I’m not sure if Mike Skinner would appreciate being compared to John Lennon, but The Streets shook up British hip-hop in much the same way as the Beatles did pop 40 years earlier – suddenly pretending to be American looked a bit silly. Two years on from “Original Pirate Material”, pretending there’s a hood full of ho’s in downtown Romford is just not going to work. Rap has gone back to its roots: people telling the world about their life. There’s apparently a Cornish hip-hop crew who rap about tractors, although that could just be my mate winding me up. But John The White Rapper is definitely real, and he’s got issues. “I’ll tell it straight / Girls don’t like me / They always say no / Even when I ask nicely”… you almost feel sorry for him! Looking a bit adrift on a Hop & Grape stage more accustomed to four piece rock bands, John swaggers around in loose sportswear, woolly hat down to his eyes, with his grinning DJ just off to the side. Over a tight rhythmic RunDMC style breakbeat, John speaks as he finds. “Listen Tony, Listen George, if we promote guns, then you promote war!” It’s nothing heavy, but as the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin name implies, it’s brutally honest. He only does three tracks, in between friendly digs at the drunken state of the DJ who struggles a couple of times with the stairs at the side of the stage, but he’s refreshing, funny and has a certain wicked charm.
Lockdown Project are about as different as you can get without leaving the genre. For a start, when was the last time you saw a Spanish guitar at a hip-hop gig? A live drummer and bassist too. First track Dreamworld is reminiscent of our own Dust Junkys, the hard-looking frontman Ollie Maides’ vocals somewhere between rapping and singing and a funked-up Chilli Peppers rhythm section. It sounds like summer, like an early afternoon pint in the sun outside Dukes with all your mates. On the second track guitarist James Newton really goes for it, flamenco flourishes thrown into the bizarre mix – forget the pint, let’s get the margaritas in! The recent single “Everybody In The Morning” adds a light reggae beat that’s impossible not to dance to, and you get the feeling there are about 17 other genres trying to get out too. There’s a real pop sensibility underpinning it all though; this and other tunes wouldn’t sound out of place on the album of an ex boy band member trying to “get real”. They finish with their drinking anthem “Down In One”, which has the kind of 2-Tone beat where you keep expecting a brass section to appear from somewhere… it doesn’t, but there’s just about everything else you ever heard of going on somewhere. This is what pop music should sound like in 2004, but you can’t help feeling it’s maybe a little too innovative and eclectic to trouble the Beyonce’d masses.
Goldie Lookin Chain should need no introduction, with their ugly mugs staring out from everything from the NME to the national press to probably Farmer’s Weekly for all I know. They bound on stage and keep bounding till the stage is rather full. The result of their recent record deal (have East West got any idea at all what they are getting into here?) is that there are a couple of items of clothing on display which may well have cost more than three pounds fifty, but you still wouldn’t stand them too close to an unguarded fire. This is their first Manchester gig and they are happy to be here, name-checking Shaun Ryder and, um, Harold Shipman. But then if you’re easily offended you wouldn't be here. First track orders us to all smoke more draw. Second track demolishes every American in popular music today, with some rather unkind musings on Madonna’s middle-aged sag and the charming refrain “Fuck you, Alicia Keys!” which I think we can all relate to. You don’t even know where to look because if you watch one of them for ten seconds you know someone else is going to be up to something. They take turns at the front: Mike Balls aka the Soccer Violence delightfully describes how he’ll kick your head in, Adam Hussain is apparently the man with the weed, and the lanky Maggot, the one who can actually dance rather than just throw shapes, rhymes about the dirty DVDs he can supply. Yeah it’s crude and sometimes a bit silly, but somewhere in the rabble there’s some killer tunes involving samples of spectacularly dodgy crap rock records. And an entire tune dedicated to Newport’s finest taxi service which ends up mutating into the theme from Jim’ll Fix It. No, really. And it’s fantastic.
By this point everyone’s shouting along: hipsters, Ordsall scallies, students, indie kids, it’s like Madchester all over again. After 45 minutes without a spliff, the dressing room’s calling, but not before Eggsy’s dragged them all back for their most outrageous and best known anthem “Your Mother’s Got A Penis”. If you haven’t heard it, believe me, it’s actually filthier than you are thinking, and funny as hell, ending with nine grown men in Argos jewellery chanting the title over the riff from Clapton’s “Behind The Mask” (and no, I had to ask someone, although I’ll grudgingly admit to having vaguely recognised it!) and a hall full of fists in the air. This time, believe the hype.
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