Another week, another Summer Nights gig at King Tut’s, fair play to DF Promotions and the venue for putting on four acts most nights, thus giving up and coming talent a chance to play live at this great venue.
Support acts were Nathan Somevi, who played some great jazz guitar with an excellent jazz drummer, also Yana (playing her first real gig tonight) who gave some very promising vocals over laptop beats, and Kardo, who played melodic Arctic Monkeys-influenced indie rock.
As is often the case with these gigs, each act brought their own audience and Kardo had a lot of beery lads with them, but there was a good number of folk either stayed on or specifically were here to see Kapil (there have been comments made about lack of masks but during Kapil’s set most of the audience BM saw up front were wearing them).
Kapil played tonight with one drummer, one drummer/keyboardist and one electronics/flute player, ie a four-piece in all. He mainly previewed tracks from his forthcoming album ‘Laal’ (out early next year), which covers themes of the injustices behind the gloss of Bollywood, and more.
The set was energetic, sophisticated in the playing (the two drummers clashing together is not an easy thing to do but they were perfect) and angry, as Kapil railed against homophobia in Bollywood (‘Funny Guy’) and played some excellent guitar at various paces, from the soulful to the furious.
As the set ran out of time, BM thinks he didn’t quite play every track of the forthcoming release, but he did manage to fit in ‘The Ballad of Bant Singh’, a tirade against the Indian caste system, from his previous release ‘A Sacred Bore’. Kapil spoke to the audience about some of these issues and it is clear he has a lot to communicate, but the transcending vibe was simply that him and his band are such a great act that an audience is bound to listen, and that can only be good.