Kid Koala

Essential Festival 2000 review

Kid Koala was headlining the Eclectic tent as the final act and was also finishing off lengthy tour with this festival appearance. The Canadian turntable nerd was performing with his band Bullfrog, as well as another wax killer, P-Love from New York. They were arranged with the drummer and percussionist to the back, the rhythm and bass guitarists centre stage, and right at the front, a bank of 6 turntables where the star of the sow could get busy.

Bullfrog are basically a laid back funk band. Not a band with a DJ who occasionally does a couple of crappy baby-scratches, but a funk band, only they don't have any keyboards, there is no horn section and no vocalists. Instead Kid Koala is constantly cutting up the strangest records you have ever heard. He has records you can't even imagine exist - vinyl with recordings of people saying and doing the most banal things, from Quebecois lottery adverts to farmyard noises, he's prepared to scratch them all. On record, he mainly works by himself, but live, he almost always works with his fellow Canadians in Bullfrog.

They played a few tracks from both the Kid Koala releases he has put out on Ninja Tune, 'Skratchappyland' and 'Carpal Tunnel Syndrome' with the band adding in their lazy beats and funky bass for Kid Koala to cut up his array of spoken word and self-help vinyl over. The band members were all very relaxed despite the manically-grinning Kid Koala seeming to constantly do the unexpected with his records. The eight or so years that Bullfrog have spent together explains this level of understanding, and you can bet that Kid Koala (the ultimate bedroom nerd DJ?) likes to practice too.

And that is exactly what he and P-Love must have been doing, because they engaged in an epic 8-minute long version of a track from 'Skratchappyland' whose name I cannot remember. As he kept pointing out, it was originally recorded on four-track, so to do it live with 2 DJ's and thus only 4 hand was going to require a great deal on coordination on the turntables. Well, that's exactly what those boys have got, and it seemed pretty flawless to me - most impressive.

While Kid Koala may not be everyone's cup of tea due to his fully weirded out ideas about what constitutes music, I think he's a genius, and him and his fellow band members got the packed eclectic tent bumping along. While it wasn't as funky as James Brown and it wasn't as strange as Lee Perry, it was a wicked blend of the two - surely no bad thing?