This was the fifth time I've seen ADF live. The first time was back in 1996 when they played the first TUC Respect Festival in Finsbury Park, the second at the 'Astoria on the NME Brat tour, then the Royal Festival Hall, as part of Meltdown, then in the Blaye Les Mines festival in the South of France (they headlined on the day Muse played) in the Summer of 2000. Back then their live shows had the same kind of polemic electricity and punk rock energy of early Public Enemy...A lot of water has passed under the bridge for them since then, with a label change, and with the departure of original MC Deedar Zaman, but after a relatively quiet period in UK terms, they have levered themselves back into my consciousness with Enemy of The Enemy, and I was both excited and curious to see how the live show had evolved...

...First impressions were that they seemed to have lost a little of the fire in their belly. I'd expected, in this current political climate, to have had my head repeatedly and happily bitten off by soapbox anti-war sloganeering, yet they were a little quiet in that department...
Instead they concentrated on making music.

The band, now incorporating drummer Rocky Singh, and Dhol/Tabla player Pritpal Rajput sounded fatter, less synthetic, and more powerful, sometimes going off into instrumental soundtrack, sometimes just pumping away at drum and bass... the band I could have listened to all day... the rhythm section sounded awesome, Dr Das is still one of the real daddies of bass, and Chandrasonic's echo laden guitar takes me away to a distant arabian night of Dick Dale and Ravi Shankar.... but it still took a while for me to get used to the vocals.Despite MCs' Aktarvata and Spex having deeper, more powerful rapping voices, I found myself missing the boyish anger of Deedar, and songs like 'Fortress Europe' that I had thought would be sledgehammers, managed to slip past without lodging in my mind...
..and yet, by the time the gig had reached its last half hour all those thoughts had gone... 'Enemy of The Enemy' stuck in my head like bostik, and somehow, the whole thing began to make sense as a whole once more... agitated sparks are no longer visible because they are contained in an engine... once it crackled, now it drives and powers away, braking through the heavy dub of 'La Haine' and then kicking down, foot to the floor in 'Naxalite' and 'Free Satpal Ram', the rammed audience bouncing as one...

ADF have, in a sense, grown up. Though it might take a bit more touring for the new line up to hang together as well as the old, I think it will be worth the wait. There are very few bands today that could have only come from the UK, and sometimes I wish the music world at large would spend less time trying to catch the tails of American bands, and more time celebrating the glorious multi-coloured multi-culture that Britain has become.