As lockdown continues different artists and organisations are exploring different formats for streaming and this is another of them.
The Scottish Alternative Music Awards, which usually consists of an annual awards and several other events during the year, is doing a series of short weekly livestreams with the help of Renfrewshire Leisure. Richy Muirhead and his team have worked hard to make this and other events happen despite the constraints of the times.
Dave Hook, aka Solareye, is the lead singer with Scottish hiphop collective Stanley Odd, and has also released solo material and a number of different collaborative tracks. He gave us a solo show from his lockdown studio setup, threatening at times to bash his head off the sloping ceiling…
For people who haven’t heard his music, the rapping is full of wordplay (“Watched the Amazon on fire, on my Amazon Fire…”), social commentary and witty asides, the music an intriguing mixture of hiphop, soul and repetitive beats, from one of Scotland’s most innovative artists.
First off was a track from his ‘All These People Are Me’ solo album, ‘Dinnae Get Repetitive’, followed by a couple of Stanley Odd tracks, the recent ‘Where They Lie’ and a solo (just with piano) version of last year’s ‘She’s a Wee Witch’.
Last track was a version of Stanley Odd’s ‘Killswitch’, which probably (“First round the virus got the frail and the weak”) felt the most apt track for the current times…