Archive for “Gigs”

this made me LOL

Yo.. I just got back from the Big Chill festival, lots of fun.

Played on the Saturday night as part of the Mighty Boosh curates. It was totally insane, the tent was so rammed, people were trying to climb under the tent’s walls..

Here’s a video, not best quality !

Womad was one of the best festivals I’ve been to. Did a guest spot with Nathan Flutebox Lee on the Friday night and another with Martha Wainwright on the Saturday.

Saw some amazing music too, highlights being Monobloco’s samba school version of Superstition, and the amazing modern Taiko act GoCoo.

Weirdest moment was being asked by Peter Gabriel for a business card, realising I didn’t have one and making him wait while I ran to the dressing room. How embarrassing.

Here’s a couple of videos of me performing during Nathan’s gig:

I love summer. I love festivals. This weekend was Latitude in Suffolk.

I was there to do a guest spot with MW on the Friday

Backstage at Martha’s gig bumped into Fyfe from the Guillemots, we talked about collaborating.

The awesome Sigur Ros headlined.

No trip to the Suffolk coast would be complete without a visit to the beach on the way home.

Next week is Womad, then Big Chill and Bestival. This country has so many festivals I am up for them ALL.

Last night I was at London Liming at the London Literature Festival.

It’s a spoken word event which mixes up music, film and carnival vibes. It was the first time I have played to the ‘words’ crowd but i really enjoyed it.

The magnificent Ursula Rucker headlined, but highlight for me was Stacy Makishi. Her piece was moving and had the whole room in stitches.

It’s 3pm. The show starts at 6. Emily Eavis has given us free reign of the Park Stage for two hours.

I’ve got the Vocal Orchestra and a heap of guest collaborators and I need to rehearse. We find a bar backstage with a decent soundsystem and get to it. Before I know it we are ready to go on, Park Stage is totally rammed!

The sun has come out and the people are smiling. Pavan from Foreign Beggars is helping me host the stage. I hear him saying my name followed by a cheer and next thing I know I am beatboxing to about 10,000 Glastonbury punters.

I kick it off with a short solo set to introduce the crowd to what I do. As I power up my looping setup, there is a loud popping noise followed by silence. I’m told that I have blown the generator for the entire Park Area. Oops. Now I am freaking out – so much work has gone into this show. This can’t be the end of it! The audience aren’t having any of it… they remain enthusiastic, singing and cheering until the power eventually comes back on. Phew!

No time to lose now, I skip straight to my drum n bass looping song to get everyone moving again, and then bring out the Vocal Orchestra. They are on fire today.

The Vocal Orchestra

What follows is a unique mish-mash of guest stars performing spontaneously. The music ranges from folk to jazz to hip hop to tabla to scratch battles to raucous sing-a-longs. If you would like to hear some of the music you will have to wait for the podcast – we did an audio diary of the whole weekend which will be out soon. There are some pics below, mostly taken by RJ Fernandez, more to come.

Martha Wainwright sang a version of ‘In the Middle of the Night’ with me on beats

Martina Topley-Bird sang ‘Police and Thieves’ by Junior Mervin with the Vocal Orchestra as backing band

DJ Yoda survived a scratch battle with Bellatrix!

Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly performed ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials with the Vocal Orchestra

Ed Harcourt presented me with a fake diamond encrusted golden microphone onstage… I think he wanted me to look as bling as Jay-Z! Then he sang ‘50 ways to leave your lover’

Me, Ed Harcourt, Pavan and Reverend from the Makers (these pics courtesy of BBC)

The other guests were Portico Quartet, Pete Lockett and Lemn Sissay.

It was a moving experience, I came off stage exhausted but happy – I felt like all the collaborations and musical experiences from the past year as resident at Southbank have armed me with all the tools I needed to rock a two hour improvised show. It was probably the best show I’ve ever done, certainly the most fun show I have been a part of. I can’t wait to do it again. Watch this space!

Saturday was an amazing concert, and one of the proudest moments of my career. It was great to perform again with my Vocal Orchestra, but the highlight for me was our ‘Beatbox Chorus’ – 25 kids from a range of backgrounds in South London. Jes and Zani, two beatboxers from my choir, have been working with these young people since the beginning of the year, firstly at the Beatbox Academy that we set up at BAC, and then at Southbank for the weeks before the show.

It was incredible to see these youngsters get up and beatbox in front of a sold-out QEH (about 1,000 people). Some of them had no musical experience whatsoever, and performing on a stage of that scale was a first for all of them. Someone said to me after the show that they loved the performance, but that maybe we should have got some kids who couldn’t already beatbox. I was exasperated: the kids had learnt their skills from scratch, in an amazingly short time. Maybe people didn’t understand how much work had gone into the project, and that drive came mostly from the kids themselves.

