HORACE ANDY | LIVE REVIEW
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Thurs 31 Aug
It’s pay day, football transfer deadline day and a week when Bake Off re-emerges on a different channel. Though some things in life do change, it’s always reassuring that seasoned performers like Horace Andy gradually reinvent themselves, giving you more of the same but slightly different each time, and based on this showing, he’s not just here to cream the money.
A waft of weed greeted me on Womanby Street, and the DJs were feeding the payday buzz with a mix of authentic reggae on crackly 7”s, blended with faux reggae like Shaggy. Horace Andy’s backing, with riddims by the Mafia & Fluxy band, cranked the party up, with some self-confessed ‘loud reggae music’ and a riff on The Godfather theme, testing the sound technician. A switch in the venue, from the Tramshed to Clwb, meant that a minor loss in sound quality, with the bassbins occasionally trounced by the basslines, was compensated for by a top-notch atmosphere.
The crowd were at fever pitch when Horace, looking ebullient in a crimson red shirt and trousers, and anything but his ‘sleepy’ nickname, started with one of his lesser known numbers Must Surrender – which was the only humdrum number of the night, but served to get Mafia & Fluxy calibrated into the right tempo. The band pepped up a good dozen or so of his 70s roots and rocksteady classics with a lick of dancehall spirit from their three decades of experience. Matic Horns was awesome all night on trombone and harmonies too, helping Horace through the high notes – not that he needed much height, as Horace disclosed that he smokes the chalice but never the reefer.
There’s a fair bit of soundsystem teasing, in the false starts and rewinds, showing a band enjoying themselves and feeding off the crowd and the music, across several stonecold classics not just from Andy’s oeuvre, but the whole of the reggae genre: Cuss Cuss, Spying Glass, Man Next Door, Money Money, Skylarking – all supremely performed, and sung along by the skanking crowd, working up a sweat.
Horace dedicates Every Tongue Shall Tell to the audience, citing it as his favourite song, with a superior version of Big Wheel being his fave Massive Attack tune – both linked by the Rastafarian spirit belief in one consciousness. Leave Rastaman is the finale, with the band belting out a bouncy ska bluebeat, to Horace and Matic Horns singing “Babylon leave rastaman alone,” before a nutty boy dancehall knees-up climax. You might get your wish with the boys in blue, Horace, but we’ll never desert you when the going is this good.
words CHRIS SEAL