After Fischerspooner divides and rules the brighter and more fashionable tourist environs of New York, shamefully underestimated DJ and co-founder of City Rockers and Crosstown Rebel Records, Damian Lazarus guides us round the avenues and alleyways of the old smoke: London. You know the score. In any other trade this would be one of those righteous co-branding activities, promising all sorts of ‘synergy’ or ‘cross- exposure’, slicing through the greater part of modern demographics like a sword through a turd. In reality, it’s a blinder of mixtape with a slightly tacky and undernourished city travelogue on the flipside featuring one shockingly outdated breakbeat soundtrack. On the one side, a 14 track CD of perfectly weighted electronica (Squarepusher, Ty, Nathan Fake, Boom Bip ft. Gruff Rhys, Point B, Shriekback) plus a few red-herrings of choice (The Magic Numbers and Yazoo). On the other side an interactive DVD guiding you around Rough Trade and Notting Hill Arts Club, Walthamstow Races, Canal Side, Kew Gardens, and predictable London enclaves like Camden Market.
In truth, this could have been so much better. Perhaps a celebrity guide, a better narrative, a street-brawl, the violent assault on a man of 85 by a gang of unruly school children. Anything but the patchy and fairly arbitrary scrape at the surface that’s offered here. If something is ‘happening’ on the ‘the other side’ of London, it certainly ain’t happening here.
Remember those little breaks in the ‘Teletubbies’ where a half-dozen or so pre-schoolers do something really boring for five-minutes, like having a ride on a train or visiting a pig farm? Well it’s a little like that. Only not as informative.