You’ll have heard of one part of transatlantic hip-hop outfit, Swet Shop Boys: Riz Ahmed. He was recently on the cover of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People issue, having been plastered all over screens big and small: Ahmed played Bodhi Rook in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Before his acting career went stratospheric, though, he was Riz MC, a talented rapper from Wembley.
Tonight, alongside Himanshu Kumar Suri (who goes by Heems ), he is part of Swet Shop Boys, an outfit whose angry party music employs creativity, rage and a roving eye to deal with the experience of being young brown guys in an increasingly mad world (Heems is a New Yorker of Indian origin, Ahmed is a Londoner with Pakistani heritage).
Manchester is, inevitably, on their minds: Ahmed wears a Man U top, Heems wears a too-tight Man City shirt and there is a shout-out for the city before a slinky but loud version of their song Phone Tap.
Removing your shoes is one theme ripe for mocking. Heems takes off his brand new trainers and urges Ahmed to do the same: “This is a house of worship,” he grins. Then they launch into No Fly List, a coruscating song about being stopped at airports – and asked to remove their shoes. This being Swet Shop Boys, there is a love song to various kinds of trainers in there too, references to Syria and a certain media magnate – as in, “Rupert trying to fuck us / And we all buying lube for him”. Airports recur on what is probably Swet Shop Boys’ greatest hit: T5, about racial profiling. At the start of the US Muslim ban, the chorus was chanted by protesters at Los Angeles airport– as it is tonight, twice over: “Inshallah, mashallah / Hopefully no martial law!”
This much-needed love-in is, amazingly, only Swet Shop Boys’ second-ever London gig. At nightfall, Heems hands out bananas to those breaking their Ramadan fast. Fondly recalling being a student at Soas in London some 12 years ago, Heems used to be the more famous Swet Shop Boy, having started off in polemical New York crew Das Racist, who are, perhaps unfairly, best remembered for a song called Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. (He is also a journalist and now works in advertising.)
Even as recently as last year’s Cashmere album, Heems seemed, superficially, to be the snarky goofball to Ahmed’s rabid conscience, but tonight both men swap from laughs to intensity and back. Behind the decks is producer Redinho, whose bass, rubbery bounce and subcontinental musical flourishes can’t be discounted. Most beautiful of all tonight is Aaja, a love song that’s a nagging, elegant fusion of west and east.
It would have been easy, you assume, for Ahmed and Heems to throw themselves into their other careers after making a definitive statement like Cashmere, but their recently released Sufi La EP is brimming with energy and party tunes. The title track pits Heems’s laid-back boasting (“all the Arab girls, they never telling me, ‘la, la, la’”) (“la” meaning “no” in Arabic) against Ahmed’s double-time swagger. Thas My Girl, meanwhile, starts with a riff on Brandy and Monica’s The Boy Is Mine and unfurls with a flirtatious Bollywood flavour.
Really, though, the abiding moment of this gig is Ahmed’s mid-set freestyle, an eloquent condemnation of the horrors of violence, and a deconstruction of how disenchanted young men are being seduced into terrorism not only by a false interpretation of religion but by socio-economic failures.
Halfway through Sour Times – a track Ahmed originally released solo in 2011, its relevance undimmed – he puts down the mic and, from the lip of the stage, continues without any amplification. The crowd lurches from devotional silence to whooping.
