The Blues - Live from Romare
An ode to rhythm and reminiscence
Hot on the heels of our last #content, edition 48 is here. Like a good 192, two turn up at once. This week sees Sam Hartford enter Manchester’s Blues Kitchen to see his favourite electronic artist Romare twiddle the knobs and blast the brass, a lesson in affinity with an artist honed over many years.
It’s April but yet another hanging night of grey, drizzly weather has descended on the city. The kind you’d get good mileage out of in the opening exchanges of a work meeting. Me and Rich are seeking some sheltering sounds at The Blues Kitchen. It’s a licensed venue with a theme in Manchester, imagine the shock, but there are worse offenders. Those that chew up the city’s cultural capital, spit it out and turn it into the very grout that lines the tiles of the naff new openings. Anyhow, the idea here makes some sense and upstairs is entirely passable as a music venue (Soul, Hip Hop and RnB nights are a regular) but maybe not the kind of purpose built space Laughing Stock are used to reviewing from.
We’re here to see Archie Fairhurst, or Romare as the alias goes, and I can categorically say he’s my favourite electronic artist. Which feels like a fundamentally childish statement. To declare an outright favourite in this fluid sphere of music, defining it like crisp flavours. That is the mantle I’m giving him though; such is the influence his rhythmic, distinctive and infectious output has consistently had on me since discovering him in 2016, when my older brother put me onto the album Love Songs: Part Two. Growing up I’d co-opt the bands my brother liked (Franz Ferdinand, The Shins, Vampire Weekend) or just outright nab things (Penguin jackets, his iPod, a Dinosaur Jnr t-shirt, his expired passport for ID) but it’s the tip on to Romare that I’m most grateful for. I’ve since gone on to see Romare in London and Leeds so catching his live DJ in Manchester was a no brainer; the banker, the one that couldn’t fail, the one that’s never failed.
It’s a fitting venue name for Romare to be playing at, so dominant is the masterful sampling of the blues and jazz records that he mined in his early work. Channeling his musical knowledge into an Afrocentrism, considered style of collage (his name takes inspiration from the multi-disciplinary artist Romare Bearden) that was a fundamental feature to the sound and artwork of his formative releases. He starts the night’s set with a track from that era; ‘Down the Line - It Takes a Number’, the atmospheric and reverb heavy reformatting of which completely ripples through my consciousness. At this point I take note of any punters who’ve paid to be here only to still be absorbed in their own conversations and think “oi, appreciate this”. Favouritism can be juvenile.
Romare moves through the gears, all long limbs and accutely focused energy as he constantly twists at the apparatus. He’s sporting a short sides, floppy top, mullet cut that curls ludicrously to settle onto his shoulders. Less Aussie rules, more rennaisance. On the decks he is smattering the toppling beats with snippets of his signature singles, in a deconstructed and delightful fashion. Then there was a bit of a churn in momentum, not helped by a technical issue where the bass cut out and over zealous exposed white lights kept being rotated on by the fellas operating those dials. Maybe it’s to cover the liability of a massive round table which has been inexplicably plonked in middle of the crowd. King Arthur declares rum and cokes. Sensing the need to recapture things Romare delivers some treats from 2020 album Home. It had all his usual hypnotic fusion of sounds and genre but progressed that from something choppy to more fulfilled and self-imposing. There were some satisfying dancefloor bangers too, like ‘Heaven’ which triumphed as a summer anthem on the networks and the streamers in spite of those quasi covid restrictions limiting us all to a speaker in the park. The rule of six, a poor imitator for festival season.
For all his finesse there’s a sense of Romare winding things down, onto the next one, but this lays the ground for him to set an interluding loop and take up a composed turn on both trumpet and guitar. Adding a grin inducing point of difference to a live DJ set, and a mere snippet of just how instrumentally minded an electronic artist he is. Some of the finer examples of his alchemy with this came on Fantasy in 2022. I greeted that album with an assurance of enjoyment but this year’s EP Here Comes The Night is more of a return to the acclaimed formula. I’m hoping ‘Discotheque’ from that gets a proper turn but there’s no time left, those white lights find their calling and soon we’re all hearding ourselves out.
All things considered this wasn’t the most affirming or off-kilter setting and experience to review a brilliant artist from. But what pierced through all that, elevated it to a personal place beyond the outer planes, was affinity. So this becomes an ode to that, to Romare, to the power of reminisence and attribution through music. How a live show doesn’t always have to inspire something anew, just reaffirm something you knew. Archie Fairhurst’s albums and tracks have been my most accompanied listen for nearly a decade, all the releases I’ve been into I can match to formative and transitional periods in my 20s. I’ve baked nostalgia into Romare’s brilliant body of work. This night I was afforded the chance to let that play out in my mind. It’s a powerful drug.
Some further watching…
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