Gig 031 Shakti / Kevin Coyne

Shakti / Kevin Coyne
25 June
Oxford Polytechnic


I’d been into the Mahavishnu Orchestra a couple of years earlier and Shakti were guitarist John McLaughlin’s Indo-jazz fusion project with violinist L Shankar. By this time it wasn’t really my thing but McLaughlin was a big name to be playing the Poly so I went along with my friend Richard; among my friends I don’t remember there being any other takers for this one.


I’d heard only one or two things by Kevin Coyne and had him down as a not-very-interesting folkie type. Ok he had long-ish hair and played and acoustic guitar, that’s where it ends – lazy thinking gets you nowhere. He had the most rudimentary guitar style imaginable, open tuned and using his thumb as a barre, making your average punk guitarist look like, well, John McLaughlin. His voice was at times like a belt-sander, several of his tunes were beautiful, his lyrics lacerating, as punk as a long-haired bloke with an acoustic guitar could be. An excellent performance, and I subsequently bought a few of his records.


This was definitely a sitting-cross-legged-on-the-floor gig, there would be no going mental tonight. A reverential seriousness was the prevailing vibe, certainly for Shakti if a little less so for Kevin; there was a definite sense of awe at being in the presence of Johnny Mac, a modest-looking, humble man, at least by the standards of your average guitar god. I wasn’t particularly familiar with Shakti’s music nor Indo-jazz fusion in general, so I just tried to soak it up, and it was most agreeable. This was probably my first experience of real virtuoso musicians, Johnny Mac and L Shankar sparking off each other in the way of improvising jazzers across rhythms provided by tabla and ghatam, at one point trading Chuck Berry riffs. My how we laughed. After an hour or so I started to find it a little dull, though that would be true for almost any gig, and in any case you can only sit cross-legged on a parquet floor for so long. I still occasionally listen to and enjoy Shakti, probably more than I do The Damned if I’m honest.

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