There are gigs you enjoy. There are gigs you remember. And then there are the nights that split the earth open for a second and let you stare straight into the fiery furnace..
Taj Farrant at The Garage was one of those nights.… we offer up our notes..
We’ve spent over forty years in darkened rooms with cameras around our necks and amplifiers rattling our ribs. In that time, only a handful of performances have carried that unmistakable voltage – the creeping awareness that you’re standing in the blast radius of a future legend beginning to ignite.
You know the feeling. The kind of night people rewrite their own history around years later.
“I was there.”
Most weren’t.
Before any history making note was played, Taj’s father stepped forward, part proud parent, part preacher at the altar of inevitability. He glanced around the modest crowd and spoke about beginnings – how great artists start in rooms exactly like this, in front of audiences small enough to count. The sort of speech that could easily collapse into cliché if the evidence wasn’t about to walk onstage holding a guitar.
But we already knew.
We’ve seen this shape before.
Tiny upstairs rooms before the world arrives. Arctic Monkeys at The Grace before the hysteria. U2 at The Hope & Anchor. Wolf Alice supporting bands nobody remembers anymore down at the 100 Club. Those strange, sacred evenings that later calcify into mythology.
And then Taj Farrant walked onstage.
The drummer watched Taj with the same razor-focus Ronnie Tutt once watched Elvis Presley — absorbing every flicker, every cue, every sudden turn in real time."
From that first bent note, the room changed temperature. Not because he was flashy – though the technique is frankly absurd – but because of the control. Total, frightening control that lit up that guitar like an extension of his nervous system. Every phrase physically pulled from somewhere deep inside him before erupting through those strings.
He often played with his eyes shut, sealed away inside the music, face twisting through waves of ecstasy, concentration and anguish as though each note cost him something real. Occasionally he’d glance toward the guitarist beside him, but mostly he existed somewhere else entirely – locked into a private communion with sound itself.
That playing? Good lord.
Yes, there’s speed. Impossible speed. Fingers stretching across the fretboard like they’re operating outside normal human mechanics. Thumb wrapped over the neck to form ridiculous chord shapes while his strumming hand somehow taps additional notes into existence mid-flight. At one point you genuinely get to wondering whether those hands are insured like priceless artefacts.
But virtuosity alone means nothing without feel.
And Taj Farrant has feel in terrifying abundance.
..we may have just witnessed the first lightning strike of something enormous.."
He leans into notes until they ache. Lets them bloom, hang and smoulder before snapping them back with brutal force. There’s deep blues in his playing – scorched, soulful, lived-in blues – but also rock swagger, funk elasticity, flashes of something cosmic and untamed. It’s not genre-hopping so much as demolition. Like he’s melted decades of guitar history into something molten and new.
The audience – small in number but utterly hypnotised – barely moved. Nobody dared drift toward the bar. Every dynamic shift, every eruption of aggression, every moment of restraint landed with surgical precision. Taj held the room completely in the palm of his big old guitar wielding hands.
And around him stood a band of absurdly talented young musicians, including his sister on keys, all locked together with the chemistry of a gang who know they’re building something a little dangerous. Tight without ever sounding rigid. Songs stretched and breathed and threatened to spiral into chaos before collapsing perfectly back into place.
This is full glorious atomic powered Farrantscopic Technicolour."
At times the whole thing carried this strange cinematic energy – like Fame rewritten by Hendrix and Prince in some sweaty underground club.
Then came “Crossroads,” introduced as their first number one single, followed since by six more. By then the chemistry between the players felt undeniable. Solos ricocheted around the stage like shared secrets. The drummer watched Taj with the same razor-focus Ronnie Tutt once watched Elvis Presley — absorbing every flicker, every cue, every sudden turn in real time.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, it hits you:
We’re not in Kansas anymore.
This is no longer media documentation.
This is full glorious atomic powered Farrantscopic Technicolour.
Because this wasn’t content.
It was a fricking moment.
You leave remembering fragments rather than songs. Little flashes burned permanently into your neural pathways.
And then came Purple Rain.
Not a respectful nod.
Not some safe crowd-pleasing encore.
He detonated it into a mesmeric purple plume.
Like some sunburnt Australian mystic digging for opals with a stick of dynamite, Taj tore into Prince’s masterpiece and dragged it through fire. The melody arrived familiar, then mutated into something heavier, rawer, almost violent in its emotional weight. It hit like a fifty-car pile-up somehow being bulldozed sideways by a freight train.
We’ve been fortunate enough to see Prince live several times, and for us, his purpleness sits at the summit – untouchable territory. The kind of artist who became the music.
That same rare electricity flashed here.
Not imitation.
Not tribute.
Something deeper.
Possession.
By the end, all the usual chatter evaporated — age, hype, trajectories, algorithms, industry noise.
None of it mattered anymore.
What remained was beautifully simple:
A small room.
A kid with a guitar.
And the creeping suspicion that we may have just witnessed the first lightning strike of something enormous.
So no – maybe Taj Farrant isn’t the greatest guitarist on the planet.
Not yet.
But give it a minute
Taj Farrant played The Garage, London Sun 3rd May 2026
