And how would you like your noodles, sir? Slightly jazzy? Half-cooked? Long, thin and spectacularly bland? You aren’t by any chance aware of Fila Brazillia, are you? Hmm, thought so.
They said it would never happen, but tonight is Fila Brazillia‘s first London show in their organically-nurtured eight-year career as Hull’s most successful acid jazz throwbacks – and half the thrill this evening involves seeing what they look like. Until last month the duo of Steve Cobby and Dave McSherry had refused to speak to the media about any of their seven albums and thrived on word-of-mouth rapture and occasional endorsements by Gilles Peterson.
Admirable though their stoically independent stance is, it’s odd that the Filas are so protective of a music devoid of any governing agenda or personality. Odder still is the feverish adulation afforded them by the rucksack-mounted massive, here determined to “chill” en masse to lost cappuccino-funk episodes like ‘Zed And Two Ls’ and ‘Harmonicas Are Shite’. This, the signs all say, is real music kept real, and it’s really tedious.
Two encores and much of their new ‘A Touch Of Cloth’ album later and London is theirs. London, though, is welcome to them.