The “Beatbox Chorus” looking as mean they can!

What a night!

I played with my own jazz quintet, featuring my dad Jeremy on guitar, and trombone legend Annie Whitehead.

I also did a special duet with poet Lemn Sissay which made my spine tingle.

Polar Bear played a storming solo set which redefined experimental jazz to me.

Then I joined Polar Bear in the second half for what was my single most incredible experience with free improvisation.

I ‘battled’ their drummer and leader Seb Rochford, had my voice mangled and magnified by Leafcutter John’s electronics, and we created some incredible music!

Check out the MP3 of the first piece we did. I’ve called it ‘Stephats’.

Then as the finale both bands came back onstage for a massive jam! Too awesome for words. The Guardian gave us a 4-star review.

This was the third concert in the series and by now the momentum of the idea has really picked up some pace. Tickets for the show sold out almost straight after the concert with Martha and Teddy before we had really done any promotion, which is awesome as it means that people heard about it through word-of-mouth and buzz!

This was another show put together against the clock - I only first met with DJ Yoda to chat through ideas about 2 weeks beforehand, and tickets were already sold out. Yoda was a bit worried at first because he was then away on tour until a few days before the concert, but after a bit of jamming we were coming up with shedloads of ideas.

The concept of DJ Yoda’s performance is all about scratching video using special DVD turntables. It’s amazing to watch and the extra visual element to scratching really adds to the experience and the understanding of how skilled a scratch DJ really is.

It also meant that we had to do some fairly meticulous preparation as everything has to be burned on to custom DVDs beforehand. We spent a day shooting some clips around the Southbank, and then spent 3 days locked in the lab polishing up the show.

We came up with a technique which means we can do a ‘live remix’ of almost any tune. Yoda has a hundreds of acappella versions of well known tunes… once he had synched that up with the original video (courtesy of YouTube!) he could then scratch up the original vocals over my remix beatbox version.

Hence the ‘collaboration’ with Michael Jackson, aged 7, on a crazy live remix version of ‘Want You Back’, featuring myself looping up the instrument tracks, singing the backing vocals, and all five of the Jacksons dancing on a giant screen behind me!

At this point the already wild Friday night crowd at the QEH nearly lost control! They were all up off their seats, dancing in the aisles and down at the front! The party continued with Yoda and friends DJing out in the Foyer until the early hours, and I was chuffed to meet a some audience members who had travelled all the way from places like Newcastle, Nottingham and Bristol to see the show, several who had been at all three of the concerts so far, and loads who already had tickets for all the upcoming ones.

In the second of the MTUM concerts I invited Martha Wainwright and Teddy Thompson to collaborate with me. I first met Teddy a couple of years ago when we were on Jools Holland’s show together, and we’d talked about getting something together ever since. I met Martha backstage at Glastonbury and we got on really well, so I thought it would be amazing to mix their delicate, singer-songwriter folksy guitar music with my beatboxing.

The first half was a real treat… Teddy went on first to a packed QEH crowd, they seemed to be a mixed bunch, kind of spread out between the three artists. I was amazed by Teddy’s country style singing… he sounded the real deal! I went on after him and was so concious about the massive change in volume so I started off by going easy on the crowd, with some quiet kicks and snares, before dropping in some looping. Martha was on next and her solo slot was spine-tingling.

For the second half we started with a series of duos. First of all me and Teddy did a rendition of one of Teddy’s tracks, followed by our interpretation of ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’. Here’s an MP3 of the first track: cantsingstraight.mp3.

Then Martha joined Teddy to sing a duet of an Everly brothers song, followed by another duet from myself and Martha.

The finale of the show was when all three of us performed together, and Martha made me do something I have never done before - playing guitar and singing a folk song! We sang Bob Dylan’s ‘Dont think twice, it’s alright’. I was so nervous to sing but the whole crowd were so supportive and I enjoyed it so much, I’m planning to bring more singing / guitar into my shows.

Here’s the MP3 of us singing together: martha-teddy-shlomo.mp3.

The show got a great response, including a 4-star review in The Independent, describing it as “A performance of jaw dropping artistry…the experimentation is playful, the message is simple: in the music playground, carefree creativity beats crass commercialism hands down.”

Top right is the short film that Sarah from SeaBuzzard prepared, it was screened at the beginning of the show. If you want to see the full performance, you’ll have to wait for the MTUM Box Set DVD release!!!