Concert Review - Black Comet - Napier - 1st August 2025
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Review By: Rob Harbers
Band: Black Comet
Venue: Paisley Stage, Napier
Date of Event: Friday 1st August 2025
Since time immemorial, comets have inspired awe in those who have been fortunate enough to witness their celestial progress. Often seen as harbingers of doom, their appearance has, in more superstitious times, been credited with causing natural disasters, among other things. Thankfully, however, we live in saner times, where there is less inclination towards such magical thinking, and greater reliance on evidence-based action (the current coalition government excepted!) Accordingly, we see these things for what they really are. And in the firmament of Aotearoa’s musical scene, the recurrence of the Black Comet heralds nothing more nor less than a fantastic experience, with a top-class band of players led by a member of music royalty, in the form of Mr Laughton Kora!
This phenomenon touched down in Ahuriri’s coolest little venue™, Paisley Stage, and proceeded to blow the minds of whoever was hip enough to the groove to have got their arses along. With an introductory set by local turntablist DJ Jayrasik, in which he offered some inspired mix-ups and some – in his own words – ‘out-of-it shit’, the ground was laid for some astronomically funky beats to follow. And follow they did, Laughton declaring the band’s intention to ‘try and rip the skin off your face’. They did their damnedest to live up to this promise!
Given what ensued, opening song Something Bad Is A Coming set a somewhat chill vibe, its organ-heavy tones more seductive than percussive. But this changed quickly, with the band bringing the funk to the fore on the appropriately titled Highway to Funk, keyboard player Poihakena Reid ramping up the ‘70s echoes with his talkbox!
This tour is in support of the band’s second album, The Force Between Us, so named, in Laughton’s words, ‘Because we love Star Wars’, and as such it is ‘based on galactic funk – Jedis and lightsabers and all that.’ But whatever galaxy is being channelled, be it far, far away or much closer to hand, it’s one with a deeply sensuous groove, carrying no phantom menace, but indeed a new hope!
The intensely driving Before You Fall kept the pace moving and the dance floor full. The rapport between band and audience was demonstrated in the forgiving reaction to Laughton’s mix-up over which song they were due to perform – an error which caused not a ripple of disturbance in the Force!
The album’s opening track Crypto Embrace brought the spirit of the Purple One himself to proceedings, a true tribute to a past master snatched away too soon. After the frantic pace of this number, the sedate tempo of When You’re So Young (Apology Letter), with its tale of growing up in poverty but with parents determined to do their best anyway, gave a chance for a bit of rest on the floor. But not for too long, as a pacy cover of Bobby Brown’s My Prerogative (including a bit of schooling from the youngest member of the band as to the decade in which it was first released!) kept the funk alive.
The slow jam of Grooving gave the opportunity to ‘showcase this band’, an opportunity that was willingly exploited, before getting ‘a little bit heavier’ with new song Happen To You and ‘another hard-out one’ from the first album, Give It to Me. Aspirationally titled Looking For A New Planet featured a stunning bass solo from Dan Antunovich, showing the power that undergirds the structure of the band, complemented by the drumming of relatively new member Adam Tobeck, fitting perfectly into the mix.
Laughton claimed the band ‘practise once a year’ and consequently are ‘trying to bring back jams’. All I can say is that if they can be this fuckin’ tight on such infrequent meetings, there’s got to be something special going on between them! But whatever the case, it was all too soon time to close, but not before slipping in a snippet of the highest selling album of all time, MJ’s Thriller, another demonstration of the deep roots of this unit. This was only reinforced by the encore, a rendition of Blackstreet’s No Diggity.
All said, a stellar night of blistering interplanetary funk, rock and soul, delivered by a top-flight crew of star-sailors, under the command of Darth Laughton! Coming to a cantina near you, where you should definitely get yourself along to. This is the way, indeed!
Black Comet - Episode II: The Force Between Us Tour