An interview with Kamakaze Rainbow, the ‘house band’ at the heart of the current ‘Demand the Impossible’ show in the Corn Exchange, Newport.
There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a flyer over there, A-telling me I got to beware. Time we stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down. Buffalo Springfield, For What it’s Worth: 1968
No, but really, what is going down? What should we beware of?
There’s a play going down at the Corn Exchange, Newport at the moment. It runs until 13th October. The Common Wealth Theatre performance of Demand the Impossible, a play making you aware of undercover police and how they have spied on protest groups for the last five decades.
It is an immersive experience, with actors mingling with the audience, projections and a live band in the middle of it all to give it the feel of a gig.
Rhiannon White Director: The activist movement of the last few decades has gone hand in hand with the counterculture scene with gigs and parties, so it made sense for this play to be based around a gig. The guys in the band were on the scene when I was living in Bristol, they played parties and gigs that are likely to have had undercover cops attending, so it made sense for them to be part of the show.
Rhiannon is quite right. Marco Jacobs, the undercover cop embedded with Cardiff Anarchist Network, regularly turned up at gigs around south Wales. Mark Kennedy, the cop that arguably ignited the Undercover Policing Inquiry when he was outed, even ran the bar at the Big Green Gathering Festival.
But, what is that sound?
Today (7th October) I’m sat backstage at the Corn Exchange, eating donuts (the mythical snack of choice for police) with the house band for Demand the Impossible, Kamikaze Rainbow.
Oliver Emanuel plays drums, Jassen Summogum plays guitar and sings, while Ruari Floyd plays bass guitar and magics up various effects.
So how long have you guys been working together as a band?
Ollie: On and off since we met really, at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, which was in 2003. So yeah, 22 years, on and off in various forms.
Jassen: I think the first iteration of this project, or the first serious iteration of it, was a band called Circus of Invention which we played in when we moved to Bristol. We put on our own shows as well. We played in squats, we played at festivals, we recorded music and put on our own festivals.
It was all about collectives, bringing people together, sharing art form, sharing ideas and it always had a very political heart, responsive to the times that we were living in and then. As the sound changed and our ideas changed, we moved into this other project called Daggers and Waves. With that project we working a lot more with strings and different tonal sounds, whereas Circus of Invention was right in your face and very much a chaotic live vehicle.
Rhiannon, the director of this show, would have seen many of those shows. This show definitely captures that sort of world. It’s like we’re coming back to some of those songs of Circus Invention.
Have you done this sort of theatre music before for any other show?
Jass: Yeah, well, we actually did Common Wealth’s first show, which was called Town of Brown and that was back in Bristol at the old fire station.
Is the music that you’re playing for this show, how shall I put it, organic and improvised – is it going along with the script, or does it change every night, or do you sort of jam it, or … how does it work?
Ollie: Do you mean the music in between that we’re playing, like, sort of like the soundtrack music for the show?
Yeah, we’ve kind of been working on that over the last few weeks and during the research and development weeks that we had over the last couple of years. All those ideas have come together in the last few weeks, and basically they’re getting more solidified for each scene. There’s a lot more ambient stuff that’s just specific for this show that we’ve been working on. We’re like the live soundtrack, so it moves from a punk gig and then develops into the theatre show, and then moves back to band music at the end again.
Ruari: It’s definitely like semi-improvised. We’ve got rough scores, and we’ve got ideas and themes and moods to kind of match to each particular scene, but it’s not, note for note, it’s very different.
Ollie: Yeah, it’s not scored out or anything, we kind of know roughly what chords we’re playing and stuff, but we are generally just trying to create the atmosphere with those ideas and improvising.
Did you start composing after the show started rehearsing, so you would get into the vibe, or did you know what you were going to do before you got there?
Ollie: I’d say during the research and development, those couple of weeks that we had over the last couple of years, we kind of got a good idea of the sort of sounds we were going to use. I’m using a lot of synthesizers, and originally, I think we had a double bass and we were bowing it, then Rory had a great idea about bowing the cymbals, and it was making almost a horror film soundtrack. What is that machine you’ve created, Rory?
Ruari: Yeah, I decided to take it out of the show, basically, but I made a long double bass sort of sounding thing, which was designed to be plucked and bowed, just like a double bass, really. I just created that as an experiment, really. Me and Ollie are woodworkers, it’s our day job, so we’re pretty handy with stuff like that anyway, we just sort of make it.
