’s an important job being a freak,” she said to HollerCountry.com in January. The album is spare and simple, with bursts of ornamentation, and addresses themes of God, loss, alienation, hurt and healing. So it seems fitting she performs solo on acoustic guitar, switching to piano just once, for ‘Dreams’; an exquisite melody that, sadly, perishes too early.
Her voice has the deep, melodic richness of Tracey Chapman or Odette and a searing rasp at points of crescendo and intense feeling that invokes the ghost of Janis Joplin. Live there is an element of possession that takes hold of her, making her wild eyed and baring ursine teeth. St Matthias church was bomb damaged during the Second World War and might feel as though it’s been struck again. She talks of Van Gogh’s therapist in a painting in the Musee d’Orsay, whose expression implores Van Gogh to “stop”. “ My own ceiling screams back at me,” she confides. She often gazes up, mid song, at the nave’s beautifully restored roof. Birds feature heavily in her imagery and, on Storm Queen’s ‘Up In Flames’, she seems owl-like in her gaze, transmuting the transepts into a falconer’s mews.
To summit a stirring evening, Storm Queen’s ‘Heaven’ segues into Neil Young’s ‘Pocahontas’ and final offering ‘Paisley’, about the bleak, Scottish town, cements her in the anglosphere, with its caledonian tones. “See you on the other side,” she says. A thunder of applause foreshadows a groundswell for her fearless clouds to buffer these shores once again.
Words: Adrian Cross
Photos: Richard Gray
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John Grant, Roundhouse, 29.01.2020
Pianist John Grant is fluent in Russian, Spanish, Germany and the language of his adopted home, Iceland. He explains that Icelandic grammar is complicated and resents the innate ease with which the nation’s children use it with ”every fibre in his body.” Though as lush as Iceland’s virgin landscapes, his music can feel monochrome sometimes in mood and structure.
That is not to say that there aren’t several stand outs. His most famous melody, ‘Marx’, is an even more overwhelming experience live than versions cut in the studio, flooding the body with feeling to the degree Van Morrison could do in his Astral Weeks heyday. Many numbers, such as, unsurprisingly, ‘Outer Space’, are given playful accompaniment on the keyboard, cleverly aping the effects of a Seventies moog and exploiting the eerie soundtracks to science fiction B movies of the fifties, a la Portishead. The valiant Roundhouse choir, standing like a clutch of Amish or prisoners behind barbed wire, also shoe in added texture to some of the compositions.
Grant’s songs are steeped in melancholia and draw heavily on a difficult childhood. The use of science fiction tropes amplifies his sense of being an outsider, struggling to come to terms with being a gay young man in a conservative Methodist household that never ceased to be disappointed in him. In admirably candid and confessional interviews he has talked of living in a state of PTSD and hyper vigilance when young, attempting to control his surroundings because he expected folk to do him harm. It was only when he contracted HIV that he began to accept who he was. As he says in ‘Queen of Denmark’ “I wanted to change the world, but couldn’t even change my underwear.” The set has some raw moments that would not be out of place on John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band.
Grant is a gentle bear of a man in the rugged, wholesome Americana tradition and will have felt the love in the intimate staging in the round of this iconic Camden venue. Several in the audience, many of whom are also bearded Sigmund Freud-a-likes, avidly remind him of the esteem they hold them in and there are plenty of wry ripostes from Grant. When a couple file out during the encore he quips: “If you’re leaving for the babysitter I’ll pay the extra.” One devotee shouts a request that Grant fails to pick out. “You want me to play Liszt? I was thinking of Caramel.”
Songs like the opener ‘TC and Honeybear’ have a wistful late 60s feel, in the vogue of Simon and Garfunkel. And there are stately ballads echoing the late Scott Walker, with whom Grant shares a rich, warming baritone. Of those ‘Geraldine’ and crowd pleaser, ‘GMF’, verge on the anthemic.
Four solo albums to the good, Grant also shares a cab musically with the likes of Father John Misty, albeit without his range and consistent lyrical finesse. However listening to the former Czars vocalist, in whatever guise, is always a soulful encounter. The final track of the night is the avowedly jazzy, blues of ‘Chicken Bones’ and more of this hike in tone and tempo would have made this a stellar night.
