GOLD AND POPCORN

When the road of excess turns out to be a dead-end.

2011-06-24T16:12:00.018+01:00

The capricious nature of modern pop stardom being what it is, there are some wrong turns that are harder to recover from than others. For instance, it was recently said of Duffy that she probably throws empty Diet Coke cans at the radio every time she hears a song by Adele (which I imagine would be fairly often). During the last few days, however, I've wondered whether or not Adele might have ever observed the career trajectory of Amy Winehouse and thought to herself, “There but for the grace of God...”. After all, artistically speaking both women come from broadly similar backgrounds – North London “blue-eyed soul” singer/songwriters with a performing arts school pedigree and a second album wildly more successful than its predecessor – but it's there that the similarities end.

By and large, Adele Adkins chooses to avoid the limelight, and therefore little is known of either her personal life or her indulgences, whatever they may be. The spectacular success of 21 suggests that her audience couldn't care less either way, which I think is quite telling. Compare and contrast, on the other hand, with the shambles formerly known as Amy Winehouse. When she emerged - or rather, came out swinging - in 2003, it was with some forthright opinions on her peers in her left hand and, for a 19-year-old, an arresting line in cynical, world-weary lyrics in her right (Fuck Me Pumps and Stronger Than Me being two of the more striking examples). Although the somewhat prosaic neo-soul stylings of Frank might at times have led lazier listeners to dismiss it as more Mill Hill than Lauryn Hill, impressive live covers of Moody's Mood For Love and Teach Me Tonight hinted that Winehouse was utilising her stage-school techniques with something more in mind than a gig presenting the National Lottery draw at some point in the future. In the seven years since, I don't think there's been another female singer/songwriter in any area with anywhere near the same potential for genuine, era-defining greatness, and I still don't.

Skip forward a few years, however, and it's as if you're looking at a different person. In the now-infamous paparazzi shot that signalled her arrival as a permanent fixture in the gossip columns and celeb weeklies, Winehouse's regular-girl shapeliness (“fat” if you're a Daily Mail reader, “normal” if not) was nowhere to be seen – this new model was all spidery, emaciated limbs, sunken eyes, sailor's tats and teetering Ronnie Spector beehive. She sounded different as well. On Back To Black, the modern r&b of her debut had largely been abandoned, at least cosmetically, for that of an earlier vintage, courtesy of producer Mark Ronson and a horn section on secondment from Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Nevertheless, despite all these outward changes, everything else seemed to suggest that her talent with a hook and a witty lyric had sharpened considerably. Her earlier Erykah Badu fixation had been dialled down in preference for a heavily-stylised (too heavily for some) approximation of Esther Phillips and Dinah Washington, but not at the expense of her interpretive skills. Overplayed as it is, there remains a sublime duality to her cover of the Zutons' Valerie, in the way it offsets the girls-night-out perkiness of Ronson's fauxtown aesthetic with some rather bleak Sapphic yearning; perhaps not what Dave McCabe had in mind when he wrote the song, but I'm sure the royalty cheques have long since eased whatever misgivings he may have had there.

There comes a point in the career of many successful artists when they decide whether or not they're going to embrace celebrity and all the things that come with it. It seems nowadays that the choice is either to go all-in, or to give it the swerve entirely. You can no longer have your cake and eat it too, if indeed you ever could. There may well be moments when certain famous people might prefer it if they were a little less famous, but the nature of the game is that they rarely get to make that call. That said, I once heard a tale of an internationally famous singer who, during a lengthy spell away from the public eye, had managed to both acquire and eventually kick a serious smack habit without the story ever leaking out. In the case of Amy Winehouse, the impression I always had was of someone who wouldn't necessarily shun stardom if it came along, but who was nonetheless quite serious-minded when it came to her music. While there's no avoiding the fact that her work has been informed by a personal life one could politely describe as “turbulent” (a one-line summary of Back To Black, for instance, might read; “He's a bastard but I love him”, although more recent events would suggest that the follow-up, “Don't hit him, Blake, you're on probation”, might be some way off yet), it's equally difficult to avoid the possibility that the path Winehouse now finds herself stuck on - that of someone at least as famous for her excesses as for her music - could actually be the result of a conscious artistic choice; something that, if true, would be as titanically stupid as it is tragic.

In the July 2011 issue of The WORD, there's a hugely entertaining and illuminating interview with Glenn Hughes, formerly of Deep Purple amongst others, during which Rob Fitzpatrick describes the bassist's memoir Deep Purple And Beyond: Scenes From The Life Of A Rock Star as “[reading] like one monumental binge with the odd LP here and there for ''colour''”. Now, Rob is a good enough writer to sell me on the idea of Hughes' story anyway, even if I may have hitherto imagined I'd have no interest in it whatsoever. The fact is, though, I'm as fascinated by preposterous tales of rock 'n' roll excess as anyone, and I'm aware that I'll appear a hypocrite if I say I believe that to still buy wholesale into the notion of “the rock 'n' roll lifestyle” is the mark of an idiot, but I think it is. The image of the “elegantly wasted” rock 'n' roller, so vigorously championed in the music press during the '70s by writers like Nick Kent, has no better embodiment than Keith Richards. But when Keith finally keels over, I'll bet serious money that the obituaries will talk first about the riff from Satisfaction, the solo from Sympathy For The Devil or the deathless chords of Brown Sugar, Street Fighting Man and Honky Tonk Women. Long after that there'll be the Mars bar, Brian Jones, Altamont and so on. Somewhere in between they'll mention the drugs, of course, but it won't be the first thing they mention. This is the thing that all those wretched souls who model themselves after him completely fail to grasp, with their artfully-teased crow's-nest barnets, skinny jeans, litany of chemical dependencies and hour upon interminable hour of terrible, hackneyed, mediocre music – Keith Richards has never needed to take drugs in order to make good music. By the time he'd reached the point where the music was interfering with his drug-taking, he'd already accumulated a body of work that would have endured even if he'd dropped dead immediately after finishing Exile On Main Street. And let's not forget the likes of John Coltrane and sundry other jazzers, either; A Love Supreme was made after Coltrane had quit drugs, remember.

Let me put it another way; nobody ever remembers any of the people who take shitloads of drugs and produce bad art, and I bet there's fucking loads of them. The possibly apocryphal tale of a distraught Samuel Taylor Coleridge writing Kubla Khan in frustration at being unable to recall the supposedly even greater epic poem he'd made up in his head in its entirety during a massive opium bender is all very inspiring, but there seems to have emerged in recent times a generation of artists whose journey along the road of excess is mostly spent in search of short cuts. I find it hard to listen to someone like Pete Doherty – a Sainsbury's Basics Tim Hardin with William Blake pretensions who attends court hearings for drug offences with pockets full of gear and yet manages to stay out of prison – without thinking, “Here's someone who's convinced himself that if he takes enough of the right drugs and throws enough of the right shapes, and maybe makes the odd record or two, he will eventually become a great artist”. And when I read about someone like Amy Winehouse breathlessly buying into the received wisdom that briefly declared Doherty to be “the greatest poet of his generation”, then it becomes easier to understand why so many gifted artists decide to skip the tiresome “art” bit and go straight to the drugs.

The music press has to take a lot of the responsibility for this, because it's the music press more than anything that's helped secure the seductive myth of drug use as a prerequisite for greatness within the cultural consensus. Its influence may have diminished significantly, but behind the wide-eyed cheerleading for Doherty in particular, there's still the implicit suggestion that you're somehow less of an artist if you don't embrace a life of wild excess. When Brett Anderson was doing gear, he was barely out of the NME. After he packed it in, he'd have needed to murder Damon Albarn for them to write about him. With the news that Amy Winehouse has cancelled her forthcoming European tour after a disastrous performance in Belgrade just over a week ago, it's hard not to conclude that here's another young artist who swallowed that line whole and is now too far along the road to ever find her way back, and I'm saddened by it. Those hair-shirted champions of authenticity who virtually accused her of taking the very food from the mouth of Sharon Jones a few years ago probably couldn't care less about the latest episode in the grim soap-opera that the life and career of Amy Winehouse has become. Some might even perversely see it as karma. But I miss the young woman who aimed for Sammy Cahn greatness, didn't quite hit the mark, yet still came up with the line, “But you're my fella, my guy, just grab your Stella and fly...”. Or the woman who wrote the amazing Love's A Losing Game, a song that would sound just as utterly, heartbreakingly complete had it been written at any point during the last 50 years, which of course it could easily have been. Or the woman from – stone me – the video for In My Bed. I liked her and I'd like her back. I'm not interested in being the sort of person who turned up at Lou Reed gigs in the mid-70s, in the ghoulish hope that tonight would be the night Lou o.d'd, and was taken to A&E and thereafter the bone orchard. I've no desire to watch someone fall to bits on stage. As far as I'm concerned, the world would be a better place with a clean, happy, functional Amy Winehouse in it, and as soon as there's one available, I'll be first in the queue. I hope I'm not the only one.

"I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal, you..."

2011-05-05T12:54:00.000+01:00

One of the very modern disadvantages of moving to a different part of the world is when you find yourself left slightly flat-footed by events due to a lack of easy access to things like the internet or English language newspapers. So it was with the news that Osama bin Laden caught a bad one in Abbottabad the other day. Having missed the by now obligatory Twitter/Facebook frenzy, it was only yesterday that I was finally able to properly bone up on what had happened via Jason Burke's excellently researched analysis in the Grauniad's international edition.

