O2 Love Music Column – May 2012

Jimmy Cliff 

O2 Academy, Sat 19 May

Doors 7pm followed by reggae DJs until 2am, £22.50 + BF.

Remember when pop music was a force for good? Yes, I'm struggling a bit too, which makes Jimmy Cliff all the more relevant in reminding us at what a musical icon can do when you combine forces of politics, culture and some of the most irrepressible pop music of the last 40 years. 

Unlike most inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cliff continues doing his thing: just last month he played his part in Coachella’s rather epic line up and now he’s back on the road in the UK. His appeal endures because, live, it is impossible to resist his glorious pop anthems like You Can Get it If You Really Want, I Can See Clearly Now and Wonderful World, Beautiful People. His more politically charged songs don’t make any trade off in terms of their pop values for moral ones; the emotive, gospel confession in Many Rivers to Cross and Vietnam which Dylan proclaimed to be “the greatest protest song”, are testament to that.

His pumped up version of Guns of Brixton from last year’s Sacred Heart EP, produced by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, feels like it has stepped into the room from another era. With neat symmetry, the song name checks the character, ‘Ivan’, that Cliff played in the 1972 film The Harder They Come that Clash bassist Paul Simonon adored. While that character never made it past the final scene, Cliff himself has proved to be one of the great musical survivors. 

New Order

O2 Academy, Sat 5 May

7pm, 

It should be no surprise that the remaining members New Order are able to find it within themselves to tour once more after losing another key member of the band over some seemingly irreconcilable differences. The mythology of the band and the era from which they emerged, along with the songs themselves, remain far too resonant to be suppressed by the self-imposed exile of bassist Peter Hook, and his replacement Tom Chapman seems accepting enough of the burden that has been placed upon him. The first UK tour in six years finds the band recharged with enthusiasm and last year’s double ‘best of’ album which featured twice as many New Order songs as it did Joy Division ones is comment enough on the music.

Balkan Beat Box

O2 ABC 2, Wed 16 May

Doors 7pm, £15+BF

Musically and stylistically, acclaimed New York/Israeli collective Balkan Beat Box manage to tick more boxes than those people who make a living out of filling out online questionnaires. Hip hop, electronica, dub, ragga, horns, guitars, decks...yes, even children’s toys have made appearances at some point across their four albums. These elements are subservient to the riotous energy that this band of global border hoppers bring to everything they play, which explains their rise from New York’s local live scene to an international band who, naturally, at their heart have Ori Kaplan, a saxophonist and ex-member of another global musical rabble, Gogol Bordello.