When I walked into town and went to cross a road last Saturday, I half-expected to be knocked down by a car it was so busy. Then something extraordinary happened: I wasn’t. No car came and knocked me over, no one was speeding, no one came careering onto the curb smashed out on booze and drugs. You see, even though I expected it to happen, it didn’t. Same thing with the lottery that day. I was all smiled-up and certain that by next Saturday I’d be eating oysters off the soft, bronzed bellies of young Tahitian girls as my yacht bobbed evenly offshore at Bora Bora. And this is the strange part: it never happened.
So when the hugely astute Doc Brown tells me that kids today only fight, thieve and fuck because we expect them to fight, thieve and fuck, and not because these work-shy slackers are idly trying to compound credible male identities in a precarious, screwed-up world that denies them access to those identities by any long line of legitimate means (because it took away the pits, the mills, the car factories) you know what? I think he’s talking shit. If I got everything I expected out of life I’d be knocking back Buddies with Beckham just as Victoria goes down on her knees, unzips my trousers and provides a fun five-minutes of non-Holistic stress relief. But if he is right, I have a simple solution to our crisis. Instead of expecting these young hoodlums to be idle, delinquent bastards without any meaningful grasp of respect in their hoodied little heads, expect them instead to come round your house next week to mow the lawn before going into town and carrying back your groceries. And bingo, they’ll all be nice again. They don’t need to adjust their behaviour; they just need the rest of us to adjust our expectations. And a hug, of course. It’s so simple.
But anyway, enough of the debate, let’s get back to stand-up philosopher and citizen to the street, Doc Brown who, putting his fairly disastrous social commentaries aside, dishes up all manner of slippery, smash and grab beats beneath a sweet West London brogue and a curiosity shop of samples.
Lively rather than loquacious and slicing through class-divides and notions of celebrity (‘Superstar Divides’) with a fairly lo-fi, workshop approach that stays fresh as a daisy throughout. ‘What Else Can We Do?’ featuring Luc Skyz might be riddled with cultural inaccuracies, but it has one cute groove and spits more good vibes than it does blood, as does the smoothy and fruity gangsta touches of title track, ‘Nothing To Lose’ featuring some rather tasty swiss-horns.
After gatecrashing the scene with his remix of Gary Jules’ ‘Mad World’ and his own debut release, ‘The Document’ last year, Doc Brown returns with 16 tracks of savvy introspection, some neat confessional twists, some assiduous soul sampling and more dust than you could pan from the street.
It revisits old ground, of course, but what doesn’t?