Words: Adrian Cross
Images: Richard Gray
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Herbie Hancock
Barbican, 17.11.2019
Fusion’s voyager continues to push the outer limits
At seventy nine Herbie Hancock is still stargazing and looking to the future. “The joy is in the striving,” he said in 2018 and he expresses reverential awe of the young musicians he has assembled to disrupt a set of his standards, spinning them into new and intricate orbits. It’s not stretching things to say there were distinct nods to Radiohead amongst the ballads, funk and Southern African vocal harmonies. Bassist James Genus is “always doing something unexpected, yet in the groove.” Guitarist Lionel Loueke is “nine people in one body. Voices, guitars, pianos.”
There is something of a school’s most beloved and respected teacher about Hancock, underpinned by his conversion to Buddhism following crack addiction. He has said in the past that jazz is about sharing and he calls on the “citizens of this planet” to “fix things.”
The first half is full of electrifying quantum leaps. Loueke’s thrilling lead guitar sounds like a conduit for a keyboard. James Genus’ bass has the tone of lead guitar in an extraordinary solo on ‘Secret Sauce’; gurgling, rubbing , a gathering storm of insect wings, which he records at the same time and then overlays with a standard bass line. It’s as if we are in the studio. Only percussionist, Justin Tyson, “borrowed from Robert Glasper”, plays trad.
The whole of 1978’s Sunlight was sung through a vocoder and ‘Come Running With me’ begins with flautist Elena Pinderhughes’ Minnie Riperton-esque vocals and ends with what feels like an emotionally intelligent robot’s dying words “You don’t have to be afraid anymore. I’m no good without you” from Hancock. This can seem cheesy and akin to Marvin the Paranoid Android to 21st century sensibilities, but like most things with Hancock, he’s somehow able to pull it off.
Those who may not have appreciated the fresh takes on the back catalogue are eventually rewarded with straightforward renditions of his most famous crowd pleasers in the second half. Elena Pinderhughes’ flute gives ‘Cantaloupe Island’s melody a more laid back feel, evoking the amble of a contented man whistling down a street. Hancock struts the stage like Chuck Berry with his keytar for the encore ‘Chameleon’ , accompanied by a great echo on Justin Tyson’s snare.
Some of the interstellar veerings cut the night’s best grooves too swiftly, leaving a sense of a present being snatched out of the hands, but, in sum, this was still vintage Hancock and no one could begrudge him the handshake with every member of the front row as he vacates the stage.
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Deerhunter and Cate le Bon, The Roundhouse, 03.11.2019
A night of compelling music, alt-punk or otherwise
“We don’t need punk. We need unity,” says Deerhunter frontman, Bradford Lee, halfway through band’s set in the vast, lunar-like module of the Roundhouse. The irony of Lee’s renunciation of punk is that Lee is a natural contrarian himself and therefore the epitome of punk attitude.
He said The Ramones brought punk to the UK at their Roundhouse gig in ’76. He told a Spaniard in the audience that he liked Spain, but also Catalonia. Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, the Atlanta quartet’s eighth album release, has sleeve notes that question the relevance of the LP in today’s world of playlists and attenuated attention spans. Very,very punk. Lee also has the granite hew of punk godfather Iggy Pop.
With a whiff of knowing paradox the call for unity should be delivered through “feedback and incredibly painful volume levels on the first step towards destroying punk’s legacy”. And so it is. The set is evenly split between tracks from Why hasn’t and Halcyon Quest, culminating in ‘He Would Have Laughed’. It was pure, delirious alt-rock Americana and confirms Deerhunter as one of the most arresting live acts on the circuit.
