Mostar Sevdah Reunion - Evening Standard
Review
YOU step out of Leicester
Square and suddenly you’re in
the Balkans. An audience aged 18 to 80 and all up for a jig were heaving in
the sweaty attic of the Marquee, dancing their socks off to the Balkan
Blues of Szapora, the warm-up support for the Mostar Sevdah Reunion –
displaced from the Marquee’s main stage by a double-booked launch for
Status Quo’s laughable “40 years in showbiz” DVD. Both
bands could actually teach the Quo a thing or two about how to rock.
When the Mostar Sevdah Reunion at last claimed the stage, it was
with style. Their “sevdah” music – which means love,
desire or ecstasy – kept morale high while the bombs fell in the
1990s and now played in London by the ensemble of two guitars, bass
accordion, drums, violin and vocals, it was irresistible. Sweet and
melancholy, the dapper white-jacketed Ilijaz Delic warbled - his voice as
wrinkled and warm as his walnut face – and his ballads could crack
the hardest heart. He ceded the stage to the supreme diva Ljiljana Buttler
who, big-bottomed and bedecked in black, wooed a willing and enthusiastic
crowd into singing with her the songs that had united them during their war
in the nineties. Never mind the Balkans (or indeed the Quo), this was real
rock and soul.