Whether we like it or not, ultimately it’s probably true that we’re all products of our environment. Few of us, though, have the tendency to carry our experiences around and put them to as good a use as BABAR LUCK.
Born and raised in Pakistan, Babar moved to London when he was eight years old. The product of a liberal Muslim background, he immersed himself in music early on, lived a stone’s throw from West Ham FC’s Upton Park ground and attended Canning Town Secondary where the school’s racial mix brought with it the depressingly inevitable running battles with other, less tolerant, schools in the area. Encouraged by his contemporaries and absorbed by everything from the Beatles and Motorhead to Public Enemy, The Clash and James Brown, Babar began making his own music, drawing on his and his associates’ strange and sometimes frightening experiences.
And, now he’s got around to getting it down for the wider public on debut album “Care In The Community”, Babar Luck’s music is every bit as potent and possibility-fuelled as you’d hope when you read about his varied, quixotic background. With sympathetic – and sometimes downright incendiary – support from musicians such as Lu Edmonds (Damned, PIL, Billy Bragg) and drummer Mark Roberts, Babar’s music and big-hearted, tolerance-first lyrical skills often ensure he (favourably) references some of rock’s most charged and socially aware figures from Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg and The Specials as well as the more obvious likes of Cornershop, Asian Dub Foundation and Fun-Da-Mental.
Indeed, “Care In The Community” is an intelligent and exciting listen, pretty much wall to wall. Over the course of 40 minutes, Babar copes admirably with everything from anthemic’n’militant, Clash-style reggae-rockers like “1 Luv” and the militaristic “Lions” (with its’ memorable kiss-off line “money and guns are gonna take your soul!”) as well as tough’n’bouncy, positivity-fuelled pop like “101 Spiritual” and the dynamic, Ska-siphoning pop of the ace title track with its’ instantly recognisable chorus of “everyone’s out for themselves, I’m just out for myself.”
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Elsewhere, he proves himself to be equally adept when he slows it down and mellows out a little, at least musically. “Raj Kapoor & Nargis”, for example, finds him delving into Eastern (End) philosophy to the sound of some great, tricksy folk guitar, before allowing the song to blossom into another fine and defiant chorus. The impassioned immigrant song “The Fight Game” (“you’re knocked down, you stand up, you rise up, you’re afraid of no-one”), meanwhile, gets more moving each time you hear it and the slower, superficially mystical “War Fever” attacks both the Islamic and American Christian extremists who ensure terrorism is alive and well in the 21st Century and makes vivid sense to these ears.
It’s not all hardline social conscience of course, as the relatively light-hearted Bollywood dreams of “Movies” and the gentle, folk-flavoured “Inner Glow” demonstrate, and the attractive latter is indeed the perfect way to lead us out of the darkness into the dawn of a more hopeful day, reminding us that seemingly old-fashioned values such as unity and positivity are still the ingredients floating to the top of Babar Luck’s melting pot.
“The white culture taught me a lot, the back culture taught me a lot, my own people taught me a lot,” he sings openly and disarmingly during “1 Luv”. He then proceeds to show us exactly what he means. I’d suggest you listen and learn too.
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