Basement Jaxx
October 2, 2001
Mayan

Basement Jaxx have only DJ'ed in the US. This was their big "live show" and there were claims of a 9-piece band coming along for the tour. I hate electronic acts with bands backing them up, it pretty much always crap (see BT). Some of the "mainstream" people might like the fact that there's a real drummer there, but I perfer to just have a few guys behind some decks playing music (Orbital, Chemical Brothers, and Underworld are perfect examples). It turns out that Basement Jaxx's band was array of singers and one guy on bongo's, which was totally sweet.

The tickets were kinda expensive so I was expecting a pretty good light show. They had three screens in the background but the edges of the screens were wavey lines. You get the effect that you're peeking into another world. Like the concert is happening in the Mayan Theater, but there's a whole 'nother world behind the curtain. The screens themselves weren't like normal projections either, it was like a really bad laptop screen times 100. So the images were really grainy and low-resolution and that just added to the effect. They pretty much fired through all the hits early on like Red Alert, Romeo, Get Me Off, Rendez-Vu, Just 1 Kiss, Where's Your Head At, and Broken Dreams. The funniest number had to be Do Your Thing. It's not my favorite song on the album but live was just incredible. Just imagine this huge black lady going "Boom Bang Boom Bang-Bang!" and shaking her ass to go with it, I was crackin' up the whole time. Basement Jaxx have waited a long time before bringing a full live show to the US and it was well worth the wait and the ticket price.