Shorry about my mate, the stranger slurs in my ear, he'sh a loverly guy really, he can't handle his drinksh you know? I take his arm off my shoulders. The staggering drunk loudmouth friend falls back into me again. We have a conversation that he'll never remember about Shri's flute playing and how amazing the drummer is. His mate shouts Play something FAST! I want to dance! Play LOUDER! I grit my teeth and grin, he's been doing this all night but the music's too good for this to get me down.
Shri has already started when we get to Fiddlers and when I enter the main room I am shocked. Horrified, in fact. I mean Fiddlers is a great place to go out. It has this whole social club feeling, what with the canteen tables out the back and the gig room with its brick walls and wooden floor. Lots of really good people play there from the 'world music' stage and whenever I've gone it's always been packed...
But not today. Today the good people of Bristol have decided that they're not interested in listening to amazing Asian underground music. Possibly they think it's all been done before, that it must be impossible to keep breathing new life into this kind of urban beats meets Bollywood and Indian Classical funk with lashings of hip hop and drum and bass. The last time I saw Shri play was with his DJ companion Badmarsh and the place was really jumping. There are a couple of classic Badmarsh and Shri tunes, from the early Outcaste days that develop into tabla vs bass vs drumkit improvised conversations, the bowed bass is divine, the female singer sounds lovely and passionate and the male singer... Well. Insane is the only word for it.
The music is still redolent of the early Asian underground days and the same formulae still apply of carnatic melodies over an urban beat. Since I love this combination and find something fundamentally sublime about indian melodies (don't even get me started on the tabla) the mix is just about perfect. The drum and bass is more complicated and much further developed than Badmarsh and Shri's early work, more 4hero and old jungle rhythms. Being played live means that the drummer wants to add much more variety to what he does, as well as have much more interaction with the other musicians on the stage. Not all live drum and bass is this good, London Elektricity got it horribly wrong in their last incarnation where the 'amazing jungle drummer' played the same rhythm over and over for an hour.
Shri himself is truly a master musician, equally of bass, flute and tabla and I'm sure a great deal more besides. The flute playing is particularly moving and even my drunk friend managed to keep his mouth shut for at least five minutes, swaying gently in his alcohol cloud.
Although the performance is par excellence, the whole gig is overshadowed by the emptiness of the place and there is an air of guilty pleasure about the whole thing, almost as if we really think they should come back later when more people have turned up. The band hide their feelings about this of course, and even give us a half hour encore to show their appreciation for us sticking around. The annoying Mr Drunk Guy even gets his hand shaken by the man himself, who at one point tells him to shut up and let everyone enjoy themselves. I would have stuck around for more too, but they leave the stage and we have to go home.
