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.
The PRS Foundation have just announced the shortlist for their ‘New Music Award’, and I’ve made the last six from over 130 hopefuls! The winner of this prestigious award will be announced in April, and will receive £50k towards their proposed project.
My plan is to commission a ‘Concerto for Beatboxer and Orchestra’ from top composer Anna Meredith, to be performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 2009. This is no novelty piece, it will be a challenge to create a modern classical work recognising the human voicebox as a full-blown musical instrument.
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.
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!!!
