Living Colour lay into 30-year-old Stain, salute Rap-Hop’s 50th anniversary, and play primal and complex elemental music. The genuine heavy, heavy monster sound.
A large motor with five-stringed electric bass and drums clearing the space, whilst Kora and the rest throw out classic elements of Seventies hard-edged Soul and R’n’B. Touches of Gil Scott-Heron, Chi-Lites, and O’Jays. Falsetto breaks, love one another mixed in with profanities and militant Black awareness.
Comet take it out with an extended Funk jam, and the Bop Gun is primed.
Singer and MC Corey Glover wears a psychedelic jacket, with colours scattered through his long dreadlocks. Vernon Reid the founding guitarist, who went through several versions trying to capture their muse before it all came together with debut album Vivid in 1988.
Drummer William Calhoun was the chosen one after circling through several others, including the great Pheeroan akLaff who played several monumental gigs here last year.
Their music is a melange of many elements, and with Stain they bombarded it in a Large Hadron Collider crucible to produce the sound of Metal vaporising through Funk and Rock.
Go Away starts with a rusty buzzsaw guitar laying a bed for angry personal politics. I’ve aided my guilty conscience to go away!
Ignorance is Bliss thunders and lacerates simultaneously, and perhaps borrows a little from the Beatles’ Helter Skelter.
Songs become barrages of attack. This is Harmolodic Funk as created by Ornette Coleman and explored by the likes of James Blood Ulmer and Ronald Shannon Jackson, the latter of whom Reid played with.
Auslander and Hemp take this approach to the peak.
This Little Pig, which has some guitar-tapping by Reid, allows a little melody to break through.
Never Satisfied and Nothingness slow the tempos down a bit and pay a little homage to the classic sound of early British Metal and Black Sabbath in particular.
Doug Wimbish gets to lay out some of those famous bass lines, with riffs from White Lines (Don’t Do It) and The Message.
I’m trying not to lose my head, a ha ha ha.
He pays tribute to Sylvia Robinson as one of the key originators of Rap. She started the Sugarhill record label and produced records for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Sugarhill Gang and Funky Four Plus One.
As Mickey and Sylvia, she had a huge hit in the Fifties with Love Is Strange, co-written by Ellas Bo Diddley McDaniels. She played lead guitar (uncredited) all over Ike and Tina Turner’s It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.
She had a number one hit moaning orgasmically with Pillow Talk in 1973, which was not a comfortable song for a twelve-year -old to listen to. A monumental figure in Black music whose importance cannot be over-stated.
Glamour Boys is a hard Disco Bop and a crowd favourite.
So is Cult of Personality, a psychedelic Rock song and the signature sound for Wrestlemania.
To close the show, they extend on the vamp of James Brown’s Sex Machine. The song is all vamp to be honest and is a progression from 1963 and Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.
Living Colour give us the mantra to go home with. Get on up/ Stay on the scene/ Like a sex machine!
Rev Orange Peel
Photographs by Leonie Moreland
Living Colour
Black Comet