Of course, it didn't take long before people started using the “c” word, which isn't so surprising, given that the conspiracy theory industry is beginning to play a similar role in people's lives to that of religion – abandoning yourself to something you believe to be more powerful than you in order to compensate for feeling a lack of control over your own life, anyone? The mere fact that later “official” reports on the events surrounding bin Laden's death differed slightly from earlier ones was enough to set off alarm bells all over the set. No consideration given (as if) to the fact that the fog of war sometimes makes for murky pictures, much less the possibility that an absence of inconsistencies or loose ends might constitute greater grounds for suspicion. But we can talk all day about conspiracies, both real or imagined and, since someone somewhere is almost certainly doing exactly that, I'm going to leave them to it.

What I found more interesting were the spontaneous celebrations that took place in Lower Manhattan after Obama made the official announcement. Or more specifically, the widespread outbreak of tutting disapproval at the fact that inhabitants of a city where bin Laden's demagoguery had its most terrible impact might choose to cheer at the news of his death. Now, whilst I can see why some people would regard that kind of carry-on as crass or tasteless, I'm at something of a loss as to why those same people seemed unable to at least understand why it was happening. I'll bet a pound to a pinch of shit that there were plenty of people on the streets of NYC that night who lost family, friends and loved ones on 9/11. So, if they want to take a “fuck 'em where they live” attitude to his demise, they can knock themselves out as far as I'm concerned. Same goes for the people of Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, where bin Laden had also decided to strike a blow against The Great Satan, killing scores of innocent people in the process - very few of whom happened to be American, as it turned out. Not that I have any idea if there was a similar public reaction to the news in those cities, mind you. But I do wonder whether there'd have been quite such a hoity-toity response if there was.

During and after the second gulf war, there were many people freely describing Bush and Blair as “mass murderers” and “war criminals”, and I detected something of a tendency to engage in death-count pissing contests as regards who was responsible for the greater number of deaths and, by definition, therefore the worst offender. Obama said something I thought quite poignant about empty places at dinner tables, and there has undoubtedly been a great many more of those all over the world in the last decade. But an awful lot of them can be traced, either directly or indirectly, back to one mass murderer in particular, and it does appear that what goes around does indeed come around. So please forgive me if I choose not to judge those who celebrate bin Laden's death – that's a matter between the people doing the cheering and their consciences. Besides, on the day news breaks of the death of Margaret Thatcher – someone also considered by many to be a mass murderer and war criminal – you can find me in the pub, sippin' on a Bud. And you're more than welcome to drop by and call me all the hypocrites under the sun, just so long as you get the ales in.

Musica

2011-04-29T15:30:00.000+01:00

Here are a couple of mixes I've recently done for other folks. The first is a sort of unofficial mixtape to mark the release of the new album by my old mates The Memory Band, with whom I played bass for a couple of years during the noughties. I like to think it's in keeping with the general aesthetic of the band, and even though it's a bit on the long side, I think it makes for a nice, leisurely listen.

Tracklisting:
Intro (Pearls Before Swine: Trumpeter Landfrey)
The Youngbloods: Darkness, Darkness
Nelson Angelo & Joyce: Um Gosto De Fruta
Soft Cell: Youth (Memory Band Remix)
Elliott Smith: I Didn't Understand
Bayete: Free Angela
Patto: The Man
The Memory Band: Demon Days
Bon Iver: Skinny Love
Four Tet: She Moves She
Aphrodite's Child: Break
David Crosby: I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here
The Accidental: Wolves (Mighty Love Remix)
Gary Bartz: I've Known Rivers
Alice Coltrane: Sita Ram
John Martyn: Solid Air
Nadia Cattouse: Mr. Tambourine Man
Jim Sullivan: Rosey
The Memory Band: Blackwaterside
Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66: After Sunrise
Laura Nyro: Gibsom Street
The Memory Band: Come Wander With Me
Julie Driscoll & Brian Auger: I Know You Love Me Not
Liam Bailey: I Belong
Eddie Kendricks: People Hold On
Pharaoh Sanders: Japan
Talk Talk: The Rainbow
Robert Wyatt: Free Will And Testament
Ronnie Lane & Slim Chance: Roll On Babe
The Memory Band: By The Time It Gets Dark

I also did another one for the Slugrave Facebook group, which isn't so much laid-back as comatose. You can stream that one here. Tracklisting is...

Intro
Gigi Masin: Clouds
The Memory Band: Come Wander With Me (didn't realise I'd doubled this up with the other mix...)
Doves: Birds Flew Backwards (Chris Watson Remix)
War: Four Cornered Room
Barefoot Jerry: Friends
Hiss Golden Messenger: John Has Gone To The Light
Bob Welch: Future Games
Bob James: El Verano
Roy Buchanan: You're Not Alone

Enjoy.

“Music is the key to freedom” - a conversation with Jez Kerr.

2011-04-28T11:04:00.003+01:00

Jez Kerr is the bass guitarist and vocalist of A Certain Ratio, the band he formed in Manchester in 1977 with three friends - Simon Topping, Peter Terel and Martin Moscrop - who bonded over a shared love of Northern soul, Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, taking their name from a line in the Eno song A True Wheel. Their 1979 debut single All Night Party was one of the Factory label's earliest releases (FAC5, for the trainspotters), and they continued to put out records on the label for another ten years. Yet recent retellings of the Factory myth on screen and in print have seen ACR's place in it somewhat overshadowed (understandably perhaps) by the ill-fated and fractious tales of Joy Division or Happy Mondays. This isn't entirely fair, since in some respects they managed to embody the wilful, maverick spirit of the infamous Manchester indie just as well as either of those bands, perhaps even more so.

Originally without a drummer simply because they didn't know one, a chance meeting with Donald Johnson, a veteran of several local jazz-funk outfits, saw ACR move swiftly beyond their abrasive post-punk beginnings, the newly expanded configuration arguably inventing what became known as “punk-funk” with their celebrated cover of Banbarra's Shack Up. Their first American tour was marked by an epiphany involving latin percussion ensembles and the samba schools of New York City's Brazilian community, and the subsequent live shows upon their return to the UK were characterised by extended and often thrilling batucada-style percussion workouts, something less than warmly received by those who'd have preferred to see them stick to a rigid diet of cliched post-punk gloom. Their fourth album, I'd Like To See You Again, took even more of a creative hard-left from its predecessors, with the band exploring their Brazilian/latin jazz leanings further still, at times sounding closer to the likes of Azymuth than any of their Factory peers. Indeed, any of their peers at all.

In the face of widespread commercial and critical indifference, ACR doggedly continued in this direction until the late 80s when, as acid house swept the nation, they began to experiment with samplers, drum machines and sequencers. The collapse of Factory saw them briefly decamp to A&M, where they came perilously close to a bonafide hit single in 1990 with Won't Stop Loving You, featuring Kerr on lead vocal. A decade on Factory meant they were never entirely at ease with major labels and eventually both parties cut their losses, with ACR returning home to Manchester and the more familiar territory of Rob's Records, the label founded by the late Rob Gretton, manager of New Order and Joy Division. At the turn of the 21st century, the pendulum of fashion briefly swung back in the direction of their Factory-era material, with newer acts such as LCD Soundsystem citing it as a key influence, and the band licensed their back catalogue to respected London indie Soul Jazz in 2002 for a series of reissues.

Having settled some time ago around a core line-up of Kerr, Moscrop, Johnson, instrumentalists Tony Quigley and Liam Mullen, and ex-Primal Scream singer Denise Johnson (no relation), ACR are still active, albeit infrequently. However, Kerr is the only member who remains a full-time musician and now, somewhat unintentionally, finds himself embarking upon a solo career. A digital-only single, Play Something Fast, was released by Chester-based indie Higuera earlier this year, and another, Rip You Right Back, is out at the end of May, with his debut solo album (still untitled) due later this summer. The singles sound distinctly Mancunian; Kerr's vocals are gentle verging on tentative, the rhythmic drive of the songs is almost a throwback to early Joy Division, the guitars grind and mesh in a way that echoes the very earliest ACR records, yet everything manages to sound much brighter and more upbeat than the sum of its parts might suggest. In fact, “upbeat” is the ideal word to describe Kerr's mood when we meet at The Social on Little Portland Street one evening in late March. He's about to perform his first ever London solo show with a band that features ex-Fall drummer Simon Wolstonecroft, former Hacienda DJ Tintin on keyboards, and Keo Martin on guitar, and is sat outside the venue enjoying a smoke. After a quick round of introductions, we chat briefly about the predicament of the modern musician, specifically whether or not it's still possible to actually make any money from music. “You can't,” he responds with a wry smile. “In any case, money shouldn't be what drives you. Even though I've got a family to take care of nowadays, I still think making music should be about having fun”.

G&P: Your solo album sort of happened by accident, didn't it?

JK: Well, not by accident, no. I mean, I've had lots of tunes knocking around for a long time, not just ACR tunes, but other tunes.

But you didn't set out to make a solo album?

No, but I'd left my job at the Post Office and I had kids to provide for, and I can't do anything else. I'm a songwriter, and I thought the best way of getting my songs heard was to get a band together, because I like playing live. I'm really enjoying the stuff that the band's doing as well.

