fri 29/03/2024

Toots and the Maytals, Academy, Islington | reviews, news & interviews

Toots and the Maytals, Academy, Islington

Toots and the Maytals, Academy, Islington

A late, brief and frustrating show from the reggae legend

The Academy was heaving, the floor was so sticky with beer that lifting one’s feet was an effort, and the crowd were beginning to lose patience. Frederick “Toots” Hibbert and the Maytals were late; a 9pm start for this London show was scheduled, but the appointed hour had come and gone, the minutes were ticking by, and the DJ’s efforts to keep us entertained with a string of ska and reggae classics were beginning to fall on stony ground. There was even some booing. Had it not been for the blast of cold air from the super-efficient air conditioning system that kept things chilled, tempers would almost certainly have begun to fray.

As it was, Toots and the Maytals finally arrived on stage at almost 10pm to a tumultuous welcome from the crowd of veteran skinheads, young skankers and reggae fans of all ages. Was it worth the wait? Actually, no. Once the sugar-rush of the opening song, “Pressure Drop”, had worn off, I quickly became aware of several glaring deficiencies.



First, the sound was thin; the keyboard was barely audible, the bass not rumbly enough, and Toots’s voice was buried way down in the mix, eclipsed by his shrieky backing vocalists. Second, the band looked disinterested to the point of boredom. Reggae as a live music has never been a forum for showboating or gurning, but these guys were taking passivity to a whole new level. They looked as if they were waiting for a bus, not playing on stage in front of several hundred people with a man who is not just a genuine Jamaican reggae legend, but is widely credited with having invented the word reggae.

Which brings me to Toots Hibbert himself: compact, smiley, bouncy. At 64, he still has energy to burn. But his voice is not what it was. There were only ghostly echoes of the soulful gospelly rasp of his heyday in the 1960s and 70s. Frankly, it was a bit feeble.

I have to admit that I suspect that I was in a minority. Most of the crowd seemed to lap it all up, singing and bobbing and doing their skanky dances. There were, however, periods when even diehard fans seemed to lose interest and talked among themselves. Toots and the Maytals have a large handful of hits to their name, and these were duly delivered, but much of the rest of the show was filled with a sort of aural padding, a drifty nothingness of lame tippy-tap rhythms and Toots’s wearisome extemporised hollerings.

They were on stage for about an hour, which I thought was a bit of a swiz. They did “Louie Louie”, they did “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, they did "Reggae Got Soul", they did “Monkey Man”, and they did a song from the new album, Flip and Twist, which was quite pleasant. And quite pleasant was about the best that could be said of a show that came and went unmemorably. More than any other kind of music, reggae has the capacity to make you feel joyful, alive; I never thought I’d be bored by it. But I was.

And then finally something happened. For the encore section, Toots strummed his guitar with purpose and the band suddenly seemed engaged. Hallelujah! They were making a beautiful sound, the gorgeous upbeat infectious ska of “Never Grow Old”, a song from their very earliest days, 1963. Fantastic. They followed it with "54-46 That's My Number”, perhaps their best known song, and even I was singing along and skanking. Which sent me home feeling more kindly disposed towards Toots and his band, but still frustrated. They’d shown us that they could do it, so why hadn’t they done it for the whole show rather than the last few minutes?

Watch Toots and the Maytals performing "Reggae Got Soul":



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