SHOOK #10

Cover pHoTo:

NO 1 0 VOL ONE / WINTER 2011

edItor: Jez Smadja art dIreCtor: Matt MonkeyBoxer www.inallforms.co.uk ContrIButIng edItors: Al Burton, Sunil Chauhan, Helene Dancer, Chris Robinson, Andy Thomas, Ben Verghese

Intro The Armley Liberal Club. Boombox. Salem. Rustie. Hanni el Khatib. Levi’s Workshops. electrikal. Austin Peralta.

Stay Sailing. Foreign exchange. Scanners.

assoCIate edItors: Charles Drakeford, Keith Pettinger, Andres Reyes, Gavin Kendrick adVertIsIng: Michael Krasser desIgn: Rosy Tsai www.almost-rosy.com SUB eDITOR: Gavin Kendrick WeBologY: Ben Immanuel ContrIButors: Sanjiv Ahluwalia, Nate Anidugbe, Keith Baker, Mr. Beatnick, Charlie Bell, Sue Boweman, Paul Camo?, Max Cole, Matt Court, Simon Creasey, Welson Creep, Colin McKean, Charlie Dark, Spin Doctor, Gerard Don-Daniel, Frank Dubya, Duke etienne, Laurent Fintoni, Adam Hussam Murray, Cal Jader, Zainab Jama, The Boy King, Benji Lehmann, Max Leonard, Kingsley Marshall, James McNally, Oscar Medina, Gabriel Myddleton, Gwyn Moxham, Samera Owusu Tutu, Ryan Proctor, Ollie Sanders, Dom Servini, Alex Stevenson, Johnny Trunk, Tom Vague, Vince Vella, Darren Wall, Charles Waring, Susannah Webb, Justin Wong, James Wright.

Contents

Features 18. WIld BunCh A Bristol Sound.

48. unIted VIBratIons Arkestral delights.

22. CYMande Nyah Rock.

50. lost sPIrIt of teChno Britain’s new wave of artists.

26. kIss fM Original Pirate Material.

30. shoP talk UK record store recollections.

34. stICkY The Ill Kid goes Booo!

52. northern Quarter Manchester stand up.

54. Carroll thoMPson Hopelessly in Love.

38. Mala Space is the Place 42. keIth MansfIeld Ultimate Library Breaks

56. laBels of loVe Behind the scenes of some small record labels.

Outro

PhotograPhY: Ashes 57, Alex Coley, Kingsley Davis, Nicky Dracoulis, Damian Duncan, evgeniy Kazannik, Alexis Maryon, Scott Smith

62. hotlanta Michael Schmelling goes South 64. sofrIto Tropical warehouse.

sPeCIal thanks: Paul Bradshaw, Swifty and Marlow Blue.

66. reVIeWs Books, films and records.

SHOOK 10 Fairlawns, London N11 2DH, UK +44 (0) 208 292 4533 info@shook.fm Printed in the UK by: MANSON Group Distributed by Central, Post Scriptum + Disticor

3

INTRO

WORDS | BARRY SMYTH PHOTOGRAPHY | ALEX COLEY

4

S

ocial clubs have provided vital entertainment to local communities across the UK since the time of Queen Victoria. At Armley Liberal Club in Leeds the future looks uncertain, a result of the smoking ban, the recession and dwindling interest.

The regular Wednesday night at Armley Liberal Club kicks off with a few of games of bingo before a handful of couples take to the polished wooden floor for the first dance of the evening. The style is modern sequence and the dancers move in measured but graceful steps around the brightly-lit room. Sitting on the bare concert stage at the other end of the room sits the club’s white-shirted organist who plays end-of-the-pier style covers through tinny speakers. You sense that he feels he was destined for greater things. As the evening progresses, another round of bingo is followed by more dancing until the weary members and their guests make their way home at around 10.30pm. Most live nearby to this one-storey venue in west Leeds. The Wednesday crowd isn’t a young one, many are of pensionable age, and isn’t large either. The club’s attendance is declining, and the club’s secretary informs us that its future is uncertain. There are some social clubs in Leeds that have cashed in on their faded retro charms, palling up with promoters and turning their large function rooms into sought-after venues by young partygoers who enjoy the irony that comes with revelling in a working-class club. These events bring much needed money over the bar and help keep the doors open. But the Armley Liberal isn’t in the right part of town for that

type of action, relying instead on its members for dues and bar-take. Wilf Parker, one of the night’s bingo winners, has been coming here for over 65 years. Introduced to the place by his dad, this retired postman used to pop in four or five nights a week, but now only comes in on Wednesdays and Sundays for a few drinks and a bit of a chat. “I’m very strongly against the closing of the clubs because younger generations are learning less and less about drinking responsibly,” stresses Wilf. “You came in with your elders and you learnt how to deal with alcohol but that doesn’t happen anymore.

I love it here, I don’t dance anymore but my friends come here and we have a catch up. The younger ones used to come in for the cribbage, cards, darts and dominoes but not anymore.

Slowly but surely this type of place is dying off.

If you can’t get a younger crowd in, how can it keep going?” asks the dapper 84-year-old.

A few tables across, Marion McGowan, 74, relates, “I’ve been coming here for about 29 years and up until maybe three years ago there used to be a turn [act] on a Saturday night.

That would pull in a big crowd but you don’t get anything like that anymore. There is about 30 people here tonight and it won’t get any busier.” In the games room Tom Fraser, 64, is quick to point out he isn’t a snooker player but a drinker. He’s probably the most enthusiastic

5

club fan I met all evening. “Why would anyone want to go anywhere else? This is a great little club. It has everything you need under one roof.

I don’t see why anyone would want to go to a pub, they’re too bloody expensive and full of strangers! Here everybody knows everybody and if you don’t turn up one evening then they are quick to ask where you were the next,” he adds. Lifelong member and club secretary Dave Johnson told us that the Liberal Club, which has been in Armley since the ‘20s and in its current location since the mid ‘60s, is struggling, like a lot of clubs, with cash flow. Dave, 63, says, “The recession is a big part of it and the smoking ban killed us. We can’t afford to put on the acts we want, so we do struggle to keep everything here running. But go on we will. Clublife is all about creating a quality night for the members.

I’ve been coming here for years and all of us have grown up together – everyone knows everyone.” During our visit we were welcomed with warmth and generosity, hallmarks of the family atmosphere that survives in these places. All of the members we spoke to were happy to answer our questions – so long as we didn’t interfere with the bingo calling. And as we packed up and got ready to leave, the organist invited dancers to take to the floor once more, and join him in the ‘Last Waltz’ before heading home.

WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION WORDS | Goldorak

B

efore the iPhone and the iPod, before the Discman and even the Walkman, was the time of the boombox, those bionic sonic weapons manufactured in Japan by companies like JVC, Sharp, Sanyo and AIWA. In truth, they seemed beamed from out of the future, with their 4- or 6-cone speaker system, chrome facades, graphic equalisers and flashing lights reminiscent of an aircraft landing strip at night.

With the arrival of the boombox in the late ’70s, music was for the first time liberated from the AC power supply, and in New York City especially the boomboxes (or “ghetto blasters” or “beat boxes” depending on where you come from) became iconic as young kids took to carrying them in the streets, playing the latest, bass-heavy streets sounds in the subways or in the parks.

“You’d bring the boomboxes to the park… put the boombox down, roll your shit up, spark

it up, and then we would dance in the park, and being Puerto Rican, we would, like hustle, you know and do it all,” explains actress/ choreographer Rosie Perez, just one of the people profiled in Lyle Owerko’s book, The Boombox Project. Owerko, besides being an accomplished photojournalist, is something of a boombox connoisseur. His book is a chance to show off his huge collection of pristine and not-so-pristine machines and to geek out about different makes and models. Besides that, it’s also an excuse to compile images of the boxes and their owners from those halcyon days– Bruce Springsteen in Central Park West with his diminutive set, Futura 2000 rocking up at the Roxy in 1984, The Clash on the Lower East Side in 1981, LL Cool J in Madison Square Park, and a host of unknowns too, posing with or caressing or dancing to or heaving these sonic behemoths which often came with 6

shoulder-straps to help their owners carry the load.

Featuring tonnes of interviews with people who made their names in that era, names like Fab 5 Freddy, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, Lisa Lisa, photographers Jamel Shabazz and Ricky Flores, Stretch & Bobbito and Don Letts, there’s plenty to read as well as drool over.

There’s even a foreword from Spike Lee, whose character Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing is one of the most instantly recognisable members of boombox brigade. It all goes to making The Boombox Project a fascinating piece of cultural history, tailor-made for people like me, and probably you too, who could never live without their radio.

The Boombox Project by Lyle Owerko is published by Abrams Image

FIRST WORD RECORDS The Finest in Hip Hop, Soul, Funk, Jazz and Beats since 2003

OUT NOW.....

ARIYA ASTROBEAT ARKESTRA

MIKE-L

SOULEANCE

KIDKANEVIL

ON A COLUMBO TIP

SOUPAPE EP

BASHO BASHO REMIXED REMIXED

From Lagos to Leeds with Love.... the fantastic debut album includes the huge single ‘Crosstown Traffic’.

First Word veteran Mike-L finally releases his debut album - fans of DJ Shadow, Madlib and Quantic need to check this.

New EP from Fulgeance & Soulist - a follow up to last year’s sold out Le Plaisir and Le Monde releases.

Remix album of this year’s Basho Basho LP - features mixes from Daedelus, Blue Daisy, Tokimonsta and Illum Sphere.

ARIYA ASTROBEAT ARKESTRA

Coming soon on First Word... New Releases from Homecut, Andy H, Herma Puma, The Haggis Horns & Lotek Find out more at www.firstwordrecords.com

Jazz Cafe & Mean Fiddler present THE

WORLD FAMOUS

BEATJUNKIES

FIRST LONDON SHOW IN 10 YEARS FOR LEGENDARY EAST COAST HIP-HOP GROUP

5 PARKWAY CAMDEN LONDON NW1

TICKETMASTER 0844 847 2514 SEETICKETS 0870 060 3777 HMV TICKETS 0843 221 0100

FOLLOW ‘JAZZCAFE -CAMDEN’

RESTAURANT 0207 688 8899 BOOK ONLINE jazzcafe.co.uk

13 JAN feat. DJ BABU / DJ RHETTMATIC / J-ROCC

hosted by RAKAA IRISCIENCE (DILATED PEOPLES) Plus Spin Doctor

SUN 23 JANUARY

DOORS 7PM. 5 PARKWAY. CAMDEN. NW1

SKITZ & RODNEY P

LIVE!

SPIN DOCTOR DJs MO FINGAZ & BOBAFATT HOSTED BY BIG TED

SAT 19 FEB

CHALI2NA (OF JURASSIC 5)

MARCH

WED 16 & THU 17 LONDON JAZZ CAFE

FRI 18 BIRMINGHAM HMV INSTITUTE

SAT 19 LIVERPOOL KAZIEMIER

KINGS GO FORTH 20 JAN

HEZEKIAH & JAGUAR WRIGHT

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE AGENCY GROUP

WITH LIVE BAND

AGMP presents

21 & 22 JAN

& HIS BAND FEAT. DENNIS ROLLINS MARCH

WED 09 LONDON

JAZZ CAFE

SAT 12 EDINBURGH

HMV PICTURE HOUSE

SUN 13 BIRMINGHAM

HMV INSTITUTE

LEE ‘SCRATCH’ PERRY 28 JAN

MÉLANIE PAIN

SEARCH FOR ‘JAZZ CAFE’

18 & 19 FEB

JOSH ROUSE 20 FEB

COLIN BLUNSTONE 24 FEB

SIMON SAYS 2 19 MAR

SUBMOTION ORCHESTRA 12 APR

THE PIONEERS 15 APR

SimonPrecilla.com presents

CONYA DOSS

www.hmvtickets.com • www.ticketweb.co.uk • www.ticketmaster.co.uk • www.seetickets.com • Jazz Café Box Office (no booking fee - cash only) 17

WORDS | Sunil Chauhan

D

ecay-pornographers love Detroit. You can’t be a band from the motor city without someone asking you whether its industrial rust and rot has deeply affected your music. So it’s maybe not a surprise that the more doomsday aspects of the music from this Traverse City, Michigan trio are what most have latched onto first. But ask the group’s rapper Jack about it and he says he doesn’t know why the prettier aspects of their music aren’t noticed more.

Salem after all achieve the unusual effect of being bulldozing and beautiful all at once. “If you saw all the things, the images and artefacts that we have in the mix, there’s so many other things, a lot of subtle things,” he says.

“For me, that’s more interesting to talk about than just the dark thing. I think that’s totally oversimplifying it.”

Murkiness figures highly on King Night, Salem’s album debut. Vocals are buried, lyrics can barely be made out. Seemingly working on parallel levels, half the time you aren’t sure where you should be listening exactly. Salem seem to quite enjoy foxing people. “There are two parts of it,” Jack says. “On the one hand we like to treat our voices more like an instrument than an extension of ourselves. On the other, as important as what I’m saying in a song was to

me when I said it, I feel it’s way more important that everyone just interprets what people are saying in their way. I’m not wanting to have these melodic songs have really audible words all the time.”

While Salem’s occult fascination, narcoleptic aesthetic and general trashy glamour has inspired a raft of similar outfits, they’re not interested in what they’ve helped birth. In fact, much has been made of Salem’s general apathy in general – one New York Times piece zeroed in on Jack’s apparent disinterest in being interviewed – he didn’t wake up in time for a phoner he was meant to do.

This might have been down to his mixed feelings about sleeping. “When I was younger I think that was something I thought about a lot and it really bothered me. I would try to sleep as little as I could, ‘cos I thought it was really depressing to sleep. I think I’m a little less like that now, but yeah I don’t really like to sleep much.”

The place their slackerish attitude has created the most fuss though is live. Salem, by their own admission, aren’t quite the finished article yet. Do they want to be? It’s hard to tell. “I think our live show’s a lot more straightforward than a lot of other people’s” says Jack. “Especially with electronic music,

8

there’s a lot of people who put on more of a show and they’re dancing around and that doesn’t really feel right for us. To some people, they don’t think they’re being entertained enough in the traditional sense. I think we’re just doing it in a way people aren’t used to. But the only thing we really think about is making music. It’s not even about putting on a show and that’s what gets people mad sometimes.”

They might not be the most polished live proposition then, but perhaps it doesn’t matter.

They are a studio concoction, one that might not work live without something getting lost in translation. For now at least. “We almost had to work backwards to figure out how to perform our own songs live,” says Jack of their live teething troubles. “Honestly, I think it’s more that it’s so based in making this music for each other that it’s hard to translate it into performing it for other people.”

He’s still just getting used to hearing other people’s feedback. “When I was hanging out with DJ Nate, I was playing him some of the songs and he was like ‘do people fuck to this?’ I was like, I don’t know. I have no idea.”

www.brownswoodrecordings.com

9

WORDS | COLIN MCKEAN PHOTOGRAPHY | TOM RUSSELL

I

t’s almost three years since Rustie’s Jagz the Smack EP was released on Glasgow’s Stuffrecords. While there was a heavy US hip hop influence in its slouching post-Dilla beats and the dirty south drawl of its low-slung bass, the tracks had a character all of their own.

Fuelled by Buckfast and ecstasy rather than Crunk Juice and chronic, there was a peculiarly Scottish griminess to tracks like ‘Clipper’ and ‘Pendulum’.

The EP’s title was inspired by graffiti Rustie had seen scrawled in a tenement stairwell.

It seemed almost apposite that the record’s release was delayed when boxes of its handsprayed sleeves had to be rescued from a studio in a building condemned by the council.

It’s fair to say Rustie is now very much an international concern, embraced by the global bass fraternity alongside Hudson Mohawke and the Luckyme and Numbers crews. Now signed to Warp records, the Sunburst EP, his first solo release for the label, came out in October - further proof, if it were needed, of Glasgow’s continuing reign as a locus of cutting-edge electronica.

“Glasgow’s great – I’ve lived there my whole life,” says Rustie. “There are lots of friendly and genuine as fuck people, and there’s just about every kind of music scene you’d find in any big English-speaking city.”

Though he mentions pioneering grime

producers like Wiley, Low Deep and Davinche, some of the producer’s key influences are a little closer to home. “As far as Scottish music goes I love happy hardcore like Scott Brown and Q-Tex,” he says. “As well as Detroitinfluenced techno like Rei Loci - and we’ve got IDM royalty Boards of Canada. Obviously I love the team Luckyme, but in a completely different vein, one of my favourite bands as a kid was Teenage Fanclub.”

If the pop classicism of Norman Blake’s Scottish group, much loved by Kurt Cobain, isn’t such an obvious reference point in Rustie’s music, the sounds and textures inspired by late 80s video games Rustie so often deploys in his music certainly are. There’s long been an 8-bit or chiptune sensibility to Rustie’s output, but it’s increasingly apparent in his most recent material – from track titles like ‘Hyperthrust’ and ‘Neko’ to the Sunburst EP’s hypercoloured sleeve.

“I’m showing my age here,” he admits, “but me and my brother had a Commodore 64 and an Amiga 500 as little kids so I picked up loads of music and vibes from all those old games – Zelda, Golden Axe, Double Dragon, Mortal Kombat, thousands of others as well.”

While he recently relocated to London, Glasgow clearly still means a lot to Rustie.

“I miss my family and friends,” he says.

“Everywhere being less than ten minutes away 10

in a taxi, rowdy crowds in clubs and gigs and just walking past all the places that I grew up.”

Given how central Glasgow’s independent record stores are to the musical life of the city (most notably Rubadub, Monorail, and Volcanic Tongue), it’s perhaps surprising that Rustie never became an especially regular customer.

“By the time I got into DJing, the Internet had taken over and I bought most of my vinyl online,” he said. “Even though there are some great record shops in Glasgow it was much easier to find what I wanted on the web.”

Rustie’s tendency to play records generally unavailable in Glasgow (B’more and booty initially, and later the first UKF 12”s) soon made him an in-demand DJ –his rise to prominence as a turntablist coinciding, more or less, with his earliest releases on the Numbers-affiliated Stuffrecords, Wireblock and Dress 2 Sweat.

He’s now working on his first album for Warp, but his plans for the foreseeable future are otherwise pretty flexible. “I’m just gonna keep doing what I’m doing and see where it takes me,” he says.

Rustie clearly appreciates the benefits success has brought with it and seems to take little for granted. “The biggest highlight is waking up every day not having to get dressed or nothing,” he says. “Just making music and DJing and making sweet, sweet love in the evenings. I’m blessed.”

Y

ou may well have heard this man’s name before, most likely in relation to cult American skatewear brand HUF - he is after all the Creative Director. However, what you may not be aware of is his musical talents or that he signed to record label Innovative Leisure this year. Born in San Francisco, of dual Palestinian and Filipino heritage, Hanni is the first generation American in his family: “My parents were both immigrants and each from different countries; it allowed me to compare three cultures constantly while growing up. My parents tried to expose me to many traditional American ideas in order to help me fit in with our surrounding culture.”

A multi-instrumentalist, he was surrounded by music from an early age: “My mom played guitar and piano, so naturally I picked up those instruments solely on the fact that we had them in the house. I stuck with the guitar and continued to play on and off.” His image and sound is reminiscent of the golden days of early Rock and R&B, Ford Thunderbirds, Sam Cooke, Johnny Cash, switchblades, early juvenile delinquents and Dapper Dan pomade.

His obsession with the 1950s/1960s and all things Americana has, undoubtedly, crossed over into his music “I really love music and style from that era. I always have. Everything was much simpler back then, there was so much more care and pride that people put into their craft.”

The other major player in Hanni’s life has been Skateboarding and all that goes with it not only has it influenced his career path but also his outlook: “Skateboarding has not only contributed to my attitude and outlook of the world, but with the visual side of things as well.

Skateboarding exposed me to art and music and an early age. It’s taught me to look at things differently and not to be scared to try things from a different perspective.”

When it comes to his music, it’s a one-man band scenario (live he’s joined by a drummer).

He is singer, songwriter and producer, crafting a collision of sounds with roots in everything from Blues, Soul, Folk, to Doo Wop, and the rough edges are deliberately left in. “My recordings are very raw and spontaneous. I generally don’t spend a lot of time during the writing and recording process, because I like the idea of recording quick and rough”. For Hanni it’s all about raw and edgy: “I like things that are a little fucked up. I call it ‘Knife Fight music’ in the sense that typically after a knife fight someone’s left bleeding or scarred.”

Hanni El Khatib’s persona and music are a refreshing antidote to a modern day mainstream that strives so hard to churn out a flawless, perfectly polished, jelly mold sound.

Expect good things from him in the year ahead.

WORDS | Milly Cundall

Hanni El Khatib’s single ‘Dead Wrong’ is available in 7” and MP3. ‘Will the Guns Come Out’ is due for released in Spring 2011.

11

LEVI’S PRINT WORKSHOP WORDS | AL BURTON

I

magine being a photographer with no studio and no money to rent a proper space, or an upstart magazine with no resources to print your launch issue. Now imagine that you do. Such is the aim of the community-based workshops Levi’s has been sponsoring as a part of their recent Go Forth campaign. In an attempt to promote the pioneering, creative ideals upon which the brand was founded, Levi’s has gone straight to heart of mainland America–in theory, though perhaps less so in geography.

The concept was born out of a collaboration between Levi’s and Sub Rosa, a creative agency that focuses on interactive, message-based, advertising experiences.

They launched with a 60-day Print Workshop, located in San Francisco’s Mission District, that showcased the medium of printmaking in all aspects–from cloth to paper.

After successfully proving their model in San Francisco, they took on the Mecca with a 10-week Photo Workshop in New York City’s SOHO neighborhood. A dream come true for amateur and professional photographers alike, the workshop not only featured a completely functional professional photography studio, but it also stocked a wide range of rentable Leica 35mm cameras. And in case you wondering about the cost, there was none. Even the tourist, who happened to pop in, sans models, might be entertained by the generous supply

of Macs fully loaded with professional editing software–also available for nothing more than a creative spirit. Throw in an enviable lineup of guest speakers (from Bruce Davidson to Michael Stipe), exhibits, and demonstrations, and this just might be one of those things that simply can’t be described in words or pictures.

Levi’s and Sub Rosa haven’t announced their next medium or location (though there has been some discussion of a music workshop in New Orleans). If you haven’t locked in your travel plans for the next few months, you may want to stay tuned. workshops.levi.com

Free The Music WORDS | KEITH PETTINGER

B

“

There should be no boundaries in music and festivals should be free.

”

ased in Edinburgh, the Electrikal collective comprises of some twenty-four (yes twenty-four) members in possession of one of the dopest soundsystems around today. Their philosophy is as simple as it is refreshing: “Our belief is that there should be no boundaries in music and festivals should be free, friendly and diverse, providing a promotional outlet for DJs and musicians new and established of all genres.”

There’s new roles and members popping up every month with an open invitation for people to get involved in the movement. One name that stands out from the list on first glance is Comrade Massie aka DJ/producer Daojia, who’s developed a following as a DJ in the bass scene, and is tipped to breakthrough with production in 2011.

The nights Electrikal throw with the rig are 12

self-perpetuating and somewhat seasonally balanced. All the money that is made from these nights is reinvested until eventually, when the weather is good, there are free outdoor minifestivals with artists from all around Scotland.

Evolving, as things tend to, Electrikal have gone one step further by establishing a free music label called Povertyblock, with Taz Buckfaster and Jamie Bostron doing the first release.

Much like the nights, their goal remains, “to cover all facets of electronic music by having different residents with different tastes...all from many different nights round Scotland to give an almost proportionate representation.”

Firmly believing that musical progression is set about by avoiding the almighty pound, the Electrikal’s take on the money-free world of music is one to be shared.

AUSTIN PERALTA WORDS | JEZ SMADJA

STAY SAILING WORDS | KEITH PETTINGER

A

s the switch-off date for FM radio approaches in 2015, there’s been renewed interest in documenting the history of pirate radio. One short film, in particular, goes deeper than the rest. Thrown up for free viewing and download via Wilderness Pictures – www. wildernesspictures.co.uk – Stay Sailing is a self-funded project filmed around day jobs since 2008, and in this respect can more than be considered an immense achievement.

Where Stay Sailing differs from other documentaries is not only in its in-depth examination of the cultural impact of pirate radio, but also by the location shoots of the pirate scene’s stations and interviews with some of its biggest DJs. The backdrops

and rooftop scenes sit alongside interviews regarding illegal tactics and the importance of pirate radio to UK culture and youth development. A definite highlight is the scaling of a West London tower block to set up a 30ft rig on the roof. There’s one thing reading about the risk in doing this, entirely another to witness it.

Stay Sailing also marks an incredible directorial debut. Simply put, the film couldn’t have been made by anyone but Michael Chandler.

Moonlighting as The Furious, his own history in and around pirate and legal radio not only opened up doors for Stay Sailing to be made, it drove him to document this vital story of a subculture whose future is becoming increasingly uncertain.