Contrastingly, the cool, demure Cate Le Bon, this time dressed like a re-incarnation of Young Americans Bowie or a self-contained fashion exec, has never been one for stage banter. Under a constant red glow she delivered a decalogue of tracks, largely from Mercury nominated Reward. Consciously or otherwise, she seems to take inspiration from some of rock’s great chanteuses: be it the Anna Calvi-esque ‘Love Is Not Love’ or the echos and primal rhythms of Siouxsie and the Banshees in ‘Wonderful’. Her voice is in vintage form on the orientally infused ‘Home to You’ and there’s a further nod to punk, or perhaps Tom Waits, on the witty ‘Mother’s Mother’s Magazines’. ‘What’s Not Mine’ was an odd choice of set closer, but that barely detracted from yet another consummate performance from the Welsh diva.
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Prodigy
Brixton Academy, 22.12.2017
Always speeding, never reversing, like unbridled, joystick mayhem
Six number one albums to the good, lurid dystopia has rarely been as thrilling as The Prodigy and the Academy is crackling with anticipation as the band finally steps out under the stage's roving searchlights. Vocalist Keith Flint, still wilfully perverse with mohican and black eye liner, prowls the stage in an adolescent slouch, like an indolent hyena scavenging off 1997's Fat of the Land, braces dangling torpidly by his knees. Alongside him the avowedly macho MC Maxim stokes all the 'hot and sweaty warriors on the floor".
Everyone hopes the music will change their picture. However the opening salvos, though reassuringly demented, are a confusion of noise that belie the guile of the group's quarter of a century of studio samplings. 'Wild Frontier' stands alone in this briny chaos as having some shape and coherence. 2009's 'Omen' was first up and fortunately the writing is not on the wall, as the set gradually mutates into the kind of shamanistic experience that avid clubbers yearn for. Whether this is through being bludgeoned, as promised, into another dimension or the sound has simply been tweaked down a notch, The Prodigy's timeworn breakneck and careering fusion of punk and techno, reminiscent of a video game carjack, is soon in cruise control.
The band shrewdly dispenses with a truncated 'Firestarter' early on, as if to say you're here to live this gig not just wait for an anthem, and from that point the malevolent hedonism assumes its distinctive form.
A delighted crowd parties frenziedly to the ominous, snarling 'Breathe' and there is barely a moment to exhale before Rob Holliday, a prototype Mick Jones inhabiting the corner of the stage, outs the heavy guitar riff of 'Voodoo People', Other gems are the pounding 'Get Your Fight On' and recent single 'Need Some 1'. After the ragga of 'Poison' the rapturous adulation almost kisses the ceiling. So Maxim hunkers the flock, like the raving crab of Fat Of The Land's iconic album cover, for a wash in the ethereal, levantine interlude inside 'Smack My Bitch Up', before erupting it from the sea bed for a final burst of hysteria.
The encore is a mission back through time to the group's undistilled dance roots with club classic, 'No Good' and the reggae-infused 'Out of Space'. As The Prodigy vanish in the sulphurous cloud of dry ice the audience is left to float alone the chorus of "I'm gonna send you to outer space to find another race."
Suitably skewed with its tilted floor, the Brixton Academy is sold out for three nights of this explosive delirium and, in an era of snowballing institutional decay and social entropy, the punk spirit of The Prodigy could be the zeitgeist once more and ensures the event is more than an outmoded and corroded panto. "I've got the poison, the remedy, the rhythmical remedy" screams Maxim. Music indeed for a jilted generation.
Words: Adrian Cross
Photos: Richard Gray
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Bo Ningen, Scala, 10.10.2013
In an era where nothing is left to chance and bands insist on being note perfect some vitality is sometimes lost. But Scala retains the unpredictability essential to tub thumping rock n roll. People crowd and drape themselves over the balcony the gangways as if it’s an illegal fighting den. It’s no surprise that the three acts tonight were so raw and expressive.
First up were N’Shukurawa Boys (not strictly true, one of the trio is a girl) , who, refreshingly ,just seemed to want to have a lot of fun and in the main the audience went wuth them, although an attempt to bring the crowd into a sing along fell flat on its face as there was an unwillingness to learn Japanese. The three band members rotated instruments, lead and rhythm guitar and drums, and took turns on climbs to the top of the speaker stacks. It wasn’t really parodic. They just seemed to enjoy the idea of being crazy rock n roll stars. In fact “I am rock n roll!” roared one band member with his blacked out panda eyes after body surfing across the audience. “We are no professional, no need professional!” The amateurishness couldn’t disguise the fact that this was often thrilling psych punk. One song in particular had a terrific driving riff.
