Rhoda Dakar live review: 45 moon-stomping years of rocksteady rhythm
Living in a major city comes with a variety of benefits, predominantly the fact that you can walk out of your house on any given day of the week, take a stroll, and see a legendary artist perform at an incredible grassroots venue. On this particular Friday night, that venue was Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, and the artist was none other than Rhoda Dakar. Perhaps best known for her time fronting The Bodysnatchers, at the peak of the 2 Tone ska movement, Dakar was in town celebrating 45 years of being ska’s leading lady, and the celebration was truly something to behold.
As a Yorkshireman, I am not an overly emotional person, but even I must admit that, upon walking through the rows of redbrick towards Brudenell, I began to reminisce about my relationship with ska music. What had started largely by accident, after buying a copy of The Selecter’s Too Much Pressure as a 12-year-old in a junk shop, had since provided me with some of my fondest musical memories and friendships, which I will forever cherish. Those off-beat rhythms and black-and-white graphics have been one of the very few constants in my life thus far.
In those preteen days, going to see the likes of The Selecter and The Specials, it was my dad who had accompanied me, and the irony of a teenager forcing a middle-aged man to go and see The Specials was never lost on me. However, for Rhoda Dakar, I was flying solo, a lone head of hair among a sea of involuntary skinheads and thinning Chelsea cuts. Despite my presence bringing the average age in the room down by a considerable margin, that did not stop the crowd from quickly being energised by the infectious rhythms of ska and rocksteady.
After Tiger Edison, a rising star on the local scene in Leeds, played a fantastically soulful support slot, Rhoda Dakar emerged onto the stage alongside her band to thunderous applause. Immediately launching into her set, it quickly became clear that Dakar’s voice sounds just as strong today as it did back in 1979, if not stronger. More than that, though, it was plainly obvious that Dakar still maintains absolute joy in performing live, with the vocalist smiling, laughing and joking extensively in between songs.
Some space must be reserved in this article to heap praise on Dakar’s backing band, too. The saxophone stylings of noted multi-instrumentalist Terry Edwards – who has performed alongside everybody from Lydia Lunch to Hot Chip – were a notable highlight, although it would take some going to eclipse Dakar’s rhythm section. Ultimately, you cannot produce a good ska show without a decent rhythm section, and the captivating strength of Dakar’s drummer and bassist were a huge contributing factor to the success of the gig.
Cycling through an expertly selected setlist, Dakar took the audience at Brudenell’s Community Room through a selection of her many career highlights, as well as cover versions of classic ska tracks and a handful of other covers taken from her recent album Version Girl. Notable highlights within the set included her take on David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, which was introduced with an anecdote about how a teenage Rhoda Dakar had once camped outside of Bowie’s house in London for a chance to see Mr Stardust in the flesh.
Elsewhere, Dakar’s take on Morrissey’s ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’ – the first single she released with Sunday Best Records – went down notably well with the audience. Inevitably, though, it was the old Bodysnatchers tracks, ‘Ruder Than You’ and ‘Let’s Do Rocksteady’, that most of the crowd had come to see. Even today, both of those tracks pack a punch, thanks largely to the enduring power of Dakar’s vocals, so much so that they leave you wondering why on Earth, The Bodysnatchers only ever got to release one single.
Aside from her work with The Bodysnatchers, Dakar also wrote and released ‘The Boiler’ with The Special AKA – a harrowing song detailing rape and sexual assault. Although one man in the crowd at Brudenell shouted out to request the song, Dakar stood firm while declaring that the song was no longer politically correct and should be left in the past. “I wrote it, so I get to decide whether or not it’s acceptable, and it isn’t,” she said, making no mistakes about who was in charge of proceedings.
Dakar managed to pack a lot into her one-hour set in Leeds, interspersing her plethora of ska and rocksteady anthems with anecdotes from her 45-year career and memories of playing Leeds in previous years – reportedly, it was the first place she ever saw people dancing to northern soul music.
Concluding the set with a particularly rousing rendition of ‘Let’s Do Rocksteady’, with a pre-warning that there would be no phoney encore, the Queen of 2 Tone sent the audience back into the cold Autumn night with the endlessly infectious rhythm of ska rattling around in our heads. It might have been a 45-year anniversary show, but there were no signs of Dakar slowing down; if anything, her music is better today than it has ever been previously.