13

A

ustin Peralta is the latest signee to Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label, but don’t expect him to be handy with a drum machine or know about dynamic range compression like many of his label mates, because Austin is a young classically trained jazz pianist who has already played with the best – his debut album, recorded at the age of just 17, was titled Maiden Voyage (after the Herbie Hancock album) and featured Ron Carter on bass just like the 1965 Blue Note opus. As a jobbing session musician in LA, Austin’s been drafted in for recordings with Erykah Badu and Shafiq Husayn as well as sitting in with Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra.

And if the name sounds familiar, it’s because Austin is the son of Stacey Peralta, pro-skater and director of such films as Dogtown and the Z-Boys and surf documentary Riding Giants. His album for Brainfeeder, called Endless Planets, is due out in February. If you’re a fan of McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock or Ahmad Jamal – and even if you’re not – you’ll have your ears opened wide with this exquisite collection of songs.

Braps to Flying Lotus for sticking his nose out on this album… it’s not every label that has the cojones to release records like this.

WORDS | AL BURTON PHOTOGRAPHY | TOBIAS ROSE

D

espite the Grammy award, Phonte and Nicolay are still making music over IM.

“

This album was actually the first where I was involved in song titles,” jokes producer Nicolay, when reflecting on the making of the Authenticity, the third album from the Grammy nominated duo. “In the past when I recorded a track I’d always give it a very nerdy name, like letters, or numbers, or some kind of mathematical shit. So on this record, there were a few times where Phonte took my kind of bogus title, and actually kept it for the album.”

His excitement over such a small feat might strike an odd note, except when you consider the dynamics of the group. While Phonte, also one half of the now defunct rap group Little Brother, is largely considered the voice of Foreign Exchange, Nicolay is often perceived as the group’s silent half. Even onstage, it would be easy for someone less familiar with the group to lose sight of Nicolay amid the cast of established musicians and guest vocalists. But if you read his background position as an indicator that he’s any less valuable, you’d be mistaken.

Authenticity, if anything, only cements his position as one of the preeminent producers out there. But that didn’t stop him being a little apprehensive about the reception of the album. “In a lot of ways, it was definitely another one of those moments where we knew that not everybody would be able to follow along,” Nicolay admits. “So it’s always kind of a nervous moment when you get the first reviews, or the first reaction from fans.”

“We actually started working on this new album a month after Michael Jackson’s death,” recalls Nicolay. “It was kind of that occurrence

that subconsciously made us realize it was time to get back to work. Everything Must Go directly deals with that.” Another impetus was the unexpected success of Leave it All Behind.

Having afforded them an increased audience and a healthy dose of tour dates, Leave It All Behind also presented them with some new challenges as well.

“One of the things that we really wanted do was to follow up as soon as we could because we knew that the longer we waited the more of a hurdle it would become,” Nicolay explains.

“We knew we had more eyes on us, and we knew it could become a kind of D’Angelo situation, where if you don’t follow up that Voodoo album it would ultimately become the impossible task. So we did the opposite, and dropped another album as quick as we could.

We also wanted to prove that we could do it again, and that it wasn’t just a coincidence.”

Though much of Authenticity cruises in a familiar lane, there were some noticeable changes. “For this album we were listening to a lot of singer/songwriter stuff like Jeff Buckley, Neil Young, and James Taylor,” recalls Nicolay.

“So we got a lot of acoustic guitars, and we added some country elements. I think it all kind of fits with our desire to just kind of strip everything down a little bit and focus more on the song, and the performance of the song more so than the production necessarily. In earlier days I probably would have probably pulled out all the stops. As I’ve worked the last couple of years I’ve learned that sometimes not doing something can be just as powerful. ” With fewer guest appearances than

14

on previous albums, Phonte took the reins, confirming his reputation as a legitimate frontman. Where Leave It All Behind showcased his improved singing ability, Authenticity showcases his much improved songwriting, proving him to be much more than just another rapper who happens to sing. “The reason Leave it All Behind contained as much singing as it did, was because Phonte felt that the music I presented him with left him no other choice,” explains Nicolay. “He felt that for the music that I was doing, in a lot of ways, rapping would have been a cop out. Not because rapping is a lower art form, but there is a significant difference in how you approach things. A rapper is going to be most comfortable in a certain musical environment, and tempo changes, weird meters, and chord structures, don’t really fit.”

Much has changed in the six years since The Foreign Exchange released their first album Connected. Strangely one thing has remained the same. Known for recording their first album largely over instant messenger, the two have since made that a key component in the group’s creative process. They no longer live on separate continents. In fact, they now live only two hours apart. Still, they agree, what worked great in the beginning continues to work just as well today. “For us it’s the most comfortable because each has their own respective environments where they can do their thing without the other one looking over their shoulder. The benefit of working like this is that you can truly and 100% do you on a track. Then it’s up to the next person to do them without any sort of interference. “

Catfish If The Social Network made you reconsider your addiction to hourly status updates, Catfish could make you rethink your relationship to the internet as a whole. One of the big hits at Sundance last year, it’s about a boy who falls for a girl via the net then takes a trip to meet her in person. The film’s appeal rests largely on knowing as little as possible so revealing much more would probably make you hate this magazine, but it’s safe to say that the film taps into all our fears about meeting people online with sufficient creepiness, all the while making you squirm and seethe at the whole unscrupulousness and (in)authenticity of it all – you’re never quite sure whether it’s staged or if the filmmakers really are just filming the misfortune and embarrassment of the poor ‘characters’ who agreed to have their lives filmed for our consumption.

The Secret In Their Eyes

I’m Still Here

The contentious winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar last year, Juan Jose Campanella’s film has more to sell it than just beating worthy competition like Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. A detective thriller, light political allegory and love story, it divides itself between all three nimbly, but by and large it plays like a straightforward murder-mystery. The Argentine setting and length – it’s not scared of taking its time, clocking in at over two hours – might somehow render it arthouse, but as you might expect from a Law and Order writer, it’s just a South-American potboiler, admittedly a graceful one, even in spite of the political messages about modern Argentina’s difficulty in facing its history of violence and a few side notes about its reliance on the US.

Another fake-umentary, I’m Still Here is Casey Affleck’s fly on the wall look at the questionable disintegration of brother in law Joaquin Phoenix who despite appearing as himself, albeit dishevelled, blubbery, and suffering a meltdown, doesn’t do too good a job. Leaving aside the question of realism or more importantly, whether anyone cares, the whole thing plays like a crap in-joke between Phoenix and his crew, not least because for all his talents, it’s impossible to take seriously the premise that Phoenix is really giving up Hollywood for hip-hop. Still, the awful rapping elicits a few giggles, especially when Phoenix is auditioning demos for Diddy, clearly smelling a rat.

Mos Def meanwhile responds more kindly with politely restrained laughter. He’s being generous.

WORD

S | SUN

Certified Copy The first western feature from Iranian director Abbas Kioarstami, Certified Copy sees Juliette Binoche and James Miller locked into fierce, passionate debate as they tour around the streets of Lucignano, Italy. Inspired by a conversation Binoche had with the director as he explained the film’s outline to her disbelief, the film seems to make that sense of ambiguity its raison d’etre.

There’s not much you can take at face value.

The couple’s relationship parallels the concept underlying the film’s title - what makes something a copy rather than a forgery? You never quite know whether the man is Binoche’s real husband or if he’s just someone happy to engage in dysfunctional domestic banter. Like a grown-up Before Sunrise, the prodding, emotive dynamic between the two leads never quite feels real, but the coldness strangely adds to the film’s twin sense of distance and closeness. Though the dispassion makes the whole thing seem like an intellectual exercise, it’s also what keeps it strangely fixating.

80 Blocks from Tiffany’s Gathering dust since 1985, Gary Weis’ 1979 documentary lands you right in the same nervy era of South Bronx history as Wild Style and Style Wars, a time when the New York borough was still a no-go zone. Rough and ready, there aren’t any grand social statements about street life being made here - Weis is more interested in the personalities of teens like Crazy Joe, a gang member charged with attempted murder and kidnapping by the age of 16. Featuring interviews with priests like the cigar-chomping Father Gigante, community aid workers and intimate footage of the gangs at meetings and block parties, it’s the real-life flipside to films like The Wanderers or Warriors. Where local gang members threw bricks at that film’s cast and crew, this lets the kids living the lives that Walter Hill’s cult fave drew on tell their own stories as raw as possible.

Filmed on suitably low-grade video, it’s as roughhewn as its subjects, one without an axe to grind, happy just to present everyone as they are. In the process, Weis gets down an era that, for better and worse, is anathema to the New York of today.

15

IL CHA

UHAN

Scanners Top Ten of 2010 1.

Enter the Void 2.

The Arbor 3.

The Social Network 4.

The Illusionist 5.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans 6.

Lourdes 7.

Certified Copy 8.

Better with Practice 9.

Gainsbourg 10.

Beeswax

DATA REDUCTION GET MAD YOU SON OF A BITCHES. GET MAD ...................................................................................

..................................................................................

I AM LISTENING TO...

I AM LISTENING TO...

QNS, T++, GLUM, Sleeparchive, Nubian Minds (all over again), Dro Carey, Moritz von Oswald Trio, Theo Parrish - Traffic, Actress Und U Boat. Even Tuell.

1990 Warp, new Tron soundtrack, French Montana, Salem, Waifer.

I AM WATCHING...

I AM WATCHING...

Exhausted people on the tube, my dwindling finances.

The Brain: A Secret History, Match Of The Day, The Football League Show and table tennis clips on Youtube.

I AM READING...

I AM READING...

I AM EATING...

Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse (again), Charles Mingus - Beneath The Underdog

half-price Tesco stonebaked pizzas (ÂŁ1.62).

I AM EATING...

..................................................................................

Apple and Cinnamon Yogurt, Byron Burgers, Fasolada, anything and everything from Makan on Portobello Rd and my mums chicken curry.

Terrifying opinions on the internet.

I AM LISTENING TO...

Africa Hitech, Zomby, Lukid.

I AM WATCHING...

...................................................................................

Enter the Void.

I AM LISTENING TO...

I AM READING...

Mike Dunn - Magic Feet.

The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda.

I AM WATCHING...

I AM EATING...

The youtube video of Mike Dunn - Magic Feet.

Potatoes, in all of their forms.

I AM READING...

..................................................................................

Norman Mailer.

I AM EATING...

Nutella. ...................................................................................

Keep an eye out/ear open for the next Thriller event at Plastic People. www.thriller-ldn.co.uk Layout design and content collection by Paul Camo? www.we-are.co.uk

WILL BANKHEAD www.thetrilogytapes.com

words: Gerard Don-Daniel photography: Beezer

T

his is the story of the Wild Bunch, the sound system collective responsible for creating the ‘Bristol sound’, that mystic brew of hip-hop, reggae, rock and soul that for many growing up in the UK in the 1990s would define the era. Made up of Nellee Hooper, Daddy G and later joined by 3D, Mushroom as well as MCs Willie Wee and Tricky Kid, the Wild Bunch would prove a launch pad on to bigger things for almost all the members.

Hooper, who always had a bigger vision, would go on to produce albums for Soul II Soul, Bjork and Madonna, while 3D, Daddy G and Mushroom would form Massive Attack and, with Blue Lines, record one of the albums of the decade. But the glue that held the family together was a tall, streetwise character with chiseled features called Miles (Milo) Johnson. Though these days he lives in relative anonymity on 125th Street in Harlem, New York, Milo is a true originator who skipped out under the limelight.

Legend has it Milo and Nellee Hooper met in Barton Hill at a post-punk gig featuring Magazine and Bauhaus. In the late 70s, Bristol had its fair share of punk bands such as The Cortinas, the X-Certs and Glaxo Babies as well as new-wavers The Europeans and the Mad Professor-produced group Black Roots bringing in the dub. The one that

Wednesday night it was home to the Wild Bunch sound system, which had a lengthy residency in the ’80s. Open to everyone who wanted to witness the original chief rockers mixing up post-punk, funk, dub, new wave, rap, electro, film score, and anything and everything in-between, the night brought together diverse crowds who were not usually to be found at the same location at the same time. With live DJs, rappers, break dancers, live graffiti, lounge rooms, sticky floors, the Dug Out brought the energy of the Five Boroughs to the Wild West of England. Its legend lives on to this day, a landmark in Bristol’s psychogeography. Its location is now home to a Thai restaurant after the Dug Out closed down in 1986. Police solicitor Richard Crowley was quoted as telling Bristol City Council’s public protection committee that the Dug Out was like ‘Fagin’s Kitchen’.

The Wild Bunch were not the only sound system in Bristol around this time, and the annual St. Paul’s carnival saw crews like 3 Stripe Posse, 2 Bad, City Rockers, UD4, FBI Crew take to the streets. But none of them were a match for the Wild Bunch Crew with their monstrous towers of bass bins that blocked off Campbell Street (taking power from G’s flat) and rumbled on till 6 in the morning.

Moving to London in ’85, Milo and Nellee began to forge links with sounds like Newtrament from Ladbroke Grove and staged Wild Bunch clashes

heading straight back to the studio.

Shook: So can you tell us how you got the name The Wild Bunch?

Milo: It was just some guys from the Front Line. The Front Line is in St. Paul’s. It was the epicentre of the St. Paul’s riots. It’s an area where dudes used to sell their weed and shit like that. Guys used to come see us play in Clifton, when we started DJing and stuff.

We used to play house parties in Clifton. They used to come up there to sell weed, or whatever and they ended up calling us the Wild Bunch because we dressed differently. Dressed in torn up jeans, and nice sneakers, n’all that shit.

Shook: I read in ’81 you were a fan of Radio 1 DJ, John Peel.

Milo: John Peel is like… Put it this way he’s the one person that I looked to as a massive, massive influence on me personally and the stuff that I was into, because he played everything bro. Pretty much everything he played back then was fantastic. The reggae stuff, the New-wave, punk, everything it was just like a fantastic… it was, just the best.

Shook: There was link from what he did to what you did with the Wild Bunch. He took those different eclectic styles, of course.

Milo: Totally, man, totally. He was like an eye opener.

Shook: I never fully got where you grew up really.

Milo: I moved to London, I don’t know when it was, ’85, or ’86 with Nellee. Up until then all my life was spent in Bristol.

“Miles is a militant, and anything to do with commerciality he wants nothing to do with. I mean he’s like an extreme. Miles is hardcore. And this is why he gets so much respect.

He’s a big influence on my career. Hip-hop wasn’t about being famous, it was about being undercover, being unknown. The reason he left is when it came to record deals. I’m pretty sure that’s why he left. ‘Cos he’s one of the most militant purists I’ve ever met.” (Tricky) everyone remembers, though, is Pop Group fronted by singer Mark Stewart. They brought punk, noise, art, politics and dub influences together and helped with the rest of those bands create a post-punk environment where something like The Wild Bunch could emerge.

At the time Nellee was in punk-funk band Pigbag (famed for James Brown cover, ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag’) before pairing up with Milo to rock house parties across the city. The other Wild Bunch members naturally gravitated together. Milo met Grant Marshall aka Daddy G in the Paradise Garage clothes store. Grant, of course, had a big record collection – a dub specialist who also worked in a record shop, Revolver. Robert Del Naja aka 3D was a young cider punk who morphed into a stencil graffiti artist, joined up after he’d done a mass bombing all over the city with the words ‘Wild Bunch’. The record shop Revolver is also where Adrian Vowles aka Mushroom, still at school, went to get some Rap records and happened upon a Wild Bunch sticker. After asking Daddy G what it was, G invited him to the Dug Out. The Dug Out on Park Street in Bristol’s city centre was located between the run down St. Paul’s neighbourhood and the more affluent Clifton. On a

against Soul II Soul, climaxing in a 1986 New Years Eve dance in West London. It was Neneh Cherry who asked Milo, after a Wild Bunch gig, to come to Japan as a DJ – setting the ball rolling for the UK/ Japan connection. Signing to Island Records, Wild Bunch released ‘Friends and Countrymen’ in Feb ‘87, with the B-sides, ‘Machine Gun (Down by Law)’ and ‘Look of Love’. ‘The Look of Love’, described in the day as “lovers Hip-Hop”, is a song that is part of music folklore. With a hip-hop beat, and Shara Nelson singing the hook, in many ways it provides the template that Massive Attack would use for their era-defining Blue Lines album.

By the time Blue Lines came out, however, Milo had already been living in Tokyo for some time where he formed alliances with fashion designers Takeo Kikuchi and Men’s Bigi as well as joining foundational hip-hop collective Major Force on tracks like ‘Thumpin’’ and ‘Return of the Original Art-Form’.

Moving to New York, he caught the house bug, releasing records as Nature Boy and DJ Nature as well as collaborating with Salaam Remi (Fugees, Nas). He’s now lived there for 21 years. His kids both DJ, as does his wife. Living in New York for so long he misses British food, and never completely rules out coming back to Blighty. He’s been busy making new music, and after we spoke, Milo was 18

Shook: Nellee grew up in Barton Hill, Tricky in Knowle West, Mushroom was in Fishponds, but what about you?

Milo: Montpelier, basically it’s like St. Paul’s really. I was born in Montpellier, then I spent some time in Eastern, yeah. You know!

Shook: I was gonna ask you where you met up with Mark Stewart. It’s known you had links, but where did you first clap eyes on him.

Milo: In school probably.

Shook: You didn’t go to the same school did you?

Milo: No, but he was going out with a girl from our school, and people used to say, ‘oh that’s Mark Stewart he’s in the Pop Group’. We had a few bands from that school, we had the Cortinas, we had most of Pig Bag. Shook: One of the things that comes across through reading books like The Sound and Art of Bristol, and looking through Beezer’s book of photographs– it wasn’t about ego, it was something quite positive. It was community-based, everyone kept their head down and did their thing.

Milo: It was a different world back then. Back then, we didn’t think we would do anything big. We just wanted to play good music loud, and that was pretty much it.

People in Bristol keep you grounded man. If you get a bit big headed, that wasn’t really part of our nature.

Daddy G, Willie Wee, Nellee Hooper, MIlo

WILD

BUNCH

The genesis of a sound (for what you make you can’t lose) 19

with everything we liked. G was the man who had incredible reggae records. I liked a lot of funk, P-funk, New Wave, and punk, and Nellee was on the same shit. The first time we played anywhere was in this place called the Green Rooms. It was this little back of a pub, or whatever, n’ we just invited our friends. It was like, ‘we ain’t got any space in G’s house anymore, we’re going to play some tunes in this place.’ I don’t think anyone paid to get in, it was just thirty or forty friends. That was the beginning. It was a heavy thing. It just was everything, it was like Killing Joke, Thin Lizzy, it was all that shit, Lonny Liston Smith, Parliament, Sly and Robbie.

Shook: I was looking at John Peel’s stuff at that time. He was playing Bauhaus, Anti-Pasti.

Milo: We only probably did that ‘cos we saw someone else do it, but yeah whatever worked.

Shook: People always go on about the Wild Bunch B-Side ‘The Look Of Love’. Did you really record that in a studio off Shoreditch High Street?

Milo: Look of Love? I can’t remember.

Shook: Do you remember how long it took you to make?

Milo: ‘The Look of Love’…Not long, not long! I already had the concept in my head of what I wanted to do. It was, like, my mind was set on a certain formula that you take from take from the reggae roots. The adaptation type shit, you know the way they would take a popular American song and put background to it. That’s how it was.

Shook: Back when you guys had the deal with

Milo, Daddy G, Nellee, Willie Wee & 3D @ The Dug Out, 1984 Milo: Ah! Definitely Bauhaus. ‘Kick in the Eye’, is the good, really good. shit. You know that? I mean there was so much Shook: I mean it was roughly ’83, ’84. Who shit man, and we just embraced all that, and that’s else was mixing dub and break beats like you what I’m saying. That was the difference between were at the time in england? I mean there us and everyone else, because we embraced was Newtrament from Ladbroke Grove. There everything and we tried to keep as much of it as was other crews, but Wild Bunch plugged into we could. Obviously some things fell by the way side different breaks that no-one else did at that time. because certain things like New Wave stopped Milo: Yeah, ‘cos we had the background for it. getting made. Obviously we played A Certain Ratio Our thing was that we embraced everything we – that we always played, whether it be ‘Hot Knights’ listened to in the past. Whereas other crews went or whatever. through different phases – they either grew up Shook: You used to cut between two copies of with their background in black music and there’s the same tune, you used to tape 7inches, to 12 a natural progression going from soul to hip-hop, inches. People at the time were scratching their n’ R&B. Other crews that were, say trendies, heads thinking, how’d they do that. jumped from genre to genre. With us, we started

Island, was it true the record company was more into pushing Mica Paris rather than you?

Milo- Right what it was, Mica Paris was on the label too and people can say that people were interested in that at the time. In hindsight you can say they dropped the ball, really.

Shook - Absolutely, totally.

Milo- Obviously, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Anyway, it was kind of tough to know which way to push. I remember going to a meeting with those guys, right. Me, Nellee and all these fucking Island executives, right, n’ our management were in this restaurant in Soho. It was Biff Winwood, Steve Winwood’s brother, who was running Island at the time. It was all the big people

We just did our thing, man.

Shook: Do you think the location of the Dug Out was essential because it was right at the edge or midst of a lot of social areas of Bristol.

Milo: Completely essential. Completely. I mean it’s documented numerous by many people. It was perfection!

Shook: It’s one thing to put music that’s not meant to be put together, but when you put people who are not supposed to be put together, it gets very exciting.

Milo: Oh yeah, yeah. There was never any beef in that club. You had the nurses from the Hospital, college students from Bristol University, you got some of your football boys down there, the guys from St. Paul’s, Clifton n’ that, it was just really

20

there. We were sitting down and it was a comical thing, B, I tell you. We were sitting there and they’re going on out about how to push this project. Then, all of a sudden, this head, this Biff Winwood, turns to me and is, “I’m really excited about this.” It’s a big table, fifteen people. And he goes to me, “can you sing?” Before I could answer, there was a stutter, because I was caught completely off guard. Nellee jumps in and say’s, “yeah, he can sing!” At the time I thought, “what the fuck are you talking about?”

But then again I can understand where Nellee was coming from, trying to get his foot in the door, trying to move shit along in some sort of way. He always had a bigger vision of situations than I did. He was a few steps ahead. I just wanted to make music, and

were in London.

Milo: The only reason we were in London was to further the crew. We went there to get a deal for everybody, not for just us. Everything we did, we did for the crew. We just took the risk, me and Nellee, because we had less ties to Bristol than everybody else, structure-wise. We were risk takers, me ‘n’ ‘im.

We went to fucking Japan with no money. We went to London the same way. We went to Portugal the same way. Me and Nellee just thought, “Ah, shit,” just off the whim, and that was the same deal. The guys didn’t want to make that move, they didn’t wanna risk it and we did!

Shook: It benefited all of you guys in a way.

Milo: Oh yeah, no doubt about it, bro. Even doing

got the whole Wild Bunch selection.

Shook: I know you’ve been in NY for 21 years now, but with the riots and strikes and the Conservative government, people are calling it a return to the 80s. One of the things you could do in the 80s as a working class youth was you could sit on the dole or alternatively you could end up in something like the Wild Bunch.

Milo: One thing I would like to say about that situation… Obviously I don’t know a lot, only what you’re telling me right now. In terms of what the government is trying to do, I think it’s really important for those people in power to understand England in terms of musical

Daddy G, Nellee & Milo @ The Crypt, Bristol he was looking at the bigger picture.

Shook: The thing with Nellee is you both are kind of similar but opposites in a way.

Milo: Me and Nellee we were like brothers. I remember him saying to somebody that I was like his wife, which was kinda strange at the time. I was like, “what the fuck’s he talking about?” I understood it later on, know what I’m saying.

Shook: After the ‘Friends and Countrymen’ single, you seemed to fall out over the deal with Island. It was never really clear when you guys split, both with the Wild Bunch and with the label.

Milo: It wasn’t like, ‘yeah we’re going to stop doing the Wild Bunch’ or anything like that. It wasn’t anything that was kinda like agreed upon.

Shook: You were all individuals? You and Nellee

Japan, n’shit like that… They were necessary moves because they broadened your horizon to what was happening in the world, rather than just in Bristol.

That shit was really important, man, really important.

So In terms of breaking up, I never said the Wild Bunch was finished. I just took all the records. Nellee started recording in London and I was doing shit in Japan with Major Force. It just so happened that the last gig we played, G didn’t want to have the records.

Because we always kept the records in G’s place.

The last gig, I don’t know what he was doing. Usually he would put ‘em in the back of his car and just take them back to his place. At this point, for some reason, I took the records. I think I put them in my sisters house, in fact I know I put them in my sisters house and that’s where they’ve been ever since. I

creativity. It’s almost like the centre of the world. D’you know what I’m saying? Of all the industries that leave England, the motor industry or whatever else, I do have to question what England has to offer to the rest of the world.

That industry right there, in terms of fusing different types of music together and coming up with new stuff, it’s England’s life blood, in a way.

And those guys really need to understand that, so rather than take stuff away, or hinder that progress, they should really just look into that and really support that.

