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On a (yet another) grim London Friday, the masses have converged on Brick Lane’s 93 Feet East to witness the return of a legend to these shores. Having dealt with more than his fair share of setbacks throughout his career, the Large Professor has finally delivered the album that heads had waited almost half a decade for. Early DJ duties were handled by the Nextmen, who span the hardest 1990’s New York beats ever made, and got the crowd warmed up. You could tell from the number of British hip-hop luminaries who had turned up to pay homage (Braintax, Simon from the Creators, Big Ted and P Brothers) that tonight was going to be a special occasion. Unbilled support came from Insight, the Bostonian who has recently been making noise with his own releases and his appearences on Mr. Lif’s material. He delivered a short but energetic set to a polite reception, from a crowd that was obviously anxious to see Extra P do his thing. After another brief DJ interlude, the man behind a thousand hip-hop classics took to the stage with his tour manager, Kaos behind the ones and twos. Launching straight into ‘Bout That Time from his new ‘1ST Class’ LP, Large Professor had the crowd bouncing and showed that despite being almost fifteen years deep in the game, his skills had not been diminished. The crowd’s reaction was even more frantic upon hearing the opening bars of ‘The Mad Scientist’ and ‘Ijuswannachill’ taken from his unreleased ‘The LP’ album. OK, so he has the crowd eating out of his hand by now, so to seal the deal what is a legend to do? A little ‘Fakin’ the Funk’, anyone? The DJ Kaos’ off beat cutting hampered the show a little but Extra P kept it together with his charismatic stage presence and vocals. The reaction to ‘Looking At The Front Door’ must have caused tremors in China as the crowd followed the make-up to break-up classic word for word. ‘Live At The Barbecue’ was a completely different matter. Now, anyone who has been to a few shows in their time would like to think that they know what a good crowd reaction looks and sounds like. Please adjust your definitions accordingly. Upon hearing the opening bars, the crowd erupted in cheers, Large Pro led them in the “It’s like that y’all!” chorus and then the audience proceeded to spit Nas’ verse in its entirety, as one, to a back at him. He looked genuinely taken aback as 500 heads claimed to have gained pre-teen entry to the underworld for “snuffing Jesus”. The fact that LP had produced so many classics for other artists proved to be a bit of a fly in the ointment as it meant that he would sometimes only drop a single verse from the songs in his back catalogue and then cut the record short, and we are also deprived of some of his best known compositions. After dropping his new collabs with (the beautiful ‘In the Sun’) Q-Tip and Nas (‘Stay Chisel’), we were led to believe that Extra P would drop a gem that the crowd requested but he changed his mind and decided to make his exit. The audience, although a bit disappointed gave him a healthy send off. So all in all, with the exception of a bit of shady turntable work, it was inspiring to see a legend do his thing in the flesh. Oh yeah, and believe those Main Source reunion rumours – we got it straight from the horse’s mouth…
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Large Professor 93 Feet East 