Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh
4 stars
“Welcome to Liberty City!” bellows Mark Stewart early on in a set to
tie in with the recent release of his all-star The Politics of Envy
album. Stewart may not need a megaphone, but he makes his point loud,
proud and without recourse to the album's guest list, which includes
dub legend Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Raincoats bassist Gina Birch,
subversive film-maker Kenneth Anger on theremin and all of Primal
Scream.
Live, such a Who's Who? may be impossible on this short tour, but it
doesn't stop Stewart and a dangerously well-drilled three-piece band
augmented by fellow-traveller, reggae MC, Brother Culture, lambasting
the audience with a thrillingly fearless set of punk-funk dub-reggae
metal clatter. Stewart begins proceedings limbering up physically as
much as vocally, looking every inch the contender sporting a shiny red
tracky top with a towel wrapped round his neck.
Stewart's regular foil and production wizard Adrian Sherwood may not be
in attendance, but this laptop and pedal-powered experience still
manages to capture the album's full-on pummelling assault. The
'Keeping the dream alive' refrain of Autonomia becomes an anthem for
a new generation of avant provocateurs, while Stereotype shimmers with
a poppy pulse that would put U2 to shame. An unlikely dubbed-out cover
of William Blake's poem, Jerusalem, invests Blake's words with a
multi-cultural modernity while reclaiming the poem's revolutionary
spirit.
The place for all this really is a noisy late-night underground
shebeen. Yet, closing with Hysteria, dating from his Mark and the
Maffia era collaboration with Tackhead, Stewart and co manage to
transform a Monday night in Edinburgh with a thrillingly relevant call
to arms. Viva to that.
The Herald, June 13th 2012
ends
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