21

Beezer’s Wild Dayz book out now via PYMCA. DJ Nature interview on ultraastrum.blogspot.com www.dj-milo.net

One of the first British bands who had to find success in America before being recognized on home soil, Cymande (meaning ‘dove’) combined the teachings of the Rastamen and the sounds coming out of America’s ghettos on a succession of hits since loved by everyone from Grand Wizard Theodore to Spike Lee. words: Matt Court

O

ver the years Cymande’s music has seen more resurrections than a George A Romero movie. Paul Winley played musical witchdoctor in the early ’80s making ‘Bra’ available on his Super Disco Brakes compilations as well as on a number of disco 12”s of dubious legality. ‘The Message’ has been through an MPC so many times that it’s become inextricably linked to hip-hop music. And 2002 saw Philip Seymore-Hoffman and Anna Paquin’s questionable nightclub interaction in Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour played out over a backing of ‘Bra’. “[Spike’s] been a huge fan of the band from way back,” says drummer Sam Kelly proudly.

The liner notes of Cymande’s eponymous first LP are helpful for learning the basics.

There’s the story of how producer John Schroeder discovered them by accident in a club in Soho; how Mike Rose, Patrick Patterson, and Steve Scipio played together as part of Ginger Johnson’s African Messengers before Cymande were formed; and how the group coined the neologism ‘Nyah Rock’ to describe their blend of funk, jazz, calypso and reggae. The curious reader is even treated to some top trumps style nuggets of information about the band members’ personal credentials: height, date of birth, and star sign for those of an astrological persuasion.

“We were in a jazz funk band called Metre, Patrick, Steve and myself” says saxophonist Mike Rose. “Metre wasn’t really a singing band y’know, it was just an instrumental band. As fulfilling as the medium of instrumental music was, we felt like real communication comes through the written or spoken word.”

The band began to include vocals on some of the jazz pieces they had performed as Metre, and the style of Cymande’s music grew out of that. It was about blending different musical genres. “But you have to recall that we come out of a particular time and context,” says Patrick.

“In the ’70s it was about communicating cultural things, pride, unity, all that sort of stuff… But we were also doing things that hadn’t been done by a band such as ours before; breaking the mold, trying to put together something that was wholly original. We brought music from the various styles that we had all been involved in, jazz, and rock, and a little reggae and a little rasta; it was blending those things together to create a piece of music that was original and tried to speak to the community that we represented.”

The overt rasta influence stemmed from Mike and his fellow ideologue Pablo Gonsales, a dreadlocked conga player whose small stature belied his ability to hit the skins harder than

Trevor Berbick. Mike was also accompanied in the horn section by alto player Derek Gibbs, and Peter Serreo on tenor sax, who was later replaced by Derek Atwell. “We were jazz influenced,” he remarks revealing a less obvious facet to the band’s music. “All of us that were playing the saxophone were jazz influenced. I listened to Roland Kirk, some Jamaican ska guys, and some Jamaican jazz guys like Joe Harriot.

And Bird and Trane; I’ve been trying to emulate Parker and Coltrane all my life.”

After a short tenure by Ray King, a man with gift for showmanship but less so for singing, the group enlisted vocalist Joey Dee. With his circular eyewear and distinctive vocal style, Dee was a Guyanese soul boy who bore an uncanny resemblance to Curtis Mayfield.

In London in the early ’70s, black bands were staged in only a handful of venues; upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s had a regular rotation of funk, jazz and black rock groups, similarly The Q Club and The Oval House, but mostly bands would cut their teeth in the back rooms of spit-and-sawdust pubs and social clubs. As with many black bands at the time, Cymande were playing to a mostly white audience. The Big Smoke’s black population mostly partied the night away in little shebeens tucked away around the city’s housing estates; mainstream clubs and bars were either unaffordable or simply unwelcoming. “You have to remember that black people didn’t have a lot of money in their pocket to spend back then,”

NYAH

ROCK remarks Jimmy Lindsay who sang on the group’s third LP, Promised Heights.

When we made the first album, we were learning to play, really,” admits Mike of the group’s eponymous 1972 opus which contained hits like ‘Dove’, ‘Bra’ and ‘The Message’. “When the recording man said I was out of tune, I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about!”

“It’s not the sort of thing we sat down and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed,”

22

23

remembers Sam. “Everything was recorded live, [just] the vocals were overdubbed, and some of the percussion was overdubbed.”

“It’s what John Schroeder called atmospherics,” recounts Mike emphasising the last word. “John would say, ‘Go in the studio and do something,’” remembers Sam. “I’d say ‘what, what do you want me to do?’ ‘Just go in and play something!’ he’d say, so I’d go and pick up a tambourine or pick up a scraper or something and play. It’s just atmospherics.”

Cymande’s debut LP first came out on Schroeder’s fledging Alaska label in 1972. But the prevalent attitude of many promoters and radio stations in the UK – that only ‘glamorous’ and ‘exciting’ Stateside black music had any commercial value – meant the record went largely unnoticed. It wasn’t so much a question of race that made people reluctant to get behind home grown black talent, although that played a part too, but essentially one of geography.

Ironically, it wasn’t until the band began appearing in the US Soul Charts, following an auspicious deal secured with New York’s Janus Records that same year, that people in the UK eventually started to take notice.

“The Americans, as they did with rock and they have done with blues, wanted something that was developed over there, taken over here, changed, and given back to them,” says Sam. “That’s the way it’s been. They heard something [in Cymande] they could relate to, but on the other hand there was enough interest and fascination with the different styles. Thinking about it, there were a lot of Jamaicans in New York City, so a lot of the West Indian traditions like the rasta drumming, they could relate to and maybe just listen to it on a different level. They’d take the thing to parties and it mushroomed, because by the time we got to America on the first trip, it was like, y’know, we’d played kind of tiny pubs [in the UK] and suddenly we ended up being the support act to Al Green! There was no gradual movement of getting to bigger and bigger venues; it was literally from the Dog and Duck to big stadiums!”

“We didn’t get much opportunity to mix with Al Green,” recalls Mike of the American tour.

“He was the star and we were the starlets.” For Sam, his fondest memory of touring with ‘The Reverend’ was talking shop with his drummer Al Jackson, “That was the biggest thrill for me,” he smiles.

In April 1973 the group played a week’s residency at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre with its peeling paint, nicotine stained walls, torn leather sofas and creaky old iron bed. “Backstage was dreadful,” laughs Sam. “But it just oozed musical history. You get out on the stage and you think about all the people that had played there and you’re thinking, ‘I’m here, playing!’”

“We were the opening act,” remembers Mike. “The main act was Billy Preston and the MC was Screaming Jay Hawkings. We did twenty minutes. The audience were waiting for the main act y’know.” For Mike, being in New York was a chance to chase the spirit of his idol John Coltrane. “I tried to get as much saxophone information as I could,” he admits.

Barely a year later, had you taken the No2 train as it rattled up towards the Bronx, you might have caught Kool Herc cutting up two copies of ‘Bra’ as he laid down the foundations of a nascent hip-hop scene. “Very popular?” asks Cold Crush’s DJ Tony Tone when asked about the record. “That’s an understatement when you’re dealing with the culture of hip-hop. You had to have it in your crate back in the early ’70s and ’80s. Even today you got to have it in your crate if you’re a real hip hop DJ. If you’re from that era, you know that is one of the classics of hip hop.”

“The first time I heard ‘Bra’ was at 63 Park in the Bronx,” recalls Zulu Nation member and MC, Donald D. “Grand Wizard Theodore was playing the break part while Master Rob was rocking the mic with the echo chamber. The beginning of the song is what the b boys love. It has that swing to it that makes them wanna get down. I think the first person I saw b boyin’ to it was Frosty Freeze. The bass line break was also cool for you to take a girl on the dance floor and slow groove until the beat came back in. Every sound on that jam is on point, Cymande made a sure shot classic in my book.”

“When we recorded that first album, we were still learning to play really. When the recording man said I was out of tune, I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about!”

As Mike sits clutching his saxophone in the South London pub where he regularly holds court, he ponders on how contemporary artists have sampled Cymande’s music over the years.

“It’s flattering, really,” he smiles, “I don’t really mind, y’know. Because I use people’s licks all the while; all those jazz guys.”

Back in the UK after the American tour, the groundswell of interest that had been generated in the US was starkly absent, “it didn’t really change anything [in England],” recalls Rose.

“In a sense that’s really one of the difficulties [we had],” explains Patrick. “Because you return to a place that is your musical homebase but you don’t have the sort of appreciation that you have in another territory. We had done massive stuff in America, and back in the UK we weren’t operating at the level we wanted to.”

Despite this, the group released the aptly titled Second Time Around in 1973, and returned to Nixon’s America for a six week tour of the college circuit, sharing stages with Albert King, Patti Labelle and Ramsay Lewis.

Although Janus wanted a carbon copy of the successful first LP, hoping to capitalise on the self-confessed naïve, raw sound that had caught many American ears, Second Time Around was 24

more polished, tighter and musically superior, but ultimately less popular. “We were more developed musically,” says Mike. “But what I thought was good, the American public didn’t really think was good, y’know?”

Although the sun seemed to be slowing setting on Nyah Rock on the American East coast, in the West it was starting to take off. “[The label said] ‘we want you to go and play for three weeks at the Whisky A Go Go [in Los Angeles].’ But we didn’t do it. It was one of those things that we all regretted, but at the end of a grueling tour when they say we want you to extend this and fly 3,000 miles West when you 6,000 miles away from where you really want to be… It was physically very very demanding,” Sam remembers, shaking his head.

In The States, Cymande prepared for their follow up to Second Time Around.

Titled Promised Heights, it was perhaps in conscious or subconscious relisation that, with evaporating records sales and still only a marginal fan base in the UK, those heights were beginning to seem out of reach. Recorded partly at De Lane Lea studios in Soho, the ultra high tech facility was in stark contrast to Chess Studios where they began the record. The Chicago facility on 320 E. 21st Street appeared positively archaic with its valve amps and tatty interior, “But we felt more comfortable there,” recalls Sam. “And again, [like the Apollo] we were very aware of the history of the place.”

The release of Promised Heights was muted as Janus was aware of diminishing returns and so paid for little in the way of promotion. But the newly formed British label Contempo, set up by John Abbey as a vehicle for a variety of British funk, did what Janus wouldn’t. It issued a 7” pressing of the album’s rare groove classic ‘Brothers on the Slide’ and offered up Promised Heights to the UK market; not since the early Alaska sides had Cymande been given a UK release.

With singer Joey Dee temporarily out of the band due to what Mike Rose calls “the politics of music,” Kelly’s childhood friend and reggae singer Jimmy Lindsay sang on some of Promised Heights and continued to front the group for a series of gigs that capitalised on the popularity garnered from the Contempo releases.

“One of the gigs I remember quite fondly was the one we did at Ronnie Scott’s when we were launching the album,” recalls Jimmy.

“That was truly, I believe, one of the best gigs Cymande ever played. It was absolutely electrifying and it just bowled everybody over.

It’s sad that Cymande didn’t get the dues that they really deserved,” he continues. “I firmly believe that, at that time, Cymande were one of the best bands in this country.”

“It’s only now, after all these years that I have realized how much impact the music we created 35 years ago has had,” says Sam on stage at a recent Cymande II gig, a band he has put together with Mike, Jimmy and new members to play a retrospective of Cymande’s music. “It’s extremely humbling.”

NYAH

ROCK

25

words: susAnnAH weBB

T

he date was 1 September 1990 and David Rodigan was in the studio on Holloway Road, North London when they played the first record on a newly legal Kiss FM. “I’ll never forget it. It was ‘Pirate’s Anthem’ by Home T, Cocoa Tea and Shabba Ranks,” says Rodigan. “There couldn’t have been a more appropriate choice, almost as though the lyrics of the 1989 record had been written especially for them: ‘Dem a call us pirates, illegal broadcasters, just because we play what the people want… DTI try stop us but they can’t.’”

Kiss FM’s story is a tale of radio rags-toriches. A far cry from its current set-up in an imposing building off Regent Street, the station started life as a pirate radio in a squatted flat in Charlton, South London. Gordon Mac, the station’s founder, had been presenting the drive-time show on another London pirate station, JFM, before it closed down under pressure from Thatcher’s government who were clamping down on pirate broadcasting.

Previously, the London pirate radio scene had been big, and at one point in the ‘80s the pirates even outnumbered legal broadcasters.

But now the powerhouse pirates, Horizon, J FM and Solar, had all gone, leaving Mac, with cofounders George Power and Tosca, to come up with a name and a set of DJs. Mac was heavily inspired by the New York station, Kiss FM: “I was just in awe of having a radio station that broadcast mixes, and I was like, ‘That’s legal over there, fucking hell! I want that!’” Mac and his pool of DJ friends tried to come up with a name for the new station, and when they couldn’t think of anything new, they went with their pirate instinct. “The Kiss station in New York was so good, so we pirated the logo, we pirated the name, we pirated the whole lot.”

Not only was the name and the logo not theirs, neither was the studio. “It was in Charlton. The door was open so we just walked in and claimed squatter’s rights.” As resourceful as ever, they found a local man to help them with the transmitters: “There was this little second hand clothes shop in Charlton village, and this black guy who worked there.

We heard he was a radio enthusiast so we went in and told him that we were looking to put a transmitter up somewhere and he said he didn’t mind if we put it on his roof. So me, Tosca and the engineer climbed up onto the roof. I’ve been there since and I don’t know how the hell we got up there. We stuck this pole on top of this rickety old chimney and put our transmitter up there. We got power off this guy a couple of doors down who we did a deal with.”

From this studio, Kiss broadcast uninterrupted for the first three months, playing a mix of rare groove, house and hip-hop to the capital. Because of the location of the aerial, not even the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) could get up there to take the transmitter since it breached Health & Safety regulations.

However, they eventually managed to get a hydraulic lift which closed down the whole of

Charlton High St. “That’s when we got our first bust, after about three months. In those three months, it just went ballistic. It just worked.”

Word quickly spread that there was a new radio station in town. “But after that first bust, it was a hard couple of months. Every time we went on, they busted us. We must have pissed them off,” says Gordon with a wicked grin. The station moved homes time and time again, from south London to north, and even broadcast out of Nick Manasseh’s 23rd floor flat on the Commercial Road in Tower Hamlets. Eventually the station settled in Camden. Long-standing Kiss DJ Steve Jackson remembers, “You’d be going up to the studio and you’d pass through the Soul II Soul shop and everyone knew where it was. We were supposed to be pirate and hiding, but everyone knew.”

A stroke of genius on the part of Mac was to sell nine of his key DJs each a 5% stake in the station. “I’d seen other radio stations and you’ve got one boss and he treats everyone like skivvies and they all hate him. I didn’t wanna be like that, so I thought to myself, ‘Okay, if I sell 45% of the shares, and nine people come up with £200 for 5% of the shares, that would buy nine transmitters, and that meant that nine weekends we could be on air.’ Norman Jay, Joey Jay, Jonathan More, Trevor Nelson, Tim Westwood were all shareholders. And because they all had a stake in it, it wasn’t just me trying to run the station, it was a team of people, plus the other 20-odd DJs – it was a crew, a gang, a family. For the three and a half years that it was a pirate, it was a great fucking time.”

To push the station and create new revenue streams, Kiss opened up a legal company called Good For Promotions. “I got myself an office up in Camden, right next door to Patrick Lilley [a gay promoter],” says Gordon.

“We’d do anything to support the station – record promotions, club promotions, just to earn some money. With Lindsay Wesker we started up a record label and we released Boogie Tunes 1 and 2, Salsoul 1, and a whole series of albums. We had this little nucleus.

We had Jazzie B just down the road. Everybody was helping each other. And because we had all these iconic DJs from the warehouse scene, people like Jay Strongman, magazines like i-D, The Face and even the Evening Standard used to give us coverage. Through the network, through the time, the place and the energy of it all, we made money and pumped it all back into propaganda.” Kiss was attracting more and more followers, and by 1988 it was listed as the second most listened to station in the capital, attracting half a million listeners – figures then unheard of for a pirate.

Roy Da Roach, owner of Quaff Records and a Kiss DJ from the early days, explains the vital role that the station played: “If you wanted to know where to go the rest of the week, you had to be listening to Kiss, and that’s really when it became a way of life. Later on it all got more ‘formal’ with legalisation, but in the old days, although we did have set shows, to be honest often we’d turn up, day or night, it didn’t really matter, just to keep that broadcast 26

going.”

Radio in the 1980s was tied up by a small number of legal broadcasters. The only time you’d hear black music on the FM dial was the Mike Allen Capital Rap Show, David Rodigan’s Roots Rockers show, also on Capital FM, and Robbie Vincent on BBC Radio London.

At Kiss, Mac brought together many of the faces running London’s nightlife. What united everyone was an almost obsessive passion for music, as Trevor Nelson recalls: “The wealth of knowledge was unquestionable, and you had to have the record collection, you had to have standing in the music community. Richie Rich was making records during that time and Coldcut released one of the best remixes ever done while on Kiss.”

A young Jonathan More, who later became co-founder of Ninja Tune and one half of Coldcut with fellow Kiss DJ Matt Black, remembers how he became involved in Kiss: “I was DJing at the time, doing a clubnight in a warehouse in Rotherhithe, the Meltdown party.

This was 1985.

I was getting a cab to go to the set that night and the driver was Gordon Mac. He saw my box of records and asked me

BREAKING THE

WAVES 25 yeArs oF kIss FM

sHook CeleBrATes THe 25TH AnnIversAry oF kIss FM, THe leGendAry london rAdIo sTATIon THAT lAunCHed THe CAreers oF TIM wesTwood, Trevor nelson, dAnny rAMplInG And JudGe Jules To nAMe BuT A Few. wITH Help FroM sTATIon Founder, Gordon MAC, lonGsTAndInG kIss dJ dAvId rodIGAn And ColdCuT’s JonATHAn More, susAnnAH weBB TrACes kIss’s pIrATe dAys And ITs sTAGGerInG InFluenCe on BrITIsH dAnCe MusIC. 27

what I was doing, so we got talking. He gave me his address, which happened to be around the corner from my house, so when I got home from my set at the party at about 10 in the morning, I went back to my flat, made a show, and put it through Gordon’s door.” Meeting through Kiss, More and Black would go on to host their adventurous Solid Steel show well into the ‘90s.

The music played by DJs such as More reflected very closely what was going on in the club: “Records that were strong in the club on Friday would probably be broadcast and spoken about on Saturday and Sunday… it all came from a scene.” The Kiss DJs were already a vital component of that scene, what with Norman Jay and Jazzie B running soul and rare groove warehouse parties around London, like Shake and Fingerpop, Family Funktion and of course Soul II Soul. Mixed with the wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm from young upstarts like Trevor Nelson and Judge Jules, the commitment to urban dance music was unsurpassed.

With an ear to the street, Kiss provided its listeners with what they wanted to hear, and as a pirate it had something the commercial radios didn’t: it could play what it wanted. “That was a strong strand that ran through the mentality of the station at the time, because we’d been edited, ignored, shoved out to the extremities both in the clubs and on the radio,” says More.

From Friday to Sunday (it was cheaper and more efficient, not to mention less risky, to run the pirate for just three days a week), Kiss was giving London a radio station like no other, finding a comfortable niche, which was only intensified in the late ‘80s when house music reached the UK. The station’s DJs were some of the first to champion the genre, whether Norman Jay with HIGH on HOPE or Danny Rampling, fresh from Ibiza, launching the legendary club night Shoom out of a gym in Southwark, and lighting the touch paper for the acid house boom.

It was at around this time that the IBA, the predecessor of OFCOM, announced that they were offering new FM radio licenses for community stations, and Gordon Mac saw his chance to go legal. It was no simple task, says Mac: “We got the application form and realised what we needed to do. We needed to raise about £2.5 million and have enough capital for another £1 million. Me and the boys had a meeting and we just looked at each other like ‘fucking hell’. We were going from being a pirate at 3-days a week, charging £150 for ads, to something that was so fucking different, so we went out and tried to find investors.” Like so many of the acid house generation, Kiss was driven by an unstoppable entrepreneurial spirit, something of a by-product of the Thatcher years; the station was not only a powerhouse for music, but also a test case, showing how dance music could become a hugely profitable venture.

Kiss went off air on 31 December 1988 to comply with the terms of the IBA license bid, and remained off for 20 months before coming back on as a legal proposition. By this time they had also enlisted new DJs, such as Dave Pearce

and champion reggae DJ, David Rodigan, fresh off the wheels of Capital FM. Rodigan was one of the only legal reggae broadcasters out there, and moved to Kiss for what it represented: “I passionately believed that London was well overdue for a music station that was able to reflect urban music in a 24-hour format. I had listened to pirate radio as a boy in the ‘60s so that I could hear ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ [by Ike and Tina Turner] and rocksteady, ska and soul tunes. This is all before BBC Radio 1, when Radio Caroline was our only hope, and Radio London was a North Sea pirate ship. So for me this was a very important development in British radio and I was very happy to be a part of it. And it still really felt like a pirate station [after it went legal], because it still had all the freedom associated with pirate radio.” The DJ shareholders had in fact written into Kiss’s articles of association that 7pm-7am would always be strictly unplaylisted, allowing for the pirate ethos to continue.

In-between going off air in December 1988 and coming back on in September 1990, a lot had happened on the music scene. “Rare groove was massive when we were on air, but when we came back things had changed,” recalls Gordon.

“Acid house had changed everything. The sound of young London was now undoubtedly house music, and it had infiltrated a young, white scene. To us old soul boys at the time, it was like, ‘What the fuck? It’s like a hoover going across the floor, why are they dancing to this?’”

But almost inadvertently, Kiss managed to appeal to this new demographic, and the station’s bid for a license embodied the spirit of the times. “We really played up the whole ‘radical radio’, the ‘sound of young London’, the ‘anti-establishment’ stuff because at the time the police were trying to close down all the big raves in the fields. There were all these type of ‘fight for the right to party’ movements. When we got the license, we represented the youth fighting back and fucking winning.”

There was a backlash from some the Kiss faithful when it went legal – in order to secure advertising revenue, the music policy had to change. It was a compromise that meant some people, not just listeners but also some of the original DJs too, felt aggrieved. Nevertheless, Kiss continued to broadcast specialist shows from Colin Dale, Colin Faver, Bobby & Steve and Paul Trouble Anderson. Later you had the Funki Dred show with Jazzie and Aitch B, the Wednesday night drum n’ bass shows from Randall, Fabio and Grooverider, and the Sunday nights with Gilles Peterson, Patrick Forge and Dr Bob Jones. Even today, you’ll still find shows from DJ EZ, Logan Sama, the first ever grime show on legal radio, and on Sunday nights, David Rodigan. What was groundbreaking about Kiss was that there were no other legal stations that could boast at least a 50-50 black/white split in its DJs – it was a model for progression, musically and politically. And with its newly legal status, its DJs for the first time were getting paid.

“Instead of broadcasting out of a flat in

28

South London, or a basement on Walworth Road, or various other strange venues, we had a proper building in Holloway, proper studios and proper soundproofing,” recalls Jonathan More.

“Some people got proper cars as well. When we started out it was just two turntables and a mixer, a microphone and a cassette player. Matt [Black] and I used to do this thing with those 15 minute cassette tapes you used for backing up computers, we found out you could unscrew them, cut the leader tape off and then you had an instant start cassette so we could record jingles.” Even their old equipment needed the go ahead from the powers that were: “I think we had to get permission from the authorities at the time to use Technics, because they’d been signed off as inappropriate for broadcasting.”

Throughout the ‘90s, Kiss – branded as “the sound of young London” – set the agenda that other commercial stations tried to imitate but never quite managed to emulate. Its reign ended towards the end of the decade when Radio 1, famously late to the dance music party, swooped on Tim Westwood, Judge Jules, Danny Rampling, Dave Pearce, Gilles Peterson, Fabio, Grooverider and Trevor Nelson as it sought to boost its flagging ratings. It was like history repeating since Radio 1 had begun its life in 1967 by enticing DJs like Tony Blackburn and John Peel from outlawed stations like Radio London and Radio Caroline. For Kiss, the departure of so many DJs signaled the end an era, but it wasn’t just its DJs who went on to become fixtures in the British cultural establishment. Kiss’s 15-minute magazine slot The Word was presented and produced since its pirate days by Lisa I’Anson, who also went on to Radio 1, Ekow Eshun, now director of the ICA, and Richard Hopkins, who was behind Channel 4’s Big Breakfast show and the first Big Brother. Meanwhile Gordon Mac’s programme assistant and future DJ on the station, Wilber Wilberforce, went on to launch BBC 1Xtra, keeping the sound of young music alive for a new generation.

Kiss broke many things: careers, laws, rules and records. It did everything it needed by doing everything it shouldn’t. And that rebellious spirit lives on. In 2010, when pirate station Rinse FM went off air after being awarded a community broadcasting license, it felt like the Kiss story all over again. Like Kiss, Rinse has attracted the most successful DJs and producers from the scene to its studios, in the process reshaping the musical landscape from the bottom up. “At Kiss, we kind of oscillated between wondering whether it was a really important thing we were doing and whether anybody was actually listening,” remembers More. “It was a messy business, and parts of it were tawdry, but most of it was pure gold.”

