The mics failed, and the crowd bayed for the blood of Elmore Judd. The 6,000 capacity cauldron in Lagos, Nigeria glowed in the light of flame throwers improvised from aerosol cans, and the group, although veterans of the Camden circuit, had never worked a tougher crowd.
“If you’d thrown in an alligator, all you would have got back is the bones” remembers Jesse Hackett, frontman of the group, signed to Damon Albarn’s EMI-imprint label, Honest Jon’s. The group were there with Albarn, Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and UK Grime star Kano, as part of a project which is trying to arrange a marriage between African and Western music.
Judd’s music courses the meridian where mixing it up verges on an attack on conventional sensibility – iconoclasts of accepted musical form, they sample anything from scaffolding clankings to pots and pans – that’s why Albarn signed them.
Their musical influences migrate from 1930’s underground Greek bouzouki music, twisted soul, art funk, and afro-pop – a haunted, rambling house built around Jesse’s spider-soft falsetto.
Sitting back in brothers Jesse and Louis’ house in Tufnell Park, its easy to see how they became what they are. Home-made mandolins made by their father sit on shelves next to mammoth tambourines from Morocco.
“Because of my dad, our house has always been filled with mad stuff” says Louis, the younger of the pair at 27. “Christmas trees hanging upside down, sculptures of giant women with huge tits, everything!”
Louis is also known as Louis Slipperz, who at a tender age carved himself a spot in the UK Hip Hop scene putting out his ‘£10 Bag’ mixtapes to underground acclaim.
These days he is as big on the experimental side of funk as gritty UK Hip Hop, with side-plans of an East German-themed soundtrack. However smart money says that he’s going to stick mainly with Judd, with the kind of crazy stories Jesse tells me.
Pointing to a framed photo of him with a turbanned musician, Jesse, 31, says: “That’s Salif Keita [Malian afro-pop star]. We went to his night club in Bamako (Mali’s capital), which was in his own house…he treated us to an acoustic set – it was amazing to be in Mali, and that close to him.
“After him Scratch from The Roots beatboxed – a lot of people hadn’t heard anything like that and thought it was quite weird how he’d get these sounds coming out of his mouth.
“When it came to my turn I was really nervous – I played with Scratch, Salif and Damon [Albarn]– if I hadn’t played that night I don’t think I would have played the whole tour.”
The group have become weathered road-runners of the sub-Saharan circuit, touring with Albarn’s brainchild, Africa Express. This project was a reaction against a patronising Live 8 that put on a concert to ‘save Africa’ without featuring any of the continent’s music. They’ve been to Mali with Martha Wainwright and Jamie T, collaborating with people like Femi Kuti along the way. Projects like these have been the catalyst for a series of modish Africa projects in recent years – from Angel’s trendy Congolese Double Club to the growing popularity of the African Soul Rebels’ UK tour, seen most recently at the Roundhouse.
Less exotically, the pair, along with drummer Tom Skinner, went to Acland Burghley school in Tufnell Park, living in Camden Town before they moved. They recorded their second album, Insect Funk, in a near-derelict studio in Kentish Town; it was here they smashed scaffolding together to record the effects.
Then, in 2006, it was torched by vandals. The group lost its decks, its record collection, everything. Almost. The entire Insect Funk album was somehow rescued from the hard-drive of a charred Roland multi-track.
Jesse went to Camberwell College of Arts, and the influence is clear: often his group’s work resembles the experimentation of a contemporary art project, and its rough-hewn meanderings have drawn criticism for being lacking in cohesive tunes.
Louis counters: “We love that unfinished element. It’s not about putting out a tune that Annie Mac will play 20 times a week – having said that – it probably would be a good thing to have a track that Annie Mac would play 20 times a week!” he says, laughing.
Jesse adds: “I’m just as interested in art as I am in music – these things are the same – I don’t like to think in boundaries.” Do they set out to be crazy for the sake of it? Jesse seems unsure. “I just don’t like main stream music that much. Our music hasn’t always been this weird – its got progressively weirder. I’ve never been interested in sticking to writing in a certain style – it’s always been quite eclectic.”
It’s unsurprising that Jesse’s lyrics, dream-like in delivery, are sometimes penned near his bed: “There’s a lot of things that come to me when I’m in half asleep and I suddenly wake up and scribble something in total darkness.” he says.
Elmore Judd is an ambassador for the UK on its Albarn-sponsored tours of Africa, so don’t sleep on them, as they represent for the race-rich spiked lullabies of our island.
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