The Danish/Serbian band Tako Lako had come recommended by Balkan DJ ‘Dr Malaka’ at a Shantel gig a couple of weeks before hand. “They’re fantastic, one of the best” he’d said as he slipped a flyer into my hand. Bold claim from a man who knows about these things, so is he right?
With Hackney’s ‘New Empowering Church’ only a convenient hour and fifteen minute journey away from our South London door step it is with the burden upon my shoulders of a guaranteed great night out that I drag myself and assorted housemates and girlfriends onto the Northern Line with a bottle of Napoleon brandy and the kind of coats you only wear out when you’re not eighteen any more.
Balkanbeat classics have been on rotation since we arrived and an hour and a half later there is a tangible thirst for live music in the air; the clunk of a manhandled microphone, the chesty thud of the kick drum, the breath noise before the first note breaks out the saxophone…
As movement appears near the stage the crowd abandons any hope of getting in a second round and begins to peel away from the criminally short bar to get a good view. I say good view, but who are we kidding? We don’t need to see them, we need to feel them!
With bodies packed tight and second-hand whiskey-coke tinged breath the only oxygen supply, I’m not ashamed to say that the next 45 minutes (or possibly hour and a half, or possibly 20 minutes, or possibly 3 hours, you get the picture…) flew by in a blur of dizzy mad ecstacy. What I can tell you is that opener ‘Rupa je Rupa’ is a bloody banger, riding the right side of the often risky Balkan/Ska line its the perfect vehicle for whipping up white middle-class art students into a damn frenzy.
Think of it, if you will, as the stimulating equivalent of being woken up by a lingerie model slapping you across the face with a Double Sausage & Egg McMuffin.
I took friends who had never been to a Balkan/Gypsy night before, let alone Eastern Europe (one of them, it’s rumored has never been east of Wapping), and they couldn’t stop raving about it and how they had ‘never danced so much.’ So, despite that I’m about to shoot down this love fest, it’s important to stress that as live events go you’re not going to experience many better this side of the EU health and safety regulations.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, but certainly disappointingly, the recorded versions of the Tako Lako experience, which I rushed to listen to the following morning, leave the listener a little flat. Yes, they’re perfectly played, well arranged and sensibly produced but there is a hole and the Bolivian dead philosopher Oscar Ichazo knew what it was when he stated 30 years ago that, “Nothing is equal to both of two different things”. He was bloody right you know.
Tako Lako are very good indeed, the crowd were very good indeed, together it was sensational and nothing could equal it. The record didn’t stand a hope.
