True Tiger’s first ever live, intimate gig was at Barfly in Camden last night. A few people were wondering how a dubstep group could perform a live show. Bringing in a bassist, drummer, and sitar and with Chunky their host banging away on a tambourine, proved that it can be done, and it can be done well.
Mikill Pane supported the group with his DJ first, he told me why he was here today, ‘True Tiger are going to be on my album, we’ve got a tune called ‘Roll On.’ We were on the roof of his (Stanza’s) studio and he was like, “We’d love to get you to support us at our show,” obviously I said yes because they’re my good mates.’
‘It was f****** cool tonight. I’m going through my iphone when I get home and picking out my favourite photos.’
‘I love live bands. If you look at a lot of the photos that I took, they’ll be focused on the drummer, it’s all about the beat for me. True Tiger’s forte is the fact they produce stuff with amazing beats. The melodies are cool, the beats are amazing, so it enhanced it.’
True Tiger performed some of their memorable tracks including ‘Jungle,’ without Professor Green who was on tour so couldn’t join them. Their remix of Ed Sheeran’s ‘A Team,’ really got the crowd going, it was just a shame he couldn’t be there, with Stanza telling me after, ‘Ed was meant to be here, we had it planned out, but last minute he had to go to Manchester to promote the album.’
Chunky introduced another support act asking the audience who they thought it was, hinting he was from the same area as him. It had to be Daley a singer/songwriter from Manchester. Stanza told me about the new track that he performed tonight, ‘we’ve got a new tune with him which is one of the singles from our album called ‘Love Lost,’ he’s got an amazing voice and we had to get him here to do the single. It was wicked to have him here, he’s going to have a bright year next year.’
Everyone got hyped up when D Double blessed the stage for ‘Be Like Me,’ which was one of the highlights of the night, along with ‘Slang Like This,’ with P Money’s appearance of the night. It proved how fantastically well MC’s can work with a live band, enhancing the performance.
They played some of their dirtier bass tracks including ‘Show Me Your Bass Face,’ and Sukh Knight’s ‘Ganja Dub,’ and ‘Orange Powder.’ The show ended with their most recently released single, which features Maverick Sabre and Professor Green, ‘In The Air.’
Stanza told me how he thought the show went about the build up to it, ‘It’s out first live show; we’ve been working on it for the past few months. We wanted to keep it intimate. Normally we just DJ so mixing tunes, or doing PA’s with artists just playing the backing track which is really boring for us. This time we got to play our tunes live, and play all the parts. We’re all playing different parts of it and added different intros and outros, so yeah it was good.’
‘It’s been tough we’ve been rehearsing long hours, just taking a lot of trial and error, there were a couple of things we weren’t happy with but hopefully no one noticed.’
I asked him how nervous they were, ‘A couple of our lot had a sneaky lot, it’s our first show so everyone was anxious to see how many people were there, and if anyone was actually going to come. Everyone was a bit nervous, and we were relying on new equipment and stuff we’ve never run through before. The maschine and the novation kit, that’s all new, we were a bit worried about how it was going to run.’