Gordon Mac can these days be found running digital station Colourful Radio, playing soul, rare groove, boogie, reggae and house music for those that know. www.colourfulradio.com For more interviews with the original Kiss team, visit WinkBall.com/users/kiss25.

BREAKING THE

WAVES 25 yeArs oF kIss FM

29

words: Andy THoMAs

TALKING

SHOP

W

hether negotiating pissed skinheads in the 2 Tone section of Wolverhampton’s Ruby Red in the late ‘70s in search of The Jam’s Setting Sons LP, humming the piano line of Soft House Company’s ‘What You Need’ to a bemused Phil Asher behind the counter of Quaff Records down Portobello Road ten years later, or spending all Sunday deep in the bargain basement of Record & Tape exchange on the Goldhawk Road wading through T’Pau and Bryan Adams records in search of disco and Balearic nuggets in early 90s, my life, like many of you reading this, has been lived through the humble record shop.

These dark and dusty stores were often intimidating places, where a hierarchy of knowledge created an air of superiority leveledonly by the name of a little known producer or obscure label. They were also vital hubs of the scene where a community would bond through the latest fanzines or the many flyers left on the counter. From punk rag Sniffin’ Glue and terrace fanzine The End on sale at Rough Trade in London and Probe in Liverpool, to the hundreds of rave flyers scattered around Spin Inn in Manchester and Black Market in Soho, these shops were both the Discogs and the Facebook of the day.

Fast forward to the present, and at the click of a mouse I can now be more knowledgeable about Italo Disco than is probably healthy, have a Ron Hardy wants list bigger than most Music Box regulars, and, well, I’ve largely lost the habit of spending all weekend digging in dusty basements. Although the internet has without doubt opened up avenues to all sorts of weird and wonderful music, some of the excitement and mystery of discovering new music has been lost. Through the recollections of some of our most obsessive vinyl addicts, we look back to the days before eBay and Shazam, when the record shop seemed like the centre of the universe.

30

I found myself living back in my hometown for a few years on the dole (still with no record shop) and I used to hitchhike to Nottingham and the wonderful world of Selectadisc. In those days (the early ‘80s), Selectadisc had about three shops in Nottingham. There was the main one just off Slab Square and then they had this little store that specialised in cutouts. It was a time when I was discovering lots of new music from ‘50s cool jazz to British folk music on Topic Records, and Selectadisc’s little cutout store was brilliant because you could pick up old Curtis Mayfield albums for 75p and even relatively newly released stuff like Come Away With ESG (which I also bought there for £1). I mourn the day cutouts ceased.”

Spin Inn, Manchester Greg Wilson, DJ I grew up on Merseyside, buying my records locally in Wallasey and Birkenhead, or heading over to the shops in Liverpool. However, back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s there was only one place in the North to buy your tunes if you considered yourself a serious black music specialist, and that was Spin Inn on Cross Street in Manchester. I first went there in 1976, tagging along with Terry Lennaine, the Soul show presenter on Radio Merseyside.

It was only a small shop, but with a massive reputation – DJs travelled from far and wide to buy their imports there. By the early ‘80s, when I doing my nights at Wigan Pier and Legend, the main guys behind the counter were Kev Edwards and the late Harry Taylor (ex-DJ Gary Laine was the owner). Apart from black music, the shop also catered for the gay scene.

I got to know Les Cokell in there, he was the DJ at Manchester’s main gay club, Heroes, but it wasn’t until later that I realised he was originally a soul jock from legendary venues like the Twisted Wheel and Blackpool Mecca.

Things got pretty political with Kev, who was openly anti-Electro, despite the contradictory fact that the shop played a major role in igniting this new movement by stocking the records in the first place – he was very critical of my move in this direction and, infamously, stuck an ‘Electro Shit’ chart in the window at one stage.

I supplemented my record buying with regular trips to London (mainly buying stuff from City Sounds in Holborn), but most of the records I was playing back then were imported by Spin Inn.

Selectadisc, Nottingham Bill Brewster, Journalist (DJHistory) The whole time I was growing up in Grimsby there was never a dedicated record shop.

We had Rayners, which was an electrical appliance shop that sold fridges, tellies, washing machines and at the back they had three listening booths where you could go and listen to the latest releases. It was miserable…

Gear Market was Fat Tony who I gave his first DJ gig along with the designers Jane Kahn and Patti Bell from Birmingham as well as Stereo MC’s Manager and Gee St Records supremo Jon Baker with his Fashion Label Axiom. I lost money but sold tickets to Spandau Ballet gigs and promoted my famous St Valentine’s Day Ball at the Rainbow. That week Ultravox were No 2 in the charts and my interests as an artist and producer were more appealing, as was my DJ work, so I just let the guys have The Cage. But not before using the name for an electro track for the Nona Hendryx version of ‘Do What You Wanna Do’.

Ames Record Bar, Blackburn Wayne Hemingway, Designer I was lucky enough to spend my youth immersed in the myriad of ‘70s youth culture movements that defined the decade. As a 12-year-old my first concert was David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane tour at King George’s hall in Blackburn in ’73. I went out, got my hair “feathered”, bought a tight-fitting canary yellow T-shirt from Clobber and then made my first visit to Ames Record Bar in the shopping centre to buy the album. A year later an older mate introduced me to northern soul and with my “bum fluff” tache and stacked heels worn under my high-waisted Oxfords I was able to get into Wigan Casino. I became hooked on vinyl with big holes in the middle and Saturday mornings (before the afternoon pilgrimage to Ewood Park) were spent in Blackburn’s amazing Record Exchange where local soul collectors sold their imported records to feed habits of one kind or another! My mum managed a pub and I was able to earn cash helping out, and all my money went on buying vinyl.When I was 15 I started going to The Highland Room at Blackpool Mecca and built a relationship with Ames where they would get hold of all that brilliant mid ‘70s disco and jazz funk.Then came punk and Ames got even more of my money...

The Cage, LONDON Rusty Egan, MUSICIAN & DJ (THE BLITZ) I started The Cage in 1979 at The Great Gear Market which was the Kings Road equivalent of Kensington Market, full of designers and friends from The Blitz Club and Billy’s. People would ask me every gig I played, “Where can I get this?” so I would say The Cage. It was basically my set list plus all the rare bootlegs and collector’s stuff. Kraftwerk’s ‘Neon Lights’ in luminous vinyl along with everything from Harry Thumann to Holger Czukay and Yoko Ono to Yellow Magic Orchestra. DJ Tasty Tim manned the shop daytimes and armed with the stock started to DJ. Also working in The Great

31

RECORD & TAPE EXCHANGE, NOTTING HILL, LONDON KODWO ESHUN, ARTIST (OTOLITH GROUP, MORE BRILLIANT THAN THE SUN) A lot of my best loved 12”s and albums came from the Record & Tape Exchange in Notting Hill Gate from the mid-1990s through to the mid-00s. I would go there with a checklist of 12”s and often I would find them, which was extremely satisfying. I would then move on to find other things in nearby sections–who knew what might be there? A new Wechsel Garland album, a 12” by Brandy, that Annette Peacock album I had heard about, an Alan Silva triple album, an unwanted PragVec 7”. The staff were super knowledgeable and I thank them all – Sean, Howard, Paul and the rest in my book, More Brilliant Than the Sun. I would sometime drop next door into Rock to see what might be there, something by Cluster or PopulVuh, if I was lucky. The atmosphere was quite distinct: more studious and less convivial. I felt at home in both of them. And next to that was Classical – maybe there might be some Takemitsu on CD, maybe a Stockhausen or that Don Cherry and Penderecki album. There was an exquisite juggling act to be carried out. I would often reserve piles of vinyl in all three shops, delaying the moment when I had to make a choice. So much depended on mood.

Buying records was an exquisite engineering of mood; finding a great track that you had set your mind on would catalyse a sense of joy, as if the world had aligned itself with your wishes.

Warp, SheFField CHRIS DUCKeNFIeLD, DJ, PRODUCeR (SWAG)

rough trade, WeSt london ANA DA SILVA, MUSICIAN (THe RAINCOATS)

Ordering records over the phone, rolls and rolls of faxed new release lists, chaotic master bag systems and an encyclopedia sized accounts book, not to mention a flagrant disregard for profit margins and workplace temperance, this was music retailing AI (Anno Internet).

During my 5 years at Warp, I went from Saturday counter boy and mixer of records to the buyer for the dance sections between ‘91-‘96. It was an amazing time for music.

Warp was the hub of the Sheffield scene, the main watering hole for thirsty music fans, and a wonderful place to work. We had so much fun, despite – like most independent stores – garnering a reputation for being moody (see: sleep deprived). We’d all eagerly await the import van on Saturday mornings, stacked with all manner of shrink-wrapped goodness, constantly fight over ‘holy grail’ promos, debate the importance of each freshly unpeeled 12” and in the process build up lifelong friendships with colleagues and punters alike.

Week in, week out, innovative and classic music falling in our laps, we took it completely for granted, and only with the benefit of hindsight is it clear just how epochal a moment it was.Independent stores were and are a magnet for extremely knowledgeable and eccentric enthusiasts and passionately addled newcomers alike. All with a common interest and purpose...it’s the non-denominational banter and community I miss the most.

The Rough Trade shop was close to where I lived, so I started going there in early 1977 to get the very few records that were slowly coming out: mostly singles by the British bands and LPs by the American bands which I really loved: Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television, The Voidoids, The Ramones... Another reason I went there then was to hang out on Saturdays.

The shop was fun. There were fanzines, badges and a lot of people exchanging phone numbers, expressing their difference and the will to change things, not just musically but socially and politically.In the spring of 1977, Geoff asked me to work at the shop, because he thought it was very important to have a female presence there. I worked on and off for a few years. When Palmolive had joined The Raincoats in 1978, we invited Geoff to our gigs and he offered to record a single and then three albums for Rough Trade Records. One of the best moments of my life was receiving a phone call to tell me that our first single had arrived at the shop. I still remember the feeling of total exhilaration as I was walking towards Rough Trade to see it. This feeling would be repeated later that year when the album was also out. It cemented what we had started and made it all feel more real and amazing.I’ve been going to Rough Trade from 1977 until just last Sunday when I bought Bob Dylan’s ‘Witmark demos 1962-64’ and Warpaint’s ‘The Fool’.

al and andY’S, chelMSFord, eSSeX SQUARePUSHeR, MUSICIAN, PRODUCeR In the early ‘90s there was a record stall in the Chelmsford indoor market run by a couple of geezers from Braintree. Their stock reflected their excellent taste, and as well as domestic releases they always managed to track down the hottest Euro and US imports.

I remember the Derrick May remix of ‘You’re Mine’ by Reese popping out of nowhere for £2, still one of my favourites! I started buying records there in 1991 when I was sixteen with 32

money I earned playing bass in local bands. The best paying gig was with a bunch of alcoholic postmen playing blues and rock covers. They’d give me £50 a night which would equip me to buy imports and other mind-altering goods.

Next stop Al and Andy’s! They later relocated to a shop in Tindal Street, which was where some of my early music got its first public airing. I popped in on a Saturday afternoon with a cassette which I really wanted to play them. I got talking to Al and he was keen to hear it, so I passed him the tape thinking that he’d play it after-hours. Instead he turned off whatever record was playing and put it straight on, which was pretty nerve-racking as the shop was rammed with people! Luckily it received a hearty reception and I went home massively inspired – it was a really special moment.

the art oF BuYing reggae MuSic (trodding the kingSland high road) PAUL BRADSHAW, PUBLISHeR (STRAIGHT NO CHASeR) I graduated to the metropolis in the autumn of ’74 and settled in E8, between Mare Street and Dalston Junction. I had arrived in reggae music heaven and driven by this mighty music I’d regularly roam Kingsland High Road from the Junction to Seven Sisters in search of new acquisitions, beginning my journey in Dalston Lane at Java, a stones throw away from the legendary Four Aces night club. Freshly opened, this most alluring little “record shack” was run by drummer Jah Bunny, bassist Floyd Lawson

and a most stylish and knowledgeable youth called Lenny. The style and pattern of the day was most enticing – the Gabichi was vital, as was that rakishly offset Baker’s boy – and the attempts of this grey boy to look relaxed and “down” in this 100% black environment earned me the tag of “screwface” and gave them more than a few belly laughs.That said, Java and its successor M&D Records, which was run by Lee Hall – a selectah and salesman par excellence – became my second home. It was there that I gained a serious education into this music and learned to peel an orange with a ratchet knife.

Just across the way, Music City in Ridley Road market was always an enticing prospect on a Saturday. If I recall, the shop had direct links to the prolific Trojan Records. It was the covers of brilliant albums like Dennis Brown’s Just Dennis, Big Youth’s Screaming Target or Ras Michael’s Nyabinghi that hung in the shop window. The speakers outside the shop projected a little burst of Al Brown doing Al Green or Ken Boothe previewing what was to become a chart topper or a touch of “skenga” – a scattering of ‘Irie Feeling’ from Rupie Edward’s Cactus label. The sounds of young Jamaica rose above the vibrant hustle and bustle of black and white working class shoppers and the cockney mantras of the various vendors. Sadly, during the ‘70s, this grainy, positively harmonious black and white image of east London was consistently tainted by a racist undercurrent based on the popularity of the National Front.

Having partaken of a pattie or a bagel one would trod from Ridley Road further up the High Roadand head for the shop of Ephraim Barret aka Count Shelley– a pioneering and most popular local sound system operator who, in the early ‘70s, was the resident DJ at the fabled Four Aces. Of course his reputation as a sound man and selector ensured he was always in possession of the latest singles from JA and was constantly plied with acetates of tunes well in advance of their release.

Shelley knew what rocked the dancefloor and accordingly his shop boasted an array of compilation albums and excellent 7” releases on his own Count Shelly label. Along with UKbased artists like Honey Boy, Gene Rondo, Roy Shirley and Laurel Aitken, he released music from the JA stars of the day –Delroy Wilson,

I Roy, Dillinger, Alton Ellis, Prince Jazbo and Errol Dunkley. Confirming the man’s vision, it was Count Shelley who first released Tapper Zukie’s majestic Man A Warrior, an album that became the stuff of legend, partly due to the writings of Penny Reel – a youth man of Stamford Hill origin who also roamed that same High Road.

The next stop on Stoke Newington High Street was home to one Leonard Chin and his Santic label. He arrived in London from Jamaica around the same time as I did and set about releasing the music he’d recorded with Gregory Isaacs and Augustus Pablo… this was deep stuff. The compilation, Harder Shade Of Black featured a cover shot taken on Hackney Downs while the vinyl delivered a brace of tracks that included ‘Pablo In Dub’, Horace Andy’s ‘Problems’ and Gregory’s ‘I’ll Be Around’.

Fortunately for today’s roots generation, this classic album of vintage deejay, dub, instrumental and vocal cuts is still available – with a few extra cuts – from Peter Holdworth’s discerning, hi-quality Pressure Sounds set up.

From Stokie it was most tempting to hop on a double decker to Stamford Hill and touch down at the most excellent R&B Records.

While London’s Orthodox Jewish males strutted their stuff in their white stockings, black silk coats and extravagant fur hats and beaver Stetsons, a more modest Jewish couple Benny and Rita King plied the postWindrush generation with some serious music.

Amazingly, R&B Records opened back in 1953 and following constant requests for Jamaican “blues” records, they contacted legendary sound man and producer ‘Coxson’ Dodd in order to buy the music directly from Jamaica.

The early ‘60s saw them launch their own R&B and Ska Beat labels, satisfying the tastes of the Jamaican community along with the styleobsessed Mods who’d discovered the music in clubs like Count Suckle’s Roaring Twenties in Carnaby Street. My fondest memory was asking Rita – who was like your gran– if they’d got Burning Spear’s Marcus Garvey LP. It had just been released in JA on Jack Ruby’s Fox label and the buzz was massive. Rita said, “Burning Spear? Marcus Garvey? No! Do you have this?” and put an album on the turntable.“I & I son of the most high, JahRastafari, All hearts shall cross thine and beat in one harmony, Sounds from the Burning Spear….”It

33

was of those record buying moments, an experience that I can only compare to hearing Coxson Dodd’s mother spinning the Gladiators ‘Root’s Natty’ in the Brentford Road shop in JA.Without even knowing it I’d paid, thanked Rita gracefully and stepped out into the street in a quietly euphoric daze.

It was rare that I would progress beyond Seven Sisters and onto Tottenham High Road.

It was, however, the release in 1974 of an extraordinary album by Keith Hudson called Flesh Of My Fleshthat had me scouring the High Road in search ofAtra Records. Upon locating the shop I was overjoyed to sight a copy of the said LP. From the sleeve design to its lyrics, Flesh Of My Flesh was an intentionally conscious venture. This was not a collection of singles. This was Hudson as producer, songwriter and vocalist – he had a concept that was totally radical. Keith Hudson’s vocals may well be an acquired taste but I headed back to Atra to purchase both his made to measure and monumental dub LP, Pick A Dub, and the follow up to Flesh Of My Flesh – Torch Of Freedom,with Hudson sporting the beret and looking militant.

Over time my buying skills became more refined, and when Lee took over Java andrenamed it M&D Records, my wanderings diminished. Whenever passing, I was sucked into the shop. I’d idle away the hours, sipping on bottles of Guiness, listening to music new and old. Lee was a controller and skilled selectah.

The man had a nice little pre-amp, a couple of superb Tannoy speakers and some discreet, uncased tweeters tucked way in the corners of the shop which gave that little extra lick of tops.

Word would go out when a shipment of Pre’s was to reach and the shop would be packed.

You had to stand firm and hold a place where Lee could clearly see you signal that the tune was to be added to your pile. Hesitate, and all you’d hear was the words, “It done!” He would work the buyers, sound men and punters, dreads and baldheads, and when all that new music had been reduced to no more takers, he would start on the revives – the Studio One. Lee was the master and at those sessions he would ensure that whatever money you had in your pocket would be seriously dented.

That was how it was and you’d step into the night with a righteous bowling walk, clutching a brown paper bag full of deep riddim.

ST w ph or o ds t o :D s u : Damia ke

Eti n enn D u e/ n ca h e n ad /d s highm amia n

d us u n ic . c ca o n m .c o .u

IC k

Like it or not, Richard ‘Sticky’ Forbes has held sway over UK Bass music for at least a decade before the term was even coined. Duke Etienne, DJ, promoter and man about town, first met him two years ago when they both shared a landlord (Mad Professor) and a studio complex in deepest South London. Over four separate meetings, each one held in the cosy reception of his studio, Sticky talks about how he went from playing parties across the capital to producing that tune with Ms. Dynamite, and the drama behind it.

KY

34

35

The first time I heard about you was as part of the Ill Kidz. Was that the first crew you were in?

No. To begin with, I was a part of was a sound called Poison around 1990. It was a straight Bashment sound from Thornton Heath.

So is that your foundation then, Reggae?

No, my roots are Hip Hop. But I love all kinds of music. I was buying records from 1978. My Gran loved buying records so I used to go round there and play hers.

What kind of music was your Gran into?

(At this point Sticky brings out a stack of 45s which belonged to his grandmother – everything from John Lennon to Clancy Eccles, Boney M, Blondie to Jim Reeves!) All her records were songs. There were hardly any instrumentals in there. That stayed with me. I like building instrumentals but I’ll always want a song on there eventually. The first singles I ever bought were ‘YMCA’ (I was 5 and I didn’t know it was a batty man thing, to me it was just a good song!) and ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ by Ian Dury. I remember the video for that one – I liked the way the song was put together. He was rapping, but this was like 1979 and it’s a white guy.

My gran used to take me to a shop on Deptford High St. We’d to go to the betting shop first, put a bet on, go back a bit later for the winnings and go to the record shop to get some records. My Gran’s the one that introduced me to Admiral Bailey and ‘Punanny’. My Gran! It was a big thing in the house. ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’ too. And she knew the dance. In the 80s my Dad’s tunes started having a bigger influence on me too because people started sampling things he had to make Hip Hop records. He was into Stax and 70s Motown, things like Gladys Knight & The Pips, The Commodores, that kind of thing. When I started hearing the samples in Hip Hop tunes aged 13 I’d be like ‘Oh, that break’s from such and such’. I could show people my age where things came from.

How did you start playing out?

The first time I played out was at a mate’s birthday party. I was 14 and I was crap! I was clanging all over the place. Then the next DJ came on and started cutting up Sugar Bear ‘Don’t Scandalise Mine’. From that point, I knew I had to conquer this thing and I started doing friends’ parties with my friend Steven. He liked the Rare Groove Soul thing and I was more into Hip Hop and Ragga so the blend was a good one. He had a wardrobe-sized speaker, we both

had amps made, proper amps, I borrowed my uncles mixer and we’d borrow his uncle’s van to get where we needed to go. Thinking about it now, I don’t know how we managed to pull it off at 15. Around ‘91 the Bogle thing came in. ‘Body Workshop’ was that first tune that I bought. I literally hunted that tune down.

So from buying ‘Body Workshop’, how did you start playing out that kind of style. That’s how you first got known as part of Poison right?

A mate I used to go school with rang me up and asked, ‘do you wanna play out this Saturday?’

When I got there, they just gave me a big Tesco bag full of records and said ‘that’s what you’re playing yeah, every tune’s a banger, don’t worry.’

That set was a struggle! I remember pulling out this white label and thinking ‘Risto Benji? What’s this?’ I put it on and heard ‘We are the Peeni Porni Peenie Porni Peenie…’ The whole place went nuts! Eventually the same crew got a link with an estate agent who had keys to a vacant

house. We did a Valentine’s party and I was prepared. I made sure I came with all my crates in order. I had a torch…the little things. I knew I had to play fast so the order was important. I used the Hip Hop skills, but with Dancehall. That particular set in Croydon, people were like, ‘look at that guy Forbsey, he can scratch and mix!’

How did you make the transition from Poison to the Ill Kidz?

While I was doing Poison, I did a work experience placement at Choice FM. My goal was to get to know everybody in there. I badgered George Kaye to play one of my mixes, and he slept on it for two years but I was persistent. In ’94, he eventually relented and the mix got a good response. I got given a slot on Wednesdays 5-5.30 – a pre-recorded mix thing. At the same time I was trying to manage a Hip Hop group to utilise the links I had with the station. The group was called Got To Get Over and Lawrence and Simon from the Ill Kidz were members. When they split up, we formed the Ill Kidz.

36

As the Ill Kidz, you caught a little fame right?

The Ill Kidz were known as a name. The main face was Simon Sez. He was the mic man. The time we started, you could play R&B, Soca, Bashment, Hip Hop, Miami Bass and New Jack Swing – they called it “bundle music” – but over the years things had got segregated and people were making names just concentrating on one genre. As the Ill Kidz we’d play anything – I’ve played Tom Jones and Abba to a room full of black people, raw! We made it work because we played it like Bashment. If you’re confident and credible, you can play anything. But It was getting harder to get booked if you played a range of styles so we started moving into Garage soon after the time ‘Desire’ and ‘R U Sleeping?’ came out. They were more like songs and I was used to working with songs so that made it easier.

Tuff Jam were smashing it at the time too. That opened my eyes to a new crowd, a mixed crowd.

I was used to just seeing black people in front of me, but the Garage scene wasn’t like that.

Is that about the time that you built ‘What’s it Gonna Be?’ Yeah. I made a link with a guy called Martin who had signed a new artist named Nesha. At that time me and another guy Sly were working together and calling ourselves Sticky. Sly worked out a melody and we put it down. That was my second vocal session. I asked Nesha to do some ad libs and when I listened back to the a cappella of the Nesha thing, I was like ‘it already sounds like a Garage tune’. I spent a whole night sampling Garage drums and sounds to work with. I chopped up some of the vocals and used an organ for the melodies. I smoked a lot then, and the more I smoked, the more I wanted it to be warped. I only had an MPC, Yamaha QI70 and a DJX, that cheap £250 thing with a ribbon controller. I used the controller to twist up the bassline and when I put the verses in, it actually worked better than I expected. I took it to Kirk Anthony at Choice FM and he was like ‘that B-line is stupid! I’m playing that in my UK Pressure slot.’ That was my first Garage production and it sold 12,000 copies. Nesha ended up doing this Queen of Garage thing – false eyelashes, hanging around with Spoony... I wasn’t looking at it like that at the time but she was basically the first act I buss. When I looked at the sales breakdown, I got £500 and she got like £30,000!

How did you raise it to the next level?

As Sticky we ended up doing a session for a group Polydor had just signed called ‘Ladies First’. To me they were just faces, there was no real talent there. They wanted us to do a cover of Lisa Lisa’s ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.’ We thought it’d be easy, but none of them could sing so it took us three days. The A&R wanted us to do the vocal and send it to the Dreem Team to do the mix. Jade, the label rep, was like, ‘We’re thinking of putting a rapper in the group, would you have time to see her? Her name’s Ms. Dynamite.’ Now I’d met Ms. Dynamite two

years before with Ill Kidz in Cameo’s. She held the mic and obliterated that club. We were the dons in that club so to see someone come up, do 30 seconds, and smash it was something.

We hitched up the tune and asked her what her name was. Her friends were like ‘MS DYNAMITE’… That time at Cameo’s was the first time she’d got up and done it publicly.