Didn't it partly come about as a result of a sound engineering course or something?

Yeah, I went back to college in 2002 to do a music technology course. I got a degree in music technology, and then I tried teaching. Didn't like that.

What was the problem there? Stroppy kids?

No, I just wasn't very good at it. There's a bit of an art to teaching, and I wasn't very patient. I was pretty stressed at the time as well, working part-time at the Post Office. I got out of it when I started doing music for adverts with a company called Gate Films in Manchester. I did an Alliance and Leicester ad that made me some money, and a few other things, but that started to dry up when advertising money got tight and agencies went back to using library music. Or not using me, anyway. So I decided to get another band together. Not that I wanted to leave ACR or anything, because we only played about five gigs last year anyway. We don't play that much. If someone asks us, and it's a nice venue and the money's decent, or it's abroad, then that makes it more enjoyable, and it keeps things fresh for us. We did a great gig in Italy last year. Beautiful venue.

You just play when you all feel like it?

Kind of. The other guys are all working, so it depends when we can all fit it in. But I'm not working, apart from writing songs, which is why I've got this together.

You've played with more or less the same group of musicians for as long as you've been a musician, haven't you?

Yeah, Martin Moscrop, Donald Johnson, Tony Quigley, Liam Mullen on keyboards and Denise Johnson. We've been together with this line-up for a long time now. I think some people must think we only get together because we can make a bit of money, but that's not true. We get together because we're a really good band, and it's as good now as it's ever been.

The music has held up in ways that a lot of similar stuff from that period hasn't, perhaps because you never really chased trends or anything.

Well, we were just concentrating on the music. We were very insular to begin with, which can be a bad thing, especially if you want to be entertaining as well. We probably took it maybe a bit too seriously but because we weren't technically brilliant, it gave us a unique sort of sound. If you do music with the right spirit, and you're trying your best, I think that shows through, no matter what you do or what kind of music you're making. It's more to do with the attitude you have towards making the music rather than what particular style of music it is. I think people recognise honesty and sincerity, and we always had that. We were never cynical about it. Some people might have thought we were, but we weren't.

I was always curious about how you ended up getting drawn towards the whole jazz thing that was going on in Manchester in the early 80s at clubs like Berlin, which is kind of one of the untold stories of Manchester clubland.

Well, we were listening to that kind of music anyway. In the early days we were reacting to punk, listening to Wire or Brian Eno. Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy was a big album for us, things like Kraftwerk, that sort of stuff. But we came from a Northern soul background as well. We all liked soul and funk, George Clinton, stuff like that. So we got a drummer who could play like that, and we went after things that inspired us. The jazz thing came about when we saw lots of samba bands in New York the first time we went over there. We saw all these drummers on stage, and we thought, yeah, that's for us. We liked Miles Davis too, which is where the trumpets came from. But when people hear the word “jazz”, they might think of Dave Brubeck or something, and if you're a musician, you can admire the skill in that, but we never really tried to make that kind of music. We were just trying things out a lot of the time.

It seemed to me that you were attempting to capture the atmosphere of it, rather than to get it spot-on.

We weren't copying Coltrane or Miles. We were just using those sounds in our own way. We were a bunch of Mancunians trying to play like Miles Davis, which in our case wouldn't normally work, but it actually can work if you play it with the right spirit.

What I thought a lot of people missed about ACR was that everything you did, no matter what it sounded like, was rooted in the punk ethos in some way.

Exactly, do it yourself. Try and be as good as Miles Davis, and even if you've no chance of being that good, you can still get through to people. When we started trying too hard, and we got a bit better, we actually started to think we were total shite. When you think you know what you're doing, maybe that's the time to give up. To me, it's about always being ready to learn something, and having a bit of humility as well, especially where music's concerned. Music's about communicating with people, and we used to find that a bit difficult. We were always getting called miserable. Being from the North-West, you don't always talk to people, you keep yourself to yourself a bit. But music's not about that, and it took us a long time to realise that, well, actually, people just want to enjoy themselves.

I never really understood the preoccupation with this “dour, serious Northerners” stereotype that a lot of people used to attach to the music Factory put out.

Well, we did take it seriously. We looked serious, we looked hard-faced.

But I think, as Northerners, you and I probably recognise that these things aren't always how they appear. The perception that the wider public had of that scene was largely dictated by the music press. It didn't have much to do with the reality of it.

Yeah, but it's totally different now. There's much more opinion out there, whereas back then there were three or four weekly music papers, and that was it. Same with the radio. You had John Peel and nothing else, so everyone focused on those things. They had a lot of influence, so whatever they said went, and people took that at face value a lot of the time. The way it should be is that you go and find out for yourself, but most people haven't got time to do that, which is why they pick up on other people's opinions. Unless you see or hear something for yourself, you end up relying on what someone else thinks of it. Direct experience can't be beaten.

Going back to that first US visit, would it be true to say that in many ways you came back to Britain a different band?

Well, because we'd seen all these percussion ensembles, we thought, let's go and buy loads of percussion instruments and incorporate it into what we're doing, so that's what we did. We had a few percussion bits anyway, but when we went out there, we had a flight case nicked. We thought it was nicked in New York, but it turned out it was nicked in Manchester, and it had all our percussion bits in it, as well as a load of effects pedals and stuff. So we ended up having to buy loads of equipment out there, just so we could do the tour. We went to New Jersey to a place called Latin Percussion, and spent $3000 of Tony Wilson's money on stuff we'd seen all these samba bands using. And when we came back here and started using it at our gigs, the people who were into the more industrial side of what we did just didn't understand it. They'd just walk out of the gigs, which was fine, y'know. When you're the age we were at the time – 18, 19, whatever – you're totally arrogant and convinced that the way you're going is the only way to go. Sometimes it takes a manager to make a band successful, and the thing about Tony was that he didn't give a shit about those things any more than we did. Nobody was taking care of business, really, but in the long run that wasn't such a bad thing. Sometimes if you make a bit of money, there's a tendency to start chasing after it, and you become restricted by the need to be making money all the time. We had no restrictions as far as the music was concerned, so I don't really regret anything like that.

There's been a few times when I've heard people talking about Factory who, through no fault of their own, won't have been around at the time, and they've described ACR as a “second-tier” Factory band, but I never saw it like that.

Well, that's because none of the bands were second-tier, that was what made Factory special. It comes back to what I said about direct experience. People who came to see us would have more of an idea of what we were about than the people who'd only read about us, partly because there was a lot of crap written about us.

But did you ever have any moments when you thought; “We made the wrong choice by sticking with Factory for so long”?

Yeah, when I can't feed my kids. When I can't put food on the table, that's when I feel like that. But that's just sour grapes, really. You can't change the way things are. You should try to be positive. Having a sour grapes attitude is the worst thing you can do in that situation, because you won't make good music if you're bitter.

How do you look back on your time with A&M?

We learnt a lot from it, and a lot of it was positive. It was an experience recording at places like Sarm West, and we met a lot of interesting people and saw how that side of the industry worked. It just didn't suit us. We also realised that you can end up spending a load of money without ever getting the results you want. That's just how it goes. There's no point crying about not “making it”. In any case, the things that end up appealing the most to people are the things you least expect to. It's totally arbitrary, especially in the music industry. If you get wound up about it, you'll end up being unhappy all your life. We probably spent about five years being unhappy, thinking we were great but not getting anywhere. But it's a very fickle industry, so you've got to decide what are the reasons why you're doing it.

And you've always been quite clear about what those reasons are?

Well, look, it's nice to make a bit of money and to make a living out of something you love. But it's very difficult to achieve that, and if you do achieve it, and you do make a bit of money, that's when the problems start. When you don't have the money, you don't find yourself in the position of having to make horrible decisions you don't want to make. It can turn you into a nastier person.

You start fighting over publishing splits and things like that.

Yeah, yeah. And we've gone through that, but we've been together so long now that, no matter what else happens, we've figured out that what we really enjoy most is just getting together and playing some top music. We lost our way at one point, when we started using Akais and whatever, so we've learnt that whether it makes money or not isn't so important. I think we've gone beyond the point of worrying about it too much.

Many bands who sign to majors quickly find themselves under pressure to get a hit single, and get forced into doing a cover. But the cover you did was Stevie Wonder's Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing, which was based on the Carmen McRae version they used to play at the Hacienda of a Saturday night...

Well, I wouldn't know that, but Donald would.

You've never heard that version? Not at all? I'm surprised.

No, I haven't. Who's it by, Carmen McRae? I'll check it out on YouTube. I never liked doing it, to tell you the truth. I was always into the heavier stuff. But because I love the band, I did it. That's the great thing about ACR; we've all got different attitudes, and we're always having arguments, but we're still together. We're not the Grateful Dead or anything, we never lived in the same house. We're not actually that close, but we still love each other. Me and Pete [Terel, former guitarist] were close. We shared a place for a bit, Martin and Tony shared a place for a while as well, but generally we don't see each other socially unless we're getting together to play, which I think is pretty unique as far as bands go. We walk into the room and, because we've been doing it for so long, we know that whatever we play's going to be good, and that is a beautiful thing to have, and it takes time to develop. You don't build it over just a few years.

Which brings us back to jazz in a way; how you don't start out being a great musician. It's through the process of continually working at it and refining it that you become one.

