I’ve done a series of posts about exciting gigs recently – but nothing’s got me panting as breathlessly as this one. They of my music tips for 2010, Fool’s Gold are coming to London, to play five dates: Thurs 21 January at Notting Hill Arts Club; Fri 22 January at Fabric; Sat 23 January at Proud Galleries; Mon 25 January in-store at Pure Groove; and Tues 26 January at Madame JoJo’s, where tickets somehow only cost a fiver.
African adapters, trop-rock outlaws, funk revivalists.. whatever you want to call them, Lewis Pesacov’s Fool’s Gold (it’s him, Luke Top and various live musicians) are a thoroughly exotic, bewitching outfit. Surprise Hotel, perhaps my song of 2009, represents the musical moon on a stick: careering guitars without a care in the world; mesmerising vocals in a seductive foreign tongue; a relentless beat and a tantric length, all the way to paradise. Then there’s Nadine, a wicked concoction of trooping brass and the quirks of lord knows what other instruments between pleas to a mystery woman, who could or couldn’t be known to Chuck Berry. Ha Dvash, meanwhile, is more Arabic desert blues in style, its rhythmic guitar and channty singing bringing to mind a gentle Sunday stroll across the Sahara.
You’ll dance, sway, pray, whoop and eventually droop. You will be entranced. You must go.
MySpace | Buy | MP3: Fool’s Gold – Surprise Hotel