As regular readers will know, besides running Breaking More Waves I’m one of the booking team for Dials Festival, a small volunteer-run multi-venue one day event that takes place on one street in Southsea, Portsmouth in October. All profits made by the event are given to mental health charity Solent Mind. For the last couple of years I’ve taken on a major role in the booking and this year had taken the job of lead booker. Sadly the Dials Team had to cancel the 2020 event due to the Covid-19 pandemic and concerns around safety and certainty in planning. You can hear a playlist of the artists that had been confirmed to play prior to the decision to cancel by clicking this link here. However, whilst we keep our fingers crossed that we are able to return in 2021, I’m pleased today to feature, not for the first time on this blog, one of the artists Dials was due to bring to you this year. That artist is Lynks Afrikka. Alongside acts like International Teachers of Pop and Brighton newcomers Hourglvss, Lynks Afrikka was set to give Dials 2020 a splash of colourful technicolour vibrancy, with dance party atmospherics being the order of the day. (Click here to see an example of the sort of fun-frenzy Lynks Afrikka brings live.) Whilst Dials would have provided its usual mix of indie rock, punk, new wave and pop that is at our core we have always tried to provide a mix of genres for people to pick and choose from. This year more than ever we had programmed the line up and running order to ensure that both our party starters and party finishers were correctly placed, ready to bring the whole thing to a shuddering climax at the end. Lynks Afrikka would have been part of that final surge of energy. Whilst the debut of Lynks Afrikka in Portsmouth will have to wait for another day, there’s no stopping his new single which has unleashed itself onto the world. How To Be Successful comes all over you like a lo-fi Pet Shop Boys or Fischerspooner banger biting against the conveyor belt of life. The track is taken from his forthcoming Smash Hits Vol.1 EP and arrives complete with a section in the song entitled ‘Dance Break’. Brilliant. Are you ready to bounce? You should be. Lynks Afrikka – How To Be Successful
If, as Robbie Williams once sang, one of the main purposes of musicians is to entertain, then colourful, exuberant, bonkers pop music that puts a smile on your face has to be the order of the day. With the current state of affairs, the world probably needs it more than ever. Quite frankly, earnest boys with acoustic guitars crooning self-absorbedly about if you still love them feel very out of date. What we need is big Muhammad Ali sized punches of joy, laughter and most of all dancing. Artists like Confidence Man and International Teachers of Pop are already raising spirits with uncoordinated hustling and bags of energy. Today’s new artist could well be the next one to join that carnival of mavericks in the club. Lynks Afrikka is the alter-ego of once Bristol now London based producer Elliot Brett and you only have to watch the crowd shot You Tube video of his heavy on the lettuce sandwich-based chant-a-long B.L.L.T * (Sample lyric: “I’m a toastie. The boys they never ghost me. Not all the time, but mostly) to understand that Lynks Afrikka is a riot. A raw and unpolished one, but all the better for his underground substance. Think Daphne & Celeste meets Toni Basil for reference points. There’s a serious and thoughtful side to what Lynks Afrikka does as well, with Brett’s message focused on topics such as sexuality and gender, but making it accessible by the use of humour. His music might be raw and primitively basic in its sound, but it certainly isn’t dumb. Take for example Str8 Acting which looks at mainstream club culture and nights out in the form of an alt-lo-fi-electropop banger; a very distant cousin of Blur’s Girls & Boys. “It's just hot str8 boys, who like hot str8 girls, who like hot str8 boys, and that's the whole straight world.” Elsewhere he does dumb down a bit (ok a lot) with a track called How to Make a Bechamel Sauce in 10 Steps (With Pictures) which was featured on the Breaking More Waves Spotify monthly playlist recently, but let’s face it, this amalgamation of music and food is still way more usefully hilarious than whatever James Bay is up to these days. Then there’s the mini-bass arcade game stomp of I Don’t Know What I Want which finds our hero listing out all the things he doesn’t want. Simple really: Money, fame, pleasure, pain, sex, a green smoothie. This week Lynks Affrika has been uploading a serious of Self Isolation Tapes, sound tracking the Coronavirus pandemic (you can find them on Soundcloud or You Tube). In the not too distant-future he was due to perform at this year’s now virus-cancelled Great Escape festival in Brighton as well as supporting cousins-of-a-kind Confidence Man in Bristol in April. Hopefully someone will find a slot for his cheerleader-of-your-nightmares-or-dreams routine on the south coast when things revert to some sort of normality. Until then watch and listen below. Let him entertain you. *Can someone give the Soundcloud version of B.L.L.T (below) a proper release please? It's about time we had something like this all over the radio and in our heads. Lynks Afrikka - B.L.L.T (Live audience shot video)
