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I got the deluxe box set special edition blah, blah, blah of The Man From Mo’ Wax for Christmas and watched it this morning. It’s basically a documentary about James Lavelle that covers almost his entire career using video footage from the man himself plus other key figures in his career, including DJ Shadow.

 

To say that it’s unflinching is an understatement as it shows all his weaknesses in equal proportion to his considerable strengths.

 

For someone like me who collected Mo’ Wax on vinyl at the time, it’s a fantastic watch. What’s fascinating though it to see how everything turned after the man and the label’s greatest moment. 

 

After Endtroducing, it was a long, slow decline of ego, drugs and a complete absence of financial sense. The more he tried to place himself at the heart of the artistic endeavour, the worse things got. It’s also obvious now - and was then in so far as I lost interest - that the further away he moved from his love of black music the weaker and - damningly - blander his output  became. 

 

If his one true talent lies in “curation” (as his Meltdown renaissance arguably proved), his real failing was the raging ego that drove him to the centre stage way beyond what his talent merited. Ironically the one person with a great career he started in parallel with and could have been his model for real longevity appears in the film.

 

If Gilles Peterson is essentially the ultimate jazz-leaning leftfield curator of labels, artists, festivals and radio shows, Lavelle could easily have been a hip hop version of his friend - and arguably, given the relative profiles of their first love genres, more successful. 

 

Either way, this is a great watch if you were into that stuff at the time and it’s certainly whetted my appetite for digging out all those records again as well as looking for what he does next. 

 

Check it out if you can. There’s a blag playlist version on YouTube if you can’t find it anywhere else.   

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Saw The Midnight Hour with Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Mohammed last night at 24 Kitchen St. I really like that venue as it’s really intimate and the sound system is great. 

 

The band were tight as fuck with the drummer maybe the best I’ve seen live.  Also they did a little photos and mingling thing at the end which was a really nice touch. Most people mobbed ASM, but I just chatted to the real main man for a bit. He’s on Gilles’ show later and said he’d give the Liverpool gig crowd a shout out. 

 

If they're near you on this tour, check ‘em. You won’t regret it. 

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