The Demon Barber Roadshow
Album: The Lock In (DVD)
Label: Safecracker
Tracks: n/a
Website: http://www.thelockindanceshow.co.uk

This is a feelgood DVD release that's guaranteed to produce positive and uplifting reactions in the sternest of visages; but that's by no means its only selling-point. Its "main feature" is a film of the latest Demon Barber Roadshow stage extravaganza. But Damien Barber and his chums have over the past few years produced a series of Roadshows which with ever-increasing inventiveness combine folk and other forms of dance in a provocative, stimulating and constantly entertaining fashion, and The Lock In is arguably the most tellingly realised and integrated of the Roadshows to date. In its most basic form, though: a pub's after-hours lock-in is the scenario for clashes between the indoors folk contingent (clog and rapper dancers and singers/musicians) and three gatecrashing hip-hop dancers. After various competing, showing off and posturing or duelling episodes, the two factions attain a healthy understanding and respect, and much common ground is demonstrated between the ostensibly opposing "traditions".

The show is accomplished, lively, fast-paced, passionately executed and at times distinctly ferocious, with that edge-of-the-seat frisson of danger that's a perennial hallmark of the DB Roadshow - and it's decidedly sexy too (in all the right ways!)… The individual "items" within include groovy session tunes, some rocked-up trad songs from the band, instrumental virtuosity, characteristic rapper and morris routines (partly familiar from earlier Roadshows), a longsword dance improvised with pool-cues, and even a sleazy cloggy tango, together with plenty of abundantly animated breakdance and bodypopping numbers. The storytelling angle is also very well managed, for all that the 87-minute show is still self-evidently made up of a sequence of routines. It's all quite literally breathtaking, and the sense of energy is carried across the edge of the stage right into your living-rooms by dint of the involving yet unfussy camerawork. Performance-wise, there are so many "stars of the show" that it seems invidious to single out any individuals, but I must do so: beatbox supremo Grace Savage is a totally extraordinary talent, while fiddle-singer Bryony Griffith and hip-hop legend Bobak Walker excel even what I'd thought them capable of. But the whole "company" works so incredibly well together to realise the thoughtfully integrated and creatively choreographed narrative.

Aside from The Lock In itself, the DVD delivers Dancing With Demons, an honest and informative mini-documentary on Damien's own artistic development and subsequent career masterminding the Roadshow, together with a couple of DB Roadshow promotional videos and footage of some memorable performances by Black Swan Rapper including the stupendous pyrotechnic display (Fire Dance) from 2003's Sidmouth, and interviews with "recent converts" (notably my old school chum, the Specials' Horace Panter). Oh, and a pair of enticing trailers for the Way Of The Morris and Morris: A Life With Bells On films - which are sequenced to auto-play before the main menu appears (the only infuriating feature of this DVD).

Taken in total, The Lock In (aka Time, Gentlemen, Please) is an entirely engrossing, involving, invigorating and supremely entertaining experience, a tremendously vital and seriously groundbreaking show - and immense fun to watch, over and again.

David Kidman