COLDCUT & FRIENDS
Manchester Sankey's Soap
If anyone deserves to be paid in full, it’s Coldcut. Progenitors of British dance music, they’ve persevered through years of record company misunderstandings, financial restrictions, and a kind of publicity wilderness to emerge, triumphant, right on the cutting edge of the groove revolution sweeping Britain with a classic ‘Journeys By DJ’ album, a massive headfuck of a comeback album, one of the most innovative back catalogues of breakbeat music with their label Ninja Tune and a pioneering approach to multi-media set to keep them busy into the next millennium.
This tour promotes the Coldcut agenda by allowing space for sparkling vinyl-driven DJ sets from DJ Food and Hex, more easy-going soul / dance from a group fronted by three heart-achingly beautiful women, scary but unfortunately tantalisingly inaudible performance poetry, and an upstairs drum’n’bass set from Lemon D, who I have to thank for converting me to Jungle with a track he once did called ‘Jah Love’. Unfortunately, although his set is immaculate, it demonstrates the unfortunate fact that darkside has gone the way of all sound and become just another formula at the mercy of the dubplate.
Then, of course, it’s time for Coldcut themselves. While two Ninjas manipulate images on giant screens to either side, Matt Black and Jonathan More face each other across a table, juggling the audio that goes with the visuals. While this produces some memorable moments, most notably when John Major is made to repeat “we lost - we lost - we lost” in syncopated rhythm, much to the delight of the audience, this is obviously an art form in its infant stages: co-ordinating the beats with the samples with the images is such a juggling act that things inevitably go wrong from time to time - loops stop and start, samples get buried in the mix, and images repeat in the wrong places. Still, it is an intriguing introduction to what is obviously an ongoing project that could conceivably revolutionise electronic music’s place in the live arena. Well worth checking out next time Coldcut come to a venue near you.
