Yoshi & David @ Slipjam:B, Freebutt 5th Apr '05

Yoshi & David @ Slipjam:B, The Freebutt Venue, Brighton, 5th April 2005

Reviewing your own gig is a little bit silly isn't it? Yes it is. But then again, this isn't a review; it's a very personal account of how my second live performance went and what I learnt from it. From all the madness that was going on in my life this week, my mind was really somewhere else, somewhere over the Atlantic ocean with my family more than it was in my beloved b-town, and I really didn't think I'd be able to give any kind of good show. I wasn't even nervous before showtime really, which is quite strange. I was just indifferent and pretty numb.

I had told my fellow brightonian beat-maker/MC David about the show from the beginning (a few months ago) because I wanted both of us to showcase our stuff together, I thought there was an interesting contrast between our two styles, both eclectic, but with my three songs more rooted in abstract positivity, with clean electro-beats, and David's coming from a more direct, accessible place, whilst having some very grimy old-school hip-hop beats. So there we went, up on stage and did our thing, opening up to a chilled Black Uhuru song (a brilliant idea by Dave himself) where I spoke and introduced Davey-boy, and he spoke and introduced me. I cracked a little joke about our CD player, which is actually the same little CD player which I walk around with every day- we were running our instrumentals off that little portable thing, and held it up for everyone to see "If the batteries run out, then the shows over" they laughed, then I realised as I put it down, that I wasn't just making a joke. I didn't have any back-up batteries. How stupid, and how fun to live on the edge like that, the show really would havebeen over and we would have had to walk off in silence if they batteries had ran out. That's living. I warned the crowd, because I felt I had to given the intense (and high quality) battling and freestyling that had been going on before, that "this is going to be some real different stuff", because I don't come from the battle/freestyle school, neither does Dave. Before I got into my first track 'Dream' I literally said with no music in the background, "This track is extremely abstract, totally personal and pretty mad, but I hope you find something in it you like because that's what hip-hop is always about, doing something different, doing new things." I remember hearing a few cheers at that comment as I got into the track and began spitting my verse.

Disaster is a strange thing on stage, because it happens, you know it's happening, and yet you don't feel too bad, it's not like you
have time to feel embarrassed, you just feel lost in a strange limbo. After 30 seconds of rhyming, the next line went out of my head completely, I started from the beginning of the song again without anyone noticing, and then just stopped. I stopped and made a few "yeah, yeah's" to the crowd, and looked at David who knew what was going on and tried to encourage me. It must have been about ten, fifteen seconds of silence but it felt like much, much longer. The crowd knew what was going on too, and were that most cool of things; supportive. Not saying much, but not murdering me either. One part of the track clicked in my head and I got the flow back, returned with a vengeance and finished out the song nicely. They loved it. The cheers after I said 'peace', and the slow, slow ending of the song were reallywell-received, and that made me feel good as I handed the mic over to David's friend who backed him up for the next track. I got the feeling from a lot of the blank yet interested faces that what they had just heard was something different, and that was good.

Something happened and I just felt peaceful, looking on at David ripping (and I mean, ripping) his first track as I nodded my head in the background. Very peaceful, like the mistake I made had now happened, and it was not going to happen anymore. Like the very worst of it was over. Like I knew it was over... and it was. Strange, that. My next track was
'The Funk' a funky jam about student life and balancing it with hip-hop, a funky jam about a lot of things. I had an ongoing thing with the crowd about my CD player and you could hear the bleeps as I skipped the tracks to find my instrumental. This track went down nicely, although I began to realise that I should have rehearsed a lot more as I was running out of breathe and almost losing control of my flow at a few points. The only thing that mattered to me though was getting through it, and the crowd feeling it, which they seemed to be, even if at times I received a few looks of confusion- that's always been an encouraging sign for me (in all things I do, not just music.)

David then went into his little medley of two songs, the second of which was the song on nefisa, 'Do you want to see anymore?' It went down really nicely, his most electronic sounding track, and definitely the smoothest of the set so far. The D-man has a very effortless and chilled flow in all of his songs which I can only admire, he doesn't push himself to the absolute extremes like I do perhaps, but in spitting in that smooth balanced way that he does, he leaves himself plenty of room to get even more animated when he wants. I, on the other hand, put absolutely every last breathe into my delivery, and then have to slightly tone down my performance when it comes time for the extra volume and energy needed when spitting live.

We closed out with the title track from my upcoming album 'Flowers & Trees' and all I can say about that was, wonderful. It sounded so nice, I knew everyone could hear the lyrics clearly (which was so, so important to me) and the vibe of this Yoshi/Diamondscepter collaboration (which is actyally two years in the making, really the brain-child of my cousin on one magical summer day) spilled out into the crowd like I hoped it would. They felt the positivity. This particular track on the album also featured David so he spat his verse too, just as laid back and assured as ever. We even concocted a funny singing chorus since the singer who appears on the album, my good friend Rahma Ali, couldn't be there on the night. The cheers went up for our final song and we said goodbye, host Brainiac came up on stage shouted out "Yoshi and David" to more cheers again and again as I unplugged my CD player and held it up in the air as we walked off stage.

I felt love, a lot of love for the people who I was performing in front of. A connection that was real. I knew I only had five or six friends watching me, and they were at the back, so all this cheering was coming from all of these other strangers, (and the place was absolutely packed on this particular night) these kiddies both younger and older than me, looked like the kind of English kiddies I went to school with. So to get that kind of love, to hear that kind of support had a big impact on me. I grabbed the mic one
last time and just told everyone so they know, "I was born right here in Brighton, so was David, I love you guys thank you" I'm sure to some peoples that would seem a bit corny, a bit of a 'Michael Jackson' thing to do, considering this was a hip-hop gig in a pretty run down old place full of battling/freestyling MC's, but that doesn't matter to me. What I felt was real, because I spent a long time making music all my life based on the fact that I was an outsider and that no one understood me (I'm sure a majority of people came into hip-hop for the same reasons). And so it all crystallised here on that night, you can do your most personal music, give your most poetic self on stage, and a true hip-hop crowd will always react positively to it. That's it.

Y.Misdaq aka Yoshi + photos by Tanny
07 April 2005