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Review: Shaking Spears at Rich Mix

Performing to a full house at Rich Mix, the Boxettes and Speakers Corner Quartet jammed, while Last Mango In Paris and Ventriloquist vocalised their literary worth. Plus a suspicious video link with Dizreali...

Words: David Barros

Pics: Craig Thomas

Shane Solanki presents Shaking Spears Despite Shaking Spears sounding suspiciously like “Shakespeare” there were no references to the famous playwrite for this special night which doubled up as the organiser’s birthday party, although considering there was a lot of poetry spoken, the evening could have been likened to an evening at the theatre.

Hosted by birthday boy Shane Solanki, front man of Last Mango In Paris, the show warmed up with Camilo, a Columbian acoustic guitarist who encouraged audience participation by getting them to sing back lyrics to his Latino folk songs. Although most of the time the audience missed their cues, Camilo continued unphased and smiling as his fingers speedily picked at the guitar strings, setting the cultural tone for the rest of the evening.

Skanking on the spot, Ventriloquist performed a poem borrowing the Last Mango musicians.

"Nothing could be more awkward that a white guy making reggae music. So that's what I'm going to do next," he began, before launching into Sputty Chap, a UB40-sounding tale of the self consciousness feeling of doing a show knowing he has zits on his face. The irony was thanks to the good nature of it, it was actually quite funny.

Originally billed as The Girl Who Learnt to Beatbox Out Her Arse, Shane informed the audience there had been a change to the running order for Last Mango In Paris. Instead they performed Broken English.

Shane's friendly tone spoke to the audience as though he was thinking out loud. With the help of projected photos on the stage wall you were lulled in to thinking he was doing some sort of presentation as he told jokes and flicked through family photos and emails from his mum. Then, within one sentence the music kicked in creating a soundtrack to his speech, and it became poetry.

Broken English changed within a moment from becoming a bit of public reflection to an hour long set discussing what it meant for Shane to be British enough to be English as a Pakistani person, yet feels foreign in his own country.

Digging deeper into the race issue, one of Shane's songs went where most would not dare to tread with Jolene, a satirical song to the tune of Dolly Parton’s hit, a song about an Asian skin whitener brand that shares the same name. Deep.

The tone lightened up (no relation to Jolene) later on with a comic poem about how his brother boasted about his mobile phone being better than his.

The whole hour or so set was an interesting look at relations between race and stereotypes most people would have been embarrassed to discuss, but Last Mango weren’t.

Dizraeli at Shaking Spears, Rich Mix

From the outset Dizraeli's so-called “live

transmission” from Cairo seemed suspicious, considering Egypt is several time zones ahead, yet he was lit by daylight when it should have been night.

During his transmission the charade was kept up long enough until the Quicktime player crashed, managing to squeeze in a bit of staged banter about his tour of Egypt before he kicked a lyrical freestyle.

Aterwards Shane admitted to everyone the transmission was a set up

Speakers Corner Quartet picked up after the interval with several jams. The projector was put to use with accompanying photos to go with the song, as demonstrated by later song, Cairo. One song was a car chase style jam, while the second song toned down for a more serene before another high energy jam with some highly energetic flute!

Closing the show was vocal orchestra The Boxettes, the all female jazz fusion quintet. As it was Shane's birthday they came out with a cake and candles. Boxettes at Shaking Spears, Rich Mix

While they sounded shy when they introduced themselves, the Boxettes were anything but. The group worked their way through an entire set of songs ranging from slow jazz to high speed drum’n’bass and even touching on operatic, amazing the audience with their vocal abilities and rounding off the show with an extended ovation.

Shaking Spears was a birthday party for the paying public to crash, and it turned out to be the sort of party where loads of people turn up and you talk about with your friends for some time.

Many belated happy returns to Shane.

The Boxettes are performing a showcase hosted by Jarvis Cocker on 11 April at Cargo. To buy tickets, click here.

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