Live Review: Cypress Hill & Smiles Again

Even the door staff at the Roundhouse had no idea who the support act was going to be, so it wasn't surprising when rapper Smiles Ahead announced that he got the call up about two hours before go time to get his shit together and drive from Newcastle down for the show. He seemed understandably unprepared, but he did his best with the ever-mugging DJ Enterprise cutting frikky-frikky-fresh scratches with hilarious regularity.

“Do you remember when we were like ten years old and we saw Cypress Hill? That must have been back in 2013 or something,” will be a conversation had in a decade or two by some of the youngest members of the all ages crowd. Liberal parents should be commended for setting their children on a pre-determined destiny of smoking weed and nodding heads, with this show as a solid building block for their future. Cypress Hill have been doing this shit for so long, they're a rock'n'roll monster which just happens to play hip hop with a proper street pedigree and a show that is basically failsafe. Eric Bobo on percussion complementing Westside Radio's Julio G on the decks made for a great line up, even after lamenting that DJ Muggs was nowhere to be seen.

The pantomime aspects of the show that come out in the big festival environments were toned down and the club show atmosphere seemed a lot more real. B-Real is hip hop, not only joining Bobo on drums for Sen Dog's Latin portion of the show (which was earlier on than expected), he also joined Julio G for a cutfest match up on the decks.

The set is a well-oiled machine – songs from the first album seethe with an angriness and hunger, Black Sunday classics like Lick A Shot and I Ain't Goin' Out Like That are dark and terrifying. The weed anthems like Dr Greenthumb (and most of the set really) saw a number of brave kids light up inside despite a couple of boys in blue wandering around. As far as the misconception that Cypress never evolves, B-Real smoking a single hitter vaporiser instead of a massive bong proves that he is keeping up with the times. Truly Cypress Hill are a proper institution of alternative music; may they keep their place there forever.