03.01 (Fri)
Cheap Picasso take inspiration from an 80s divided by glamour and glumness. On the one hand, you have the idealised iconography of blue pastel jackets, paraffin cologne, Soul-Glo hairspray and Dan Akroyd, and on the other, greyscale Scargill bashing, vertiginous social inequality and Margaret fucking Thatcher.
An entire Atlantic Ocean separates these two sketches of that period, yet it's clear that Cheap Picasso have brought them together via a few common denominators: disco, house and synth music. Music that does a jig on the deck of the speedboat, but remains moored in the misery of Reaganomics. Playing a mixture of classic italo and boogie music allied with contemporary house and disco indebted to its analogue forebearers, Cheap Picasso's hands-in-the-air approach is a popular one, though it comes at considerable cost: last year, they were billed £3,018 for ceiling damage.
Dance music's capacity for renewal means that the Pointer Sisters and the Human League remain as relevant today as they were 30 years ago; the tension between the coke-drenched Miami harbour inhabited by all the bastard sons of Burt Reynolds' penis and the darker, heroin stained tuxedo chic of the Human Leag... More Biography
An entire Atlantic Ocean separates these two sketches of that period, yet it's clear that Cheap Picasso have brought them together via a few common denominators: disco, house and synth music. Music that does a jig on the deck of the speedboat, but remains moored in the misery of Reaganomics. Playing a mixture of classic italo and boogie music allied with contemporary house and disco indebted to its analogue forebearers, Cheap Picasso's hands-in-the-air approach is a popular one, though it comes at considerable cost: last year, they were billed £3,018 for ceiling damage.
Dance music's capacity for renewal means that the Pointer Sisters and the Human League remain as relevant today as they were 30 years ago; the tension between the coke-drenched Miami harbour inhabited by all the bastard sons of Burt Reynolds' penis and the darker, heroin stained tuxedo chic of the Human Leag... More Biography