Although he twice claimed the UK beatboxing championship, Beardyman has transcended the boundaries of his craft. Armed with four Kaoss pads, the Brighton based musician has perfected his innovative technique of sampling and looping his own voice. Hip Hop is the staple of beatboxing, however, Beardyman’s shows reveal his unwillingness to toe the line as he touches on jungle, Stevie Wonder, and whatever else takes his fancy. Here the not-actually-bearded man reminisces on some of his stranger touring experiences.
On weird gig commissions I did a gig for Google, pretending to be a French lecturer on voice recognition technology. I got a couple of people up from the audience and got them to say their names into this system, which was actually my live rig and then started sampling their voices and forced them to dance and then I had these images come up on the screen, weird images. And then I did a proper set and then I had to introduce the head of Google and the head of Youtube. I’ve done these children’s concerts in Dublin, Manchester, and London. In Manchester there were 8,000 children behind me singing when I beatboxed, and all of their parents. I’ve also done breakcore gigs, Like this one gig where there was this naked Spaniard saying poetry and everything he said ended with ‘you have the most beautiful cock in the world. That was his thing.
On the Late Late Show I was expecting a crowd made up of entirely older woman, but on the night it was a really mixed crowd. I’d seem some clips before, and it pans across the audience and it was just old women,. It was really fun, I wanted to play longer and get a party going but I just had my four minutes before I had to get out of there. I didn’t realise how serious it was. I was standing up there waiting for my turn listening to Anna from Big Brother 1 talking about what its like being a lesbian nun.
On warm-up acts and ugly Russians Actually the weirdest warm up act I had was the entire Russian army choir. This was in Moscow and the bill was the Red Army choir, Groove Armada, and me. They were singing all these old-school, hearty Russian songs and then halfway through this, a hous
e beat kicks in and they started doing this left to right march, and the weird thing was that no-one in the audience thought there was anything strange about it. That’s how weird Russia is, that they were all dancing and nobody even had a smile on their face.
They had this thing on the door called face control where if you’re ugly you don’t get in. I’m not even joking, in Russia that is a totally acceptable thing to do. You can advertise that you’ve got that policy on the door. I was chatting to groups of people who were like ‘ our friends didn’t get in, they are too ugly!’ It kills the vibe in a club when there are no ugly people. If the all the girls are that good looking, the boys don’t want to act silly. It was a very serious atmosphere.
On improv and crowd suggestions If there is a club of like 300 people it can be impossible. If you ask for a suggestion all you get is ‘yaaaaah’. I’m kind of budgeting for the fact that they might be really crazy by saying that the suggestions I’m gonna do are from Facebook and Twitter. I think that’s probably safer because I’ve had some really good suggestions so far. It’s probably just gonna be me announcing what I’m gonna do, or just do it and let people figure it out for themselves. If people are being reverential and chilled out and want to listen to me talk for a few seconds and explain what I’m going to do then great, if not and they’re just up for a mad party that’s cool as well.
The inaugural show of his Open Sauce tour is set for the Twisted Pepper on April 28th. You can barrage him with requests via Facebook or Twitter if you feel so inclined.
Words: Paddy O’Mahoney
