Gotta love heading out to see a highly regarded underground maverick, whose career has spanned three decades, influenced multiple generations of Hip Hop artists and has way too many aliases to care to mention: all on a school night!

Despite Kool Keith being such an iconic figure in Hip Hop, it was still a Wednesday night and the weather was pretty miserable (this often sounds a death knell for mid-week gigs). This made it so much better when I arrived to see that Shape was already pretty packed and still filling up nicely as the headliners start time approached.

I was curious as to what exactly a Kool Keith gig would entail, with his bizarre lyrics and multiple-personalities surely an average stage show would not suffice? It had been two years since he had last been out to Australia, and it seemed as though he was intent to giving everyone in the audience a crash course in the works of Kool Keith, Dr Octogon, Dr Dooom… Working through his set at a pretty brisk pace Keith went from track to track working the crowd into a frenzy. His stage presence was particularly noteable, seemingly almost nonchalant, he seemed completely comfortable working through several decades of material.

12 o clock came around, the bar was closed and Kool Keith was still on stage! treating the crowd to a furious final 10 minutes, managing to get through what had to be at least 5 or 6 tracks, with the dj cutting to each one after only a verse or so. It was awesome to see an artist who could remain so cool and collected on stage, but still be giving it all to the crowd without appearing to be ‘over doing it’.