So you remembered her when the A&R dropped her name?

At first the name didn’t click but then I was like, ‘Hold on Jade… did you say Dynamite? From North London?’ I was straight on the phone to her and got her to come down to the session the following day. We gave her half an hour to write something and when she stepped in the booth I was just sitting there waiting for their reaction. I just knew. I ran the tune and she murdered it.

So did Polydor sign her then?

Yeah, they signed her but they’ll never admit I was involved in the A&R process. At that time female MCs were shit in everyone’s eyes. Even after that, it took time to get promoters to put her on. I went out of my way to make it work. When we’d managed to break the barriers and Niomi (Dynamite) had gained acceptance, everyone I’d given her links with swooped in. Suddenly I didn’t exist anymore…

How did it all go down?

Well I’d just met Jason Kaye so I had a link with Social Circles, and use of their studio. They were looking for artists. They were based in Southgate, North London and Niomi was in Tufnell Park.

I’d moved from Croydon to Southgate for those two reasons. I took a big risk, but I was confident I could make it happen. Through Psycho from Rampage, I managed to get Niomi on Commander B’s Choice FM show every week for 6 weeks, 1-2am. It was the Surgery show. On the sixth week, we did a P.A. of ‘Booo!’ That was the first performance of it. By the time she got through half of it, Commander was hitting the sound FX buttons and freaking out! I remember going to the barber shop the next day and hearing people talking about her.

So what happened next?

From then I took her to all our gigs, even then we’re still doing Ill Kidz. Our network was right, we had Commander B supporting on the radio, Jason Kaye supporting from the Garage scene and we were on road doing pure gigs. The only thing was that we were in-between the Garage and Urban scenes because the Ill Kidz were perceived as an Urban act. I worked both scenes, and the Asian scene too. I promoted Ms. Dynamite first, and the tune second… that’s why it ended up being known as ‘that Dynamite tune’ rather than ‘that Sticky tune with Dynamite on it’. Within a few months, she was airing my calls.

Then I got a phone call from her telling me that the contract I’d sent her was trying to rip her off. I was confused. I hadn’t sent her a contract. Turns out Jason Kaye had sent her a contract that I hadn’t even seen. She went on to tell me that she

now had a manger and was getting booked in her own right. I couldn’t believe that she’d forgotten all the work I’d put in on the basis of a contract that I didn’t even know existed. Then stories were circulating on the net that I ripped her off. I was upset. To this day she still maintains that me and Jason tried to rip her off. To be honest, Jason did try to rip her off, but I didn’t deal with the business side of things, it wasn’t me. It was frustrating because I didn’t have any way of putting my side of the story over to the people… and on top of that, she’s doing PAs making money off the back of my beats and production.

You got paid for your beats though right?

Well I got signed to London Records, but still got treated like a dickhead. They signed the tune, but it was Dynamite they wanted, not me. In the marketing meeting, her management said I couldn’t do any photos or interviews at all, and the label I’d just signed to were like ‘yeah, that’s fine’.

I’m sitting in the boardroom thinking ‘this is the

They fell off. It was them who instigated Dynamite leaving. I wanted to go my own way with Sticky and it was Sly who organised Dynamite’s manager.

There’s more to the story but that’s not for now.

Suffice to say, in the end, the only people that won were the label cats with their chequebooks.

You’ve famously worked with Tubby T too, and could have become extremely rich with that. How did that come about?

Des, the same guy who helped Dynamite get signed to Polydor, was now working at Virgin and had a big budget for Urban acts. He wanted to sign Tubby based on the three tunes I’d recorded with him and the fact that Jo Whiley had been playing the first one, ‘Tales of The Hood’. They wanted to sign ‘Tales’ to Virgin but when I found out it was Des, I said flat no… not even for a million. They ended up signing Tubby, without the tunes, for £200,000, but they were still on my back to sign the big tune. The next month, I got an offer from Go Beat for £2m. Then everything went quiet, waiting to see what I’d do. The story ran in Music Week. Then I’m in meetings with Lucian Grainge (Universal CEO) explaining to him what I do.

What stopped you from going down that route?

When I look at it, with Ill Kidz I made a lot of friends, and made alright money. As Sticky, I made a lot of money, but failed a lot of people.

What I had to do to make that money wasn’t cool.

I almost had to turn into the very industry person that I never liked to make things work. It’s taken me the last 10 years to learn to communicate properly and create a balance.

first time I’ve walked in to this whole world, and this is how I’m being treated? The tune is Sticky ft. Ms Dynamite and I can’t be seen in a photo or heard in an interview?’

You must have become disillusioned with the music industry.

The whole Dynamite business ripped out my heart. I was just this soulless, egotistical character making hits but for the wrong reasons.

I fell out of love with music, but I was driven to buss more tunes purely to prove a point. I set myself the goal of replicating the success of ‘Booo!’ within 12 months. In January 2001 everyone was talking about ‘Booo!’ By January 2002, the tune on everyone’s lips was ‘Dollar Sign’, the tune I did with Lady Stush. Because it happened in the same month a year later, exactly as predicted, my ego went into overdrive, which was ugly actually.

You said Sticky was originally three people. What happened to the others?

37

Fast-forwarding a little, how did you come to be associated with Funky?

I ended up working in what was the Social Circles studios alongside Paleface, Flukes, JC , Marlon and Ben Scars. Flukes was 15 then, Jason was 15 and Ben was like 18. Ben signed Tinchy Stryder and Flukes is Crazy Cousinz, so there I was again at the roots of the next phase of the game. Without being bigheaded, I can honestly say that I’ve influenced each part of the whole movement, whether it’s Garage, Two-Step, Dubstep, Bassline, Funky whatever. The things that myself and others have gone through have provided the avenue for this next generation to push through.

So what is now like for Sticky?

Right now I’m at my happiest. I’m a father first, and I’ve never forgotten that. Now it’s just me, Paleface and Kyla – Northern Line Records. I’m dealing with business first. I’ve seen it, I’ve been there. I’ve had chart success, I’ve had radio play and I’ve been though all the years of graft to even get to that place. I’ve hit the glass ceiling and now I’m just about dealing with people who do music… in a real sense. People who play an active part in the music-making process as opposed to someone who just wants to make money out of music. That’s not love anymore.

words: Helene Dancer photography: Ashes 57 - www.ashes57.com

SPACE IS THE PLACE

As one of dubstep’s founding fathers, Mala commands respect the world over. He continues to spread the gospel of peace, love and bass weight through DMZ and Deep Medi Musik, and, discovers Helene Dancer, isn’t scared of speaking his mind either.

“

I still never expect anyone to turn up, to be honest with you,” says Mala as he surveys the empty club. There’s an hour to go before the doors to DMZ are open for business, the club night he’s been running with Loefah, Pokes and Coki for more than five years at Mass in Brixton.

He twists a dreadlock and pulls at his DMZ t-shirt as Loefah starts to warm up the system. “You go outside after soundcheck and there’s a couple of people standing there, you go out again and there’s more people standing… Every time it just surprises me, you know.”

Such modesty may be surprising for a DJ, producer and visionary who many class as one of dubstep’s founding fathers. DMZ, the label, now has its early vinyl releases going for big money on eBay and Mala’s own Deep Medi Musik is widely seen as one of the finest electronic labels around. And tonight, despite his misgivings before the doors open, the club will indeed be packed. “It was vibes,” he tells me the next day – as it is every session.

Mala inhabits a space where pride doesn’t exist (he prefers the word ‘pleased’ when tracking his musical journey) and it is all, and only ever will be, about the music. This is why he reckons DMZ continues to be real head’s night, holding true to its musical roots while it watches money and fashion stake their claim on dubstep as it enters the commercial arena.

“I remember the energy we had among us when all this started,” he says, recollecting the memory with visible fondness. “There was this massive desire to make heavy music. It didn’t matter what anyone was saying because it really was a music thing that built this.”

Mala also speaks of a rebellion that underpinned this desire at the time – especially when it came to sharing this new breed of bass music that Hatcha from Big Apple Records in Croydon took such a prescient punt on back in 2004.

“We were sick of going out to nights that were more concerned with the decorations and lights rather than the sound system,” he says. “The Metalheadz [at the Blue Note in Hoxton, London] thing had already kinda died off, which we used to go out to, and I thought it was awful that you can charge money to come into any venue where people play any type of music on terrible quality speakers. It lead us to a point where we were rebelling against it. I was 22, 23 and had this fire. Fuck all this nonsense. It’s all about sound.”

The sound that Big Apple Records unleashed on the world has now splintered into myriad forms, as happens with time, and with the ease at which people can make music on a laptop these days. In fact, there’s an awful lot of dubstep coming out now that’s a far cry from the quality cuts celebrated on labels like DMZ.

“For me it’s not necessarily about what I like or what I dislike. It’s really about what I feel when I listen to music,” Mala suggests, diplomatically. “And I think what you feel depends on your circumstance, it depends on your age – it depends on everything.

It’s inevitable things are gonna go off in a whole lot of different ways. And if it’s called dubstep, then so be it. I don’t control dubstep. I don’t own dubstep. I don’t even call what I do dubstep.”

Whatever he chooses not to call it, Mala’s most recent release, Return II Space, stands in a class of its own and you can’t help but do just as the DMZ slogan instructs, and come meditate on bass weight. The finely sculpted sounds, expertly tweaked 38

39

SPACE IS THE PLACE

frequencies and rolling basslines make the simple compositions shudder with emotion – and attitude.

They carve out a space where it can only be you and the music.

“I used to love hearing Grooverider play in the mid 90s and then when he did his session with Fabio at Fabric when it just opened,” says Mala.

“Them sessions were serious and I remember closing my eyes sometimes and just listening to the music thinking to myself the music was so energetic and so hard, so aggressive, but what it used to make me feel was the complete opposite.

It was a total release, so it was natural for me to make this kind of sound because it’s kinda how I am as a person.”

And in the spirit of enterprise, Mala decided to give the release of Return II Space an extra special twist in the form of one hundred triple pack picture disc versions of the EP inserted randomly into the sleeves – much like the golden tickets in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

“I was seeing people [on forums] like, yeah, I’m gonna buy five copies and I’m gonna sell them on eBay. And then I had a really funny situation with some record shops that offered to buy however many I pressed, so people were really trying to monopolise on something and taking it too far,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye. “That’s why I came up with the idea of the picture discs.”

Mala also refused to release a track list to the press before it was released and didn’t send out any promos, which these days for a label is pretty much unheard of. Return II Space is also still a vinylonly release – a format Mala feels very strongly

about.

“You get this different sound with vinyl,” he explains. “When I go master records and when they get cut onto a dub and you play it off your record head, it gives the bottom end a real nice texture, warmth and roundness and it takes off some of the tops. It’s something I really enjoy still.”

And where does Mala stand on the debate surrounding modern production’s obsession with compression and making their music as loud as possible, known as the loudness wars? “My mixes are pretty quiet. They always have been. I like the dynamics that the music has when it’s not so compressed and so limited – but everyone’s got their tastes, you know?”

He smiles coyly, again, refusing to be drawn into battle, but his face breaks into an unabashed grin at the mention of his own label, Deep Medi, which he set up in 2006. He was doing youth work at the time and getting sent loads of music, so he decided to pull the two together.

“I could help people younger than me, or in a different place from me, start experiencing where I was and learn how to get music into a shop. That’s why I set it up – to help people really develop,” he says. “I was also making music and wanted to put out stuff that was a little bit obscure – more so than the stuff on DMZ. But I actually ended up not releasing a lot of my stuff and it just became a focus for other artists.”

One of his finest signings was West London’s Silkie, who Mala says always surprises him with the quality of his music. Quest, too, is something special. “You got a record like ‘Smooth Skin’ 40

– you know, the guy’s a young guy and that’s sophisticated music and is light years ahead of his age,” he says.

“I remember meeting Silkie and Quest in 2006/2007 and both of them come down to my studio and gave me a couple of CDs. I swear both of them had like 17 tracks each. I remember listening to their music in the car and I was like, you know what, those guys have got music for albums and albums in them. I said to them back then, it ain’t about now – it’s about a development with you guys. I’m really looking to support you the whole way.”

But this didn’t mean signing their lives away to Deep Medi because Mala doesn’t believe in contracts. “I like to think that in life you can tell somebody something and then by your word and by your action, that should be enough to make people want to continue working. I want them to work with me as much as I want to work with them,” he says.

Along with this auspicious business model, Mala also refuses for Deep Medi’s releases to be tailored to the sections of a record shop. “For me, Deep Medi is something that allows people to develop and gives them the artistic freedom to do what they like regardless of tempo and genre,” he says.

“And I just try and encourage the people on my label to forget any tag they’ve been associated with because as much as it’s great that I have an association with a scene, it can also be limiting. Not necessarily to the outside world but just in my own head.”

Soundway RecoRdS B e s t o f 2 010 The Sound of Siam CD & Double lP

“Surprise compilation of the year” Gilles Peterson

“My favourite comp of the year, thumbs up all round” mr Scruff

The woRld endS

CD & 2 Part triPle lP

“This double disc stands out as a relentless dance-floor scorcher” Spin magazine “What an extraordinary collection!”

The Sunday Times

Palenque Palenque CD & triPle lP

“These intense in your face floor fillers defy all laws of musical appreciation” The independent 5/5

cdS, lPS, downloadS and dJ mixeS all available aT

www.soundwayrecords.com

Keith Mansfield

funky work ethic During the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s Keith Mansfield established himself as one of Britain’s most gifted and prolific composers of library music. Today, thanks to the attentions of the current crop of film and music makers, his work for the KPM label is more in demand than ever.

44

Keith Mansfield Words: Welson Creep Photography: Sandra Borszcz

L

ibrary music has always been an enticing domain full of mystique – limited pressings, top-notch players, great recordings, secret guests etc. The fact that library LPs have never been commercially available makes them all the more desirable. There are many music libraries around the world but several of the top libraries are based in London.

The ’60s and’70s was a highly productive time for the library music scene in London, with a network of funky musicians churning out work at an alarming rate. One of the most famous companies from this era is KPM (Keith Prowse Maurice) – a leading source of production music for over 60 years and a benchmark within the industry for high quality recordings.

In 1964, a young Keith Mansfield went to KPM’s arranging department and worked there initially as a copyist. The job opportunity came through a trumpeter named Alan Moorhouse, who he played a gig with every Saturday night in Clapham.

Alan was a well respected freelance arranger at KPM – he was famous for writing Lulu’s hit ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ (something he and Keith would laugh about), and later became the conductor for the BBC orchestra.

Alan was an early mentor to Keith, allowing him to ‘ghost’ on some of his projects.

‘Ghosting’ on a track meant that if Alan had too much work on he would ‘farm out’ the job to Keith. The piece would have to sound like Alan, and Alan’s name would be on the record. This might sound unfair but at the time it was a common practice, and in Keith’s eyes, all part of ‘being professional’.

During this period Robin Phillips was running the company; a young man with a ‘terrible stutter’, who in the space of three years helped turn KPM into a world

famous music library. Robin trusted his own instincts and if he thought somebody had talent, he would give them a chance.

He saw potential in Keith and gave him the opportunity to record an album of jazzedup Christmas carols in a grotty, run-down studio. The album was a big success in the States so within six months he was asked to record a Nursery Rhymes album in the same style. After the success of this record Keith was given his biggest and most exciting challenge to date:

if you weren’t reliable and didn’t deliver, that was it, over. It was essential that he kept a clear head,

“Robin went from giving me small group Christmas carols, to doing my own compositions, eight titles, recording them in Germany, with a big orchestra! So I go from writing for a six-piece to writing for a thirtyfive piece orchestra!”

at the end of a project. I’d get laced. I did get sent home once with a note. The guy drove me home, rang the doorbell, and left a note on me (laughs). But I couldn’t drink and write.”

“You can’t drink and write. When you’re averaging, as I was, three arrangements a day at one stage – drunk? I wouldn’t have got through one! You know, sometimes you drink

“There was one week when I did 27 arrangements! All for an over-thirty piece orchestra!”

At the time there was a union rule that wouldn’t allow library music to be recorded in the UK. The unions were concerned that the music libraries would make many professional musicians redundant, so the musicians would go abroad to record most of the big arrangements. Sometimes, however, KPM would ‘cheat a little bit’ and secretly record some sessions in the KPM studios back in London.

“They always used to have a scam, they used to have a letter to say what the music was, in case the union rep came there and said: you’re doing library music! Robin always had this letter there from Pathe/Marconi, saying it was to do this specific music for their film in France.”

As Keith’s career went from strength to strength his workload increased dramatically. Professionalism was the key –

46

By the time Keith reached 28, the intense pressure of working as a commercial arranger almost got the better of him, “You know, I used to average four hours in bed a night! As I said, I used to do fifteen arrangements a week. There was one week when I did, I think it was 27 arrangements!

All for an over-thirty piece orchestra. I was in the studio nine times in that week, from Sunday to Sunday. But I was a head-case at the end of it. I was so drained! So I nearly had a breakdown.”

The output and quality of Keith’s music during this period is pretty phenomenal.

Working every hour under the sun evidently had its drawbacks, but the fact that he was creating new arrangements day in day out, under intense pressure, meant that he developed masterful writing skills. He was at the top of his game with arrangement ideas whirling around his head every minute of the day. It was about this time that Keith penned

the classic theme tune to ‘Grandstand’, one of the BBC’s longest running sports shows – which only took one morning to write!

“I’m driving up Haymarket, just had this idea ‘bopadum bom bumbadumbom’, just that bit, so I stop at the traffic lights, write that down, get into the office ‘bidumbadum’ etc. Why I did that I’ve no idea. I didn’t have time to second-guess myself. That’s what I heard, so that’s what I wrote. Then the piece goes into big band style. If I’d had the chance, if I’d had time, I’d have said: Don’t be silly Keith, you can’t go from pop music to big band music, it doesn’t make sense! I was going from pop triads into a big band chord. The only reason I did that was really because the line-up I had on my score… I had four trumpets, four trombones, saxophone’s doubling woodwind, and two French horns or something. So I’m sitting there, and I’m thinking I’ve got a big band sitting there and I’m only writing pop music, I’d better write for them, so I just literally went into big band mode, which I call Las Vegas-style writing, didn’t think twice about it and went on to the next piece of music. So I wrote and arranged it in the same day, and then went on and I might have gone to another piece of music that night but certainly I started another piece the next morning. These days when I have to do an arrangement of ‘Grandstand’ it takes me about a week! (laughs)” ‘Funky Fanfare is probably one of Keith’s most famous library compositions from this era, and yet another product of his extremely

heavy schedule and ability to write under pressure. The original, entitled ‘Soul Thing’ was recorded in the UK during a session with Decca. Keith was called in to arrange an A-side and write a B-side in one day. The deal was that the profits from the B-side would be split equally with the producer (even though he wasn’t involved in the writing).

“Monday morning I get up (claps) I’ve got to write a B-side! In fact I didn’t panic. The one thing I knew was: whatever idea I come up with, that’s what I’m going to write. I’m not going to start thinking, is this what they want? I put a record on, maybe Junior Walker, just to get me in the mood for the kind of groove I’m going in. Musically, I went all around the place...you see, I didn’t even think about it because it didn’t matter, it was a B-side, nobody was going to say, you can’t do that! So I did it… I got to the studio in the afternoon…I’m thinking, why am I giving the producer half of the song when I didn’t even want to do the session in the first place?

So I went in, I said, look, I’ve got some bad news, I didn’t have time to write a new piece of music, I’ve had to use a piece of music I wrote for KPM. So, that was it… we recorded it. What happens next? It gets turned over, becomes the A-side! So instead of being the B-side, it’s now the A-side, and it’s called ‘Soul Thing’. A week later I go to Brussels, and I now record it again in Brussels, and it’s now called Funky Fanfare.”

‘Funky Fanfare’ was released by KPM library and distributed worldwide. It was

48

“I’m very grateful to Danger Mouse/Gnarls Barkley for sampling my music”

picked up by the National Screen Service and used in cinemas throughout America and Canada in the late 1960s where it was used to underscore presentation cards shown before the film, including the ‘feature presentation’ and the ‘previews of coming attractions’. As a result, the composition became imprinted on the consciousness of a generation. Quentin Tarantino featured these sequences prominently in his films Kill Bill and Grindhouse. Hip-hop producer Danger Mouse sampled ‘Funky Fanfare’ on the track ‘Old School’ which was featured on the Dangerdoom LP (a collaboration with MF Doom).

In fact, Danger Mouse has sampled Keith’s music four times, maybe more. The compositions he used (‘Funky Fanfare’, ‘Junior Jet Set’, ‘Mono Ski’ and ‘Morning Broadway’) are all from the KPM archives.

Unlike some musicians from his generation, Keith doesn’t have a problem with hip-hop or sampling. In some ways you could say it’s not dissimilar to 1960s advertising executives chopping his compositions up to fit adverts or TV programs – all part of the business and all part of ‘being pro’. So maybe this has something to do with his openness and ability to view sampling as a positive thing.

“Chop around however you want! That’s what it’s there for! That’s what it was designed for…I’m several generations away from the hiphop / sampling guys, but I’m delighted when they choose my music because they give a whole new life to it. I always find it interesting to see how they use it, and how they shape the music to serve their own needs.”

It feels really special to be sitting having coffee with a man who has made such a large and significant contribution to music. At 70, Keith is great company – still bubbling with enthusiasm and passion for composing. He is still kept awake at night because, as he puts it, ‘music just won’t leave you alone’. In a beautiful twist, Keith explains that it is in fact Danger Mouse who has made it possible for him to pursue his forthcoming projects.

“I’m very grateful to Danger Mouse/Gnarls Barkley for sampling my music, because the success of these tracks is enabling me to undertake a couple of projects which are very personal to me, and has given me complete creative freedom. The projects are a celebration of my 50 years in music. Some of the recordings will be my own compositions and the others will be my arrangements of songs that have some special meaning to me.”

It’s not hard to see why Keith has stayed in the music business so long – the consummate professional with impeccable manners – a true English gent from London’s swinging’60s.

The following interview was conducted as part of a music heritage youth project.

For more info please visit: www.thebeatexcavation.com Special thanks to Keith Mansfield (for your help with the project over the last 2 years.), The Heritage Lottery Fund, Mark Watts (for your help with the intro and hours transcribing), Sandra Borszcz (for your brilliant photography), Veris (for the KPMs) Rob Gilmour, Katie Lowe, Daniel Niles and to all the young people who attended the interview. Design tom.law@me.com

49

D

own in deepest Deptford, South London, United Vibrations are readying their debut LP. Amalgamating a wealth of influences, the record is set to seal their promise as one of the most exciting bands in the UK today. Our pathways met at their studio at The Midi Music Company where we swapped cakes for conversation.

Comprised of four brothers (three blood, one invited), UV are Ahmed, Kareem, and Yusef Dayes and Wayne Francis. Eldest of the siblings, Ahmed traces the band’s beginnings “It very, very, very first started in 2003. But United Vibrations as people know today begun about three years ago. We were an eight-piece, then within a week it became a four-piece.”

Having whittled it down to a more mobile setup, the foursome discovered they had “more space” and with that came more responsibility.

Over the past three years UV have seen an incremental rise in their number of live shows.

From local to international invites, promoters are fighting to book them; audiences savouring what they see. The week prior to our meeting UV had played the UpRise Anti-Racism Festival, Finsbury Park, then in Bristol on same bill as

Tony Allen (a hero of theirs), and finally back to London, headlining their new single launch at King’s Place. At each show, as is their vigorously expressive way, UV wowed the crowd.

Along their unravelling path, busking has been a constant and it remains on their agenda. “The last two summers it fed me!”

Kareem reveals with relish, “It kept me fed and clothed and in a house. And [it helped] in terms of practicing and getting our stuff down. Also, it’s enabled us to accurately measure music, time, and money, in a real tangible sense. And experience what it means to have a stable relationship between the three of them.”

Busking has certainly helped UV know their worth, inadvertently teaching them some lessons about the industry. “We can ask for certain things at gigs” Kareem continues, “because we know that if we don’t get X amount, we’ll make X amount on road on our owns. We came to realise we could go out in a couple of hours and make 400 quid off the street. And sell a bag load of fucking CDs! So why should we go in to a club, get paid less and not get treated well?”

Blending mastery of their respective instruments with hypnotic chants, UV offer

far more than many comparative acts.

Able to work as an impeccably well-layered ensemble, each player also individually excels.

Yusef’s drumming often prompts the most audience discussion, as he mixes thunderous hits, inventive patterns and contorted facial expressions.

Existing between the notes and beyond the music, UV carry a message. With music as the central vehicle for bridging and reaching communities, their ethos echoes great collectives who’ve gone before them, notably American acts from the 1970s, including those connected to Black Jazz, Tribe, or Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra.

As with Tapscott, who referred to his music as “contributive, rather than competitive”, UV carry their own maxims.

Lyricized in their track ‘Motto’, beliefs in “galaxies not ghettos, equilibrium not domination, deeds not empty words” are integral to their existence.

