Even Bohemian Teenagers Need a Recreation - Sam Duckworth Flies Without His Cape

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. Everybody's doing it. Reprising their classic albums for live performance, that is.

Tonight I will be experiencing all the "Dah, da-da, da's" of The Fratellis' Chelsea Dagger for the first time in many a year as I watch them perform their debut album Costello Music in its entirety, ten years after release. Next month Kula Shaker dust down their robes to celebrate 25 years since K introduced Govinda and Tattva into common parlance. And on Friday night just gone Norwich Arts Centre played host to Get Cape Wear Cape Fly's Sam Duckworth treating us to a complete play-through of all the songs from 2006's The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager. Duckworth has also ditched his superhero associations, and now performs as Recreations with his band The Magnetic South. After having gotten my head around Mica Levi's band Micachu and The Shapes having morphed into Good Bad Happy Sad and confusing the hell out of me when they supported Savages at the UEA on Wednesday, this is all getting almost too complicated to keep up with. No wonder we old-timers need the familiarity of a classic album performed in track order, just to restore some order to our frazzled brains.

Savage Island

Friday night at the Arts Centre kicks off with local psych-punks Savage Island, a five-piece familiar to followers of the Norwich music scene for their rollocking shanties infused with Middle Eastern tinged melodies, trumpets, saxophones, various percussion enhancements, and some primal screaming. Yes, they sing as well, though it is the climactic instrumental numbers that normally get us moving early on into their sets. A great opener to any night, even if a lot of tonight's audience were a little tardy in arriving at the venue.

Dan Allen

Dan Allen is next up. Enormously popular in Norwich and beyond via his band Ducking Punches, Dan is performing a solo set tonight, his first back in normal shoes since breaking a leg during the filming of a video with the Punches in September.

Followers of the band have now bulked out the auditorium to give Dan support, and to sing along with some of the familiar songs. At this point I have to raise my arm and admit to never having seen Ducking Punches live before. Not through a lack of trying, it's just that the band don't play Norwich that often, being kept busy touring throughout the UK and Europe. I am impressed. Not only is the voice big and filled with passion, but the guitar playing seems to echo the sentiments contained within the songs. I am genuinely moved by some of the lyrics, and the issues of suicide, friendship and mental health that are being dealt with here. Top man.

Sam Duckworth fronts up a band that contains the usual guitars, bass, keyboards and drums/percussion, but in addition features two trumpets on one side of the stage and a flautist and violinist on the other. These players collectively form The Magnetic South, the appendage to Duckworth's Recreations, and producing all the flair and accompaniment required to bring the Bohemian Teenager songs back to life, ten years after the album's initial release.

There is a lot of pent-up energy in Duckworth. Thirty-something life has not dulled the fire in his belly, and the band serves as a melodic and rhythmic anchor to his bounding vocals and strident guitar strumming. The issues dealt with in the original release - poverty, multi-cultural tolerance, and social care seem even more relevant today, yet the Magnetic South manage to beautifully harness and enhance the mood without diluting the message. Today's issues of Brexit, Trump and mass migration somehow seem wholly relevant to this ten year old album, and the track Get Cape Wear Cape Fly with its observations of over-consumerism could not be more appropriate to today's Black Friday orgy of spend. 'Open your eyes, as you don't need to buy'.

I am a sucker for a well-blown flute (god, that sounds like a line from American Pie - "there was this one time, at band camp..."), and the haunting trumpets on Once More With Feeling provide exactly the right amount of lump-in-the-throat special-ness. Yet Duckworth is still able to hold court alone with his guitar, and his message.

