Gaika review – street-corner evangelist reignites music's political passion

Listening to dancehall on the radio, you might easily forget that this is music with a proud political tradition, stretching right back to the times when calypso would mull over contemporary events with the energy of today’s rolling news. Gaika, a Brixton vocalist sitting somewhere between MC, crooner and street-corner evangelist, is reigniting it.

“Nothing can stop us, no Theresa, no Boris,” he ad-libs between songs which sketch out a London teetering on apocalypse – but which still holds the potential for sex and abandon.

Warming up the city’s famously aloof power-hipsters on a cold Wednesday evening proves difficult, but Gaika’s anthems finally win them round after 15 minutes or so. Backed with a laptop-wrangler, and a drum programmer who provides live dub echo with ultra-faint backing vocals, he delivers bracing sermons, with melody dispensed in favour of a rhythmic monotone. Bipolar Sunshine cameos, but he can’t match the sheer brimstone weight of Gaika’s delivery.

He has the iconic, unteachable magnetism of a cult leader, and can therefore invest a chorus as banal as Roadside’s “under the streetlight” with intense drama merely by repeating it. On Buta, his sexuality sounds calculating, with erotic demands delivered as if from a throne; but on Bohdy Knows At 90, he’s vulnerable, pleading for forgiveness. He closes with 3D, and its announcement of “this is my city, and these are my streets, in a state of emergency” feels appropriate in Corsica Studios, where, over the road, social housing has been bled out of the Heygate estate and replaced with luxury flats.

Gaika is a politician, a seducer, a poet and a preacher, and on stage is where his words have the most power.