Next along were Telegram whose psychedelic new wave is rich in promise. Although setting a more serious, sombre tone in skinny black jeans and pointed Chelsea boots, they weren’t without a bit of fancy dress themselves with androgynous lead guitarist donning a false moustache. Debut single single ‘Follow,’ due for release in early November ,was a highlight. Lots of energy, bouncing on their toes with vocals soaring over excellent punchy riffs, they could be going places.
And so we waited for Bo Ningen, much heralded as the most exciting act on the live circuit. Well they certainly get you moving, in my case, to the back of the auditiorium, within ten minutes. Their appearance is indeed striking. Black hair down to the waist and two of them in dresses and plenty of throwing themselves around in wild banshee abandon under a siren of strobe lighting, and this kind of ear-splitting in-your-face more-fool-you if you want a melody, can be a quasi religious experience and it does generate a decent mosh pit, but here it quickly turned into unending dirge and iIsoon detached myself from the devoted ritual of the pit as I had become bored.
At the end the boys seemed to want to smash their instruments, but perhaps they can’t afford to just yet.
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Anna Calvi, Islington Assembly Halls, 08.10.2013
Anna Calvi is back and still the troubadour, in a white blouse and high waisted black trousers, but she’s more spectral this time. In her delicate moments, it’s as if she’s a ghost presence gently billowing the curtains with just a whisper.
It’s been a two year wait. Nevertheless she’s in celebratory mood this evening, following the release of second album One Breath the previous day. The songs are a response to family bereavement and largely continue the successful formula of the first record Anna Calvi, but with more classical orchestration. The stage band has expanded to include keyboards and Mally Harpaz’s skilful harmonium playing is now also brought to the xylophone.
The Assembly Halls, emerging from its own re-vamp, is St. Petersburg palacial. Its excellent acoustics serve Calvi’s dynamics admirably. It could soon cement its place as one of the capital’s best venues.
The set opens with Suzanne and I, a song driven by Daniel Merriwood’s tolling drums, that gives full expression to Anna’s operatic power. She moves seamlessly on to latest single, Eliza, another of percussive charge and belting vocal, during which, her mouth seems to loom wide open like a shark. A further track from One Breath, Suddenly, deals in the trademark storm and lull of her writing, its clashing chords midway, reminiscent of The Doors’ The End.
Next up is Sing To Me which has the glorious, nostalgic sweep of a celluloid Western soundtrack. Each of these offerings is punctuated by a humble, hushed ‘thank you’, giving credence to the popular conception of Anna Calvi as a being of contrasts. Piece By Piece, a multi-layered late Siouxie and The Banshees-esque number is the high point of the new repertoire, creating a wonderful sense of space between its separate musical elements.
Anna Calvi cites Jimi Hendrix as an influence however her performances are too measured and stylised to merit close comparison with the latter’s incendiary chaos. Still, she is more satisfyingly raw live than the somewhat over-contrived production on her recordings.
I’ll Be Your Man as ever stands out. The Devil swells and dissipates and is the most faithful to her Andalucian visual aesthetics, infused with thematic echoes of composer Manuel de Falla. Blackout and Desire are perennial crowd favourites. Yet however she makes the long neck telecaster slide, reverberate or sing her audience is strangely mute and never seems to lose itself in the velvet texture and jagged violence of her music.
The set culminates in the talismanic Love Won’t Be Leaving, a song that suffers death by arrangement in the studio, but here is stripped of adornment and features Anna’s signature throwing back of the head during the tortured crescendo of its guitar break, her face in a kind of art house mortal-carnal ecstasy.
The brooding ballad Bleed Into me is the band’s first encore. Anna is, unsurprisingly, popular in France and departs with her thundering rendition of Edith Piaf’s Jezebel to warm acclaim.
