The Rachid Taha gig was totally excellent on Monday night – the band was a fully monstrous rock’n’rai machine, relentlessly driven by a simple but monumental kit drum sound. Instrumental frontline of electric mandolute and Fender Stratocaster. No bass, but fat bottom from laptop/keyboard + heavily-amped hand-drum. Taha like a demented satyr, lurching and falling, getting in the face of his band, but no-one missed a beat. It was great. The audience was on their feet from the first song.

The Op Hse Theatre was not an ideal venue for this sort of gig, ceiling too high (for upper level seating) and seat-bound, not that it stopped anybody, but he made it his own.

Eno was in the audience (right in front of me – I was 8 rows in, just above head high) and Taha called him up on stage about ¾ in – didn’t add anything to the music, but crowd loved the gesture. Eno was involved with the Tekitoi disc 3 or 4 years ago, so they know each other. Strange for such a musically and politically tough-arsed gig, but he did his version of a Rai standard – all the Arabs in the audience (there were plenty + lots of Francophones) knew the words – he invited them up onstage. So the there was a stage full of Arabs, middle-aged matrons flaunting themselves to supercharged belly-dance, mad ululations at the chorus, and a few blokes had a go at singing verses in turn – several were really good.

Crunched the set with a totally colossal Rock el Casbah – then off. Crowd standing applause for 15 minutes. The house was supposed to shut down at 11pm, but Eno apparently did some emergency negotiating with the house, so back they came for two encores. Two hours of Taha – powerful, relentless, hypnotic. Fabulous.

Hakim Hamadouche was the mandolute player and excellent too, but pretty swamped in the mix except for feature pieces but it was Stephane Bertin's Stratocaster that was driving the rhythm – no lead, just inexorable industrial crank.

The warm-up band was a pretty good local Gypsy/world/folk outfit – Lolo Lovina was the singer, and pretty good voice too – technically very good players, but a few too many smart-arsed instrumental tricks and time signature changes for me.

Oh, and the Op Hse looked great with the evolving light motif. Cannot understand what the whingers are on about – they need to get a life.

Written by Peter Tozer of Sydney :)