Messed!Up
It seems quite fitting that Greentea Peng’s show in Hamburg falls on a Sunday night. As people of all ages are standing in line and gathering at Docks, the mood is relaxed and a sign of a beautiful evening ahead.
Support act Goya Gumbani visibly enjoys opening the show with a mix of jazzy vibes and rap, and the crowd passes the vibe check immediately. Perfect conditions for Greentea Peng, who is excitedly welcomed by a sold-out venue as she enters the stage with a bright smile and gets into the groove.
The London-based artist and five-piece band The Seng Seng Family fill the club with their soft sound like billows of smoke (pun intended), and classics like “Suffer” meet tracks like “Glory” from the new album “Tell Dem It’s Sunny”. With warm ease, they move through this last evening of their tour, through Nu Soul, Reggae, Trip Hop, and Pop, through building soundscapes and – then again – jamming for minutes. The sweaty crowd is softly swaying along, the whole room is a sea of movement and happy faces.
Greentea Peng is known to be a political artist, and in case somebody had missed out on her black and white head scarf that’s revealed after a few songs underneath a big cowboy hat, she also vocalizes it: „Free Palestine!“. As the show progresses, she proves that she’s not one to be pigeonholed, neither thematically, nor musically: she’s moving from using her warm, unique voice like an instrument, creating spheric sounds, hissing and stimming, to accentuated raps and upbeat tracks like the 2025 single „Stones Throw“.
Should there be somebody left not dancing by that point, her cover of Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam” takes care of that. Declarations of love from the audience can be heard throughout the show. Greentea Peng’s music is like a warm embrace, and we’re all here for it. “Mr Sun” even has the crowd waving their lighters (sic!), and “Hu Man” is the singalong everybody has been waiting for. And just in case somebody thought that Aria Rachel Adrienne Wells – as Greentea Peng is known by civil name – and her band only know the soft tunes: the triphoppy “I AM (Reborn)”, also from the recent second studio album, evolves into a full blown rock music experience with guitarist Alex throwing his instrument across the stage.
“We don’t know when we will be here next, so we want to stay until they literally kick us off the stage”, a widely smiling Greentea Peng states over 1,5 hours into the show, and the audience couldn’t agree more. A few songs more (like the 2019 “Downers”), and this tour is one for the books. And the smiling faces leaving the venue tell everybody looking at them: this was a beautiful
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Photographer: Julia Schwendner