Complimenting their conscious outlook, the band’s studio and creative refuge is The Midi Music Company. Offering music as a means of creative expression and career direction for 5 to 30 year olds, the charity is operated

12Tone “Live your own legend, write your own myth.” So say United Vibrations, a collective of brothers who are both biologically and spiritually connected.

words: Ben Verghese photos: Evgeniy Kazannik 48

by Wozzy Brewster, an endearing figure succeeding in trying times.

Sat swivelling on office chairs, the blood brothers frequently fidgeted like kids, energetic and in need of a task to focus on. The studio doubles as Ahmed’s workplace, as he teaches and works as Midi Music’s in-house sound engineer. UV set up camp here in December 2009, although Ahmad started coming here in 2001, as he shares, “I started off as a student, and worked my way right through the ranks volunteering for them. I never went to university, so this was my place to come and apply myself. It made sense for us to move in.

As 12tone, we needed a space, a base, to do our recording, so this seemed ideal.”

Developed by Austrian composer, Arnold Schoenberg the twelve-tone technique is a compositional style which has influenced UV and a method they use in numerous compositions of theirs, most notably ‘Circles’.

But United Vibrations’ vision of 12tone goes deeper, acting as the name of their record label and much much more. 12tone is UV’s organisational foundation, with profits raised going towards the building of a self-sufficient housing project, where Kareem volunteers full-time. This progressive venture, seeking to

offer an alternative to conventional living, is inspired by the Dayes’ family home, a self-build in Lewisham where the boys grew up.

Work on their album began soon after they became a four-piece. Certain tracks from those early days continue to stimulate audiences and are due to feature on the final track list. ‘Maya’ and their debut single ‘Ra!’ are two favourites.

The latter was their debut single, released in late 2009, and described by Theo Parrish as a song that “knocked his head off”.

Between the four of them, UV fuse many influences, including an appreciation for British contemporary figures Robert Mitchell, Floating Points, and Richard Spaven. One being who’s left his mark on the band, shaping their mentality and message, is Sun Ra. Yusef admits he wasn’t initially won over by the sequin-robed genius, as he tells of his eureka moment, “I was 14 and watched a YouTube clip and was like, this is taking the piss! He’s playing these notes and going round in circles. I was thinking, is this sick? Is this sick? I’m trying to hear it! Then I saw another clip and it was a really good composition, and thought yeah, this is bad! Then I listened to Lanquidity and thought, rah! This is some deep shit. It started to make sense.”

49

Kareem adds that his appreciation for Sun Ra goes further, “It’s the whole thing. The big attraction is he’s literally from another planet.

You can hear it! Instead of listening to Britney Spears you can go to Saturn.”

“For me” Wayne interjects, “it’s Space is the Place, the film. First watch, got bits of it.

Second watch, got bits of it. Every time I watch it I get something else out of it. It unravels different things. If you listen to one of his songs, you’ll get something from it. But in that film, all of it was in there. Each quote was like its own universe! Every time I watched the film it connected up.”

“Like in the second half of our song ‘Ra!’” Kareem cuts back in, “Live your own legend, write your own myth. What I’ve taken from him is be what you are to its fullest. From a compositional level, the way he uses textures and sounds, it’s literally creating and painting a star system within a composition.”

While United Vibrations have a long way to go to reach the Arkestra’s heights, like Sun Ra these vibrations are different. And armed with instruments, opinions, and energy we’re all fortunate they’re united. www.12tone.co.ukwww. themidimusiccompany.co.uk

words: BenJAMIn seMTek

THE LOST SPIRIT OF

TECHNO

seI A Glasweigian Andy Seinan makes the kind of futuristic bassline techno that fills dancefloors. His ‘peaktime’ pieces like ‘Chinese Whispers’ (International Deejay Gigolo) share chart space with some of the true legends of techno music. Like many of the new generation, though, he’s looked outside the confines of his own chosen genre for inspiration, and recruited the sounds of garage, hip-hop and ambient music to his productions. The results are startlingly original, both when he puts his hand to the trademark four-to-the-floor killers that have made his name, and also on his more experimental downbeat efforts.

‘Techno’ - what does the word mean to you?

The words “Innovative” and “Technology” spring to mind, and the ability to cross into different elements of sound/ideas/genres. Techno Music is the core of Dance Music.

What would be the ideal context for someone to hear your music in, fictional or otherwise?

I like the fictional idea. To create something with a whole mystery type aura

wBeezA Peckham’s Wbeeza is a relative newcomer. At 25 years of age, and with only 6 ePs under his belt, you might not expect to find the kind of focus that he has achieved in his sound. His 12” releases for the label Third ear have had the words “This Is The House Sound Of London” emblazoned across the back, and though a sweeping statement, never a truer word has been spoken. There’s something intuitive and to the point about his music, which plays like a series of life episodes. Snatches of conversation, keys, percussive elements that are sometimes Latin, sometimes Caribbean, sometimes Transatlantic, go towards making rich and hypnotic grooves that, in another life, might have found a home on early Mo’ Wax or Ninja Tune releases.

‘Techno’ - what does the word mean to you?

Guy McCreery from Third Ear describes Techno as House music made with electronic sounds, rather than samples. Those electronic sounds can be samples but they will be processed beyond recognition and for a specific

In 2010, TeCHno HAs underGone A reInvenTIon oF sorTs. A HosT oF TAlenTed And well-esTABlIsHed ukBAsed produCers HAve Been sHunnInG predICTABle ForMulAs To explore soMe oF THe MusIC’s losT spIrIT.

around it is something special. An endless dark hallway with Lazers and LED light shapes, continually mapping their path and telling a story.

What has been the greatest challenge you have encountered in getting to where you are today?

I suppose that I’m constantly learning about how the business works and what has to done to be able to keep yourself at a level. I guess releasing music on a continual basis but making sure the sound isn’t being saturated is important. With so many artists and I suppose the ease of being able to produce Techno or Dance Music, this then pushes for you to continue new ideas which are original and mainly not trying to follow what the trend at the time is.

What makes your music yours? What distinguishes it from what anyone else does?

I suppose adding the vocal element to my tracks makes it a lot different to other tracks. I’ve been told before that I have my own sound but I still don’t know what it is. I suppose this is a good thing as I’m not trying to stick to the one sound, but if the listener can identify it’s a track of mine, I guess that’s a positive reaction.

purpose in a track. That’s a pretty good description. What we now know as Detroit Techno was tagged Techno when the first of those records were appearing... not by the cats who were making the music, mind you.

What would be the ideal context for someone to hear your music in, fictional or otherwise?

A small dark club with the best possible sound system for the space.

What has been the greatest challenge you have encountered in getting to where you are today?

Myself.

What makes your music yours? What distinguishes it from what anyone else does?

It comes out of me. I don’t try and make music that sounds like somebody else’s music. I make music that I feel inside me. Obviously I am inspired by the music of others but I don’t try and copy others or their sounds. I’m focused on the sounds forming inside me.

50

perC Reading-based Ali Wells has been releasing music since 2002, refining his sound over the course of a number of years. His productions are experimental and daring, darkly cinematic, often founded on sparse broken rhythms. Arguably his biggest track to date, ‘Up’, which appeared on the legendary Kompakt imprint, was based on a single modulated continuous tone, and despite becoming a seminal anthem of 2007 it remains one of the most experimental tracks the label has released. Perc Trax, his own label, is nearing it’s 50th release, and continues to push the boundaries of Techno.

‘Techno’ - what does the word mean to you?

For me it is the quest to find a balance between sonic exploration and dancefloor satisfaction. Covering everything from the rawest rhythms to the most lush melodic sequences, it is the range and open-mindedness of techno that I love so much.

What would be the ideal context for someone to hear your music in, fictional or otherwise?

A pitch-black room, sweat dripping from a low ceiling, speaker stacks from floor to ceiling, thick smoke and a strobe. That is all you need.

olIver Ho Oliver Ho resides in West London where for 10 years he’s been crafting sound in all its many incarnations. His music has appeared on some of the best established labels in techno and tech house, like Poker Flat and Cocoon. It’s his recent excursions on his newly established label Wires though that have really seen him venture into lesser-explored sonic territories. ‘Total Pure’, the label’s first release last year, explored some of Ho’s interest in electro-acoustic sound, a seam that he has also been mining through his industrial guitar based project Zov Zov, and was one of 2010’s stand out releases.

‘Techno’ - what does the word mean to you?

Techno embodies a certain type of feeling. I know to some people it means futuristic music but to me it’s nothing to do with the future. It’s more like an ancient thing, it’s a type of feeling, a feeling of being reduced to a kind of single-celled state of mind, like the Big Bang in reverse. It’s the abstract fabric of perception, a psychoactive experience. The feeling of ‘the eternal’ is very techno. Words aren’t really enough to describe it, you have to experience it.

What would be the ideal context for someone to hear your music in, fictional or otherwise?

It depends on what type of music. I make music that makes sense in a lot

51

What has been the greatest challenge you have encountered in getting to where you are today?

Finding the strength to keep to my own path is always challenging. For example after ‘Up’ was released by Kompakt I had a lot of well-paid offers to reproduce the track. It would have been easy to make 5 or 10 slight revisions of ‘Up’ but once I do something I have to move on to something else. Repeating myself for money would be soul destroying and people would soon call me out on it.

What makes your music yours? What distinguishes it from what anyone else does?

For me there is a certain combination of factors that I hope distinguishes my music from that of others. The sounds I use, the rhythms, the arrangements, the mixdown. I like aggression and power in my music but I always shy away from relentless banging and jack-hammer rhythms.

Like everything in life a balance must be achieved. I’d rather stick to my vision of techno and my overall aesthetic, even if that means occasionally confusing people. For me this is of far greater value than producing something that will work on the majority of floors but is instantly forgettable. A fight against the disposability of music, that’s a phrase that works for me.

of different environments, some of it is for dancing, some for still listening and a lot in between. I think dancing is a powerful and elemental way to experience music. You get lost in the moment. On the other side, drone and noise/experimental music is about losing the sense of having a body, and more of an out-of-body experience. So, in answer to your question, it would be a club with a great dancefloor, and then an ambient room with mass floatation tanks and holographic projections inside them.

What has been the greatest challenge you have encountered in getting to where you are today?

I guess balancing business and creativity, most producers have to be good at business, a lot of us run record labels and deal with a lot of tax issues and various ways to reduce paying too much tax! So it’s keeping your head clear on that level, and then it’s allowing yourself to get lost in the music, and be free enough to get inspired. To put yourself in two worlds at the same time.

What makes your music yours? What distinguishes it from what anyone else does?

What makes music mine is hard to say. We all have a unique vision if we allow ourselves to be free individuals. so it’s a reflection of my personality.

I think maybe its about chasing a type of feeling, trying to find something elusive. David Lynch describes the act of creativity as ‘catching the big fish’ – having the patience to wait for the big idea to come from the depths of your subconscious.

THE

words: Kelvin Brown + Natalie Sappleton

NORTHERN QUARTER

Indie kids might continue to grasp tenaciously onto the long-dead Madchester scene but these days, Britain’s second city (or third, if you’re talking to someone from Brum) is home and host to an eclectic music dynamic. Here, in no particular order, we highlight some of the Manchester’s most notable established, celebrated and up-and-coming stars.

M R S C RU F F

M A R C US I N T LEX / DU B P H YZ I X

Self-described Badly Dressed Boy, doodler, tea-drinker and general jack-of-all-trades, Mr Scruff is one of the city’s most enduring lights (it’s no coincidence his empire is run from the city’s Sparkle Street).

With his own brand of tea nestled on the shelves of Selfridges, bustling tea-and-cake shop in the city’s North Quarter, tea-tent at the Big Chill festival (can you sense a theme here?), it’s a wonder he has any time to sit down and create those bass-heavy wobblers for which he’s renowned. 2010 has seen Scruff touring over the UK and beyond to celebrate twenty years of his label, Ninja Tune, and he’s also set on expanding our musical tastes by posting every (!) 6-hour (!!) live mix from his extensive touring calendar on soundcloud (a major feat if anyone knows how long it takes to upload even a 3-minute song to the site). With a new album promised for 2011, lately he’s been road testing new material at his monthly residency in the Northern Quarter’s revitalised Band on the Wall.

Always ahead of the curve, Mr Scruff is fixed firmly at the frontline of Manchester’s continuing musical metamorphosis.

Long-time ambassador of the more soulful end of drum & bass, and previous resident at seminal Manchester jungle night Guidance, Marcus has maintained his position as one of the most in-demand DJs in the world, while countless microtrends in drum & bass (all with equally stupid names) have come and gone.

Undoubtedly this is because he has taken his own route within a form of music so commonly subject to the taste of fresh-faced student clubbers, and has proven himself to be an infinitely better producer and DJ for it. When not touring the globe, Marcus produces some of the most forward thinking and soulful music in the scene via his Soul:R label. Most interestingly of late, with their Revolve:r imprint Marcus and ST Files have inspired a new generation of Mancunian drum & bass producers to think past recycling the amen break and hoover basslines – most notably Dub Phyzix, whose commitment to original production ideas and high quality studio equipment sets him apart from much of the software-driven music taking up internet bandwidth at the moment.

Check out ST Files ‘Tek No Dub’ (Revolve:r) & M.I.S.T. ‘Clockwork’ (SOUL:R)

M A T T H EW H A LS A LL

DEN I S J ONES

If there’s one form of music that’s somewhat lacking in Manchester’s rich musical heritage, it’s jazz. Along with the likes of big band outfit Riot Jazz, this is something Matt Halsall is on course to correct. Playing trumpet since the age of 6, Mr. Halsall took a detour into the electronics of Warp, Carl Craig and Theo Parrish before returning to jazz via Pharaoh Sanders and Alice Coltrane. Matt’s take on spiritual jazz has garnered acclaim from the traditional jazz scene and more forward-thinking music press alike over the course of his two albums ‘Sending My Love’ and ‘The Colour Yes’. His consistently handson approach finds him writing, producing, arranging and releasing on his own label as well as supporting other unacknowledged talents of the Manchester jazz scene. Matt has amassed an unrivalled set of players for his live band, and his show are one of the only times you’re likely to see a harp on stage in the city. For more recent projects, Halsall has branched out to include his electronic and hip-hop influences, with live performances that sound more like golden-era ATCQ than Miles Davis.

Jones’ mesmerising drawl is a treat to hear, but watching him bring his uniquely experimental electrified folk to life with nothing more than a guitar and a loop pedal really brings home the man’s genius. On his recent release ‘Red + Yellow = (Humble Soul)’, his talents blur and mesh with those of his consorts – trumpeter Matthew Halsall, Cinematic Orchestra’s drumming impresario Luke Flowers and quirky leftfielder Paddy Steer (Homelife), to name just three. Although the LP lacks the rawness and intrigue of the one-man show, the instrumental wizardy is unmistakeably present.

Highlights are the loop-laden ‘Clap Hands’ – a dark, spellbinding twist on Shirley Ellis’ playground favourite ‘The Clapping Song’, divine instrumental ‘Conception, Consumption and Radiation’ and the uplifting ‘Blengin’. Good as the album is, Denis’s live show is by far his greatest strength – the sense of barely controlled chaos in watching him creating full arrangements out of thin air never fails to be mesmerising. There are a lot of people taking the ‘foot-pedal sampler and a couple of instruments’ approach to performance at the moment, but Denis is one of the best you’re likely to find.

Matthew Halsall’s ‘The Colour Yes’ available on Gondwana Records

Red + Yellow = is out now on Humble Soul. Hear the album at denisjones.com

52

picking up a 12” of Neighbourhood on Locked On records back in 1999 – that track with its ‘I Feel Good’ hook would make it to Number 25 in the charts a year later. But despite making ‘garage’ records, Dave was never part of the champagne-sipping, Moschino-wearing crowd who’d frequent Sun City and was much more likely to be found at a Sunday night club in London’s West End called Forward>>, sharing DJ duties with names like El-B and Jay Da Flex where they’d lay down the template for a sound called dubstep. But Dave, originally a rare groove DJ, can also come with more musical flavours, and that’s what Maddslinky’s always been about. Proof of the pie lies in his 2002 opus ‘Make A Change’ for the Sirkus label, and of course his latest album which is getting played by everyone and their uncle. It’s about time too.

T RUS ’ M E Idris Elba, Michelle Ryan, er Bush…

Ok so the inventory of Brits that have cracked America while hiding their lights under British bushels is by no means huge, but, as far as electronic music is concerned, Trus’me should be at the top of that list. David Wolstencroft established his flair as a producer on the back of his 2007 debut long player ‘Working Nights’. The big-ups he picked up from the likes of Gilles Peterson, Carl Craig and Jazzanova allowed him to replace the soul and disco samples with vocals and instrumentation from a cast of heavyweights and stalwarts (Dam Funk, Amp Fiddler) for last year’s follow-up ‘In the Red’. Little wonder he’s managed to command the attention of promoters across the pond, and beyond (Wolstencroft even managed to put together his own low-key festival in Croatia in 2009). These days he rarely plays out in his hometown. Instead, he spends his time putting out other people’s masterpieces on own imprint Prime Numbers. Responsible for dancefloor classics like the massively underrated Mr Scruff/Kaidi Tatham cut ‘Fresh Noodles’ and Linkwood’s long-player ‘System’, the label is starting to carve out a signature sound: fresh, inspiring and downright groovy.

‘Make Your Peace’ and ‘Make A Change’ are both out on TruThoughts.

Single ‘Further Away’ featuring Falty DL, Illum Sphere and El-B remixes is out in January.

SW I N G T I N G The proliferation of ‘hip hop followed by dubstep’ or ‘dubstep and drum & bass’ on flyers across the city is decidedly at odds with Manchester’s famously eclectic approach to clubbing. While this undoubtedly appeals to the hoards who want nothing more from a night out than saw-tooth basslines and white noise layered snares, it has left many others reminiscing of days when music of varied eras and tempos was just as likely to get aired, and the sense of not knowing what was going to come next was part of the thrill of being on a dancefloor. This is where Swing Ting comes in, carrying on the city’s tradition of playing any type of music as long it’s soulful and has a groove, but bringing this template right up to date. Classic street soul, hip hop and one drop revivals rub shoulders with the latest grime, 2 step and dancehall tracks; tempos change regularly, vibes shift but the groove maintains in the capable hands of talented residents Samrai and Platt. Still a fairly new night, Swing Ting is quickly establishing itself with a regular crowd that covers the spectrum of Manchester’s diverse population, definitely a reminder of what made nightlife here so special in the first place.

Fudge Fingas album ‘Now about How’ is released on Prime Numbers soon.

G R A H A M M A SSEY From the stadium rave music of 808 State to the avant-garde big band jazz of Toolshed, Graham has been a consistent figure on the leftfield of the Manchester music scene for the last 30 years. Notable for his unwillingness to fit neatly into any musical pigeonhole Massey operates under a dizzying array of aliases that manage to take in almost every conceivable style of music. Trawling through his impressively vast back catalogue it turns out that his music has played a part in pretty much every milestone in Manchester’s musical history: from his post-punk jazz experiments with Biting Tongues for New Hormones/ Factory Records, to the Hacienda classic of 808 State’s ‘Cubic’ thorough to the Massonix project for infamous Manc electronica label Skam. Although most recognisable across the world for his writing and production work with Bjork, it’s his less chart-friendly releases that yield the most from repeated listening. In particular pretty much anything that includes his regular collaborators Paddy Steer (multi instrumentalist extraordinaire) and Seaming (whose astounding voice and own Mayming project are both criminally overlooked), and his latest Sisters Of Transistors project which reveals a sense of humour so sadly lacking in many of his pofaced musical contemporaries.

H OY A : H OY A To call Hoya:Hoya infuential and forward thinking would be understating the cause. With the announcement of their permanent residents for 2010 and beyond, Hoya:Hoya cemented themselves as the most important night in the UK. Manchester don Jonny K joins Krystal Klear, Eclair Fifi and Lone as the now-permanent names on the rotating roster, alongside founders and promoters Ryan Hunn aka Illum Sphere and Johnny Dub. Housing itself at the Roadhouse, the night has also become the international haunt for Kutmah, Gaslamp Killer and Cotam amongst others. As Lone puts it, “it’s not your average stuff. The people that come to Hoya do so to listen to the music.” Hoya have recently extended their reach with the launch of their first 12” featuring the three producing residents - Lone, Illum Sphere and Krystal Klear - offering up fresh productions for the project. The label’s set to release music only from those who’ve played the night, and HOYA002 has just been confirmed to be delivering new workings from previous guests Eliphino, Lorn and Ras G. The evolution of Hoya into a hub for music as opposed to a night is something that Ryan and Johnny are both aiming to develop further. As the label grows there’s also some hushed plans for a reissue of influential music that the masses missed the first time, paired with breaking new tracks and artists and developing their own sound. With no signs of slowing down, Hoya’s proof of an independent entity evolving at their own pace.

Booking who they believe in, keeping at the club that brought them together, releasing music from their residents and doing it all in their hometown. The sales game may have changed, but the ethos never should. (Keith Pettinger)

Sneaky ‘Mental Origami’ (Graham Massey Remix) available on Hot Sauce

M A DDSL I NKY A man of many names and endless, deadly tiger styles, Dave Jones goes by pseudonyms Zed Bias, Maddslinky and Phuturistix (alongside Injecta) and has been pushing the envelope of underground electronic dance music for over a decade. Operating these days out of his Biasonics Laboratory in an underground bunker somewhere in Manchester with lab technicians including the beautiful Fyza, he’s recently dropped the album ‘Make A Change’ for label TruThoughts that sees him collaborate with some of the UK’s best-loved singers and producers including Skream, Omar, Mr Scruff and the one called Tawiah. I can still remember

53

HOPELESSLY

IN LOVE Carroll Thompson is one of the undisputed Queens of lovers rock, the soupy slick south london-flavoured reggae that burst out of the mid-to-late 1970s. Her debut album Hopelessly in love was released by the Harlesden-based Carib Gem records in 1981. she is still performing, she says, ‘because love drags you through.’

words: CHArlIe Bell

C

arroll Thompson sits on the bonnet of a Ford Escort, in a fur coat, her eyes glancing left, a slight smile on her lips. She is twenty and posing for the cover of her debut album. The street behind her, flanked on one side by a row of red brick terraced houses, is empty. There’s something about the image – the emptiness, or the model of the car, the grain of the photo or the slant of the font on the album cover that, thirty years on, gives the impression of another time, long gone.

I bought the record out of curiosity, by chance, whilst sifting through a forlorn rack of ‘80s reggae in a dying record shop, amongst 30-something men on a Thursday afternoon.

I knew that Carroll Thompson was one of the pioneers of Lovers Rock. Through years of hearing it on pirate stations I developed a habit for its delicious confection of syrupy, heartfelt lyrics, lilting licks and its cheeky use of electronics and synthesisers.

Once home, £3 lighter, it soon became

the mainstay of my turntable. Like a kid at Christmas I would play it to everyone. It made me smile. The more I listened to the album the more I fell in love with it. Love lost and found is about as well-worn an album subject as can be, but there’s something about this album, the honesty of the lyrics, the tightness of the melodies, that’s infectious. I wondered whether her story might tell me something about what happened to the people that rocked all that love.

Fast-forward a few weeks and I am entering the Nettleford Hall, a low-slung auditorium tacked to a library in West Norwood. It’s a charity fundraising event for a school in Gambia. A man behind us is singing to himself as he locks his car and my companion remarks on the sweetness of his voice. With short, soft black dreds and an undulating leather cap, he turns out to be actor and Lovers Rock star Victor Romero Evans. An hour or so later, he would be gently taking the forty-something women in the crowd back to raving early ’80s style, while sheepishly confessing that these days his legs shook when he tried to whine.

54

Carroll follows Victor’s 1980 dancefloor smash ‘At the Club’. She comes on and the crowd starts to ooze as she spins her charms. Three songs later, and all too soon, she has gone. I meet her just as she comes off stage. For a woman who has sung with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, you would forgive a hint of diva, but there is none. I ask Carroll about the birth of Lovers Rock and what she was doing in her life when she wrote the album. Imagining a struggle against recession, racism and all that, I am soon put right: “We didn’t realise we were making something new. It wasn’t at all contrived. It was an amazingly optimistic period. Looking back it was the time of the SUS laws, and all sorts of strife, but the music was hugely, unashamedly positive. The music was about saying we’re here. The immigrants have come and now they are having children. And this is our music. The music of our parents, but also the music of our youth with strong Pop sensibility and Soul too. It was a hybrid of the Bay City Rollers, the Osmonds, Philadelphia stuff, Motown, Elton

John, but also ska, reggae and Blue Beat.

We were here and incredibly hopeful and optimistic about what we could be. We came with a serious work culture of our parents – if we studied hard and worked hard we could achieve anything. We liked each other too, the community was small, incredibly supportive and we were all, as young women artists, incredibly comfortable. We were pleased to be here but still had that joy of the Caribbean.”

What shines through on Hopelessly In Love is also the timelessness of the messages.

“Personally, the time was all about self discovery. My first love. My first heartbreak. It was kind of my coming out period. Growing up, finding out about life and love and dependence.