To me, being a jazz musician is about expressing yourself through your instrument, and about your playing reflecting your personality. And if you can do that as a collective, fantastic. It's the key to freedom. Because once you start playing, all the shit in your life goes out the window. All that shit with your job or your missus or your kids or your mates, everything – when you're playing that music, it's gone. I mean, when you're 18 you're just doing what you're doing. You probably don't even know why you're doing it – to get girls or something. But we were always interested in sound. Martin Hannett taught us about that - the love of sound, trying to find a sound nobody had heard before, or even just turning an amp right up and making a noise. Just the love of music generally. A bit like that film School Of Rock. I love that movie.

Speaking of films, I wanted to talk about David Lynch for a minute, because there's a bit of dialogue from Inland Empire on the album. Any particular reason for that?

I just think it's a fantastic movie, one of my favourites. Not necessarily to go and see at the cinema, although I did see it at the cinema – all three hours of it. A bit too long. But on DVD, it's fantastic. Eraserhead was a big film for ACR. I remember when we started out, it was on at the Arden, this great old cinema in Hulme, and we went to see it about four or five times. It had a really big influence on us – the soundtrack, the visuals, everything. We connected with it totally.

To end on a completely different note, something that most people won't know about you is that you used to play football for Manchester United.

I did, yeah. I was recently in the Man United magazine, the February 2011 edition with Ryan Giggs on the cover. There's an article about me on the inside back page. My uncle was Eddie Thomas, who used to play for Everton in the 50s and 60s, and went on to play for Derby County under Brian Clough. He was a good footballer, an inside forward. I played for United from the age of 11. I signed schoolboy forms at 15 in Matt Busby's office, then went back to school to do my A-Levels, but when I was 17 I broke my ankle. I broke it three times in two years, and that was that. I was a ball-boy at United for a while, and there's a famous goal that George Best scored against Sheffield United in 1971. It's one of those they always show on TV, and I'm stood behind the goal when it goes in. It's on YouTube. I posted it on my Facebook page a while ago.

We Live In Berlin, Baby (number one in an occasional series) – Raphael Saadiq, Postbahnhof, 25/04/11

2011-04-26T12:57:00.002+01:00

It seems a bit churlish to tag Raphael Saadiq as “the retro guy” just because he's taken to wearing David Ruffin specs and windowpane-check slacks for work. After all, right from the jump he's indicated a strong attachment to black music's core values, or at least a particular set of them; his former band Tony Toni Tone! announced themselves to the world with Little Walter, a song built around the much-adapted gospel warhorse Wade In The Water, and a later hit, Oakland Stroke, paid tribute to the Bay Area funk bands of Saadiq's youth like Tower Of Power. In other words, the lad's got form. It's only recently, however, that his retro leanings have morphed into full-blown pastiche, with 2008's The Way I See It album abandoning the kaleidoscopic neo-soul of his earlier, Grammy-winning Instant Vintage (see the pattern here?) in favour of a beautifully-woven tapestry of fauxtown and throwback soul. Furthermore, it's something he's undeniably very good at. So good, in fact, that it's quite some time into his energetic and entertaining live show before you spot the flaw in his plan. But I'll come back to that in a bit.

On the evening in question, Saadiq is playing the Postbahnhof which, as the name might suggest, is a former railway station on Berlin's east side which has been converted into an arts centre/club/live music venue (post-Ostbahnhof, y'see), across the road from the newer, still gleaming and shiny Ostbahnhof. It's very easy to tell when you're in the old East; the streets are all named after dead revolutionaries (Postbahnhof is on Strasse der Pariser Komune), and everywhere you look there are clear echoes of the Honecker years in the architecture, even though many of the tower blocks have since been done out in a variety of pastel shades in an attempt to take the edge off their innate cold-war brutalism. The venue itself is functional and unspectacular, but not unpleasant. Imagine something like a large-ish student union, bigger than the main room at Cargo, but smaller than the Garage on Highbury Corner. Even though tickets were still available at opening time, Saadiq had no trouble filling the place, and the make-up of the audience said quite a bit about the broader constituency he seems to reach in this part of Europe. Catch him at somewhere like the Jazz Cafe in London, for example, and you might expect to find yourself amongst a mixture of ageing soulboys and thirty-something black couples, mixed with a smattering of Dingwalls refugees and Gilles Peterson acolytes. Here, however, a surprisingly diverse crowd ranged from the Adidas-clad jugend you see all over the city to couples in their late 40s/early 50s – all, one presumes, attracted to the ethos of authenticity for which Saadiq flies the flag, and seemingly untroubled by the fact he makes new music which actually works incredibly hard at sounding old.

Certainly, when it comes to pastiche Saadiq makes the likes of Mark Ronson seem like rank amateurs, approaching the job with an almost forensic precision. It must be said, though, that the skilfully replicated Benny Benjamin smack of the show's opener Staying In Love or the vintage Sly Stone chug of Heart Attack are as much evidence of Saadiq's obvious love for the material he's referencing as they are of any muso obsessiveness over the way it's constructed. Incidentally, while we're on the subject of muso values, even when you take into account the size of the venue and any consequent scaling-down of the production it's still worth noting how unusual it is nowadays to see an r&b show where all the energy is generated by the musicians onstage. Apart from the odd exception like Mary J. Blige, who can dominate a stage in ways that would shame performers half her age, we've become used to the obligatory phalanx of dancers, retina-scouring pyro effects or other smoke-and-mirrors trickery being employed to mask any number of shortcomings. Not here, though. Ostensibly touring to promote his forthcoming album Stone Rollin', Saadiq makes for a charming and engaging visual focus throughout, bounding around the stage and occasionally strapping on a Telecaster to beef up the rhythm section. In fact, apart from the odd breather where he allows his backing vocalists to step forward, such as on the Leroy Hutsonesque Never Give You Up, he's out there and grafting for the whole ninety minutes. But I mentioned a flaw earlier, and it's this; often the material isn't quite strong enough. For example, good as it is, there's something absent from the musical DNA of Love That Girl which might prevent you from remembering that its base element, The Impressions' Woman's Got Soul, is much the better song. It's as if so much effort has been poured into making his recent material sound just so that Saadiq seems to have left no energy in reserve to come up with enough killer hooks to push it beyond a mere exercise in retro.

It isn't as if he can't write great hooks either – somewhat tellingly, two of the biggest cheers of the night were for the more contemporaneous Don't Mess With My Man (sung by female b.v'er Moné) and Dance Tonight, both hits for Lucy Pearl, the ill-fated “r&b supergroup” from the early noughties, in which Saadiq was partnered by A Tribe Called Quest's Ali-Shaheed Muhammad and ex-En Vogue singer Dawn Robinson. It's at this point that the already high energy level in the room takes a huge leap, and Saadiq is a skilful enough showman to sustain that energy and ride it through to the end of the show, where the Philly-inspired Get Involved switches effortlessly into the set's closer, the glorious widescreen cosmic r&b of Skyy (Can You Hear Me?). By then, he's got the crowd in the bag, and even the band's brief fusion-y detour into “Morris Day and the (Tony Williams' Life)Time” territory doesn't dampen the vigourous and genuine demands for an encore. Saadiq duly obliges, whilst driving home the undeniable point that, even if he doesn't always deliver quite so emphatically on record, he's the very definition of a sure shot live.

Wir sind offen

2011-04-26T12:48:00.003+01:00

Hello. I've recently moved to Berlin, which doesn't completely explain the lack of activity, although it's nonetheless partly responsible for it. I was going to document the Berlin thing elsewhere, but that was a bit of a nine-day wonder. I'm going to try and resume normal business here from now on.

Closed for refurbishment.

2011-01-01T16:39:00.000Z

Back soon.

Something to listen to

2010-11-23T08:55:00.001Z

I haven't done one of these for quite some time.

80 minutes' worth of tunes old and new (ish), mostly with a somewhat melancholy vibe, to complement the long, cold evenings as we head towards winter. Enjoy.

Ennio Morricone - Cosi' Come Sei (Postludio d'amore)
Cousteau - The Last Good Day Of The Year
Corinne Bailey Rae - Are You Here
Dungen - Vara Snabb
The Durutti Column - Madeleine
Grizzly Bear feat. Michael McDonald - While You Wait For The Others
Emmylou Harris - Till I Gain Control Again
Mark Capanni - I Believe In Miracles
Player - Baby Come Back
DJ Shadow - I've Been Trying
Jim Sullivan - Rosey
The Grateful Dead - Dark Star (7" version)
The National Gallery - Diana In The Autumn Wind
The Paradise - In Love With You
Duran Duran - The Chauffeur
The Bees - Winter Rose
The Coral - 1000 Years
The Youngbloods - Darkness, Darkness
Lee Moses - California Dreamin'

Laissez les Bonjay rouler

2010-10-26T02:51:00.004+01:00

Bonjay photographed by Laurie Kang

In the normal order of things, I'd avoid making wild proclamations of the Next Big Thing variety altogether, much less be making them before October is done and dusted. But on this occasion, I'm going to stick my neck out (and I don't think I'm taking a huge risk here) by declaring that Bonjay are going to be one of the acts of 2011.

