During the first weekend of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2025, The Chap and I were gifted tickets to see An Evening with Gilles Peterson at Norwich Cathedral. Here, resident music buff, The Chap gives a review of the evening.
‘An Evening with Gilles Peterson’ kicks off with an hour of African music from pop and 80s-inspired grooves to percussive cuts and afro-house. Norwich DJ Tadi The Great drifts behind the decks, unassuming.
The experience is already surreal, as a gaggle of 40-something lapsed hipsters file into this house of God, to sit in orderly rows all pointed at a set of decks, all talking loudly over the reverberating thrum of beats, discussing how annoying it is that you can’t bring your drink from the bar to your seat. Surreal not to be dancing to music that is begging, nay, demanding that you dance. And of course, some people did. Two people did.
The music fades, and Gilles introduces himself and the be-hatted and be-spectacled gentleman to his right, Rob Gallagher (founder of ‘90s acid jazz band Galliano). Gilles doesn’t look his 60 years, but his voice is his signature, softly-spoken tone – middle-class vowels and London consonants – the one this audience knows from 30-something years on the BBC airwaves.
He and Gallagher (aka Earl Zinger) sit in a chat show mini-environment on the stage, two potted plants failing to hide the fact that they’re in the middle of the tallest building for 100 miles. It’s like being in some Lynchian dream sequence. Peterson is both awkward and natural, yet disarming and professional, and everyone is put immediately at their ease with anecdotes about Norfolk as he unsleeves vinyl and cues up MP3s on the kit in front of him.
What follows is a fascinating three hours of music and stories from a 45-year career in music. Every so often, Gallagher reads a poem, raps over the top of a track or adds comments about their shared history in music.
Peterson plays rare cuts from the likes of Sarah Vaughn and Brian Jackson and classics such as Gil Scott-Heron’s Winter in America. With such broad tastes and so many years to cover, he plays some of his signature Brazilian music as well as weaving personal stories in with tracks from The Roots and Skream (never thought I’d hear dubstep in Norwich Cathedral. I suspect the arch-deacon is more of a drum and bass fan). There’s jazz, there’s hip hop, there’s contemporary classic and world music – all of it a refined and sophisticated selection that has people surreptitiously adding artists to their Spotify lists as he and Gallagher bob their heads in appreciation to each track.
Three hours on a hard chair in a cold church is a tough ask, but his stories reveal so much about his role in music since the 80s, as a DJ, a producer and label boss. Many people seem to appear on our airwaves as if by magic, plucked from obscurity to play songs for hours every week. But like John Peel, his position is well-earned and tonight shows just how much Peterson has been a driving force in the UK jazz, hip hop and dance scene.
I left with a cold bum and newfound respect for the quietly spoken backroom king of millennial jazz and its many children.
NB: In another life, some 25 years ago, I interviewed Rob ‘Earl Zinger’ Gallagher. Read that interview here.
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