Back at the Barbican!

Kid Creole and the Coconuts + Arto Lindsay

+ Justin Strauss

7 October 2017 / 19:30
Barbican Centre, London

Go to the website

Flashback to New York’s Downtown scene of the 1980s, as Kid Creole & the Coconuts and Arto Lindsay recapture the bubbling, frenetic energy of the era.

Over two sets, they represent the frenzied creativity that defined the scene. First, there’s Arto Lindsay and band, at turns warm and sultry, and at other times prowling and deranged. Playful, weird and sometimes scary, his guitar and vocals move from washes of total noise to soft, tropicalia-indebted balladeering, exhibiting a willingness to embrace every influence taken from 80s New York’s cocktail of cultures.

So, too, do Kid Creole & the Coconuts, blending calypso, funk, disco and much more to create the ultimate party music. Backed by his big band, Kid Creole is a man out of time, the zoot-suited embodiment of cool, singing and dancing through hits including ‘Annie I’m not your Daddy’, ‘Stool Pigeon’ and ‘I’m a Wonderful thing, Baby’.

It’s an experience captured in Downtown 81 as Jean-Michel Basquiat – the subject of Boom for Real in our Art Gallery – wanders the streets of New York, witnessing the birth of no wave, rap and Downtown Disco amid the cheap warehouse lofts of Lower Manhattan. It’s here he encounters Arto Lindsay (then with his influential no wave band, DNA), Kid Creole, and their brilliantly bizarre music – music that’s performed tonight, as these two artists revisit the chaotic excitement that defined the Downtown scene.

Additionally, DJ Justin Strauss joins the party – a former resident of the infamous Mudd Club – further evoking the era, having soundtracked nights when Basquiat, Kid Creole and Arto Linsday took to the dancefloor.

On sale to Barbican Members 10am Thursday 1 June
On general sale 10am Friday 2 June