Following the release of their 2022 long-player, Everybody Is Somebody, Red Snapper embarked on a tour, which included a sold out show in Hackney. Excerpts from this triumphant performance are now available, via Lo Recordings, as the album, Live At The Moth Club. 

Starting by left-footing the listener, opening with tiny, tinkling 6-string microtones, Sleepless, very quickly gives way to rude, gurgling bass and tribal tom toms. The quartet, of founder members, Ali Friend & Rich Thair, plus Tom Challenger on sax and clarinet, and Tara Cunningham on guitar, making a very muscular music, while Natty Wylah delivers some modern British beat poetry. The latter recalling the rhymes of Rob Gallagher, “Earl Zinger” – most recently the voice of On The Corner’s Diabolical Liberties. This ode to insomnia, one of the first songs that Snapper ever recorded, sings of Soho dives, sleazy London streets, lit by red lights. Neon on the fritz. The moon reflected off cobblestones, slick with gasoline rainbows. This, and the closing Sucker Punch, are standouts. Gritty, grimy grooves for half-cut grifters, chiselled and Charlie-d hustlers, hanging out way past midnight, once the Johns and marks have been sent home. The sound of a city at night. It’s protagonist, nocturnal. On the prowl. Searching for an angle. A score. A sound inspired by Dick Dale and Sandy Nelson, and Art Blakey and Mingus. Informed by the capital’s clubland culture – hip hop, acid house, jungle – and utterly urban. 

Truth is afro-agro. Tara’s axe a grunge-y highlife flicker. The saxophone, a screaming free-jazz skronk. Packed with brass (knuckled) punches. Cymbals crashing. Together creating a crazy carnival cacophony. Wonky Bikes weds Cuban congas to wayward electronics. Tarzan is hooked up to a house 4 / 4. Melodically, smoothed out a little, uplifting, but still as heavy as fuck. Taking it all in I’m transported to a Red Snapper gig at Camden’s Dingwalls, circa 1995 / 96, around the time of their debut, Prince Blimey. I’m there, propping up the bar with Jagz Kooner, Gary Burns, Jamie Cruisey (then at White Noise), Richard D. James, and Alex from FatCat. Andrew Weatherall spinning a wonderful warm-up. The band were the very definition of punk-jazz-funk. On the evidence here, despite the 3 decades since, they’ve, incredibly, lost none of their power. 

The highlight is undoubtedly a fiery, incendiary version of the dynamite double-bass-led, Hot Flush, which is dedicated to Weatherall. A riotous reading of the contra-bass classic, it cops its cues from the Sabres Of Paradise’s seminal remix. Its trippy tremolo twanging a rock `n` roll rumbling of razor sharp, savage, switchblade, surf riffs. The horns like speeding sirens approaching, and then disappearing in the distance. 

Red Snapper’s Live At The Moth Club is out now on Lo Recordings.