Kid Koala @ Cargo 20th Sept 2006
September 21st, 2006 by rui
Q. Where would you find Bjork, cucumbers, mosquitos, penguins* and flipcharts all in the same place (apart from after eating some very strong cheese, spinning round 17 times and going to bed…..)?
A: The London launch of Kid Koala’s latest album, ‘Your Mom’s Favourite DJ’, that’s where.
The last time I saw Mr Koala was at The Zodiac in Oxford, when he was showcasing Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. And what an incredible show that was – 3 sets of decks and a mate to bounce scratches off, plus a mid interval round of Bingo. What more could you want? OK, chuck in a very friendly crowd and a decent sounding venue, and you’ve got one hell of a gig.
Which is possibly why the immediate feeling I had on leaving his latest event could be categorized as ‘very mild dissapointment’
Now, please don’t get me wrong. There really isn’t anyone else quite like our cuddly Canadian friend – in fact, no-one even comes close. He’s one of the most inventive, ground breaking talents around. Had I never heard or seen him before, the show he put on last night would have blown me away. Rarely did his hands leave the three decks he was effortlessy manipulating (all without headphones, it has to be pointed out), except to attend to a cute portable turntable to astound everyone with his new ‘mosquito scratch’ trickery. Even when he missed the beat a few times he recovered almost instantly, and always with a cheeky grin on his face.
And from the very start of the gig, it was clear that the crowd loved him, and he loved them. But not as much as he loves shuttling records across decks, mashing up everything from the aforementioned Bjork to Kanye West, dancehall, ska, rock, thrash and, as he eloquently termed it, a new kind music – ‘grungelism’. In fact, I challenge anyone to do what he does with even one-tenth of his style, flair and panache. And if anyone else can work three copies of Moon River into such a beautiful and entertaining 5 minutes, I’ll eat my proverbial. Also, it must be said that finishing the gig with a series of flipchart messages shown by his now wife, which thanked the crowd and let us all know how and when he proposed (and the outcome) is a truly unique and fantastic way to end things.
So, it sounds like a pretty amazing gig, non? Well, in many ways, it was. But for me, it lacked something of the originality and inventiveness of his other gigs, where he would scratch chicken noises, make a trumpet sound drunk, and construct bizarre and hilarious conversations from random vocal samples. At this gig, there was maybe a little too much straight-up ‘mixing records together’ – much of the time he simply had two records playing at once, and scratched a third one over the top. Impeccably well, of course, but nothing your average scratch DJ couldn’t do.
Sadly, the now infamous sound quality of Cargo was, as always, detrimental to the overall enjoyment of the night, as was the presence of people who really should have stayed at home and told their own reflections just how amazing they are. But even allowing for these factors, it lacked a certain spark.
So, in summary – moments of pure, unadulterated genius, puntuated too often by a guy simply scratching some records.
Herby Vor
* OK, so I lied about the penguins.
