East End Review

Tag: Geoffrey Chang

  • Bloc Party review, Village Underground: ‘time is the only silent alarm’

    Bloc Party
    New line-up: Bloc Party

    Bloc Party, a name that triggers elated nostalgia for those who embraced seminal album Silent Alarm as teens, has undergone major surgery. But is it a convincing facelift of no regrets, or a botched nip and tuck job? Imagine a BLT without the bacon. Then remove one of the slices of bread. Considering exactly half the original band members are missing, this sick sandwich sacrilege goes some way to painting the current situation – kind of.

    No discredit to the new fillings, not mere fillers. Bassist Justin Harris’ adaptability was quickly on show as he picked up a baritone saxophone to support Kele’s vocals in the loop-laden ‘Mercury’. The You Tube-scouted Louise Bartle probably has the toughest job of all, however, tasked with filling the shoes of Matt Tong, one of indie’s standout drummers since the millennium.

    But with new band members comes new material, and the intimate Village Underground provided an opportunity to road test new album Hymns. An online stream went live only hours before the gig, hardly giving fans time to acquaint themselves, and like most of their previous follow-up albums Hymns will take some bedding in, based on the lukewarm reception here.

    Opener ‘The Good News’ set a sauntering pace for the night’s live premieres, which on the whole displayed less ecstatic emotion, and more mature introspection (aren’t we too old for moshing now?). The chirpy guitars of ‘Into The Earth’ sounded like something you’d play on an American road trip (a diversion from the familiar), while ‘Only He Can Heal Me’ leaves the biggest impression with its holy incantations. Otherwise the songwriting is a bit predictable.

    Whatever happens to the shelf-life of Hymns though, Kele may be confident that they can rely on older songs to spark a crowd, as proven by mosh pits breaking out right on cue for the likes of ‘Banquet’, ‘Song for Clay (Disappear Here)’ and ‘She’s Hearing Voices’ – tracks founded around Tong’s consummate drumming skills.

    Then there was the encore, which nearly didn’t happen. It was as if the crowd just accepted the gig was over, temporarily forgetting their customary role of baying for ‘one more tune’. After ghosting back on, the band slipped into the intimacy of ‘Fortress’, a strangely down-tempo start to the encore when the whole room was craving a fiercer finale.

    “East London, do you like bangers?” Kele finally asked, before fixing the mood with the swaggering ‘Ratchet’ and closing on crowd-pleaser, ‘This Modern Love’. This is no longer the same Bloc Party that rips into the spurring ‘Helicopter’ as they please, a noticeable absentee.

    Seventeen years have passed since the band first formed, 11 since their first album – time it seems is the only silent alarm. And while Bloc Party are still fun to watch, the new LP fails to deliver anything really special to their live show that the old guard didn’t already possess. Anyway, who said we’re too old to mosh?

    Bloc Party played at Village Underground on 26 January.

  • ‘Breaking’ the January mould: Hackney Wick warehouse to hold dance jam party

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    Are music and breakdancing enough to sweep away the January blues?  All photographs: JAMuary

    Perhaps January has the hardest job of all, forever playing backing dancer to the all-star bingeing of December and New Year. The fridge is bare, payday couldn’t come sooner and the most depressing day of the year is forecast.

    But that doom and gloom looks set to break down with the third edition of JAMuary – a global, grass roots dance jam that promises world-class breaking, taking place on Saturday 30 January across two rooms in an East London warehouse.

    Special guest ‘breakers’ and dancers hailing from New York, Paris, Oslo, Stockholm and Marseille to name but a few, will converge upon Stour Space in Hackney Wick.

    Accompanied by a line-up of wax DJs, the international invitees will share the dancefloor with a UK cohort from all over the country to create the unique community atmosphere that defines these back-to-basics parties.

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    JAMuary is the annual dance beginning-of-the-year blowout organised by a collective of London-based breakdancers, artists, DJs and musicians called Hashtag Unity, who throw free parties and regular open events across the capital to promote ‘unity in the community’ – look out for their monthly parties at Bohemia Café in Hackney Central. And it’s their passion for the collective dance that is helping keep B-boy culture alive in London.

    Music duties will be led by Hector Plimmer who has had releases on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings as well as an appearance from Ninja Tune affiliate Dolenz. Live band Smith and the Honey Badgers are also set to soundtrack some of the night with their infectious analogue funk, while Colectivo Futuro have just announced a special DJ set celebrating female artists.

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    It’s rare not to have a stage at live dance and music performances, but that’s exactly what it’s like at JAMuary, where the warm vibe is all about inclusivity; no barriers, no spotlights, just an open floor where everyone is welcome – boys and girls – to join in and be part of the community.

    Get tickets for JAMuary here. (http://www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?774279)

    Facebook event. (https://www.facebook.com/events/1722816361285993/)

    Hashtag Unity (https://www.facebook.com/hashtagunity/) throw free monthly parties at Bohemia Café in Hackney Central.

  • Black Theatre Live to shake up Macbeth

    Robert Mountford as Macbeth. Photograph: Talula Sheppard
    Robert Mountford as Macbeth. Photograph: Talula Sheppard

    Any rendition of a classic as widely known and cherished as Macbeth is not easy to pull off without becoming just more throwaway theatre fodder. Harder still is to reimagine said play across modern-day cultures and current cultural politics. Yet, Black Theatre Live – a pioneering consortium of eight regional theatres committed to increasing the amount of black, Asian and minority ethnic theatre – is trying to do just that.

    Led by Tara Arts, a theatre company with over 35 years of experience, this new production is the artistic creation of director Jatinda Verma, who is confident there are fewer cultural barriers than it might seem at first glance.

    “Shakespeare creates two worlds in Macbeth, the normal world of the living, and that of the witches. Asians share the same dichotomy of worlds split between England and back home,” Verma tells me over the phone.

    “I have seen this play through Asian eyes. Of course I am wary of the Christian sensibility, but certainly all faiths have a sense of good and evil. And that’s what this play is working on, when goodness turns to evil.”

    Verma first set up Tara with a group of friends in 1977 after the racist murder of a boy in Southall. “We were concerned about why those kinds of racist attacks were happening and also what our own lives were now becoming in Britain. We wanted to not only critique what was happening outside of our lives, but also the discrimination within.” This two-fold purpose exists today and Verma suggests it’s more relevant now than ever.

    “One of the inevitable things of migrants is they go in search of who they are and try to make sense of the world they’re in as well as the world they’ve come from, and that carries with it a natural tendency to examine their roots – a purity of culture. It relates to fundamentalism where an attempt to purify culture tips over the edge and turns completely fascist,” warns Verma. This same evil overcomes Macbeth during his bloody path to the throne as a result of his search for purity, prophesied by the witches.

    Finding cultural equivalents for characters wasn’t the hard part according to Verma. The witches are interpreted as Hijras, marginalised communities in India that identify themselves as transgender or ‘third gender’. “Like the witches, they carry a whole world which is their own. They have a past that dates back to antiquity, and still exist today, so they don’t stick to a particular time – they’re timeless.”

    The biggest challenge was to honour the text and appreciate its musicality admits the director. Yet Verma’s underlying passion for diversity in theatre and creating new opportunities to appreciate these works is clear: “Asian artists shouldn’t feel like they can’t enter into the great arts of the world. All the works belong to our shared heritage. Our duty, then, is to pay respect to whatever classic and bring something of ourselves to it – not to demean, but enhance it.”

    Macbeth is at Stratford Circus, Theatre Square, E15 1BX from 26–28 March
    stratford-circus.com