First it is important you know that I was very tired. It was late at night and I’d just got back from a weekend trip to Germany with Of All The People In All The World when, scrolling though the BBC’s online Glastonbury coverage, an image of Nadia Rose intrigued us enough to eventually persuade our tablet to play her set.
It was UNBELIEVABLY GOOD. I was amazed at how fresh and radical it was. She was fantastic, her all female team were powerful, the whole set was an incredibly complex web of looped beats and wordplay that was like rap fused with the early tape experiments of Steve Reich. Eventually sleep became imperative, we stabbed the damn tablet and at the second attempt got it to shut up. I drifted off content that music was at last exciting again.
The next day, bounding into work like an over exuberant teenager I insisted that everyone listen to my remarkable new ‘discovery’. On listening back Nadia Rose was good but not that good and the radical loop effect that had blown my mind seemed to have disappeared. Gripped horror at my own stupidity and crushed by disappointment, the penny finally dropped, we’d been playing her set twice simultaneously, in two browser windows, one delayed from the other by maybe a second and a half. We had been adding the Steve Reich effect ourselves, Nadia Rose and her DJ/Producer are not geniuses after all, they’re great, but we were bloody idiots.