The Toronto duo of vocalist Alanna Stuart and producer/programmer/beatsmith Ian Swain (a/k/a DJ Pho) first turned up on my radar about four and a half years ago, when their superb electro-dancehall refix of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Maps began to get some blog love. At a time when there seemed to be an irritating trend amongst indie bands towards things like the slightly-too-pleased-with-itself ironic rap/r&b cover, Bonjay flipped it nicely and took the concept in a more original direction, but one that at the same time placed them firmly in the well-established Jamaican tradition of versioning pop, country or MOR hits - think Jimmy Cliff's Wild World, John Holt's Help Me Make It Through The Night or Ken Boothe's Everything I Own. They took it a step further a year or so later with their stunning take on TV On The Radio's Staring At The Sun; Alanna's vocal riding a speaker-punishing fidget-house riddim, punctuated by electronic whoops and growls flying all over the shop and a bottom-end that removed the option of standing still altogether. By this point, I'd begun to play games of Fantasy A&R in my mind and had already made Bonjay my first signing.

They continued to come correct with the covers, versioning Feist's Honey Honey on Emvee's UK funky bruiser Glitch Dub, and in late 2009 they dropped their first original material in the shape of the Gimmee Gimmee EP - the title track being more of their trademark mutant dancehall with Alanna channelling T-Boz, Tanya Stephens and Missy Elliott over Pho's twitching thump-and-clatter beats, while the non-EP cut Faat Gyal showcased their ability to switch effortlessly from bit-crunching intergalactic ragga to a sneaky hoist of the classic Primo beat from Paula Perry's Extra Extra. They've now gone four-for-four with the Broughtupsy EP, six original tunes that smartly distil everything they've developed over the last few years into an exhilarating blast - Alanna's assured, powerful, yet playful vocals, Pho's back-a-yard via the Mos Eisley Spaceport riddims, and a shared belief that the bottom-knocker rules all things. In a country like the UK, where the nurturing of hybrid mongrel fusions of bass music's many variants is now as natural as drawing breath, there should be a ready-made audience for an act so consistently capable of bringing something fresh with them every time they return to the table.

I have it on good authority that Pho and Alanna are to finally begin work on their debut album next year, and may even return to the UK for a few dates. I can just as easily see them going down a bomb with a festival audience next summer as turning out some dingy sweatbox in East London or wherever. Bonjay are the very definition of now, and they're only going to get better.

Download Stumble from Broughtupsy here.

Whatchoo talkin' bout? Willis.

2010-09-02T10:49:00.004+01:00

It's been seven long years since Hayley Willis released her excellent debut album, Come Get Some, on 679, but the largely positive reviews it received weren't enough to prevent it sinking without trace. Nevertheless, I liked it a lot, and the two mesmerising live shows I saw in 2004, at the ICA and the late, lamented Spitz (both in London), had me desperately hoping she wouldn't become yet another casualty of widespread public indifference. But other than her inspired cover of Cameo's Word Up memorably featuring in an episode of CSI, and a one-shot self-released 7", Get In The Ring, about five years ago, there's been nothing since. Until now.

If you click here, you can preview her new album, Uncle Treacle, which is out later this month. It's already one of the best I've heard this year - raw-boned, spooked-out country/blues/folk, with a version of Dolly Parton's 9 To 5 that strips away all the Cosmo perkiness of the original, making it far easier for anyone actually familiar with the drudgery of working life to relate to. It's quite magnificent.

Nowadays, it's possible to throw a stone over your shoulder and hit half a dozen self-consciously "rootsy" female singer-songwriters straight from central casting. I doubt too many of them would have been as good as Willis back in 2003 and, on the evidence of this, I don't imagine much will have changed seven years on.

Remembering a true English eccentric - Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010)

2010-04-09T12:43:00.009+01:00

A journalist acquaintance of mine has a fascinating story about Malcolm McLaren, who died yesterday aged 64, and one which sums up the spirit of the man beautifully. It took place at the offices of hotshot advertising agency Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury, who were responsible for the Tango ads. The agency had decided to host a series of "provocative cultural talks" by "off-beat thinkers", and Malcolm McLaren had been called upon to give the inaugural lecture. To a huge room full of ad types and journalists (of whom my acquaintance was one), he proceeded to give a very detailed and convincing argument which asserted that anyone working in the modern media industry today was using ideas, methods, images and techniques first developed by Dr. Josef Goebbels, and that they were all inheritors of the Nazi legacy. Everyone filed out in silence, and no further talks were organised

My own personal interaction with Malcolm McLaren is limited to a couple of occasions. The only time I ever met him personally was in a club just off Kensington High Street in West London during the 90s. Nobody seemed quite sure why he was there that night but, as this particular club was enjoying a brief spell as one of the place-to-be places, he was probably there just to see if there was anything noteworthy going on. I recall him being surrounded by a number of rather attractive young women, and he was wearing a well-cut, expensive-looking cream suit. Not wishing to cramp the man's style, I waited until his retinue had briefly thinned out before approaching him. I offered my hand and, in my somewhat refreshed state, thanked him for the profound and lasting effect he'd had upon my life. He looked at me disdainfully, as if to say, "Are you taking the piss?", but nonetheless shook my hand and said, "Well...thank you, I suppose". And that was that.

Several years later, our paths crossed once more. By then, I was working for a major music publisher who'd just done a deal with Malcolm to administer his catalogue. He was based in Paris, where he'd lived for some years with his partner/assistant Young Kim. At this point in what had already been a vividly colourful life, he was flitting between there and China, where he was cultivating a female Chinese punk band called the Wild Strawberries and talking up another of his discoveries, "chip music" or "8-bit punk" - low-tech DIY electro-pop built on sounds from old video games. Neither of these adventures bore much by way of fruit. But on this particular morning I'd been assigned the task of navigating the labyrinthine copyright nightmare that was Malcolm McLaren's music publishing interests, and I knew it was going to be difficult enough without the worry of whether or not I'd be able to maintain the appropriate degree of professional detachment. I called the Paris number I'd been given and, to my surprise, Malcolm himself answered. I said hello, explained who I was and why I was calling, and asked him where he thought would be the best place to begin the job of straightening everything out. "Weeeellll...", he began, "Many, many years ago, I used to run a boutique in the King's Road with a lady called Vivienne Westwood, who I was going out with at the time..." He was off. I sat there, grinning to myself and barely able to get a word in edgewise for almost half an hour, while Malcolm McLaren recounted the last thirty years of his life in very precise detail. He'd obviously grown used to dealing with people who didn't really know an awful lot about who he was or what he'd done, but I wasn't one of those people. At any point, I could have interrupted him and said, look, Malcolm, I know all this - I bought Anarchy In The UK the week it came out, I saw Bow Wow Wow in their Your Cassette Pet days, I taught myself how to mix using two copies of Buffalo Gals and, trust me, I am more than aware of your vast cultural significance as regards the development of punk and hip-hop. But we really need to talk business here...

Of course, I didn't. Fucking hell, why on Earth would I? One of the key catalysts of 20th century popular culture was talking to me, telling me his story. And Malcolm loved to tell a story, just as he loved the opportunity to place himself at the centre of it, even if the truth of the matter was often somewhat different. But I'll leave those sort of testimonies to the people best qualified to make them. When I think of Malcolm McLaren, I'll remember someone who brought ideas back to the centre of pop music, even if he'd cribbed many of those ideas from others. I'll remember an iconoclastic prankster who cut holes in the fences of art, culture, thought and politics that enabled millions of people to gain access to worlds they may otherwise never have even imagined. I'll remember the avuncular, yet charismatic raconteur with whom I was briefly on first-name terms. I'll remember the mischievous Svengali who was a landmark figure in that great and enduring tradition of provocative, manipulative, larger-than-life pop managers, alongside Larry Parnes, Andrew Loog Oldham, Simon Napier-Bell, Peter Grant, and many others. I'll remember a true English eccentric who revelled in the many things, big and small, that made (and continue to make) this country such a unique and vibrant place to live, work and create, and who never shied from offering a symbolic fuck-you to those people who still try to stifle and contain the wild, romantic, almost Pagan spirit at its heart. I'll remember someone whose work and ideas had a profound and lasting effect upon my life. And for that, Mr. McLaren, well...thank you, I suppose.

Erykah Badu puts it out there. All of it.

2010-03-30T12:33:00.004+01:00

At 3.33am last Saturday morning, Erykah Badu premiered the video for her new single Window Seat on her official website, and her new album New Amerykah Part Two (Return Of The Ankh) is released in the US today. UMG has been pulling the video off a few sites, including YouTube, but the clip's viewable on Badu's website as well.

Without an enormous amount of fuss, Erykah Badu has spent much of the last decade planting her flag squarely in the centre of that piece of turf - left-of-centre, post-hip-hop, black female singer/songwriter - that previously appeared to have been Lauryn Hill's to call her own. She still gets bracketed in with that whole neo-soul, coffee shop, headwraps-and-incense clique that emerged in the mid-90s, usually by people who don't realise she's made five albums since breaking through with On And On and the subsequent Baduizm album, but she's gone in a much more interesting direction since then.

