Number / Binary / Sunday Best

Red Snapper tapped into the secret history of London’s streets. Founding members Ali Friend and Richard Thair`s new venture, Number, is just the same. A melting pot of influences that gathers the capital’s musical ghosts. A creation informed by too many sleepless nights to count – parties and afters – that has found itself – too many times – in places it didn’t ought to be. Privy to a seedy underbelly of blues, shabeens, blackmarket spivs and speakeasys. A hip hep-cat mix of rock & roll rumble and jazz jive. Echoes of The Flamingo and The Whiskey A Go Go. Out on the piss with Lucky Gordon and Root Jackson. A creation with a whole lot of stories to tell. Infused with inner city grit and grime, and as punk-funky as fuck. In places recalling the duo’s equally grungy contemporaries Gramme. In others sounding like the spectre of the Sabres Of Paradise`s Nicky McGuire – winding his hammered way home from a haunted dancehall. Down lost pre-gentrification east end alleyways towards dawn. Loose rumbas of of beach blanket bongos and Pablo`s melodica. Sweet vocals backed by dread soundsystem boom. Dubwise rewinds and twists. Friend manhandles his bass. Thair deals with the drums. His beats like a subtracted, deconstructed, Tony Allen. The tightly twanged guitars also bearing a West African influence. The brass coming in punches. There are wheezy 808s – electro – cowbells, marimba, Tarantino-esque Pulp Fiction exotica sleaze, and epic Eno & Lanois-like treatments of strings and Stratocasters. Never Change sings of betrayal to increasingly angry, snarling sequences. Red Flag speaks of flames and revolution.