KSAP wrote this stunning review of Coldcut's gig at in Sussex in 2005
COLDCUT @ THE DE LA WARR PAVILION
February 24, 2006 KSAP
‘Why do you walk down the high street with a lobster at the end of a lead Mr Duchamp?’
‘Because it doesn’t bark…………..and it knows the secrets of the deep.’
The phrase, ‘it was really surreal’ is generally over used and rarely justified these days. You expect to see a sculptor of Duchamp’s magnitude walking down the high street with a lobster at the end of a lead instead of the usual ‘cat jumping in a funny way’ or ‘sink gurgling melodically’ when people tend to utter it.
However when you experience Mike – Welcome to the Afterfuture – Ladd being pushed around the stage of the De La Warr Pavilion in a wheelchair and rapping, ‘Keep rocking Bexhill tonight! Keep on rocking in Bexhill tonight’ to great comic effect, you can’t quite think of a phrase more apt. The biggest piss-take since Duchamp’s urinal in fact!
Homage to Nirvana at Reading? A sly yank wink at Lou and ‘Want that one homeboy’ Andy? An ironic nod to the residents of the Milligan coined phrase’ God’s Waiting Room’ or just a stage prop taken on a whim? Whatever, the sight of two grown men whizzing each other around in an NHS wheelchair whilst spitting rhymes is zaniness personified and goes a long way in deflating the usual po-faced Hip-Hop stage show.
Behind the b-boy prance at an elongated table stand four shadowy figures manipulating laptops, gadgets and gizmos; prodding, scratching and tweaking sounds and images into new unimaginable forms. Imagine if a Moldovan swagman and a Berlin pimpmaster joined Kraftwerk and you’re halfway there. Jonathan Moore and Matt Black, the Coldcut mixtape dons, have landed. Over the next couple of hours they take us on a rollicking good ride both musically and visually, through a loosely tied together package of post-apocalyptic images, landscapes, beats, videos and live performance. The oppressive images on the large screen embellishing the sounds with dramatic effect.
The lethargic clunk and slap of metallic beats opens the show with an onscreen cartoon rabbit being drawn in real time. Each mark and line scratched into life like a DJ scratches a record. In fact, this is DJ-ing using visuals. The badly-scrawn rabbit boy strums a line wire guitar and sings along with the song. Google Earth flickers onto the screen. You Are Here! We can almost see our own nostrils when suddenly we go up up up, rocketing away from earth and into space. We’re not in Kansas any more Toto.
Slabs and soggy chunks of sound are scratched and sliced through with the precision of a surgeon’s knife, Seventies pimps and melodic Amazonian Queens jostle for position next to Angus Young and the guitarist from The Muppets. Back in Black riffs and ‘The Dark White Noise villain’ from some imagined spy thriller fill the screen and speakers. Gay robots dance as the Ninja Tune logo Ninja is ‘mixed’ in. A sample from the Jungle book is mixed in. Slowly surely you realise not only the song is coming in but the whole film scene. Eventually the Ninjas make way for Balloo and Mowgli and their ‘Man Mancub dance’.
Still the madness continues. Flavour Flav’s Boooooyeeee! hollers in and out of the mix over a split screen battery of drums until the drum riffs become the Can Can! Suddenly the whole screen is an explosion of colour as thirty or so Can Can girls do leggy kicks in our direction. The drums are chopped in (sampled) over the top again.
Bliar the politician in a staccato manner informs us that ‘The lunatics have taken over the asylum’ whilst Bliar ‘the rocker’ strums ‘a strat’. The agit prop continues with Bush saying, ‘no-one is safe’ and Kenneth Clarke repeating the word, ‘ugly’. It’s compelling stuff but not in the clumsy ‘anarcho’ chop ups of Crass and Chumbawamba. It’s far more sophisticated.
Daleks and Charlton Heston continue in the hotchpotch of cultural ciphers, chopped up blended and scratched back into the mix. ‘No-one is safe’ says Heston as he cradles a gun. Bus Stop becomes Bus(h) Stop! And Hal from 2001 watches us all with a cold clinical eye. It’s like being attacked by a living breathing tabloid monster. Heston, Nixon, Thatcher, Clowns, the ceaseless barrage of images and music reaches a tumultuous climax then swoops back down to melodic electrobabbling. Timber! A Brazillian rainforest and a logger playing his chainsaw like a thrash metal axe. An ethereal woman’s face wearing a crown of feathers, floats out of the screen possibly singing of magic and loss as the savage riffing continues and trees are ‘butchered’.
The screens switch off
The music ceases
Robert Owens takes his position. A couple of new songs then, ‘People Hold On’. Grown men cry and start to come up again. The sediment of rave suppressed then released twenty years on. It’s House as we knew it. Hands are shaken. Hands are placed in the air. Feel the Rave.
Ross Allen sheepishly shuffles on. Dressed as a Balearic warlord – rainbow stripy top, long hair, baggy cargo pants and converse – he treats us to under an hour of dirty hard jump up ragga, bruk and dub. We dance like things possessed as though someone’s just nicked our wheel chair and we had no need for it all along.