The video was shot hit-and-run style and sans permit on St. Patrick's Day in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, TX, the site of John F. Kennedy's assassination. One camera, one take, then run before the cops turn up (you see her feeding the meter at the start because she knew she'd have to come back for the car later). Badu has described the shoot as being simultaneously terrifying and liberating, and although the symbolism may perhaps be a little heavy-handed - if you expose yourself as an artist, you risk being shot down - it's still a pretty daring thing to do whichever way you slice it. Almost immediately, she was criticised for supposedly indulging in the kind of thing that she herself has previously criticised others for (the whole "half-naked video chick" yada-yada) whilst trying to dress it up as some kind of guerilla performance art exercise. Personally, I don't think that argument is even remotely capable of standing up, and I'm sure she's perfectly well aware that most of the talk surrounding the video will deal with the fact she gets her kit off at the end. But come on now - this isn't Lil' Kim's Crush On You. It's not even Alanis Morrisette's Thank You. Erykah is not auditioning for Girls Gone Wild here. And even though the concept of the artist being attacked for daring to express him/herself can seem a bit whiney and self-indulgent in the hands of some, Badu has been on the dirty end of such attacks often enough for her to have an issue or two with the groupthink mentality she criticises at the end of the video. There have been plenty of instances in the past where she's been vilified as a kind of hip-hop Yoko Ono/succubus figure, supposedly emasculating rappers like Common or Andre 3000 and leading them astray (whatever that means), or for dressing herself in pseudo-mystic boho/earth mother/numerology rags early on in her career. Nevertheless, she continues to push the boat out.

Not that there's any connection between the two things other than the one in my mind, compare and contrast with Lady Gaga's Telephone video. Coincidentally, here's another female artist courting controversy, who's not afraid of using the pop video format for something more than the purpose of just selling records. But entertaining as Telephone is, it's unclear what point, if any, Gaga is trying to make other than cramming together a succession of images each more bizarre and surreal than the preceding one. The most obvious conclusion to arrive at is that Telephone is just a well-executed 80s throwback, paying lavish homage to the days of high-concept mini-movies like Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bad videos or Madonna's Like A Prayer. On the other hand, with Window Seat, Badu is almost literally out there on her own, and is arguably taking a far bigger risk in playing around with iconography that continues to have a lot of potency and resonance as far as the American psyche is concerned. It resonates that little bit more when you consider it (unintentionally) arrives only days after those nimrods occupying the furthest lunatic fringe of the American right began to vocalise their belief that the correct response to Barack Obama's attempt at healthcare reform was to assassinate him before they woke up to find a gulag in every town.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. Maybe it's because I've grown used to pop stars who aren't interested in giving their audiences anything to think about which doesn't relate to the mythology they create for themselves and expect us to buy into.

Alexander McQueen and the rise of Shania Twain journalism

2010-02-13T03:02:00.010Z

I don't know an awful lot about fashion, but I do know that anybody who's ever pulled on a pair of jeans for anything other than the purpose of manual labour is implicitly acknowledging certain things whether they like it or not. There's some proper "no shit, Sherlock" stuff coming up next, but please bear with me. Firstly, they are acknowledging that clothes can be more than just clothes in the most basic functional sense, and the things we wear make very specific statements about us, both as individuals and as a culture. By extension therefore, the people who create or model the stuff we end up wearing can be said to have a tangible influence upon society on all manner of levels. It may not be the most important, or even positive, of influences, but it's undeniably a significant one. You can find all the proof of this you'll ever need if you hang around the Oxford Street branch of Top Shop on any given Saturday. According to a friend of mine who works in the fashion business, it was well-known that Alexander McQueen, who was found dead on Thursday, had endured a grim few years on a personal level but, specifics aside, her view (and that of many others) was that the world of fashion had lost one of its brightest and most inspirational stars. She described him as "a genius in the vein of Yves Saint-Laurent; dark and troubled, but a romantic capable of great beauty". During Massive Attack's London gig later that evening, 3D dedicated Unfinished Sympathy to McQueen, similarly praising him as "an absolute genius".

Some people seem to have bristled at the use of this word in such a context, most notably Toby Young on the Hurleygraph's blog the following day. Rather like the once-omnipresent Canadian pop-country singer mentioned in the title above, Young wasted little time in declaring that the idea of McQueen being a 'genius' certainly didn't impress him much. Disguising his observations as an insight into the shallow world of the fashionista, he proceeded to beast McQueen over the course of a few hundred words. At the point he must have actually filed this tripe - the condensed version being "I met McQueen a few times and didn't like him", coupled with "the world of fashion is superficial" - McQueen probably hadn't even been dead 24 hours.

We see a lot of this sort of thing nowadays (thanks, Internet, but really, you needn't have), and here's how it usually goes. Person of note dies, people whose lives were in some way affected by dead person's work or life express sadness and grief on one hand, mad race to be first at letting the world know how unimpressed they are on the other. "Why all the fuss? He/she was just a pop singer/actor/fashion designer, and hardly a genius". As if only an Einstein could be such a thing and that it's unthinkable someone could be, within their very specific field of endeavour, a genius. In fact, this is more or less Young's opening point - Alexander McQueen? He just made frocks. Oscar Wilde and Jimi Hendrix? Now there's genius! Whilst I wouldn't argue with the latter point, you can always find someone, especially nowadays, who'll take against a well-established consensus for shits and giggles or, in some cases, with absolute sincerity. Such as the person who once insisted to me that Hendrix was simply an over-rated hack blues player, and that the Stone Roses' John Squire was by far the better guitarist. I swear to God.

It seems contrarianism is good for business, though, and in these straitened times people will do whatever it takes to get that money. Someone recently described the practitioners of this strain of lazy, bear-baiting, 'Shania Twain journalism' as "trollumnists", which I suppose is close enough for jazz. To me, it's just further depressing evidence of the general coarsening of public debate we find ourselves faced with; "freedom of speech" or "speaking one's mind" becomes the default justification for anyone in the business of spouting poorly-informed, insensitive, boorish crap. Elsewhere, in the Stygian depths of the comments sections, there's a bloody great hole through which anachronistic concepts like "common courtesy" are slowly draining away, while the malignant, paranoid ravings of what used to be known as The Silent Majority are cheerfully validated by a procession of lionhearted souls who supposedly speak truth to power but who are actually, for the most part, idiots. So, take a bow, Rod Liddle, Jeremy Clarkson, Melanie Phillips, Julie Burchill, Jan Moir, Kelvin Mackenzie, Richard Littlejohn, etc., etc. You've all done very well. By the way, meet Toby.

You could argue, I suppose, that Young is merely shining a light on a world overly preoccupied with the transient and the trivial and calling for a little perspective in the process. If you were being extremely polite, that is. But how polite would you want to be towards someone whose familiarity with his subject extends little further than having been rubbed up the wrong way by him and his retinue at a few photo shoots many years ago, yet remains sufficiently slighted that he'd apparently use the guy's death as an opportunity to exact some kind of revenge? Throw in a handful of cliches as applicable to the rag trade as the world of haute couture, add a few back-handed compliments about McQueen's "creative flair" (but no real talent, eh, Toby? Just "prima donna-ish...force of personality"), and hit "send". Someone on Young's Twitter feed complimented him for his "courageous and funny" piece. If we're living in a world where sticking the boot in on the freshly dead can be described as "courageous and funny", then we're fucking doomed.

Nice as it is to be paid for having an opinion, I would hope there could still be some value placed upon holding your tongue once in a while. Especially when the person on whom you're offering your "verdict" has, literally, just died. But if you really feel you must be heard, then why not ask yourself a few questions first? Y'know, questions such as, "Is this person a mass-murderer, or a despot who's brought misery and hardship to millions?". How about, "Did this person, through his or her work as a pop singer or a fashion designer, contribute in some way to the gaiety of nations?". Once you've done that, you might want to do everyone a favour and consider this perennial of maternal wisdom - if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

One Time For The Rebel, or; why you need some Son Of Bazerk in your life

2010-02-05T13:42:00.003Z

Every year or so, I’ll dig out Son Of Bazerk’s one and only release, Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk, and usually I’ll end up playing nothing else for about a week. It's not super-obscure or anything – after all, it came out via a major label and, although long-deleted, you can still find second-hand copies on Amazon here and in the US. Nevertheless, I do feel it’s massively under-appreciated, despite loads of people being up on it and waving the flag for how good a record it is. One of its most committed champions is Questlove of The Roots. Questo has, on several occasions, declared it to be one of his favourite albums of all time, placing it “next to Pet Sounds, Nation Of Millions, 1999, Here My Dear” and the similarly neglected debut album by Son Of Bazerk’s labelmates, The Young Black Teenagers who, some of you may recall, were neither black nor teenagers (that Chuck D – what a kidder, eh?). I wish I knew what happened to my copy of that one…

Son Of Bazerk featuring No Self Control and The Band (to give them their full, unexpurgated handle) grew out of a Long Island rap crew called The Townhouse 3, who were managed by Sugar Bear of Don’t Scandalize Mine fame. One of the crew, T.A. (Tony Allen), became tight with the emcee for Spectrum City, a local soundsystem who also did a radio show on WBAU, the campus station for Adelphi College in Hempstead. Spectrum City eventually became Public Enemy, their emcee Chuck D staying in touch with Allen, and when PE founded their short-lived S.O.U.L. imprint with MCA, Allen (now christened Son Of Bazerk) was one of the first signings. Joined by The Almighty Jahwell, Sandman, Daddy Rawe and Cassandra a/k/a MC Halfpint (collectively No Self Control) and a DJ, The Band, they got stuck into their first album with The Bomb Squad producing (Incidentally, in an epic rap nerd fail, I only recently learned that the enigmatic Carl Ryder, the Bomb Squad member who never gave interviews and was never photographed, was a pseudonym for Chuck D). Anyway, as I remember it, the concept behind SOB was something akin to Public Enemy through a James Brown Live At The Apollo/old-school soul revue filter, with the emphasis on cross-genre hyperactivity rather than the black radicalism which PE had brought to the forefront of rap at the time. Not that the militancy had been toned down all that much, mind you – Allen’s lyrics are still pretty forthright, and only a little less hard-hitting and tightly-focused than those of his mentor.

