East End Review

Tag: live reviews

  • Review: The Fish Police, Café Oto

    Review: The Fish Police, Café Oto

    Dean Rodney, the charismatic singer of The Fish Police. Photograph: The Fish Police
    Dean Rodney, the charismatic singer of The Fish Police. Photograph: The Fish Police

    ‘It’s gonna be a big one,” warns Dean Rodney, lead singer of the Fish Police – and although size is always relative, he isn’t wrong.

    Within minutes of taking my seat at Café Oto, the five-piece launches into a song that has the venue on its feet. ‘Coco Butter’ nods to the quirky alternative hip-hop of De La Soul with its blaring 80s funk keyboards, but as a paean to the pale-yellow, edible vegetable fat extracted from the cocoa bean, this is music that inhabits its own unique world.

    “Just a little cream, raise your hands up to the skies, it will moisturise,” Rodney implores. Won over, the crowd obeys. Before I know it the chairs are folded away – I’m in danger of becoming an island in a sea of revellers.

    There’s no raised stage so audience and band blur into one as the dirty fuzz bass and spoken-word intro to ‘Black Scissors’ kicks in, calling to mind the silliest (and most fun) excesses of George Clinton.

    The Fish Police play catchy and uplifting pop songs informed by singer Dean Rodney and guitarist Matt Howe’s autism. The band is part of a nascent music scene, where learning-disabled acts share bills and audiences with those unaffected, that includes Ravioli Me Away, a post-pop-punk trio with a penchant for costume who are the evening’s excellent support act.

    Listening to the Fish Police takes you away from the drudgery of the real world into a joyful realm inhabited by cartoons.

    Through the course of the night we hear about a Japanese girl who is “always reading and falling asleep in the classroom” and Monica 300, whose defining feature is her blue hair.

    Watching the band is pure escapism from everyday drudgery, with Rodney’s deadpan delivery balanced by soulful backing vocals and some very capable musicianship from bassist Charles Stuart and drummer Andrew McClean (both of whom have played in Grace Jones’s backing band, no less).

    The biggest crowd pleaser of the night is ‘Chicken Nuggets for Me’, in which Rodney whips the crowd into a frenzy promising “I’m gonna tell you how I like my chicken” before doing just that in the chorus (no spoilers).

    Jumping up and down about chicken nuggets is an oddly liberating experience, and one that – like the rest of this band’s extraordinary output – comes highly recommended.

    The Fish Police played at Café Oto
    on 15 March
    thefishpolice.com

  • Florence and the Machine live review – ‘exuberance and theatricality’

    Florence and the Machine live review – ‘exuberance and theatricality’

    Florence and the Machine live in Hackney. Photograph: Dan Dennison
    Florence and the Machine live in Hackney. Photograph: Dan Dennison

    It’s been a long time since Florence Welch played a venue this small, the singer being more at home in leviathan arenas and on festival main stages than the relative compactness of St John at Hackney. The show comes as part of War Child UK’s Passport to the Brits, a series of concerts that has brought big names to small settings. Tickets were made available via donation and subsequent prize draw. A stirring introduction from War Child CEO Rob Williams expounds upon just what these donations can do for the most vulnerable victims of conflict.

    Given the exuberance and theatricality that have become the calling cards of Florence and The Machine live shows, it is difficult to imagine how the band would approach playing in a fairly Spartan interior. However, The Machine has all but powered-down in favour of an acoustic line-up of piano, harp, trumpet and minimal percussion. Yet Welch’s vocals on the opening few numbers (‘Cosmic Love’, ‘St Jude’ and ‘Drumming Song’, all played sans drums) already threaten to rattle the stained-glass windowpanes. Following a galloping performance of ‘Queen of Peace’, Welch confesses she’s more nervous of small shows because she “used to be a lot drunker” when she originally played them. A voice in the crowd immediately offers to get her a shot.

    A winsome cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Silver Springs’ comes as a delightful surprise, and one that superfan Welch seems to be enjoying even more than the crowd. Equally surprising is a rendition of Calvin Harris collaboration ‘Sweet Nothing’, pushed a world away from the kitschy pop-house of the original and made into some real Nicks-worthy balladry.

    Welch opts to go out on a high, with ‘Shake It Out’ and ‘Dog Days Are Over’ rousing the rabble into a swarming mass of rapturous singalongs and rhythmic clapping. It is one thing for a musician to sell-out a 20,000-capacity arena, but quite another to make the jump back to snugger surroundings without sacrificing the galvanising energy of the large-scale extravaganza.  Even the most recalcitrant detractors of Welch’s music would find it a challenge to call this performance anything but impressive.

    Florence and the Machine played at St John at Hackney Church on 26 February.

  • Julia Holter, Oval Space, live review: ‘not pigeon-holed by expectations’

    Julia Holter
    Playing straight: Julia Holter. Photograph credit: Flickr

    Julia Holter’s bracing and intelligent compositions have met with great critical acclaim ever since her debut Tragedy in 2011. However, she turned out to be one the big flavours of 2015 following her fourth studio release Have You In My Wilderness, which deviated from her more avant-garde earlier albums with its mix of vaudevillian pop and literary ballads.

    Holter’s vocals are every bit as striking in the flesh as they are on record, effortlessly clear and cool as she enunciates the first few words of set opener ‘City Appearing’.

    There’s always been a sense of perfectionism in Holter’s music that presents each track as a finished whole. This translates to the live show as she plays each song exceptionally straight, swerving away from too much embellishment as she trips through ‘Silhouette’ and ‘Horns Surrounding Me’.

    Surprisingly, ‘Feel You’, one of the stand-out pop tracks from Wilderness, is played in muted tones, flattened down and shuffled in between ‘Lucette’ and ‘Into The Green Wild’. But if Wilderness taught us anything it was that Holter is not one to let herself be pigeon-holed by expectations.

    Between songs the LA-native offers up a bit of context, expanding on the ideas that shaped the tracks or the time and place of their inception. ‘Silhouette’, we learn, was the last track she wrote for Wilderness, ‘Goddess Eyes’ was written when she was “a teenager, basically”.

    “This song is about Betsy above the building,” she says, eliciting hearty chuckles from the audience until they are all struck dumb by the frosty opening bars of ‘Betsy On The Roof’.

    However, in her introduction to ‘Lucette Stranded On The Island’, a track built around an unfortunate minor character in a short story by Colette, Holter informs the crowd she’s growing tired of talking about this particular song. “Maybe it’s just about going to the store,” she deadpans in her California drawl. “Maybe it’s a metaphor.”

    Pre-encore closer ‘Vasquez’ is the evening’s certified show-stealer. “This one’s about Tiburcia Vasquez who was on the loose back in the 19th century,” offers Holter as a primer. “I was there. I saw it happen with my own eyes.”

    The jostling percussion and slow-burning vocal lines, imbued with the electrified energy of live performance, dazzle their way into a dramatic clamour of scrambled jazz.

    Finishing with a two-song encore of the Dionne Warwick/Burt Bacharach hit, ‘Don’t Make Me Over’, and the harpsichord-heavy ‘Sea Calls Me Home’, it’s an apt conclusion to what has been a relaxed and rewarding display of Holter’s motley talents.

    Julia Holter played at Oval Space on 15 February 2016.