Hot gig action, yo

Yeah, I was going to tell you about that Killing Joke gig I went to, wasn't I.

Well, Killing Joke did a gig in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago. And I went. It was good.

Hmm, I s'pose I should expand on that a little otherwise this will be a real crappy excuse for a blog post.

OK, so, this is the first time that all four original members - Jaz Coleman, Geordie, Youth and Paul Ferguson - have toured together for 26 years. Jaz Coleman, the band's shy and retiring frontman, comes marching out on stage adorned in boiler suit, lank black hair, hastily-applied face paint and bulging crazy eyes. He looked, quite frankly, fucking nuts, as if he could leap into the audience at any moment and start killing people. This is, of course, exactly why we love him.

His murderous aspect is juxtaposed somewhat by his heartfelt but often cheeky anti-establishment comments between songs, and he is quite touching when paying tribute to his reunited band mates and also former bassist, Paul Raven, who died last year of heart failure.*

Highlights? Wardance, Money Is Not Our God, Whiteout, and the double-whammy of Love Like Blood (dedicated to Raven) and Eighties (Jaz: "This next one's called Push Push Struggle...") were fantastic. It was also great to hear some older tracks like Follow The Leader and Madness get a rare live outing. Overall, there was an excellent balance of early Joke and later material.

One of the most interesting aspects of the show, in fact, was the make-up of the crowd, an almost equal mix of older original fans and a younger post-Pandemonium crowd. Me? I guess I fall somewhere in between.

(Here's an easy way to distinguish an original Joker from a new fan: Ask them what their favourite track from Killing Joke's eponymously-titled album is. An old-school fan will assume you mean the Joke's 1977 debut whereas a young whipper-snapper fan will think you mean the band's 2003 album. The correct answer is, of course, "Which one?")

Here's a little taster of the Joke doin' it for real...

A week later, in stark contrast, I went to see Roots Manuva. Now, Roots Manuva is that rarest of beasts: a good British rapper. So many British hip hop artists adopt this faux-American style and get all bling an' gangsta' on our asses, yo. It's laughable, really.

Roots Manuva (a.k.a. Rodney Smith from Stockwell, London), on the other hand, suffers no such pretensions. His raps are unashamedly grounded in British culture, his lyrics intelligent, insightful, witty, self-deprecating, gritty and occasionally bleak. The production on his records is also quirky and inventive, no lazy beats and samples thrown together in five minutes. There are all manner of odd effects and vocal manipulations bouncing around the stereo spectrum.

I confess I don't listen to a great deal of rap but this man is a genius.

In person he is a warm and amusing presence engaging in random banter with his on-stage cohorts and the crowd. It's been a long time since I've seen a performer generate such goodwill and affection from their audience. And, aside from anything else, his music rocks and kicks and makes even a rhythmically challenged klutz like me shake his booty.

But, here, watch this and tell me it doesn't raise a smile even if you think you hate rap.

* Just noticed that tomorrow, 20th October, is the first anniversary of Paul's death. R.I.P. Raven, my man.