Themselves at Hoxton Square Bar and Kicthen

Themselves at Hoxton Square Bar and Kicthen

16 October, 2009
by: Alun

'We're putting the Zap back in RZA, please stop making music,' announces Adam 'Dose One' Drucker, continuing a game Themselves have been playing with the audience since early in tonight's set at The Hoxton Square Bar and Kicthen. Once the laughter recedes, a girl in the front row responds with 'We're putting the Lam back in Kill a Motherfucker.' He's visibly impressed: 'We'll definitely use that at the next show.'

Any Dose One performance, whether it's with the electro-rock sextet Subtle or, as tonight, the long-running duo with producer Jeffrey 'Jel' Logan, hinges on his ADHD-style showmanship, both during the songs and in the frequent mono-/dialogues between them. He paces back and forth across the stage, clad in a grey three-piece suit with incongruous skull-belt and medallion accoutrements, relating touring anecdotes and childhood stories in the manner of an amiable psychopath chatting up his soon-to-be-dismembered captive. Jel, situated always behind his MPC and synths, makes an excellent foil—the laconic straight man, observing his partner's manic episodes with detached amusement and occasionally pitching in with a one-liner of his own.

The music itself is frantic, rough-hewn hip hop, given heft by a kitchen-sink approach to electronic textures. Unfortunately, Dose One's surrealist lyrics, one of the primary vehicles for his all-important persona, are seldom audible above the din—his vocals are reduced to virtuoso streams of consonants, their contribution to the overall sound exclusively rhythmic.

Still, no one seems to mind; for the first two-thirds of the set, theatrics and danceable beats are more than sufficient to keep the audience happy. There's a brief lull when the band breaks out some songs from their patchy second album, The No Music (too many white-noise passages and abrupt changes in tempo), but they manage to ride the audience's goodwill all the way to the finale, a 'fake' encore featuring early career favourites 'It's Them' and 'Grass Skirt and Fruit Hat'.

Anticon, the independent hip hop collective from which Dose One and Jel both hail, has always taken pains to emphasise its uncompromising outsider status, sometimes to the point of making itself appear ridiculous. It's not hard to paint it as a clique of snooty white-boys, undermining the culture they're supposedly expanding. But beneath all the invective lies a great passion for writing and performing, and an unstinting belief in artistic autonomy: 'We didn't get rich, but we're not whining,' said Dose One, when I spoke to him earlier in the evening. On the contrary, after a career of more than 15 years, he seems to be enjoying himself as much as ever. And he's more than happy to share.

Themselves are currently on tour around Europe. Check out www.anticon.com for more details.

Check out more Live Music
Check out more Things To Do in London

Alun