Generally, though, the main reason Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk is held in such high regard by those familiar with it is because of the production. Alongside the aforementioned YBT album and Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, it’s probably the zenith of the mid-period Bomb Squad sound, still chaotic, but not quite so densely-layered as the first couple of Public Enemy albums. Yet in spite of how it crams so many styles - hip-hop, funk, metal, blues, dancehall, soul, electro, hardcore and so on - into one record, sometimes even one song, it's still probably one of the funkiest and, idiomatically speaking, blackest-sounding records the Bomb Squad ever made. Listening to it now, it also sounds like a last, glorious hurrah for the era of “fuck it, we’ll sample anything” Wild West recklessness within the realm of hip-hop production, before Grand Upright Music Ltd v. Warner Bros Records, Inc. finally brought the shutters down on the copyright free-for-all that had become a hallmark of rap’s so-called Golden Age. I’m usually lairy of the rose-tinted nostalgia through which many rap fans of my generation (more or less) attempt to make sense of the music’s past, but all the same, I do miss the days when it was all still relatively new and underground, all bets were off, notions of what hip-hop was or wasn’t hadn’t yet been set in stone, and the whole thing wasn’t being sold to you as another lifestyle option by the same people who’d have held it at arm’s length a decade earlier. Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk kind of reminds me of that time. It’s certainly not the kind of record that could be made now, and while it’s perhaps fair to say that a record like this oughtn’t to be made now, it wouldn’t do any harm for someone to try and match it for ambition.

Obviously Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk barely sold a tap when it came out, and with hindsight that probably had as much to do with the way in which hip-hop was beginning to change as it did with how awkward it might have been to market an act like Son Of Bazerk, who didn't much look or sound like whatever else was out there. In 1991 the majors hadn’t yet figured out whether or not they could make money out of gangsta rap, and were thus more likely to get behind the next NWA than the pre-existing SOB. As it turns out, there was a second Son Of Bazerk album recorded in 1994 that was never released. MC Halfpint (now a schoolteacher) has a YouTube channel under the name ‘rebelsista’, and she’s posted up a few tracks from it. It’s decent stuff, too. The production – upright bass samples and Power Of Zeus boom-bappin’ drums – leans more toward that mid-90s T-Ray/Lord Finesse/DITC sound, but there are still a few Bomb Squad-ish touches, although I’ve no idea if they were involved. The most heartening thing about it, though, is that it still sounds like Son Of Bazerk, which proves that it wasn’t all the work of The Bomb Squad. Tough as it must be to impose your personality upon career-best beats by one of the greatest production teams in hip-hop history, SOB managed it, and made a hugely enjoyable record in the process.

For those of you who like happy endings, I’ve discovered whilst writing this that SOB have reunited and are working on new material with PE’s Johnny Juice Rosado producing.

“Five, ten, fif-teen, twenny, twenny-five, thir-teeee...”

Is the ''one rapper/one producer'' hip-hop album on its way back?

2010-02-02T15:50:00.003Z

Late last year, amongst the numerous attempts to summarise the decade before it ran out of road, one piece by Simon Reynolds on the Guardian’s music blog seemed to generate quite a bit of ire, as was perhaps to be expected of something decorated with the headline “When will hip-hop hurry up and die?” Echoing an earlier article in The New Yorker by Sasha Frere-Jones, Reynolds snottily attempted to wave away almost the entire decade, largely on the grounds that hip-hop had, in his eyes, floundered in its duty to pursue The New as an end in itself. Why he then flagged J-Kwon’s Tipsy – a Sainsbury’s Basics hip-pop knock-off of Grindin’ by The Clipse – as one of the decade’s high-water marks is all a matter of taste, I suppose, but it’s still a funny way to try and make an argument in favour of “more surprises…in terms of sound and style”.

In a later column, Reynolds went on to suggest that the widespread critical praise for Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Pt II (Time magazine called it the rap album of 2009) was somehow further evidence of the backward-facing creative stasis afflicting the music. Since the slender possibility of Reynolds paying much attention to anything rap-related this year is only likely to be matched by the increasing irrelevance of his disconnected musings, I'll say no more about him. The obsession some people have with The New above all else can be a bit tiresome, rather like the insistence that music should be “challenging”, “difficult” or “confrontational”. Personally, I’m happy enough for it just to be good, and to sound as though a bit of love and consideration has gone into it. If it also happens to sound like nothing I’ve ever heard before in my life, then so much the better, but that’s hardly a deal-breaker. After all, there’s a lot to be said for making sure you’ve got the fundamentals right, and three forthcoming rap releases suggest that, in some quarters, the creative focus could be returning to those very things.

A year or so ago, writing about Jake One’s album White Van Music, I hinted that a full-length collaboration with Freeway could be in the offing. Well, it’s finally here. The Stimulus Package is released in the US by Rhymesayers Entertainment two weeks from today (in an incredibly lavish package by Brent Rollins of Ego Trip fame/notoriety) and the pair’s buckshee mixtape from late last year, The Beat Made Me Do It, is still floating around as well. The latter is a good, solid listen – proper meat-and-potatoes rhyming over a grip of sample-heavy 80s r&b-flavoured beats, not too far removed from the boogie/modern soul flavour of Jake’s excellent A-R Music mixtape from a few years back. Whether or not The Stimulus Package follows a similar direction remains to be seen, but early reports are all positive. In any event, it appears Free has managed to put all that messy Roc/State Property business behind him and has adopted a Stakhanovite work ethic that’s resulted in some great music, especially over the last year or so. However, the anticipation this time around lies in hearing one great rapper vibing off one great producer, a combo that’s become increasingly rare in hip-hop. The age of guest-list rap albums with a multitude of names behind both the board and the mic may have helped disguise the comparative absence of strong, compelling personalities in hip-hop nowadays, but it’s also resulted in artist albums sounding like mixtapes, often lacking a clear or cohesive musical direction. How much this has to do with a shift in emphasis back towards rap’s roots as a singles-driven medium is anyone’s guess, but the way I see it is this; if you’re going to make an album, then make it sound like an album – something that can be listened to from end-to-end. Amidst the perpetual debate over whether old-school musical values are something to be cherished and maintained within hip-hop, or whether it’s all about looking forward and on-to-the-next-one, it’s easy to forget that the former approach resulted in some genuine classics, and there’s no real reason to believe it couldn’t do so again.

You get the feeling David Banner would agree. His forthcoming album, Death Of A Pop Star, also adopts the “one rapper/one producer” method, although it might surprise some people to learn that the Mississippi maverick (no mug as a producer himself) has stepped back from the board and brought in 9th Wonder to take care of the beats. Needless to say, this has resulted in some outrage amongst the hair-shirted “four elements” Taliban for whom 9th is something of a hero, one commenter on Nah Right even suggesting that the collaboration “might be the worst idea in music history”. Amusing as it is to observe the reaction when it dawns on a certain strain of rap fan that their heroes don’t necessarily share the same tastes as them, collaborations between performers with seemingly little in common are still fairly unusual. That said, from Crooked Lettaz onwards, Banner’s never been afraid to make room for thoughtful lyricism and musical diversity alongside “throw dem bows” raucousness, so perhaps this isn’t as awkward a fit as some are suggesting. Death Of A Pop Star’s broader concept is somewhat vague at this point, but for anybody seeking clues, Banner can be found most days enthusiastically talking up the project on his Twitter feed. There are also a couple of teaser/trailer-type things on YouTube, one of which (see above) shows the two of them, dressed buppie-style, playing chess in the library of some country pile. It looks a bit Ron Burgundy – “I have many leather-bound books, and my apartment smells of rich mahogany” – and a teeny bit pretentious, but at least they’re making an effort. Certainly, on the evidence of the freshly leaked Slow Down and last year’s Something’s Wrong, there’s a distinct whiff of “grown-ass man rap” about the proceedings, which should bring a bit of much-needed balance to the hip-hop landscape. 9th’s beats are typically chocka with reconfigured soul samples, while Banner delivers the “I don’t know what this world is coming to” subject matter in characteristically declamatory fashion. Not sure quite when it’s out - there was talk of the pair making it available for free, but Banner has since poured water on this. However, he's offering fans and bedroom producers the chances to remix tracks from the album, the best of which will feature on a freebie remix album later in the year. All in all, this is looking like one to catch.