It was quite an explosive time.” The album is also about witnessing her girlfriend’s lives and the men in them, the callous players ripe for their comeuppance in her song ‘Mr Cool’, or the feckless fathers in ‘No You Don’t know’.

But it is optimism that drives the album. If Side A is the pain of losing love, Side B is its resurrection. “There are a lot of melancholy songs about the other side of love”, she says,

“Where you get the bumps and bruises, but also it’s about how love will drag you through to the other side, how the sun comes out again, that nothing stays stagnant.”

I confess at this point, unashamedly, that I have almost fully transposed her album onto my own emotional life. And so when she had sung the mournful apology for breaking someone’s heart, ‘I’m Sorry’, it had really meant something to me.

At Nettleford Hall, she hadn’t sung the title track that closes the album – ‘Hopelessly in Love’ – but as she stung the audience with Lovers Rock, they sang it right back to her.

as well received. As the ’80s wore on, the scene lost its lustre. Despite her very successful career as a session singer, does she think that it was misplaced given that Lovers Rock never fulfilled its promise?

Carroll talks about the extraordinary talent that made up the pioneers in Lovers Rock. Just take a look at the credits on Hopelessly In Love and you’ll see names like Cleveland Watkiss, who went on to co-found the Jazz Warriors and later became resident MC at the Metalheadz, guitarist and Jazz Warrior Alan Weekes, as well as drummer Jah Bunny of Matumbi and the Cimarons fame.

“Not at all, I don’t think we were wrong. We were right to have that optimism. We were young.

Maybe we were a bit naïve but twenty five years later I’m still performing, I’m still selling records and I’m finally working on a new album for next year. There was all that militant stuff running concurrently to us in reggae, competing with us, which kind of overshadowed us. Our music was seen as too lightweight, people overlooked how good it was, maybe because it was full of love and tolerance and optimism. But it’s a good little music. Maybe it was too honest. We were never fully exploited as a genre, never marketed in the way Roots music or Bob Marley were marketed.

But there is a stirring of interest now, the people who know the music love it and new people are discovering it all the time”.

So what about that optimism? Had the music lived up to it? Had the last thirty years proved her right? Carroll’s follow-up albums were not

Unashamedly optimistic, maybe naive in the face of a whole lot of hate, but maybe it’s worth hoping on Lovers Rock after all.

55

This peerless house music collective from edinburgh let the music do the talking.

“

w ord s: keITH peTTInGer

I’ve been through a lot of things in my life that have come and gone.

House is the only thing that’s remained there for any length of time.

It’s made me a living, let me see the world and I have to respect that.

House will always be there.”

Listening to Lindsay Todd, better known as House Of Traps, talk about house music is to watch the genre take on an identifiable, almost godly form of its own. The label manager for Firecracker Records who, along with Linkwood and Fudge Fingas, makes up the UK’s top house music collective - respected worldwide for their work both together and as individual artists and DJs in their own rights - has always taken an unconventional and very hands-on approach to running a label. Their lack of self-promotion and reluctance to be interviewed is a direct consequence of their ethos to let the music speak for itself.

“None of us have ever had a plan or a career path for this. It’s basically just similar minds and attitudes that come together to do a project and release a record once a year,” explains Fudge Fingas. A multi-instrumentalist, Fingas (aka Gavin Sutherland), originally met Lindsay in Edinburgh through singer Joseph Malik. It wasn’t until a few years later, when Linkwood (Nick Moore) moved his equipment in to Lindsay’s spare room that the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Pushed to define the shared traits that brought the Firecracker collective together, Gav doesn’t even touch on musical influences. For him, it’s “grumpiness, stubbornness, a shared sense of humour and a hatred of dull shit.” Officially launching in 2004 with the Firecracker 1 EP, the label has averaged just one release a year. In their wake, though, they have developed a worldwide reputation for quality, and in the process have dispensed with all conventional wisdoms when it comes to releasing records. In the way that

the Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson (originator, elevator, innovator) have been seen to embody techno, Firecracker represents the benchmark for the modern house scene. The scary part is that it’s all happened seemingly effortlessly.

“To become generic is not what the label’s about”, says Lindsay. “It’s always been quite an organic experience. I never knew how to run a record label and just picked it up on the fly as we went along. It’s the same with the sleeve designs; it’s the same with the music. If something fits then it fits.”

If you’re not already familiar with their releases, it’s probably because they fly out of record stores like hot cakes on a cold day. Linsay’s quick to acknowledge part of this to Nick’s brother Tim, whom his collaboration with early on was a massive influence in crafting the label’s identity. Their attention to detail goes into every part of the package – the 10” format, the heavyweight vinyl, the non-digital artwork inspired by ‘80s Marvel comics… “Everyone our age grew up with comics. To package these records honestly and from the soul, it’s not about nicking artwork or whatever, it’s a nostalgia trip,” stresses Lindsay.

“It’s the way the comics smelt, or the way the ink was printed and when you enlarged it the way the dot matrix colours were. For me to immerse myself in the whole screen-printing process … it’s just another way to get closer to the production and to be a control freak. There’s a lot of love that goes into it.

That’s why we take our time to put things out. Hopefully in ten to twenty years from now it’ll be stuff that people will cherish, as opposed to kicking around in sale bins.”

Much of what the Firecracker collective does hinges around Linkwood’s studio, still based in Edinburgh. A perfectionist and self-confessed synthesiser addict, it’s the end result of a lifetime invested in building up a huge collection of 56

quality gear, and the effort to get to know each machine inside out.

“I’ve been buying bits since I was a teenager, and had to sell quite a few bits too when I’ve been short of money,” says Linkwood. “I miss them, but my set-up now is relatively minimal, and somehow better than it’s ever been” Another source assures me, however, that ‘minimal’ is a hideous understatement.

“I’m always buying more but it comes and goes. Half the gear I end up using is probably considered rubbish, but it works for me. There is always the MPC and SP, though. You can’t skimp on replacing them.”

As attention grew around the crew on the back of the Firecracker releases, it was only a matter of time before they started being sourced for projects in the downtime between records. Looking back it seems logical that the Prime Numbers label, owned by Trus’me, would be the perfect second launch pad for the two studio heads in the crew. 2009’s Systems LP from did exactly that. Hailed as one of the most accomplished house albums in recent memory, it instantly made Linkwood one of the most name-dropped producers in music. There’s been enough written about the deep analogue-tech sounds that formed the album, laced with the unique style, suggesting that it will stand the test of time.

In addition to the System LP, Prime Numbers recently released the ‘About Time’ EP from Fudge Fingas to wide acclaim. “Trus’me just came to us with an idea to do a release. Obviously we’ll work with anyone. We’re not out to conquer the world. If someone wants to work with and they’re good people in the same frame of mind then of course we’ll want to work with them”.

With Firecracker’s unconventional approach to the record business, the trio can be considered the owners of the perfect business model for labels starting out – selling-out their limited presses worldwide whilst waylaying tour offers,

remix opportunities and bespoke releases on other labels. They still maintain, however, that there’s no easy way into the game. Unknown artists on an unfamiliar format from an unknown Scottish label, Linkwood, Fudge Fingas and House of Traps came good simply through the quality of the tunes. And whilst the label’s never been short of supporters, having had the chin-stroke massive on side from the beginning, they’ve avoided playing the press and promotion game, mainly because of some bad experiences with music journalists.

It’s a stance that every self-respecting artist should be able to take, but unfortunately in the modern age, where artists spend hours bigging themselves up online to sell records, the music speaking for itself is a rare phenomenon. It’s important to remember that when it comes to the Firecracker family, music is something that’s taken seriously and treated with the respect it deserves. From an outsiders view, the artists have grown and branched out to other labels, while the label itself has evolved at its own pace. Ukranian artist Vakula has been the first artist outside this crew to be released on the label, with the Firecracker 5 EP earlier this year. The launch of Linkwood’s own Electronic Sounds label in the coming months is another vehicle that will see him turning more of his own countless ideas and sketches into finished products. By the time this goes to print there’ll also be a sub-label sprouting with very little fanfare, under the name of Unthank, its first release welcoming into the family a mysterious producer by the name of Bakey Ustl.

As always, I’ve been promised, it’ll be delivered with the same love, care and individuality – another screen-printed project limited to those quick enough to grab one. It may seem that they’re keeping busy, but from their inside perspective it’s just another day doing what they do – paraphrasing Fudge Fingas – “working for the music.”

57

words: CHArlIe drAkeFord / pHoToGrApHy: sopHIA sprInG

A

lot of great thing seem to happen in music when people act on their confusion, and Ramp is one of them. A label built out of simply liking a variety of sounds and wanting to house them somewhere – that seems to me like a good enough career to me. Ramp is a label steeped in personal influence. Tom Kerridge, the label’s founder, is what makes the label such a constantly evolving force – the man has some serious listening skills.

He runs everything from his home in Stone Market, Suffolk, something he thinks would be a total nightmare without the Internet: “I think it probably makes me a bit more proactive, being based there as well, because I don’t have all those fun distractions you find in London.

If I was based in London I’d be attending all these fun distractions every night you know.” It’s frankly a welcoming point of view, assuring us that it’s not impossible to succeed in music outside of major cities. “I don’t think I’m unique doing what I do,” adds Tom. His personal relationship with music is what has turned Ramp into the label it is today. A childhood obsession with 7” sleeves is apparent in the label’s incredibly detailed and meticulously planned sleeve artwork.

“I just try and amuse myself really, everything I do is to try and amuse myself. I’ve kind of got a background in art; I started studying it at university but didn’t really finish because of DJing and just getting way too into other things. I’ve always kind of had that love for funny looking things, though.”

Tom’s life-long infatuation with hip-hop has highlighted his desire to release, where possible, full albums from artists, while his natural ability to get bored with stuff quickly and watch more than one genre at once has made sure the output never gets too caught up in just one sound. Going through into 2011 you can expect on Ramp albums from some of the label’s key artists in the form of both Computer Jay and Airhead LPs. His varied taste palette has recently led to setting up offshoot labels PTN and Brainmath. The former is dedicated to releasing the more trackier offshoots from UK Funky – and offering them a home.

His love for house music was spurred by the release of Daft Punk’s seminal ‘Homework’. “Their track ‘Teachers’ – it was just like all my favourite people. That led me onto a lot of good house music. I got into Matthew Herbert, Pepe Bradock, and Kenny Dixon Jr. I started finding out about a lot of Detroit techno and Chicago house. The 12” culture associated with that just forced me to learn how to beat match. It’s also what’s made me set up the sub-labels. I wanted to give them identities, which is why I’d just use one artist for PTN. I love those kinds of labels.”

Looking back over what they’ve released this year alone, it’s shocking to see what stuff might not have been around if it wasn’t for Tom Kerridge. Truly one of the most diverse labels out there – wholly dedicated to just putting out as much good music as possible.

58

words: MICHAel krAsser / pHoToGrApHy: evGenIy kAzAnnIk

w

e have stepped into First Word headquarters. evgeniy clicks away with his camera and I set up the recorder. A Miles Davis portrait hangs omnipotently to the left of the room amid shiny Apple Mac’s and crates of dusty records. Run out of label boss Andy Gillani’s London home, First Word is every bit the modern independent record label, down to it’s small but dedicated team and house cat Lola.

Andy retells the labels history: set up in the early 2000’s, with co-founder Andy H, the two conspired to form FW with the intent of being an outlet for the bourgeoning Leeds scene. Calling on connections made through promoting several Leeds staples like Funky Mule and New Bohemia, Andy signed up residents Kidkanevil, Homecut, Haggis Horns and Mike L. The learning curve was nevertheless steep: ‘Basically we pressed things up we shouldn’t have. We had a brief flirtation with broken beat that burnt us pretty badly. I mean the music was good but it just wasn’t selling. On the other hand the first Kidkanevil and Haggis Horns records did really well for us.’

Our chat leads us on to the current state of label-artist relations: ‘It’s not like the good old days where an artist would finish a project and go “here it is” I’m going to sit here and wait for you to do something. You’ve got to gig. Hustle your music. The guys from ASM do it, they’ll have a competition each night to see who sells the most CD’s. You’re going to get out as much as you put in. If my artists don’t have gigs it looks bad for the label’

The times evidently change and so do the outlets: ‘We also used to do really well in Japan until HMV closed its doors. That was a massive outlet especially for the Funk stuff. You’ve got to learn lessons really quickly. Now we use Bandcamp which is just brilliant! And sell directly to the consumer’ ‘The best advice I would give to someone starting up is not have any preconceived ideas. The business changes so rapidly. Also have stuff coming out. We used to release sporadically so what worked last time wouldn’t work with the next, any momentum we built was suddenly lost.’

‘There’s also this pressure to do vinyl. It can work in some cases but if you want a sure-fire way to not get past your first release do it because vinyl is a hard sell. The moneys better spent on a big name remixer because you know it’ll get out there. Saying that, anyone who says this is the way you should be doing things is a liar. There’s no way of doing things in this business’ One thing Andy does count on is the sage advice of his distributors: ‘Kudos give us so much advice. If they tell me they can’t see us doing it on vinyl I listen whereas in the past I’d be like I’m going to do it anyway. 1500 quid later I have to go them and pick up all our unsold stock’ So what’s next for the label? ‘Being consistent with releases, so we’ve got stuff coming out constantly and not letting the quality drop. Otherwise FW is just another fancy web address’.

59

words: Jez sMAdJA / pHoToGrApHy: yev kAzAnnIk

l

ike so many operations these days, the Wah Wah offices, located in a converted church on the steep inclines of Haringey, North London, double as a flat, a studio and a hang out. This morning we’re in for an unexpected surprise as label honcho Dom Servini swings opens the door, wrapped in nothing more than a little white towel, having just stepped out of the shower.

The offices are clearly a hub of industry, with Adam Scrimshire crunching algorithms on his laptop and Dom furiously firing off emails to everyone and their grandmothers ahead of the Wah Wah 11th Birthday. Their birthday party is an event that brings together Quantic, Florian Keller, The Simonsound and the full roster of Wah Wah artists, including Stac, who this morning is in the adjoining studio, working on a festival of her own with the South London One Taste collective.

2010 has been a rollercoaster year for the Wah Wah label, and whatever successes they’ve achieved have been somewhat overshadowed by the sudden death of co-founder, Simon Goss, who 11 years ago started the label with his brother Chris Goss.

Launched off the back of their Wah Wah club sessions at the Jazz Café, Wah Wah 45s originally released 7” records with a classic reissue on one side and a new track on the flip. As time progressed, and with the Italian stallion Dom Servini coming on board when Chris took off to run Hospital Records, the label moved away from

reissues, focusing instead on idiosyncratic but always soulful musical offerings. These days they’re one of the few labels on the scene to be pushing live music, and with two regular live sessions a month plus yearly bashes at the Scala and many one-offs, it’s all about the 360-degree record label model, or at least some approximation of it.

“The live nights are a good A&R opportunity. We’ll book a band for the night at the Vibe Bar and if that goes well we’ll book them for the Jazz Café or Favela Chic, and if we really love them we’ll sign them,” explains Dom. “The Resonators are a good example of a band we put on live, and also the Hackey Colliery Band who after we saw playing at the Vibe Bar session, we were like ‘we want to sign you.’”

This year, however, all efforts have been concentrated on the Stac album, which is possibly their most accomplished to date.

“Previously, producers would come to us with a ready-made album, but with Stac, she had songs but we had to make the album.

Through friends we found a great studio The Fishmarket and Nostalgia 77 recorded the album. It was a real beginning-t0-end job.”

With 2011 shaping up to be a big year with albums from Hackney Colliery Band, The Resonators, The Colman Brothers and two remix albums of Stac material, it all goes to show: if you build it, they will come.

60

61

words: Chloe McCloskey

HOTLANTA! Old school players to new school fools Photographer Michael Schmelling goes deep into Atlanta’s youthful hip hop scene Atlanta is the fifth book of photographs from Michael Schmelling. The Chicagobred photographer’s project began as a 331/3 book – long-players of journalism dedicated to a single record. He pitched it around OutKast’s seminal ‘98 release, Aquemini, after becoming fascinated with the city’s hip hop scene through years of visits for magazine shoots. “It was going to be very literal; photographing the studios, the people who made the record etc....,” he tells me over the phone from his home in New York. With the pitch approved and contracted, Schmelling set about his work, but soon found he had a problem: “When I started working on the book in 2007, Soulja Boy’s first song - Superman was blowin’ up. It was a really interesting time to be down in Atlanta.”

“The stuff from the past was really important, but I thought, ‘What if we look at Aquemini and examine what’s happening ten years later?’ I wanted to use that to see where the record has taken Atlanta’s hip hop.” A year and a half later, he got out of the contract, and reignited the project with this slightly different take. “Atlanta has such a great music scene. In addition to hip hop, you’ve got Deer Hunter and Black Lips and the whole east Atlanta punk/garage kind of indie rock stuff. People there really embrace that crossover between hip hop and indie rock. It’s very fluid.”

Through web research, persistence and a lot of “hanging out”, Michael cracked into the influential local teenage scene – “Andre and Big Boi were in high school when they put out their first OutKast record and Jermaine Dupri was super young when he started producing Kriss Kross.” One of the acts he came across in his research, Travis Porter, has just signed to Jive Records.

Schmelling also spent a lot of time in the strip clubs, which play a key role in Atlanta’s new music distribution. “A lot of the DJs at the strip clubs work at the radio stations and people bring records to get played at strip clubs. If it works in the club, then it’s a good sign it’ll work other places.” They also aren’t the seedy, testosterone traps one might expect, as Schmelling explains, “It’s more of a club atmosphere. A lot of couples go together, people eat there; most of the clubs have restaurants. The Body Tap even had a barber shop in it.”

He was at The Body Tap shooting Big Boi when Cee Lo showed up to hang out.

“That’s a great thing about Atlanta. There is room for Cee Lo and people like Young Jeezy to coexist... People are trying to be successful and get their music on, lending a certain amount of openness to the scene. It’s very friendly.”

The book has a corresponding blog (atlbook.com) featuring outtakes, an exclusive mix tape and other bits. “It was a really fun thing to do; I had all this extra stuff that I wanted to show people. One of my favourite things was getting music from these kids and the people that I met. A lot of it is largely unheard of, so I hope people are downloading it,” he says.

“I love hip hop and I love how alive of a genre it is,” he explains. And everything that makes up Atlanta’s version of this living genre: the hunger of the artists; the playersto-be; the fashion; the strippers - are presented artfully in Schmelling’s book, which he seems quite happy with: “It’s very great to be able to add something to the visual language of hip hop.”

“Atlanta – Hip-Hop and the South” by Michael Schmelling is now available via Chronicle Books.

62

63

Sofrito Tropical Warehouse Party East London, mid-2000s. Fed up with holding parties in nightclubs along the Old Street promenade, promoters started looking for warehouses where the music could go on till the early morning and people could get up to whatever they liked (from 1 January 2007 this usually meant smoking indoors). Hackney, with its surplus of defunct factories, clothes manufacturers and storage spaces, seemed to have a disproportionate number of such venues on offer.

You’d find dubstep raves in community centres in Stepney or dancehall nights in the basement of a theatre, Greco-Roman top-floor parties accessible only by a goods lift, All Ends Up extravaganzas with a skate ramp, disco music and a urinal fashioned out of a bath tub or Loft-style adventures in sound with Klipschorn speakers and psychoactive substances. These parties were often word-ofmouth affairs, posted on MySpace or organized over email, with the precise venue not advertised till the day of the event. Nightclubs suddenly didn’t seem like so much fun anymore.

There was one warehouse party, however, that wasn’t really like all the rest. With a live band, swelled by West African axemen alongside big ballers on the live scene like Malcolm Catto, or bands including Poets of Rhythm, and even on one occasion Manu Dibango playing Soul Makossa live, the Sofrito Tropical Warehouse parties often felt like a West African dancehall, not a semi-illicit gathering on some ill-lit back street. Then, with DJs throwing down dusty 45s from places like Colombia, Guadeloupe, Ghana and Nigeria, the bodies on the dancefloor would writhe well into the early hours of the morning.

Launched in 2005 by DJs Hugo Mendez and Frankie Francis alongside the Mighty Crime Minister, Sofrito moved from venue to venue until finding a home at the The Old Cholmeley Boys Club, home to some unforgettable parties in sweltering temperatures (the windows couldn’t be opened because of noise issues). From the Boys Club, it moved to a spot with an equally evocative name, The Empowering Church, where they still hold parties to this day. A Sofrito compilation is out soon on Strut to celebrate… what? Nothing in particular, Sofrito never really needed an excuse to celebrate, just a glass of Ti’Punch in one hand and a dancing partner in the other. The compilation moves indiscriminately from raw cumbia and soukous to bassline calypso and soca. It’s the soundtrack to a succession of long and sweaty, tropical nights in London town.

Illustrations by Lewis Heriz – www.lewisheriz.com

64

65

BOOKS

DVD

“Catch the Beat: The Best of Soul Underground 1987-91” David Lubich (DJHistory.com)

Soul Underground, a forerunner of this fine publication, emerged in 1987 in response to the lack of coverage of hip-hop and the rare groove scene in the mainstream music press with the rare exception of magazines like i-D and the Face.

Founded by Dave Lubich and Darren Reynolds, the first issue, released in October 1987, was printed to a total run of 850 copies and contained articles on Derek B , CJ Mackintosh and Gwen McCrae.

Distributed through the thensizeable network of record stores, it

sold out in just 10 days.

For the next three-and-a-bit years, Soul Underground grew to become the definitive word on the street, delivering 38 issues that covered a watershed era in music. “We simply wanted to capture the essence of the music scene we loved, to treat it with some respect, and to write about it with passion and intelligence,” insists Dave Lubich, the magazine’s long-term editor.

“More than anything, we wanted to be there first. And that meant putting in the hours, building up a team of contacts - in those preInternet days, social networking happened in the real world; our piece on the truly Underground ‘Circle Line Parties’ came from a whisper overheard in a club queue.”

As hip-hop entered its golden

days and then, in 1988, as house music blew everything out the water, Soul Underground was right at the forefront of it all, interviewing what are now considered legends at the peak of their careers. You’d have Mr Magic, KRS-One, Rammellzee, Biz Markie and De La Soul alongside Ce Ce Rodgers, Frankie Knuckles, Kevin Saunderson, DJ Pierre, not to mention a whole circus of UK artists, from a pre-Blue Lines Massive Attack through to Shut Up and Dance.

You can now relive those days thanks to a very heavy (in the literal sense) 450- page tome which compiles the best moments from Soul Underground. It’s incredible to read stuff like George Clinton talking about how he used 66

to cut Amp Fiddler’s hair in his barber shop, to see DJ Krust and DJ Suv, later drum n’ bass icons, on the cover of Issue 24 as a Bristol hip-hop crew called Fresh Four, or to learn how the Richard Long speaker cabinets at Club Zanzibar in New Jersey were known to produce what was affectionately known as ‘pussy bass’. Plus, with articles on anything from go-go to acid jazz to hip-house to dancehall, and including each consecutive month’s charts from shops like Black Market, City Sounds and Groove Records, Catch the Beat is full of insider information you’re unlikely to find anywhere else.

Catch The Beat is published by DJHistory.com, £19.95

BOOKS

DVD

“STREET STYLE” Ted Polhemus (PYMCA)

“WHAT WAS THE HIPSTER?” eds. Mark Greif, Kathleen Ross (n+1)

The First Thirty Years” Gaz Mayall (Trolley Books)

“FLIP THE SCRIPT” Kingsley Marshall (blurb.com)

Two men, dressed identically, lean up against the wall of a London bar at the launch of Ted Polhemus’s Street Style book.

Above them is the photograph that appears on the front cover of the book – two men, identically dressed, leaning up against a wall. Although Janette Beckman took this photo back in 1981, time disappears when the twins introduce themselves as the self-same pair. Their style is still as powerful as that captured in the iconic image, and Street Style celebrates all that this represents in its detailed exploration of sartorial identity. Street Style was first published in 1994 in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the V&A, and explores trends including rockers, rude boys and ravers. The reissued version, published in partnership with cultural research archive PMYCA, includes an extra five chapters about modern street fashions shaping popular culture. Polhemus is a writer, photographer and anthropologist, so the images and words carry equal weight.

The chapters are expertly researched and each includes a list of recommended reading and a selection of music that has shaped each scene. It’s a fascinating journey.

(Helene Dancer)

“Someday when hipsters no longer walk the earth, and subcultures have changed, and new aesthetics have evolved, the hipster of the period 1999–2010 will remain of historic interest.” So begins this outwardly silly attempt by a group of liberal New Yorkers associated with n+1 journal to deal with the phenomenon of the hipster. The hipster, you’ll know, is that subcultural invention fashioned out of the pages of Vice Magazine, known to inhabit neighbourhoods like Williamsburg, Hoxton, Belleville and characterized by handlebar moustaches, track bikes, dayglo colour schemes and a preponderant intake of cocaine.

