Review of Dilated Peoples UK Show Thurs 18/03/04

[On The Edge of Insanity]

After much trouble trying to find the venue from the tube station, I got in at about 7:45pm, to be greeted by a DJ playing the a pretty standard range of hiphop. After a few drinks I made my way towards the stage to get a good position before the support artists came on.

The first support artist was some dude from New York, but I unfortunately I didn't catch his name. He played for about 20 minutes, and most of his songs sounded pretty dope, he had a joint with Pharoahe which he wanted to perform but the cd kept fucking up so he couldn't perform it. He said that Pharaohe, Biz Markie and Dilated were going to be on his album, so if I can find out who he was I'll probably peep it.

After a small DJ set, Music Mystro of the Natural Born Spitters came out with one of the other members of NBS, who I didn't catch the name of. He played for about half an hour, and pretty much persuaded me in that time that he album would be worth checking out. Most of his beats were dope, and his rhyming had some real quality moments. The other guy basically just played the role of his hype man throughout the performance, but then dropped a "freestyle" at the end which was tighter than anything Mystro had spit in the whole time he'd been on stage. I couldn't help wondering how dope it would have been if he had been spitting the whole time.

After another DJ session, Dilated finally arrived on stage at about 10pm. I had managed jostle my way to the equivalent of the third row by then, so I had a real good view of proceedings. Babu came out first, did his soundcheck, a little scratching, and then scratched into the instrumental for "Live On Stage" as Evidence and Iriscience jumped onto the stage, and stated an hour and a quarter of pure dopeness. They went through all the classics from "The Platform" and "Expansion Team", played some new material and busted a couple of a freestyles. Both of them sounded almost spot on live, but Evidence is by far the more crowd friendly of the two, keeping the audience pumped up throughout the show, and involving plenty of crowd participation. Being in the third row I was close enough to slap palms with Evidence as he shook with all the dudes near the front to the left of the stage as we were by far the most live section of the crowd. The only disappointment was that the show had to end, because I could have quite easily watched them all night. They closed with "Work The Angles" after an encore, and it was a dope way to end a really good night, definitely up there with seeing Gangstarr and Pete Rock & CL Smooth.

[Darksider]

sounds good