This is one of the most curious gigs I’ve ever been to: it’s almost as if the audience was incidental to the event taking place at all.
Save for some very brief words at the end, drummer/vocalist Momoko Gill and electronica mastermind Matthew Herbert barely recognise there is anyone else in the room.
Gill looks pained, or resentful, or uncomfortable, or at the very least concentrating too hard to enjoy things. She repeatedly waits for Herbert to hand over a keytar or to acknowledge that a rhythm banged out on some skeletal fragments has gone adequately into his loop.
Herbert – mostly behind his defensive lines of knobs and switches, laptops, and a keyboard – shuffles around, occasionally seeming to remember the next adjustment needed to some gadget but seldom looking up.
But close your eyes and listen and there are complex, layered sounds being performed and mixed live. They are fiercer, darker, more intrusive than the delicate, jazzy versions on the recorded version of album Clay, but there are undercurrents of hope, of joy. We almost break into calypso towards the end.
The use of two basketballs as percussion gets one of only two applause breaks throughout the whole hour, and a rare beaming smile from Gill. But I’m still not sure whether this device was playful or earnest, given the box of exotic instruments would give the BBC Radiophonic Workshop a run for its money.
Musicians don’t have to be showmen. But if you’re performing live, it does help.
- Herbert & Momoko at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival on Thursday 14 May 2026.
