Preview

Nizlopi are Luke Concannon on acoustic guitar, vocals and percussion, and John Parker on double bass, acoustic guitar, human beat box. The pair have been making music together since the day they first met on the school bus at the age of 13. In a world of manufactured pre-packaged artists these two young men represent the freshest most original sound imaginable. They take just about every genre you can imagine and blend it into the most compelling sound in the UK today. No wonder the Grammy award winning Los Angeles producer Bob Marlette says of them, "The UK's most talented and exciting live acoustic duo - these boys have something very, very special."

Their debut album, 'Half These Songs Are About You', spent an unprecedented TEN weeks at number one in the National Unsigned Network Chart and has been featured on both Radio One and Two. Add to that appearances at two of Europes biggest and most prestigious music festivals, Glastonbury and the Big Green Gathering where audiences were totally wowed by each and every performance. Whether in a small and intimate club or a huge auditorium Nizlopi believe in eliminating the gap between performer and listener. Expect them to unplug and get out there face to face with their audience - a truly awe inspiring experience.

"Ah man, that shit is f****d up, holy christ you aint supposed to be that good!" - Kelly Joe Phelps

Review

Two highly contrasting duos graced our stage tonight. For openers, previous Tregaron visitor Emily Williams brought along her musical compatriot Rebecca Sullivan (from Salt Lake City, Utah) and together, as Ember, they offered up a satisfying acoustic set. Each is a deft guitarist, and Emily revealed herself this time to be an excellent fiddle player, too. Ember's neat original song repertoire, unsurprisingly, bears a strong transatlantic flavour, and 'Happy Are We' (with convincingly distinctive harmonies), 'Skin' (Spanish hormone overload), and 'Ocean' (er, lurve) are quality items; stand-out was 'Little Doggie', an a cappella backwoods paean in praise of pick-up-driving men with beards. Seems that's what some women like. (Are you sure you've got your facts right? - Ed.)

All preconceptions of the duo format are unceremoniously swept aside by the astonishing Nizlopi, without doubt one of the most original and iconoclastic acts to feature in the Cambria Arts annals. Luke Concannon and John Parker have been playing music together since their schooldays, and the enormously likeable young Leamington Spa twosome have honed their category-defying jazz-informed folk/hip-hop (you could say ...) into an irresistibly engaging form that's uniquely theirs: in a performance that brings together the audience-grabbing skills of the best buskers you ever saw and the kind of theatrical spontaneity that only the most fearless performers can muster, these personable lads, once the bewildered onlookers have got themselves adjusted, can do no wrong. The first breach of convention comes with the show's opening gambit, which finds them playing unamplified in the middle of a somewhat nonplussed audience - audacious stuff. Once on stage and plugged in, John holds down a physically-taxing dual role as virtuoso double-bass wielder and simultaneous funky 'human beat-box': remember Bobby McFerrin? The breath-control that this continuous rhythmic scat-panting entails would make severe demands on the fittest of men, but John's high virus fever on the night was giving not a little cause for concern ... happily, the non-stop ingestion of countless litres of water and Lucozade got him through. A trouper ... Luke, meanwhile, plays hectic acoustic guitar, excellent if unconventional bodhran, and sings with glorious abandon a selection of their rather brilliant songs, which confound impressions of Middle England as a staid curtain-twitching haven by tackling subjects such as falling in love with a beautiful eco-warrior puppeteer and swimming in a flooded quarry. Most touching, perhaps, is 'JCB', a childhood vignette of a proud Luke riding shotgun in his dad's yellow digger down the Coventry by-pass, and which includes period references to heroes of the time such as the A-Team and Bruce Lee. We hadn't reckoned on promoting Nizlopi as a dance act, and Whistling Ted had, as instructed, placed rows of chairs across the dance-floor, but many were soon cast aside as a certain amount of spontaneous footwork was prompted, not least by potential hit single 'Fine Story'.

Audience participation is very much part of the deal with these guys, who had us singing chorus parts and call-and-response snatches - their claim to break down the audience-performer barrier is certainly well justified. True to their unconventional form, their unplugged coda continued amidst the punters even after the final 'Goodnight' had been uttered. In the final analysis, it would be very odd indeed if Nizlopi were 'for everybody', but for most of us they were a real breath of fresh air, and 'stars in the making' is the general consensus around the Cambria Arts water-cooler.