At the time of year when interesting gigs are quite hard to come by this was a great excuse to clamber over piles of uneaten brussels sprouts and shake off the cobwebs. This was the launch of Darren aka Loki McGarvey’s “final” album, reason enough to be there, but there were a couple of excellent opening acts as well.
First up were BM faves The Girobabies, sporting an acoustic lineup (Marks McGhee and McTeeth, joined by regular co-conspirators Gordy Duncan, Jenny Tingle and possibly the debut of Josephine Sillars on backing vocals) – “think Nirvana on MTV unplugged” MM quipped. Recent release ‘Steal My Sleep’ was played along with a new track from 2025’s forthcoming album, and a couple of oldies including closer ‘Equinox’ which got some decent crowd participation.
GASP has been on the rap scene for a while (BM last saw him at the SAMAs in November) – joined tonight by Sean on live drums and MM manning the backing tracks, he put in a committed performance in his trademark style, rapping the same words as the backing track but in a slightly different timing, giving an overall somewhat surreal and paranoia-inducing effect.
Words about career breaks and failures, rags and riches, cats (yes definitely) and loves lost were all delivered at speed and with often devastating effect, ending up with him in the audience for at least some of the time. He admitted his voice was a bit done from another recent gig but it held up pretty well – he also acknowledged, as Mark McGhee did, the headliner’s inspirational power as an artist…
Loki started his set with a kind of “all our yesterdays” playback of excerpts from tracks over the past 20 (!) years that he’s been recording, admitting he barely remembered a lot of them but they were “quite good actually…”.
With Beccy Wallace providing some backing vocals, he then launched into his new album in full. Entitled ‘Not Funded by Creative Scotland’, it may be his last statement as a rap artist but it sounded like the best thing he has ever done. BM can’t claim to have followed Loki for the 20 years that some in the room have but she had seen and heard enough to have had pretty high expectations of this, and they were more than fulfilled.
Starting with the opening statement ‘Adult Rapper’ (acknowledging that he is no newcomer but a force to be reckoned with), the 17 tracks are a journey through experiences of rejection of rapping as an artform, dogged determination and eventually imposter syndrome, against a backdrop of competing forces like addiction, toxic masculinity and deprivation.
There are some moments of high emotion (‘Don’t Jump’) but also of valediction, and the album runs consistently through highs and lows. Apart from the lyrical dexterity (and my god the torrent of word references is more than just impressive, they play directly into the themes described so it is never just showing off…) the variety of musical backing is also impressive, with horn stabs, heavy percussion, techno beats and god knows what else in the mix.
BM understands there were quite a few musical collaborators but the whole thing hung together extremely well live – by the end it felt like a real triumph of effort against some tough opposing forces, although the audience were with him all the way. If this really was the culmination of 20 years work it certainly sounded worth it – and a great tonic for that pre-New Year dead period…
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