Welcome to community music from the neighbourhood of freaks. East London’s King Prawn are the weirdest looking band on the planet. Chief velocity rapper Al Farabi-Rumjen is normal enough in a Maori prop-forward sort of way but bald, bearded bassist Baba Luck looks like a cross between Charles Manson and Rasputin, while guitarist Devil Hands (no, really) looks like something out of Dawn of the Dead. Together they’re going to scare the shit out of The System. Comparisons with Asian Dub Foundation are inevitable. Those of you who have followed the band’s obstinate rise from the gutter, outside of any significant national press acclaim, will know that there’s a similar genre-torching fusion of ska, hip hop and punk while songs like ‘Racist Copper’ pull no political punches. But King Prawn are bigger, uglier and far more brutal than ADF. They’re also a lot funnier. Recent single, ‘Day In Day Out’, might be full of righteous polemic and scouring Minor Threat riffs but there’s a rich vein of humour running through the whole show and Baba’s constant gurning and gibberish spouting adds a surreal edge to it all. It’s an education through entertainment method that’s helped them, over the last five years, to become one of the biggest bands on the UK hardcore circuit. So much so that they seem to return to Oxford on an almost monthly basis at times and their audience grows with each visit. They can do spaced-out dub too, but it’s when they’re firing out whiplash ska-core anthems like ‘Not Your Punk’ that the fun and the fury really reach critical mass. The system remains resolutely unsmashed after all this time but King Prawn are chiselling away at its foundations. Baba Luck, meanwhile, remains the best mayor London will never have.

Victoria Waterfield