John Parker is one half of Nizlopi, the Leamington Spa duo currently contributing heartfelt, politically charged tunes to music catalogs across the UK. Their new album, Make It Happen, was released late March and its melodic hip-hop folk songs are charged with memories from nights in Senegal to active criticism of Western world capitalism. Luke Concannon provides the lyrics, guitar and tear-jerking vocals, while Parker contributes, well, everything else.

“Mainly on the album I play double bass and the beatbox thing. And I play a lot of the guitar and did the string arrangements and wrote all the parts... I did that sort of thing… Yeah, that’s about it really, I’ve not done too much,” he says on a crisp April morning.

Over the telephone, Parker explained how the album came about in a very lively fashion, comprising songs that fans have been hearing for some years now at endless gigs, the heart and soul of Nizlopi’s work. Make It Happen, then, is less new material and more a compilation of songs that have been hits with fans during the past three years. According to Parker, many fans will therefore not be unfamiliar with what they hear on the album, which is a good thing now, but had its drawbacks in the process.

“We kinda make things difficult for ourselves. People who had our first albums [Half These Songs Are About You, 2002, and ExtraOrdinary, 2006 EP] came to the show and half of the songs we played are songs they’ve never heard of, and that’s quite hard to do because we could feel the audience going ‘I want that song I’ve actually heard of’,” he says.

And the fact that songs were recorded live does not mean that the album was finished after performing fifteen songs. Parker says it took them about three months to put everything together, including writing, recording, editing and mixing. The result is a live album with studio quality, with all the energy of the crowd and the technique of studio work.

The work was not limited to Parker and Concannon in the studio either. Gospel choirs came in for Start Beginning, Concannon traveled to Senegal and wrote Last Night in Dakar, and British Rastafarian writer and poet Benjamin Zephaniah came in for England Uprise.

“Luke is a big fan of Benjamin Zephaniah and because the song that he kinda rants on before, England Uprise, is a lot like what Benjamin writes about identity and what Englishness is and what Britishness is and that sort of thing, he felt like a very natural choice,” says Parker.

Zephaniah’s presence in the track hints at the album’s politically charged messages. Themes such as homosexuality are explored in the cheeky Part Of Me, where the duo ask everyone from George Bush to Eminem to, inevitably, Amy Winehouse to admit that part of them is gay. Parker says Zephaniah might even send a copy of England Uprise to Tony Benn.

“Luke and I represent a different vibe. Luke’s very much more the political side and for me, since I play a lot of the instruments, it’s more of a kind of art, a support thing, the method, I think. But yeah, we have a political edge to us,” he says.

Besides being infused with a protest spirit, Nizlopi’s sound is also unique in itself. Parker’s talent goes beyond handheld instruments to sounds he produces from within. As a trained human beatboxer, he brings a hip-hop sound to songs heavy on string-instruments, giving them a lift and a sharper edge. Although beatboxing came about as an accident (“It was a joke, really, someone put a mic in front of me years ago”), the powerful double bass was a mediated transition from electric.

“I like the fact that you can tell who the player is by the sound of their instrument and you can’t do that with an electric bass,” he says.

Parker’s preference for the double bass isn’t only technical, however. His four double basses have names and, according to him, personalities.

“The one I play at the moment, called Nanny, is about two hundred years old and French. To me they’re very womanly instruments. I love the way they look. And an instrument doesn’t really become yours until you name it. I know I sound like a complete nut for that,” he says.
“I have four, but I keep them split up. They’re all over different parts of the country. They all have names. I only have one male double bass as well.”

But Nanny is the one who goes for the tours. The core of Nizlopi’s work is performing live and they’ve taken their sound to stages as massive as Glastonbury and as intimate as fans’ living rooms.

“The smaller ones are scarier, where they [audiences] could hear every note. That can be quite intimidating, when you’re knocking someone with your bow by accident,” he says.
“And yet the bigger stage is a quite ‘Alas,’ you know. You get on stage and you think ‘Oh my God it’s like I’m famous or something.’ It’s a bit of a laugh, it’s quite hard to take seriously.”

They do take it seriously though, and it is what they play at gigs that ends up in their albums. The processes of creating music and performing it are one and the same, in many cases.

“We do a lot of the creating of new music on stage. We’ve always liked people like John Martyn or Danny Thompson who kinda write songs on the stage going out on a limb and I think that’s what excites us. And we get the audience to sing in harmony and join in whenever possible with me and Luke leading them on. It’s like playing in a massive band.”

But it’s only the two of them that have played at Wembley Stadium, have joined Billy Bragg onstage and are set to play Glastonbury again this summer. All humbleness aside, a string of almost back-to-back tour dates well into May and a new album out on shelves point to a bright future for Parker and Concannon (and Nanny).

Christina Cromeyer Dieke