Have you had complete artistic freedom, or is the show director nudging you in any direction?
Jassen: I think there’s been a level of artistic freedom to it. There was a bit of direction in terms of the set, playing some of these songs. We were playing them quite some time ago, and maybe Rhiannon was at those shows, and maybe she felt that was like when the Spy Cops were around, some of them would have most likely been at those shows. We played at the Squats, we played in very edgy places sometimes, personally I think they were some of our favourite shows. The absolute raw energy you get in those places is like nothing else. It’s really intimate, and it was wonderful to play those shows.
But I think in terms of the Spy Cops, and all the people that might be spying on us – maybe that’s what Rhiannon thought to herself, you know what, this is the right soundtrack band-wise, but in terms of all the other stuff, like Rory, Ollie and myself, we all like to experiment.
Olie: I’d say we’ve pretty much had full freedom of all those other sounds, it’s just we have to be a bit wary sometimes of overpowering the speeches, and so like we’ve got to create a balance. Yes, we’re making quite noisy and edgy stuff, but it’s more like volumes and things we’ve got to think about to work with the actors, because we don’t want to overpower their speaking. Occasionally we’re told like, oh, maybe that’s a bit too loud, or a bit too dark for this particular moment, or something, but yeah, it’s more of a collaborative thing, really, we haven’t been told, no, you can’t do that, or, so yeah, I’d say we’ve had a lot of freedom.
Okay, so you’ve played the squats and things, can you feel a lot of empathy towards the general theme of the performance – activism, spycops and such?
Ollie: Yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah, I was not like super surprised, but after hearing some of the things when chatting with people after these shows, realising that maybe some of these spycops were at the shows we did. It’s a bit of a weird feeling, really.
Jassen: And the show, though it is about that, it’s also about the protest movement. And it’s also about the people, why people did and still are doing these things. It does cover that in the show, which I’m very grateful for, because I’ve always felt that our music is involved with that, to some level. I’m not saying all the songs have that sort of meaning behind it, but we were interested in talking about these things.
Did you ever go out and actually get involved in action or protests?
Jass: Me personally, yes, I’ve been doing that sort of thing for a while. But there’s different ways to get involved in activism and sometimes, personally, I think with what is going on in the world right now, a lot of people feel afraid to express themselves in the art world, in the music world. But I think it’s even more important now, that’s why you need to do it and that is a form of activism. It is actually just saying, no, this is wrong, you’re calling out genocide, or you’re calling out, spy cops, it’s part of the conversation.
After the show then, what next?
Jassen: After a little bit break, we’re working on this new project called Kamikaze Rainbow, which is what we’re calling ourselves for this show and very excited to release music too. Even though it’s quite different to Circus of Invention, it still contains a lot of the same philosophy politically. It’s a bit more electro, but various styles within that umbrella of Kamikaze Rainbow.
We’ve been working on this six track EP. It is coming out this year, at least the first single will come out at some point in November. We are very excited to put this work out after a bit of a break. We have not released anything for a while. We’ve shot a music video, there’s other music videos planned, and I think it’s just getting back into it, you know, maybe doing some more recording as well.
Ollie: There has been some talk about potentially recording some of the music that we’ve done in the show as a soundtrack, so that would be great if we had the opportunity to do that. I don’t know if it’s the soundtrack type music or the band music, but maybe both, we’re not sure yet,
Ruari: We are definitely keen to start looking at developing our kind of sound design.
Ollie: Yeah, it’s enjoyable making that sort of atmospheric music, isn’t it? I’ve done a little bit of, soundtrack work for animations and things in the past. I always like that atmospheric, sort of, mood making.
We wind up with me suggesting that they could act as the orchestra in the pit for a silent movie and the conversation veers off into all sorts of different directions. They then have to put their donuts down and go and try out something the director wants to possibly change for tonight’s show.
- To read our preview of the Show and for links to tickets and such like, go to SHOW PREVIEW: Demand the Impossible – AKA Spycops the Musical (6th to 13th October 2025) – Peppermint Iguana Zine
- To hear Circus of Invention, go to Stream circus of Invention music | Listen to songs, albums, playlists for free on SoundCloud
- To hear Daggers and Waves, go to Daggers & Waves | Spotify