She describes her songs as narratives which the shifts in mood and dynamics are meant to reflect. They follow a similar pattern that can make the playlist feel like a one trick pony. However these remain early days and, with such an eclectic sensibility and natural talent, there could be fascinating experiments to come. Anna Calvi, as ever, is nothing short of mesmerising and the devil, albeit caged, is most definitely in the room.
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The Staves
Scala, 26.04.2013
There’s an urban myth in popular music that a natural harmony exists between sibling voices, essentially that family groups, perhaps simply because they’ve grown up singing together, sound better. Whether or not it’s true the Staveley-Taylor sisters, Emily, Jessica and Camilla, aka The Staves, possess it in abundance.
The Watford trio have been orbiting the scene for a while now, including live appearances alongside Bon Iver down the way at Wembley. These days the sororal trio are headlining in their own right and this week they brought their pared down, uplifting, acoustic arrangements to two sell-out dates at Scala.
A single naked bulb hangs over each sister and the lights go on and off in synchronicity with their alternating harmonies, reminiscent of the sequences of light and sound in Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’.
In fact the audience stands mute for much of the set, faces bathed in purple stage light, as if waiting for first contact with another life form. The Staves’ caressive melodies, rooted in both the British and American traditions, induce an awed, spectral hush.
The band has recently returned from California, with vivid memories of the elephant seals lining its coastline. Crowd favourites like ‘Mexico’, in which the sisters admit they like “to see the colours of another sky”, spark a brief ripple of shouts, however even shuffling percussion and outright stomps, such as in the haunting ‘Winter Trees’, only fleetingly rouse their devoted following.
In many ways The Staves are more suited to lunchtime recital at the Southbank Centre than the box-like Scala and its anarchic, punk traditions. There isn’t a false note in a venue where, over the years, there must have been countless.
New single ‘Facing West’ gets an outing as does other material from 2012’s album ‘Dead & Born & Grown’, including the excellent ‘In The Long Run', a tune about being on the road, and the Nick Drake influenced ‘Eagle Song’. ‘Gone Tomorrow’ begins the set with its opening line “Holy Moses”, and, indeed, The Staves are a revelation.
Look out too for another trio, the emerging talent that is Sivu, who provides accomplished support here. He continues the current vogue for EPs, opening with latest release ‘Bodies’. Backed by violin and cello his melancholic, but optimistic songs, move like the ice floes on a thawing Alaskan river.
They may be restrained, but both The Staves and Sivu are worth staveing the door to get into.
Words by Adrian Cross
Photos by Richard Gray
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Elbow
iTunes Festival, Roundhouse 11.09.2012
“Throw the curtains open wide. One day like this a year’d see me right.” These days an Elbow gig is a group therapy session, thrumming with warmth and positivity, as though the band remain eternally grateful for their lofty status after so many years of fruitless struggle for recognition. And while it’s true their recent output tends more towards the anthemic than even their early offerings, who can resist the charms of Guy Garvey, the embodiment of witty, soulful, Northern intelligentsia with the common touch. The bear hug is all embracing. “Good evening Camden, and to all those watching at home in their underwear.”
Of course there’s more chat than a local radio DJ, and the band’s frontman knows how to work his audience, which is a good thing, as this multitude is not his hardcore fan base, having assembled through the iTunes ticket lottery. Once or twice frustration crosses his face at the crowd’s less than intimate knowledge of the group’s work.
Unsurprisingly the set leans heavily on the Mercury Prize winning ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’, but departures from this also reverberate along the Roundhouse’s timbers. Following ‘Mirrorball’ the crowd is led through a mass breathing exercise, and the final communal sigh Garvey elicits is, well, breath taking, before the group flings itself into the pulsing maelstrom of ‘Leaders of the Free World’. A mid-set lacuna sees the group gather round the keyboard for ‘The Night Will Always Win’ followed by Craig Potter on piano for ‘Puncture Repair’; two deeply personal songs that seem to visibly move Garvey on stage. The themes of friendship and bruised adolescence are clearly close to his heart.
