"Damn these wild young hearts"

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Long time folklets! I've been away on a roadtrip with friends to Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Our final destination was The Lake of Stars Music festival in Mangochi, Malawi. We literally went to the echelons of tretchery and back on the way there cos we were four cute girls in a mini thinking we could just drive 4000km across Africa with no issues. Yeah right. That said, it was all worth it.






My favourite performance was the sublime presence of The Noisettes and especially their leading lady, Shingai Shinowa - who was short of parting the lake with her piercing voice and arresting performance antics. She is truly incredible. I don't know what happened to me while I was watching, but while she was crowd surfing (in the most elegant fashion), I started crying and felt the need to touch her. It was definitely one of my geekiest moments because I never used to understand why those crazy fans were crying in Michael Jackson's videos of his concerts. I now get it. Music is God's way of telling us everything will be ok.


This girl is Zimbabwean but grew up in South London. She doesn't just sing - she draws you in with her facial expressions, her quirky unpretentious vocal spasms, her overall attitude of cool and of course, what she wears when she performs. I couldn't take proper pics cos I was too far in the back but she came out wearing a very Abba circa 1979 white jumpsuit with long and flowy batwings attached to it. She then changed into a gold and white body suit with long sleeves, golden tassles and a fringed skirt that fell off while she was performing. She was barefoot throughout and kept lunging or running across the stage and at some point, on top of it. She clearly drank from the same cup of talent that Grace Jones and David Bowie once sipped from. It was truly the best live performance I've ever seen and I think she's one of the greatest performers in the world. I haven't slept properly for 5 days and this is the first thing I'm doing while I should be resting...looking for pics of her on the net.

Enjoy and sorry for the awolness.

2 comments:

@AkuaKor said...

Shingai rocks.....xa :)

Le Swapside said...

i dig the noisettes

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