We appear to have plenty of singers in the audience, all prepared to contribute some beautiful harmonies from the floor. As the final track, the ironically titled Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager (Part 1), builds to its climactic conclusion the refrains sung back from the floor build with it, and continue long after Duckworth and the band have left the stage, and the house lights have come up. Let's hope that the sentiments of this evening still resonate into the next morning and beyond.

www.facebook.com/alldrunkorchestra - Facebook page for Savage Island (formerly known as Juke & The All-Drunk Orchestra)

www.facebook.com/duckingpunchesuk - Facebook page for Dan Allen's band Ducking Punches

www.facebook.com/recreations2k - Facebook page for Recreations and The Magnetic South

Welcome to the Wild Wild East - Dubioza Kolektiv Do Norfolk, Boy

I wasn't really sure what to expect from Bosnian dub-rockers Dubioza Kolektiv. I knew that the band formed out of the turmoil that existed during the siege of Sarajevo during the 1990's, through which the founder members lived as children. They have released six albums since 2004 and toured relentlessly, as well as being politically active in their homeland, organising demonstrations and mobilising young voters against what they saw as corrupt government. Now, in 2015, they have played Glastonbury and are nearing the end of a string of live appearances in the UK which included two sold-out nights at London's 100 Club. Tonight, on a cold Monday evening, they played Norwich Arts Centre, not exactly the Wild Wild East (name of their 2011 album release), but probably the most easterly of their UK dates.

Support comes from Savage Island, a local band that has emerged from the ashes of Juke and the All-Drunk Orchestra. The name may be shorter, snappier, and form more easily into a drumskin logo, but perhaps loses some of its predecessor's charm and individuality.Which is a shame, as they really put in an excellent set. I had not previously seen them, and if you had told me that they were from Eastern European and were touring with Dubioza, quite honestly I would have believed you. Their music is an amalgam of spirited drumming, primal screaming, great rock vocals, bass playing that could at any minute launch into Electric Six's 'Gay Bar', a brass section that can switch from Cossack rhythms to KC and the Sunshine Band funkiness at the flick of a switch, and some great songs. Despite starting to an almost empty auditorium (shame on you, bar lizards) they ended to much dancing and enthusiasm. Definitely want to see them again.

Savage Island

After clearing the stage sufficiently to create room for Dubioza - the drumkit is pushed right back and screened, the MC decks are also well to the rear. There are no mic stands, and even audience drinks are ordered off the edge of the stage. And when the eight-piece collective, in co-ordinated  yellow and black tops, bound onto stage you can see why. Every square centimetre of space is going to be needed for this level of pent-up energy. From the start of the opening number to the final bars of their set, the stage becomes a maelstrom of circling bodies, waving arms, and energised posturing. With Adis and Almir charging back and forth, taking alternate verses on vocals, and everyone else wanting a piece of front-of-stage action, nobody's pint would be safe, even for a second. These guys have the energy of an entire doped-up cycling team - it's like a team of Lance Armstrong doppelgangers with funny haircuts.

Interestingly, for a band with such a political pedigree, there is very little mention of politics tonight. Even a chant from the crowd of 'We Love Bosnia' is rebuked with a reminder that the band now also contains members from the neighbouring states of Serbia and Slovenia. Only when they perform  Free.mp3 (The Pirate Bay Song), and produce a pirate ship banner to reinforce the logos on their t-shirts, does their antipathy towards capital exploitation of musical downloading raise its head. Sorry guys, but I'm with the artists on this one. Creative expression is all well and good, but a musician still needs to be paid for his or her intellectual property in order to eat. However, it's undoubtedly a great novelty song, with an hilarious video to accompany it.

And that, I'm afraid, is where I have to draw my line in the sand with Dubioza Kolektiv. On the basis of last night's performance they are great entertainers, and the audience loves them, culminating with a mass stage invasion, mostly at the band's own instigation, to a backing track of Prodigy's Out of Space which follows a rather cheesy encore of Can't Take My Eyes Off You, complete with more collective arm waving. It's the sort of post-fondue entertainment that goes down well with the après-ski set in Val d'Isère, but risks reducing Dubioza to the realms of cabaret. Which is such a shame for a band that has such a great collective conscience and a message to spread.

As bands like Gogol Bordello have found, there is always room at the inn for a lively infusion of Balkan and gypsy rhythm with rock music, but unless you are prepared to nail your political convictions firmly to the mast as well, your preaching will not get through to your audiences. Or, perhaps now that we have Jeremy Corbyn they no longer feel that we need their help.


Watch out for Savage Island's new website (on the way). In the meantime follow them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/alldrunkorchestra/

Follow Dubioza Kolektiv via their website at http://www.dubioza.org/ , and do watch the video to Free.mp3 (The Pirate Bay Song) :-