- "This is party time like in East Harlem—we're gonna take you back to the '60s," vowed Joe Bataan as he took to the stage; seemingly an empty promise when made in a basement club down by rainy Leeds' Bus station. A few chords into opener "Latin Strut," however, and time and space was successfully transcended. Spanish Harlem was ours for the night.
James Pants, a west coast DJ and musician, played the role of compere, managing to stir the crowd into the grooving mass required for the entrance of the self-professed "King of Latin Soul" Joe Bataan. James Pants' own tracks, taken from his album, Welcome, were funky, groovy and disco, but sadly lacking in any real feeling. With the advent of Joe Bataan on stage and James Pants own self-demotion to the cowbell, it was clear that, although he has a lot of potential with an interesting, atypical synthesiser-funk sound, Pants is still a new jack in the business.
Bataan tore through his extensive repertoire, moving from the plaintive Latin soul of "Gypsy Woman," "Johnny" and "Ordinary Guy" to more upbeat numbers like "It's a Good Feeling (Riot)" and the brilliant "Bottle," originally written by spoken word soul genius Gil Scott Heron. The dance floor, an equal mix of young and old, yuppie and bohemian, only stopped grooving to come up for air or to hear one of Bataan's pearls of wisdom—"We don't need music, we just need rhythm!" The night really got moving with the rap-disco classic "Rap-o Clap-o," which summed up the communal feel of the night perfectly: "Got something for the young, something for the old, something that's missing from the rock 'n' roll."
Whilst the charisma and energy of Bataan completely dominated the night and made it more or less a one man show, it's worth mentioning the flawless Grupo X backing him up with keyboard, brass, guitar and no less than three drum kits. And Pants closed the night with a redemptive performance on the decks, seamlessly mixing Motown, soul and funk until closing.
In any major city, it's easy enough to go and see Claude VonStroke for the seventh or eighth time (playing the same night around the corner at Back to Basics) but sometimes it's worth leaving the present-day for a night and catching a forefather of this now dynamic and all encompassing leviathan we call dance music. And if there are places like the Wardrobe around, full of laid-back intimacy and old-school sophistication—not to mention a very well stocked bar—the sights, sounds and flavours of the days dominated by disco, soul and funk are not far away.