Elbow find the universal in the commonplace and this genuine feeling for humanity isn’t lost, in an arena in which you can swing a train, the venue’s original use. “While the Sex Pistols played downstairs,” quips Garvey. And so you see him either clutching the microphone to his lips, as if he’s blowing on some tinder in his hands, or spreading his arms open wide as the figurehead of a ship ready to carve through the audience. There’s an appreciation of simple good fortune in Elbow’s lyrical, gently haunted songs and knowing when your luck’s in. And if it does feel like a church in there by the end, rather than Mad Max’s Thunderdome, that’s a pretty good sermon about life to take home.
Despite being the cousin of former world squash champion Jahangir, Natasha Khan, alias Bat for Lashes, says she’s out of breath half way through her short, but immaculate set. New songs, including current single ‘Laura’, blend seamlessly with the old, such as ‘Sleep Alone’. This bodes well for the new album release in October, ‘The Haunted Man’. Physically a diminutive version of comedienne Josie Lawrence she puts everything into her performance, a rich, soaring voice delivering powerful, folktronica melodies. There’s a touch of Annie Lennox and Siouxsie Sioux in them and the overall effect is not diminished by some of the instrumentation having been pre-recorded.
Words by Adrian Cross
Photo by Richard Gray
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U-Roy, Yellowman, Winston Reedy and Dennis Alcapone; O2 Indigo Arena, 28.07.12
There are no surprises at the Indigo’s latest instalment of the Jamaican fiftieth anniversary celebrations, as more of Jamaica’s reggae’s aristocracy skank into “London Town”. There’s much talk of “back in the day” and predictable dialogue about racism and freedom. Dennis Alcapone might say he’s “shocking and electric”, but in truth he looks more like an Iranian Barry White. And of course it doesn’t matter how much he toasts he’s Alcapone not Scarface, Al Pacino’s chainsaw wielding mobsters belong to yesteryear.
Nevertheless reggae is musically fascinating and its bass led rhythms irresistible, from Bob Marley’s early dark notes of struggle to the dub experiments of Augustus Pablo. And in the same way that a certain ceremony the previous day, whose name dare not be spoken for fear of the marketing stasi, was a cliched exercise, Jamaica 50 is inevitably too. In its defence the music of the assembled preserves the genre’s essential earthiness. Mixes, or in dub parlance, versions, abound, from Yellowman’s takes on fifties classics like ‘BLUEBERRY HILL’ and Elvis’ ‘IN THE GHETTO’ to country standards such as John Denver’s ‘COUNTRY ROADS’ and even ‘I’M GETTING MARRIED IN THE MORNING’. While the toasters come and go though, the backing band is relatively unchanged throughout.
“Jamaica team come with we. We are them security,” says Yellowman, dressed in combats and doing his utmost to emulate the gymnastics at the five rings event taking place across the consumption strip in, what is for the next three weeks, the North Greenwich Arena. Skanking across the stage like he’s on strings there’s been no relaxing in his energy over the years. All this despite having a cancerous tumor excavated from his jaw in the mid ‘90s, which permanently disfigured one side of his face. So called because of his albinism, in 1981 Yellowman was the first of the reggae dancehall artists to be signed by a US label, spending a large part of the eighties boasting of his sexual prowess until, belatedly, developing more socially conscious preoccupations in the nineties. Both are in evidence in his set here. As he removes his shirt to show off the washboard stomach that shows no sign of subsiding, simulates sex and performs press ups he also pokes mischief at the police.
In contrast, U-Roy has the gentle, wise and enlightened air of the ancient Kung Fu master. Although he’s the godfather of toasting, the chat over an instrumental riddim to which hip-hop owes a huge debt, his blend of mellifluous tunes, like the archetypal ‘SOUL REBEL’, form the evening’s only straight songs.
Sadly The Indigo is only half full as reggae no longer commands a young, black coterie. Nevertheless it remains a far and welcome cry from the soulless, corporate surroundings of the former Dome and is a reminder of the true values of popular music. A gig that, if not metaphorically offbeat, never feels downbeat.
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