AR Kane
The Jazz Cafe,
London
Sept 2024
A small sea (a pond?) of lonely male heads, balding, or grey or combining both, interspersed with some younger, more vivacious barnets and even some women, solo or as part of a tag team with a feller. That is not such an unusual audience these days and seems appropriate for an AR Kane show at The Jazz cafe in London.
The part of M.A.R.R.S. (Pump Up The Volume) that wasn’t two DJs, AR Kane were that very unusual combination in the 1980s of two Black men making fashionable rock music in the UK. In the queue I earwigged a man of a certain age speaking to his buddy about the last time he saw AR Kane live, back in the 1980s, when the sound was a screaming wash of feedback. There were some of us here tonight hoping that age hadn’t blunted the sonic edge and, to be fair, we weren’t let down.
Despite his avuncular stage persona, rattling out creaking dad jokes between numbers and genuinely moved by the audience reaction (and it’s sold-out size), the remaining ARK, Rudi Tambala can still make a guitar sound like two foxes sexing up in your garden and then being devoured by a badger, all of this flashing across very basic electronic rhythm patterns and dubwise bass, augmented by sister Maggie doing her best Space Whisperer impression and Budgie on Pharoah Sanders-ish bubbling clarinet.
a vindication of the vaunted Andy Weatherall co-sign blessing
It makes for a deep dive. Rudi puts his voice through what sounds like a pitch corrector that phases as his occasionally dodgy tuning slips away and creates a unique sound that, when it tracks with his sister just adds to the family mystery. The live experience, more than anything I’ve heard recorded, is a vindication of the vaunted Andy Weatherall co-sign blessing that has, no doubt, brought a fair few heads down tonight. It’s a head-nodding, teeth-hurting immersion which, despite Maggie inserting the whole of The Beat’s Mirror In The Bathroom and most of The Beatles’ She Came In Through The Bathroom Window into meandering AR Kane originals is, absolutely original.
‘Absolutely original’ is about as high praise as I can ever give anything. Go see.
