CAMBRIDGE: Green Mind @ The Portland Arms

SUN 11TH MAR, 2012 7.30pm

"You'd have thought someone would have used the name before, but they haven't. We've had Prince, even a US funk musician called Prince Charles, not to mention all the royal female permutations you can imagine – notably Queen and Princess – but no King Charles. Until now. This one has never engaged in a power struggle with Parliament (neither the English governing body nor George Clinton's funk mob) but he is getting rave notices for his psychedelic acoustica, and his wild hair has been getting pretty good reactions too. The term "wigga" has been dusted down and brought out of storage. We prefer "wasta". He's from west London, you know, so some might say "trustafarian"...
...he also discovered at a young age the collected works of Donovan, Marc Bolan circa Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Syd Barrett because he is part of that tradition of uniquely English, psych-inflected pastoral whimsy (well, not completely uniquely – Devendra Banhart operates in a similar area). Not surprisingly, it's catching on with the same sort of people who last year loved Noah and the Whale and this year seem to have switched allegiances to Mumford and Sons.

...he spent some time gigging in girls' schools across England and apparently "rescued a baby giraffe from the jaws of a jackal" according to his press release, neither of which experiences inform the lyrics of his debut single, Time of Eternity, which appeares to address the apocalypse and death, in that order, over frazzled electric folk. On the follow-up, Love Lust, he compares and contrasts the relative merits of sex and the other thing over pounding piano and what sounds like a washboard. Elsewhere he uses ancient shanties, a cappella operatics, skiffle and raunch rock to enhance his idiosyncratic visions. Well, someone's got to do it, and it might as well be this dandy in the underworld." The Guardian