‘Because it doesn’t bark…………..and it knows the secrets of the deep.’
The phrase, ‘it was really surreal’ is generally over used and rarely justified these days. You expect to see a sculptor of Duchamp’s magnitude walking down the high street with a lobster at the end of a lead instead of the usual ‘cat jumping in a funny way’ or ‘sink gurgling melodically’ when people tend to utter it.
However when you experience Mike – Welcome to the Afterfuture – Ladd being pushed around the stage of the De La Warr Pavilion in a wheelchair and rapping, ‘Keep rocking Bexhill tonight! Keep on rocking in Bexhill tonight’ to great comic effect, you can’t quite think of a phrase more apt. The biggest piss-take since Duchamp’s urinal in fact!
Homage to Nirvana at Reading? A sly yank wink at Lou and ‘Want that one homeboy’ Andy? An ironic nod to the residents of the Milligan coined phrase’ God’s Waiting Room’ or just a stage prop taken on a whim? Whatever, the sight of two grown men whizzing each other around in an NHS wheelchair whilst spitting rhymes is zaniness personified and goes a long way in deflating the usual po-faced Hip-Hop stage show.
Behind the b-boy prance at an elongated table stand four shadowy figures manipulating laptops, gadgets and gizmos; prodding, scratching and tweaking sounds and images into new unimaginable forms. Imagine if a Moldovan swagman and a Berlin pimpmaster joined Kraftwerk and you’re halfway there. Jonathan Moore and Matt Black, the Coldcut mixtape dons, have landed. Over the next couple of hours they take us on a rollicking good ride both musically and visually, through a loosely tied together package of post-apocalyptic images, landscapes, beats, videos and live performance. The oppressive images on the large screen embellishing the sounds with dramatic effect.
The lethargic clunk and slap of metallic beats opens the show with an onscreen cartoon rabbit being drawn in real time. Each mark and line scratched into life like a DJ scratches a record. In fact, this is DJ-ing using visuals. The badly-scrawn rabbit boy strums a line wire guitar and sings along with the song. Google Earth flickers onto the screen. You Are Here! We can almost see our own nostrils when suddenly we go up up up, rocketing away from earth and into space. We’re not in Kansas any more Toto.
Slabs and soggy chunks of sound are scratched and sliced through with the precision of a surgeon’s knife, Seventies pimps and melodic Amazonian Queens jostle for position next to Angus Young and the guitarist from The Muppets. Back in Black riffs and ‘The Dark White Noise villain’ from some imagined spy thriller fill the screen and speakers. Gay robots dance as the Ninja Tune logo Ninja is ‘mixed’ in. A sample from the Jungle book is mixed in. Slowly surely you realise not only the song is coming in but the whole film scene. Eventually the Ninjas make way for Balloo and Mowgli and their ‘Man Mancub dance’.
Still the madness continues. Flavour Flav’s Boooooyeeee! hollers in and out of the mix over a split screen battery of drums until the drum riffs become the Can Can! Suddenly the whole screen is an explosion of colour as thirty or so Can Can girls do leggy kicks in our direction. The drums are chopped in (sampled) over the top again.
Bliar the politician in a staccato manner informs us that ‘The lunatics have taken over the asylum’ whilst Bliar ‘the rocker’ strums ‘a strat’. The agit prop continues with Bush saying, ‘no-one is safe’ and Kenneth Clarke repeating the word, ‘ugly’. It’s compelling stuff but not in the clumsy ‘anarcho’ chop ups of Crass and Chumbawamba. It’s far more sophisticated.
Daleks and Charlton Heston continue in the hotchpotch of cultural ciphers, chopped up blended and scratched back into the mix. ‘No-one is safe’ says Heston as he cradles a gun. Bus Stop becomes Bus(h) Stop! And Hal from 2001 watches us all with a cold clinical eye. It’s like being attacked by a living breathing tabloid monster. Heston, Nixon, Thatcher, Clowns, the ceaseless barrage of images and music reaches a tumultuous climax then swoops back down to melodic electrobabbling. Timber! A Brazillian rainforest and a logger playing his chainsaw like a thrash metal axe. An ethereal woman’s face wearing a crown of feathers, floats out of the screen possibly singing of magic and loss as the savage riffing continues and trees are ‘butchered’.
The screens switch off
The music ceases
Robert Owens takes his position. A couple of new songs then, ‘People Hold On’. Grown men cry and start to come up again. The sediment of rave suppressed then released twenty years on. It’s House as we knew it. Hands are shaken. Hands are placed in the air. Feel the Rave.
Ross Allen sheepishly shuffles on. Dressed as a Balearic warlord – rainbow stripy top, long hair, baggy cargo pants and converse – he treats us to under an hour of dirty hard jump up ragga, bruk and dub. We dance like things possessed as though someone’s just nicked our wheel chair and we had no need for it all along.
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