Canadian instrumentalists Bad Bad Not Good rounded off their Aussie tour last Wednesday.
As the sun set behind St Kilda’s historic Palais Theatre last Wednesday evening, wonderful things were happening inside it’s almost-a-century-old walls.
As we made our way to our seats we were played in by the magnetic man onstage, grooving around to his own talented mixes, carefully slipping treasured vinyls back into their sleeves, thanking them for their service.
Haseeb Iqbal is a turntablist DJ, writer and broadcaster from London who has been travelling the country with Canadian group BADBADNOTGOOD for their first Australian tour in seven years.
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I pity those who didn’t make an effort, or perhaps simply didn’t have the time, to arrive for his set on the final show of the tour; a set full of hidden gems from all over the world married with spontaneous tidbits an anecdotes on the UK music scene, Pakistani culture and arts history and commentary on the transformation of live performance.
You could hear the delicious crackle of needle on vinyl through each track as he spun wax which pulled together eras decades apart; reggae from a time when that genre had arrived onto the scene and modern tunes he loved that somehow worked as a pairing.
As he spun, and boogied, Iqbal would occasionally pick up the mic to share a story, while the music continued as a backing track for his words. He spoke about the last remaining record store in Karachi, Pakistan, while a record he’d bought there played the most wonderfully rich vocals from female vocalist Nahid Akhtar on a track by M Ashraf. He told us about a woman he’d sat next to on the plane trip to this very gig, who had seen Aretha Franklin play at the Palais Theatre in the 70s.
He celebrated his own trajectory to this very tour, looking back at a 15-year-old Haseeb who listened to BadBadNotGood on repeat, and saw them live three months before playing his first ever DJ set.
“I’m just full of beans. [This tour] has left an extraordinary impact on me, this is the first time in years I’ve felt sad to be going home.”
It was a show that will truly last in my memory forever, a feeling not quite shared by everyone it seemed because, while I was having a spiritual experience, a woman in the row in front of me was looking up images of shrimp.
After a brief leg-stretching, awe-inspired-chattering intermission, the first bars of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs called us all back to our seats and we waited, cloaked in darkness, for BADBADNOTGOOD to make their entrance. What a song, what an entrance.
The instrumentalists and producers, who have collaborated with the likes of MF Doom, Snoop Dogg and KAYTRANADA, treated us to a lively set of what I’m calling space music; think Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia, for aliens.
With curated 16mm projections playing on the big screen above them, draping shadows and light over drummer Al Sow, bass guitarist Chester Hansen, saxophonist Leland Whitty, keyboard wizard Felix Fox-Pappas, Trumpet player Kaelin Murphy, Juan Carols Medrano Magallenes on percussion and guitarist Tyler Lott, the group looked like an orchestra playing the score to their very own feature film.
I’m not sure how long one particular tenor saxophone solo went for, but it felt like seven minutes at least, and I could have listened to seven hours more.
Both Haseeb Iqbal and BBNG clearly understand the collective magic of music, particularly live performance, and how special it can be to share a room with strangers for one night and experience something together, that can’t ever be replicated.
