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[title]Buster Mantis owner Gordon McGowan has spent the last 18 months telling people off for dancing. They told him off, too: ‘Why are you playing this music if we’re not supposed to dance?’ It was fair enough, shrugs the south Londoner, who moved here from Jamaica aged 13. After all, the playlist that accompanies its saltfish fritters, jerk jackfruit burgers and Lychee Mojitos encompasses R&B, hip hop, dancehall, grime, garage and ‘a bit of afro-house’. ‘We play anything that a Jamaican would like apart from Celine Dion,’ he says. ‘Jamaicans like Celine Dion but we’re not playing that.’
The bar, restaurant and impromptu dancehall has just revived its weekend DJ sessions with regular-turned-resident Gyps. Fletch and Pharaoh G. ‘People were timid, like little deer,’ says Gordon, who opened Buster Mantis in late 2015. ‘We just darkened the lights a bit more and within a half hour there was this collective relief. They just picked up where they left off.’
Buster Mantis became a key location for London’s resurgent jazz musicians, who fuse conservatoire-level skills with the energy and vibe of a garage rave. The venue hosted artist collective Steam Down’s weekly sessions between 2017 and 2019. (It continues down the road at the Matchstick Piehouse and Buster Mantis plans to revive its own Champion Sounds jam soon.)
The return of bopping, shuffling and 2-stepping at Buster Mantis is a welcome reprise of the area’s long musical histories. ‘We didn’t have a DJ when we first started but the music we played got people out of their seats,’ says Gordon. ‘It meant more to people than I anticipated, and they expressed it with their feet.’