Review: Hak Baker, The Louisiana – ‘There is an obvious catharsis sought through Baker’s songwriting’

There is frequent diatribe in certain red-top newspapers about how the cockney accent is ‘dying out’, with reasons espoused ranging from ‘mass immigration’, to ‘rampant multiculturalism’, to Eastenders being too ‘woke’. Hak Baker is as cockney as pie and mash with a side of jellied eels, and the tales he tells of adolescent misadventure, weekend benders and run-ins with the Old Bill would send readers of said newspapers into a spin of hypertensive rage. He embodies a wonderful dichotomy of new and old. A new sound from a familiar voice.

He is perhaps an outlier of the London scene in this respect. Despite his roots in grime with early noughties collective Bomb Squad, he sits closer in musical taxonomy to Chas & Dave than Santan Dave. Through artfully arranged sketches of East End life, like patches of a lost tapestry sewn together by the hand of a talented seamstress, Baker invites you with charming bonhomie into his world.

Tuesday night’ invitation was to The Louisiana, whose intimate environs lend themselves perfectly to Baker’s frank and confessional style. First up however was Sophia May – a local talent whose warbling vocals laid over intricate fingerstyle guitar evoke comparisons to a young Laura Marling. So demanding were these intricate riffs on her E string that it gave way during inter-song tuning. Almost instantaneously, the side door burst open, and with bags of the aforementioned charm, Baker offered Sophia his guitar to finish her set with. Despite some early nerves (in her own words she “doesn’t do this very often”) the audience were enamoured, and I expect we will see more from her in the future.

Baker’s first song, Wonderland, was also his personal favourite. Finding the need to salvage something from the wreckage of another weekend bender, he penned the song about the slivers of gold found in the depths of inebriation, chased all too often down the tumbling rabbit hole. The brief and glorious moments when the various intoxicants stop fighting in your innards and the wildly oscillating pendulums of speech, confidence and charm combine in synchronised harmony, before spinning disastrously off their axel.

Tender moments in the anecdotes between songs reveal an open vulnerability, a disarming candour, quickly batted away with jovial chuckle. Yet for all his larger-than -life bravado, these anecdotes cut a sensitive figure with a tough past. There is an obvious catharsis sought through Baker’s songwriting as he exorcises painful ghosts of the past in his songs. This is ever apparent on one of his earliest singles, Tom, dedicated to his friend who died before he had the chance to address an unresolved division, introduced to the audience with a pronounced lump in his throat.

The venues intimate environs lend themselves perfectly to Baker’s frank and confessional style. Credit: Sam Roberts

Delicate sincerity gives way to jubilant singalong with crowd-favourite, Venezuela Riddim. Baker barely has to sing as the audience vehemently chant back the words, even filling in the trumpets for his absent backing band. He takes the opportunity gladly to finish the bottle of Courvoisier he’s been sipping and sharing all night. Not wanting to incite a riot, the sound engineer that cut the performance off at the curfew relinquished to allow Hak to play his final song and my pick of the night, 7AM.

As a part-time fake-Londoner having moved there for university I find versions of myself in Hak Baker’s lyrical poetry – but such is their ubiquity you’d be hard pushed to find someone who doesn’t. The downstairs walls of The Louisiana are adorned with gig posters from illustrious artists that have performed at the unassuming venue over the years, and you think how lucky you must have been to see them somewhere so intimate. I can’t help but think we enjoyed some of that luck last night.

Main photo: Sam Roberts

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