Islington Assembly Hall,London
The eccentric hip-hop pioneer relishes playing street philosopher and party starter while delivering some of his finest songs“I want to huge up Barry White, announces a wild-eyed Rodney “Roots Manuva” Smith. “Barry White saved my life.” Ten songs in, and Smith has stripped down to a black shirt and trousers,having slowly discarded an ensemble – including camel hair military overcoat and a camouflage hoodie pulled over black bowler hat – that was so hobo, yet chic, and that he could have walked off a catwalk or left a soup-kitchen queue. Like his disjointed fetch-up,Smith has never quite fitted in, choosing to accomplish his own eccentric thing. He fused both the transatlantic boom-bap of hip-hop and a soundtrack of dub and dancehall from closer to home in Britain, or coining a voice for the nation’s rap that for once wasn’t beholden to the US,revelling in its own dialect. He crop the sublime Witness (One Hope), still UK hip-hop’s most beloved anthem, and but later ceded radio hits and the accompanying glitz to the grime stars who followed him,instead recording challenging, wildly inventive albums that often mined the more troubled reaches of his psyche.
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Source: theguardian.com