You’d think the editors at n+1 had loftier things to occupy their great minds with, but there’s something about the hipster that galls them (ok, it galls me too). Divided into essays on various aspects of hipster culture such as its global impact and a piece simply entitled On Douchebags, as with all n+1 offerings, there’s a lot of elegant writing, and some sections are pretty funny – like bit about the Onion headline which goes ‘Group of Hipsters Realize Longtime Friend Is Actually Homeless Person’. Sometimes, though, you begin to worry whether your blood-curdling hatred of the hipster doesn’t reveal, like the old truism about homophobia, your repressed hipster waiting to come out of the closet.

(Gary Casper) “Gaz’s Rockin Blues:

Like The Ivy or the Arsenal, Gaz’s Rockin Blues is nothing short of a London institution. It’s no mean feat to keep a club running for three years, never mind thirty, but Gaz Mayall has done just that. His weekly club night still attracts a diverse clientele, who dress the part in two-tone mohair tonic suits or R&R get-ups, and you’re still likely to see famous faces like Keith Allen, dropping by with his daughter Lily. The history of Gaz’s club, which began at Gossip’s on Meard Street in 1980 in the heart of seedy Soho before moving round the corner to St. Moritz where it still happens every Thursday, all comes to life in this glorious publication by Trolley Books. There’s too many great anecdotes to mention them all here, but whether it’s how Gaz introduced Jamaican deejay Prince Buster to the Clash’s Joe Strummer (Strummer in turn introduced Gaz to Robert De Niro), or how Tracey Emin used to work in the cloakroom, it’s a adrenaline-fuelled story from start to finish. The insight it gives into London, the sounds, the fashions, the markets, brings back to life a semi-forgotten era for those who were there and for those who weren’t. Lovingly compiled, too, are the club’s flyers – there are literally hundreds of them, all hand-drawn, often in a comic book style reminiscent of Lucky Luke or Judge Dredd – and also extensive archive photography. It’s a fitting tribute to a true originator. (JS)

You know when people tell you they’re planning on doing a massive project and you just nod your head and humour them? I can imagine Tim Berners-Lee telling his mother about his idea for the world wide web and his mother nodding sagely and saying, “Tim, that’s lovely”. Well, when SHOOK photographer Kingsley Marshall told me he was going to bring out a book of his own photography, let’s just say I wasn’t actually expecting to actually be holding it between my hands quite so soon. But such is Kingsley’s conviction that he made sure he managed to take his idea – to create “a photographer’s music diary” – and bring it to life.

And what a beautiful product it is.

Between its thick hardback cover, Kings’s portraits of KRS-One, Estelle, Wiley, Jose James, Omar, Flying Lotus, Ty, Erykah Badu and even a photo of IG Culture smiling (!) just jump off the page. There’s a foreword by Norman Jay as well as some memorable shots of the Good Times bus at Carnival. What, for Kingsley, unites all the artists in the book is that they’ve all done the unexpected, regardless of the sacrifices, whether financial or personal, to stay true to the music. The same should be said of Kingsley – it’s not easy on this scene to do your thing when the forces of commerce conspire against you, but that won’t stop some people. If you’re feeling flushed, head over to blurb.com and support this fine project.

(Jez Smadja)

67

Got to get

Got to get

Reviews

Reviews by Sanjiv Ahluwalia, Nate Anidugbe, Keith Baker, Paul Bradshaw, Al Burton, Sunil Chauhan, Helene Dancer, Cal Jader, Michael Krasser, Tajha Myer-Ferreira, Colin McKean, Benji Semtek, Dom Servini, Jez Smadja, Steven Smith, Ben Verghese, Samera Owusu Tutu, Vince Vella, Charles Waring and Susannah Webb.

Lone “emerald Fantasy Tracks” (Magic Wire) We used to go to Back to 88 raves around 1995. They were full of people who’d been through the summer of love the first time around and failed to realize that 7 years had since passed, and others who hadn’t been there the first time around and were trying to re-create the magic.

The irony is, 15 years later, it still feels like one big Back to 88 party wherever you look, whether it’s Funkineven and Hudson Mohawke recreating the classic sounds of Trax and Transmat, full of TB303 basslines, TR-808 drums and off-beat handclaps, or Actress and Jacques Greene doing something a bit different with a house beat. But let’s not forget Lone, aka Matt Cutler,

hailing from Nottingham, who, although making hip-hop beats since a teenager, has been toiling away in the genre for a little while now, following up his impressive and largely midtempo Ecstasy & Friends album for Werk Discs with that belting acid cut ‘Pineapple Crush’ on his own label Magic Wire. His new album/EP – eight tracks long and also available as two separate 12”s – he picks up where he left off with ‘Pineapple Crush’, inspired by his early love of house and hardcore, but tempered with a mellowness that makes this also an album you can listen to at home without waking the neighbours.

The two opening tracks ‘Cloud 909’ and ‘Aquamarine’ are more like the sound of Detroit

Various Artists: ‘CTI Records: The Cool Revolution’ (Sony Masterworks) Creed Taylor was a man with a plan. Though he was a fairto-middling trumpet player from Virginia, he believed he had more chance of making a name for himself in the jazz world as a record producer.

After blagging his way into a job at Bethlehem Records in the mid-‘50s – he saved it from bankruptcy - he went on to found Impulse! in 1961, an iconic jazz label renowned for its superb sound quality, distinctive artwork and impressive roster of recording artists.

Taylor adhered to the same philosophy when he started CTI (Creed Taylor Incorporated), which began as an imprint of A&M in 1967 before going independent

68

three years later. To celebrate the label’s 40th anniversary, Sony (who, much to Taylor’s chagrin, acquired the CTI catalogue in the late-‘70s when the producer faced bankruptcy) have put together a superb 39-track 4-CD set, which is packaged in a stylish, gatefold LP sleeve that features many of the label’s iconic album covers (all photographed by Pete Turner). Each CD in the set focuses on different aspects of CTI’s repertoire (they are titled ‘Straight Up,’ ‘Deep Grooves/Big Hits,’ ‘The Brazilian Connection’ and ‘Cool And Classic’) and includes remastered versions of the label’s most famous tracks – among them, CTI’s biggest chart smash, ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra,’ Deodato’s edgy, funked-up take on a

than that of its twin, Chicago, with the shuffling drum patterns that recall to mind Underground Resistance or Kenny Larkin’s material for R&S. But there’s more to the man than just techno plagiarism, and it’s on tracks like ‘Rissotowe_4’ and ‘Petrcane Beach’ that he conjures up the original spirit of Detroit - it’s not all pounding drums but also about numinous synth grooves because, let’s remember, in the early days of techno they didn’t have samplers so all the parts had to be played live. Emerald Fantasy Tracks may not be groundbreaking, but sometimes you need to go back before you can go forward and that’s something that Lone understands better than most.

(Keith Pettinger)

classical music piece by Richard Strauss that had gained notoriety via Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi movie, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ There are also classic tracks by Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine, Chet Baker, Bob James, George Benson, Milt Jackson, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and also selections originally recorded for CTI’s sister label, Kudu, which covered more R&B-oriented musicians like Esther Phillips, Hank Crawford and Grover Washington Jr. The set certainly doesn’t tell the whole CTI story but for the uninitiated it provides an accessible entry point to the label’s huge catalogue and paints a vivid and fascinating sonic portrait of one of the last great independent jazz labels.

(Charles Waring)

Catalyst “The Complete Recordings Vol. 1 & Vol 2” (Porter) Hard-to-find is an understatement when it comes to the clutch of LPs put out by this Philly ensemble in the 1970s who straddled avant jazz and soul in a way that Oneness of Juju or Gary Bartz also managed in that fertile era. These two compilations bring together the rated Catalyst and Perception albums for Cobblestone as well as Unity and A Tear and a Smile for Muse. Best played loud, Catalyst will blow your mind. (MK)

Richard Spaven “Spaven’s 5ive” (Jazz Re:Freshed) The first of hopefully many more albums for the Jazz Re:Freshed 5ives series, there’s a lot to like here. Spaven, who has drummed for Guru, Mark de Clive Lowe, Robert Mitchell, Kaidi Tatham and Flowriders, has put together a stellar set, enlisting the likes of Jose James for vocals on ‘Maz’, and DJ DooWop on ‘Zeebra III’, but it’s his prolix and prosodic drum phrases that you’ll love more and more on each rotation. (SOT)

Coati Mundi “Dancing For The Cabana Code In The Land Of BooHoo” (Rong Music) Responsible for adding the heavy Latino pulse to August Darnell’s compositions as well as dropping his own leftfield classics like ‘Me No Pop I’, it’s a stunning return by the multi-instrumentalist and arranger for both the Savannah Band and Kid Creole, as the Nu Yorican soul man gives a progressive modern day twist to his unique brand of mutant Latin disco and post punk pop. (AT)

Remy LBO “Umpqua Fire” (Noecho Records) Limitations can often lead to the finest work. Remy LBO selfimposed some when making this LP, isolating himself in “a cabin in the middle of the Oregon wilderness”. The result is a blissfully relaxed blend of jazz and instrumental hip-hop sensibilities. Seek it out digitally or act quick to bag one of a limited supply of hard copies.

(BV)

Alton Miller “Light Years Away” (Mixed Signals Music) A true house soldier, Alton Miller has been releasing music since the 90s when he worked under the wing of Derrick May at Transmat Records.

This, his fourth album, has already racked up 19 plays in my Winamp in the past month alone. Deep house with a afro-funk groove, there are spiritual vocal cuts, vintage analogue synth washes, some electrifying live percussion, and even a cover of ‘Stars in their Eyes’. If you like Kerri Chandler, Peven or Osunlade, you need this little self-released gem. (JS)

DJ Rashad “Just a Taste/Grace” (Ghettophiles) A counter to the footwork’s colder, harder end, these two sets from the man behind the incredible Teknitianz find DJ Rashad remoulding familiar lush 70s soul steals into seriously unusual, jittery shapes. You Azz and Ghetto Tek Muzik pump and pound excellently but mostly this is surprisingly mellow, even as Rashad works overtime to derail the samples. Lovers’ juke anyone? (SC)

Various “Night Slugs Allstars Vol. 1” (Night Slugs) Taking us through the impressive catalogue while also giving us a glimpse of what’s in store for 2011, with tracks from core artists such as Jam City and Kingdom, unreleased material from Jacques Greene and Optimum not to mention strong contender for release of the 2010 with Girl Unit’s ‘Wut’, this compilation really is a comprehensive guide to the label’s sound and into what we hope is the future of dancefloor-killing bass music. (SS)

The Uniques “Absolutely Rocksteady” (Pressure Sounds) The Uniques were the band formed

by Slim Smith after leaving The Techniques. Eighteen low-key, high-quality tracks embracing both hits and less well-known versions, including ‘This Feeling’, ‘The Beatitude’ and ‘Let Me Go Girl’ (followed by Dawn Penn’s excellent response ‘I’ll Let You Go (Let Me Go Boy)’). Often compared to Curtis Mayfield, Smith rivalled Bob Marley in popularity, had international solo success but died tragically early.

This is a true gem of an album. (KB)

69

Reviews

Brandt Brauer Frick “You Make Me Feel” (!K7) The ambition to reinterpret techno classics with live musicians has befallen Re:Jazz and Christian Prommer, but BBF move the goalposts by trying to create technosounding music using nothing but live instruments. You may have seen the video for single ‘Bop’, a classical techno workout somewhere between Steve Reich, The Martian and Music For Apartment and Six Drummers (google it) but it’s live that they really come into their own as you’re sure to find out in 2011. (BV)

Various “Lefto & Simbad Presents Worldwide Family Vol. 1” (Brownswood) Remember when James Lavelle released Headz in 1994 featuring then-barely known names like DJ Shadow, DJ Krush and Nightmares on Wax? Well, with Worldwide Family, it feels like 94 all over again as Simbad and Lefto recruit beatheads from the five distant corners of the earth. There’s Onra, Exile, TOKiMONSTA, Illum Sphere plus Seiji, Zed Bias and many more.

It’s an epic 27-track wager on the future of music. (JS)

Warpaint “The Fool” (Rough Trade) Warpaint’s hipster credentials are immaculate – they have famous fans, supermodel good looks and their doe-eyed hypnogogic pop sounds like Fleetwood Mac on ‘luudes. The extent to which they embody the current alt-pop zeitgeist might seem faintly objectionable, but only the hardest-hearted could resist songs as beguiling as ‘Undertow’. (CM)

Georgia Anne Muldrow “VWETO” (Mello Music) Okay, don’t get over-excited and wet yourself, this is an instrumental album so while it shows Ms. Muldrow (with some help from Dudley, perhaps?) really is in a league of her own when it comes to beat making, you don’t get that transcendental feeling you get when you hear a track like ‘Never In Vain’.

Creating her own genres (fOnkrock, pianospace) these beats bang hard and whet our appetite for a new full-length soon to drop. (BV)

Maddslinky “Make A Change” (TruThoughts) Too often, dance music artist albums aren’t really albums at all, though is hardly the case on Dave Jones’ highly anticipated album which serves up more variety than Kellogg’s.

Besides UK anthem ‘Special’ with Omar and Timbaland-sounding joint ‘Further Away’ with Tawiah, there’s funky, broken, soulful, (post-)dubstep, there’s even tracks for which genres have yet to be invented. The sort of album you can listen to before the club, in the club and after the club, it’s quite an achievement. (JS)

Various “New York Tropical” (Dutty Artz) NY’s DA crew throw together some of the hottest joints from the burgeoning Tropical scene, fusing African rhythms and Latin styles such as Cumbia and Merengue with electronic beats. Tracks include exclusive material from scene-leaders DJ Rupture and Maga Bo alongside newer producers like DJ Orion, whose ‘Undertow’ is a seriously grimy slice of chainsaw funk.

(CJ)

Cassandra Wilson “Silver Pony” (Blue Note) Cassandra Wilson returns to form with Silver Pony, an album part recorded live and part in the studio. As such it has the consistent warmth and intimacy of a live club date, accentuated with some intricate playing. Wilson’s duet with John Legend ‘Watch The Sunrise’ is too polished, but aside from that, this is a strong album and a welcome return from the Queen of Jazz. (SA)

Curren$y “Pilot Talk II” (BluRoc) There’s been a rise in popularity for Weed Rap and one of the first to emerge from the billowing smoke is New Orleans’ second son, Curren$y.

‘Airbourne Aquarium’ draws you in with fantastic instrumentation, a theme that continues throughout the album courtesy of notes from The Senseis and Ski Beats. The stand-out tracks are ‘Real Estates’ featuring Cali new-comer Dom Kennedy and single ‘Michael Knight’. It’s a solid body of work but if you’re not in love with that green leaf, this might not be the album for you. (NA)

70

Scuba “Triangulation (Interpretations)” (Hotflush) Scuba’s relocation to Berlin catalysed the development of a strain of British bass music that made particular sense in Berghain – long the crucible of European techno. These thrilling interpretations of tracks from the resultant Triangulation album now confirm his music’s global resonance, Falty DL and Deadboy’s refixes providing particular highlights here. (CM)

Dennis Brown “The Crown Prince of Reggae” (VP) In Jamaica it was Dennis Emmanuel Brown more than Bob Marley who was the people’s choice. Beginning as a little boy singing ‘No Man Is An Island’ for Coxson Dodd, Brown always sought to spread messages in his music. This overview, covering 1972 to 1985, misses obvious cuts – no ‘Here I Come’ or ‘West Bound Train’ – but scores heavily with Joe Gibbs productions, work with Niney The Observer and timeless cuts from exuberant 1972 album Super Reggae & Soul Hits. (PB)

Finn Peters “Music of the Mind” (Mantella Records) Finn Peters is definitely one of the most talented and versatile jazz musicians/composers in the UK. With an all-star band including Tom Skinner and Oren Marshall, Mr. Peters puts together a very interesting project using a music software that explores brain mapping so his brainwaves can be translated into notes and tones.

The resulting music is quite unique, drawing on Sun Ra and Kraftwerk and Finn’s mysterious brainwaves.

(VV)

Various “Scientist Launches Dubstep Into Outer Space” (Tectonic) Dub pioneer Scientist takes dubstep right back to its roots and into the realm of live performance on this excellent compilation. His deft manipulation of the mixing desk’s auxiliaries gives tracks by producers including Mala, Loefah and Pinch a deeper texture. Perhaps the story is more remarkable than the output, but the magic is obvious. (HD)

The Foreign Exchange “Authenticity” (E1) This, Foreign Exchange’s third album, is an evolution. While Phonte opts for less hip-hop and more soul, his aching vocals and the dark melodies create a depth to each track that more than makes up for the departure from the group’s first offerings. In fact, title track ‘Authenticity’, ‘Maybe She’ll Dream of Me’ and ‘Don’t Wait’ are the truest love songs a generation are likely to hear. Pure genius. (SOT)

Foster Manganyi “Ndzi Teke Riendzo” (Honest Jon’s) Following the mind blowing Shangaan compilation, Honest Jon’s come with another killer from this little known corner of South Africa. “Sublimely convulsive Shangaan electro-gospel by a pastor from Giyani, Limpopo, brimming with aching, plaintive, mournful spirituality,” proclaims the label on an LP of infectious ancient to modern music to shake your soul. Confirms the sounds of the Shangaan as one the most exciting revelations of late. (AT)

Various “Angola Soundtrack” (Analog Africa) Another winner from Analog Africa, this compilation beautifully unearths some musical gems from Angola. These preserved analog recordings prove the incredible creativity of different Angolan bands fusing rhythms such as rebita, kazukuta with other African and Latin styles to create a sonically unique view of what was happening from 1965 to 1976 in Luanda. (VV)

Peder “Dirt & Gold” (Fake Diamond) 2nd album from Danish beatsmith and jack-of-all-trades Peder.

His music is a complex but well balanced melange of soul-fuelled electronics and bespoke indie pop, offering everything from New Orleans death march jazz to 80s synths, slo-mo hip-hop and emotional sound collages. Offering the kind of melancholic big band sound that acts like Ilmiliekki Quartet have made Scandinavia famous for, head for tracks like ‘Daylight’ for the full-on, cold Nordic joy. (BS)

71

Reviews

David Rodigan “FabricLive 54” (Fabric) Reggae legend Rodigan steps up to the Fabric wheels for this collection that spans Roots, Dancehall and Dub, classic and new alike. Remember, it is Rodigan, so don’t expect a seamless beat-matched mix, but do expect an impressive selection of BIG tunes (like Cham’s ‘Ghetto Story’ and Collie Buddz’ ‘Come Around’) and as always, some exclusive dubs. (SW)

Radioclit “Secousse” (Crammed Discs) The excellent Radioclit DJs have turned their adventures in global music into an adventurous compilation, this time focussing on ‘African Dance Music Anthems’. Crossing a wide range of contemporary genres from the continent, from Kuduro to Shangaan Electro, their expert picks sometimes bust through the 170bpm mark. Try not dancing to that. (SW)

Cos/Mes “Gozmez Land Chaosexotica” (ESP Institute) Joining the dots between Brainstorm and Richard Wahnfried, crate digger Andrew Hogge hosted one of the most cultish blogs for lovers of obscure disco. While Lovefingers is no more, his new record label has been causing a quiet storm for a particular kind of music geek. Cos/Mes live up to the promise of those early 12”s with an LP packed full of Quiet Village and Mongolian Jetset atmospherics as they cross from Balearic to Cosmic in their own unique way. (AT)

Fujiya & Miyagi “Ventriloquizzing” (Full Time Hobby) The fourth, and most accomplished, album from F&M. Still present, the familiar Can-ish motorik grooves and half-spoken lyrics in addition to a more organic feel courtesy of producer Thom Monahan (Devendra Banhart, Vetiver). Written in the band’s hometown of Brighton, but recorded in California, it’s an intriguing blend of West Coast and East Sussex, a fascinating soundtrack to an impossible roadtrip. (KB)

Bjorn Torske “Kokning” (Smalltown Supersound) Torske is a Norwegian hero, a producer and DJ, a major influence on the new breed of Scandinavian artists such as Todd Terje & Prins Thomas as well as remixer for artists like Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Lindstrøm. Three years in the making, his fourth album, ‘Kokning’, is described as the ‘ultimate Bjorn Torske album’, a delightful smørgasbord of sounds, textures and musical styles, if you will! Delicious. (KB)

Fruko y Joe Arroyo “Rebelion Tropical” (Nascente) Tropical badboys Fruko and Joye Arroyo were some of the finest musicians in Colombia. These 2 CDs bring together their most celebrated tracks, cooking cumbia, salsa,afro, chicha and champeta with modern New York salsa style arrangements. Good compilation if you are bored of commercial cumbia lol. (VV)

72

Gil Scott-Heron “Real Eyes” (Soul Brother) Only previously reissued in Japan, this overlooked 1980 album by the so-called ‘Godfather of Hiphop’ is a lost gem. Though mellow musically, its lyrics pack a visceral punch, as evidenced by ‘The Klan.’

Three of GSH’s collaborations with Brian Jackson (‘The First Minute Of A New Day,’ ‘From South Africa To South Carolina,’ and ‘It’s Your World’) are also back in circulation.

(CW)

Richard Norris “The Time & Space Machine mixes” (Nang) Following his brilliant psych releases as Beyond The Wizard Sleeves, ex Grid man and acid house renegade Richard Norris returns with these mixes under his T&SM moniker. From the epic space disco reworking of Visti and Meyland ‘Stars’ to his shimmering mix of Mountain Of One’s ‘Bones’, Norris brings a kaleidoscope of cosmic colour to some of the best little Balearic burners around. (AT)

Gecko Turner “Gone Down South” (Lovemonk) Gecko Turner’s life story sounds like a Bukowski short story – after his wife died, he quit his bank job and dedicated his life to music. This, his debut album, is astonishingly accomplished, with a strong vein of soul with afro-cuban flourishes, psychedelic Stonesinfluenced pieces and blues.

Some is sung in English, some in Spanish. Personal highlights are Shuggie Otis-inspired ‘Let’s Stay Tonight’ and ‘Mbira Bira’ with its swooning West African melodies.

(JS)

Cap D “PolyMath” (All Natural) Staying true to his All Natural roots, Cap D delivers another substantive gem that’s sure to please loyal followers of the Chicago emcee, while also appealing to the previously uninformed. Mixing his trademark boom bap with a slight touch of rhythm & groove, PolyMath is the sort of complete offering sorely missed in today’s underground hip hop scene. (AB)

Belleruche “270 Stories” (TruThoughts) A more mature, more guitary third album from London trio fronted

by Kathrin deBoer who still have a touch of Portishead about them, though I’m hearing more Beth Ditto than Beth Gibbons on ‘Tired Robot’ and lead single ‘Fuzz Face’.

Like The Invisible’s rock/jazz hybrid, Belleruche seem to want to turn their hand to something new. However, moments like ‘Ginger Wine’ and ‘Cat In the Dog’, albeit pleasant, can’t resist a bit of automatonophilia (Dummy-love).

Kouyate-Newman “Kangaba” (No Format) Kouyate-Newman’s infectious debut album, is part ethereal African sounds, part beautifully executed vibraphones and part rock/electronic. The album has an ambient feel, very appropriate in these days of dark, winter nights. Tracks such as the opening ‘Here’ have a very textured sound, and some tracks are equally at home in a club or on a live stage such as ‘Djanfa Magni’. This is the sound of African music taken to the next level, one of the albums of 2010. (SA)

Various “Disconnect: Leo Zero” (!K7) Glad to have this just for Wunmi’s version of ‘Message In A Bottle’ (not currently on YouTube) though this collection of b-hits, rarities and secret weapons from Mr. Leo Elstob draws mainly on the 1980s, mixing up synth-pop and post-punk with jazz-funk and ska. Featuring names you’ll know like CAN, Brian Eno and Chris and Cosey, and many you won’t, this harks back to Thatcher’s Britain, a time of high employment, strikes and working class poverty.

Sound familiar? (JS)

Yaron Herman Trio “Follow The White Rabbit” (ACT) Israeli pianist Harman’s album is excellent. It mixes engaging piano, bass and drums in a jazz setting, with left-of-centre twists – the cover of Nirvana’s ‘Heart Shaped Box’ is masterful and one of the tracks of 2010 IMHO. Their cover of Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’ continues the level of excellence, a respectful cover which manages to capture the soul and mystery of the original yet take the track somewhere different.

Recommended. (SA)

Faith Evans “Something About Faith” (E1) The first lady of Bad Boy is back with her sixth album release ‘Something About Faith’. With the usual ballad or two like the first release from the album ‘Gone Already’ to the catchy funk inspired ‘Way You Move’, Ms. Evans gives us a taste of what we been missing during her five-year absence. With appearances from hip hop legends Snoop Dogg, Redman and Raekwon to R&B divas Kelly Price and Keyshia Cole, the album, though uneven, is worth a listen. (TMF)

DMX Krew “Wave Funk” (Rephlex) The first DMX Krew release was 1995’s ‘Got You On My Mind’ on Dutch label DAP, followed in 1996 by ‘Sound Of The Street’ on Aphex Twin’s label Rephlex. Since then the prolific producer has continued to develop his own brand of futuristic electro pop. Wave Funk sticks to his established formula of off-the-cuff analogue jams. There are a couple of stand out moments, like ‘Meridian 1212’, a simple and brilliant micro italo groove, but the sheer quantity of tracks sometimes outweighs quality. (BS)

73

18