If these two albums do indeed represent a trend of sorts, then by rights Just Blaze and Saigon ought to have been at least 18 months ahead of it. When Just signed Saigon to his Fort Knocks imprint in 2005, it was on the back of probably the most impressive street buzz for a New York rapper since 50 Cent. Coming from more or less the same part of Jamaica, Queens as Fiddy, Saigon had also spent more than a little time on the corner and in the nick, but rather than choose the self-mythologising route favoured by Fiddy, Sai saw an opportunity to position himself as a somewhat more conscious, but no less uncompromising Yin to Fiddy’s Yang. A few enthusiastically received mixtapes (the high-points from which were later compiled on the Warning Shots album) and a short stint playing a West Coast version of himself in Season 2 of HBO’s Entourage saw both the momentum and the profile building nicely. Fort Knocks had signed a label deal with Atlantic, and Sai’s first single - the rowdy, J. Geils-sampling Come On Baby - came out in the spring of 2007. Jay-Z’s guest verse on the remix was seen in some quarters almost as an endorsement of an emcee many saw as being capable of putting New York City back at the centre of the rap universe, and Sai’s Just Blaze-produced debut album, The Greatest Story Never Told, was scheduled for release later that year. Only it never happened. What happened instead was a salutary lesson in Industry Rule #4080 – postponement followed postponement, Sai began to use his MySpace blog to rail against the record biz politics that had stalled his career (he even announced, then quickly withdrew, plans to quit music altogether at one point), and sundry internet wiseacres began to snarkily refer to the album as “the Chinese Democracy of hip-hop”. Eventually, and just before the release of a second single (the glorious (Gotta) Believe It, above), Just managed to extricate Fort Knocks from its Atlantic deal, taking the masters of Sai’s now somewhat ironically titled album with him. A new deal was said to be in the offing. This was mid-2008, and although one or two cuts from The Greatest Story Never Told have since turned up on mixtapes, the album itself has yet to see daylight.

Miraculously, though, neither has it leaked, and if the latest release date – a somewhat vague “first quarter 2010” – is to be trusted, Just and Sai may actually find themselves bang on trend. Music is one of those fields of endeavour where leading the pack may not always be beneficial. History is littered with tales of innovators who were too far ahead of their time, or of trendsetting performers who had to wait years for the rest of the world to catch up, but perhaps the sight of three rapper’s rappers and three producer’s producers (rather than one of each) all purposefully moving in a similar direction will encourage a few more people to follow.

“Turn off the lights, and light a candle” - Teddy Pendergrass (1950-2010)

2010-01-14T16:15:00.000Z

If you’re of a certain age (as I am), then by now you’ll know the tiresome familiarity of turning on the TV, opening a newspaper or checking a website, to be greeted by the news that yet another significant musical figure from your youth has died. I wasn’t even halfway through the first coffee of the day when I noticed Roots drummer/bandleader Questlove posting a load of Teddy Pendergrass songs in his Twitter feed earlier this morning, so it took a few minutes before I figured out what was up.

Certain voices are probably always going to remind me of less troubled (but no less confusing) times, and Teddy Pendergrass is one of them. When If You Don’t Know Me By Now started getting played on the radio over here in 1972, anyone already attuned to the lush melancholy of increasingly popular Philadelphia vocal groups like the Stylistics would have immediately noticed what set Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes apart from the pack. Instead of the light, Kendricks-influenced falsetto of Russell Thompkins Jr., the voice of the Blue Notes came from somewhere between its owners’ boots and his gut. If nobody had told you otherwise, you might have thought you were listening to David Ruffin on steroids. As it turned out, for a while nobody did tell us, and it was widely assumed by UK audiences that Teddy was actually Harold Melvin. There are a couple of different stories about how he (originally the drummer in the Blue Notes’ rhythm section) became the band’s lead singer. According to one tale, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who’d been trying to sign The Dells to their newly founded Philadelphia International Records label, encouraged Melvin to put Teddy up front because he sounded like Dells lead singer Marvin Junior, and if they couldn’t get the actual Dells, then they were going to create one of their own. The other story - the one they’ll use in the biopic - has Teddy leaping from behind his drum kit in the middle of a Blue Notes show, and grabbing the mic to the amazement of both his band and the audience.

Arguably more than the O’Jays even, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes were the definitive act of the PIR era, largely due to Teddy’s voice, personality and charisma, and their hits rapidly began to dry up once he made the decision to go solo in 1976. From his 1977 solo debut and onwards into the 80s, he became a permanent fixture in the US r&b charts, managing to ride out the disco backlash and cementing his “Mr. Luva-Luva” persona to the extent that he could do a succession of “For Women Only” shows without alienating his male audience. There’s a great scene during one episode in Season 5 of Homicide: Life On The Street where Det. Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) is at home with his wife Barbara. Their marriage is on the outs, and as is often the case in crumbling relationships, they’re bickering over minor irritations. In this case, it’s the garish and somewhat tacky portrait of Teddy that Meldrick insists should take pride of place on the living room wall and which, it turns out, Barbara has always hated. But what’s interesting about the scene is how there’s no suggestion of anything unusual (beyond simple bad taste, that is) in a grown man hanging a picture of an r&b singer up in his front room.

Perhaps the reason for that is that Teddy personified a kind of undiluted, unapologetic, black masculinity that appealed to both genders. Women loved him, and although men may have envied his charisma, they also admired him for the classy, measured way he asserted his blackness without ever pandering to a mainstream white audience. Plus, those men were the direct beneficiaries of all Teddy's hard work on stage and on record whereas, as the man once memorably complained during an interview, he usually returned to his hotel room alone. Black comics like Eddie Murphy and Lenny Henry were able to lampoon his persona affectionately because they understood what he represented, but elsewhere that persona was reduced to cheeseball cliché and held up by many white rock critics as a shameful example of how far post-disco black pop culture had drifted from the radical ideals of the Black Panthers. All of which completely disregards Teddy’s fondness for socially conscious material throughout his career, as well as ignoring the genuinely subversive Garveyite politics that informed a significant proportion of Philadelphia International’s output during the 70s, even at the height of disco. Once it became public knowledge that his passenger on the night of the 1982 car accident that left him in a wheelchair was a transsexual nightclub performer, many felt that neither his image nor his voice would ever fully recover from the damage, but his core audience stayed characteristically loyal. Tiger Woods should be so lucky.

It’s that voice that he’ll be remembered for, of course – that rich, gritty baritone both mournful and declamatory, simultaneously pleading whilst bristling with righteous anger, able to ride the joyous rhythm of a song like The Love I Lost whilst remaining utterly convincing that he’d suffered the cruellest heartbreak. It never really regained its power after his accident, but it’s testament to the man’s spirit that he continued to record and perform for well over a decade after his 1984 comeback. His persona may have been easy meat for lazy parodists, but there was always a tenderness, warmth and likeability to Teddy that the ‘bedroom bully’ crassness of his present-day equivalents could never hope to convey. There are precious few true soul men left nowadays as it is. We ought to cherish the ones that are still around.

Sorry we lost you, Teddy.

Treme

2010-01-14T01:12:00.004Z

This is a teaser trailer for David Simon’s new series for HBO, Treme, set in the New Orleans district of the same name, the traditional home of the city’s muso community. It doesn’t tell you an awful lot about the story, but according to Simon, the show is centred on the local music scene and also deals with a number of themes familiar to fans of The Wire (political corruption, the criminal justice system), as well as the post-Katrina attempts at regenerating the city. It debuts in the US on April 11. No idea who’s picking it up for broadcast over here, but if it goes to form with HBO shows in the UK, then FX should get first dibs.

Wire geeks will doubtless be delighted that Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters are teaming up once more, although I’m not expecting any “Lester and the Bunk”-type comedy this time out. It’ll be interesting to see how Simon et al tackle the oft-documented ambiguities of the city, particularly since it's said to be one of the most racist yet racially inclusive cities in America. Likewise how they’ll deal with the popular perception of New Orleans as a city in perpetual recovery from Katrina. Given how long Liverpool struggled to leave behind the 1980s post-riots/Thatcherite whipping-boy image it had in the eyes of British dramatists (Jimmy McGovern included, if we’re being completely honest), it's probably wise of Simon to rope in local writers Tom Piazza and Lolis Eric Elie alongside George Pelecanos, so there’s less cause for concern than there might be otherwise.

A few more reasons to hope it reaches our screens sooner rather than later; the excellent Melissa Leo (a veteran of Simon’s Homicide: Life On The Street) is in it, as is Khandi Alexander (The Corner) and, reportedly, John Goodman. Fittingly for a show about musicians, Simon has found room in the cast for Steve Earle, although from what I can gather he’ll be playing a supplementary role similar to that of Walon, his character in The Wire. I understand Wynton Marsalis is also involved on the music side, which doesn’t exactly thrill me. Brilliant musician he may be, but his "guardian of the artform" approach to jazz gets on my pip most of the time. That said, when you’re after the specific kind of accuracy that a project like Treme calls for, then I suppose Wynton is the go-to guy, or at least as good a go-to guy as anyone else. And, to tell the truth, I can almost forgive him his tedious, fusty, academic purism when he sticks to things like this.

While You Were Sleeping...*

2010-01-13T22:12:00.001Z

Just as the first decade of the 21st century was limping to a close, and perhaps in an attempt to disprove the maxim that nothing decent is ever released during December, three new tunes quietly surfaced with comparatively little fuss last month. Personally, I thought all three were better than just about anything else released in the whole of 2009 and, while it's more or less certain that at least one of them will reach a mass audience in 2010, they all deserve more attention than they received during that dismal month when half the country was pretending to like Rage Against The Machine.

The track most likely to find its way onto Radio 2's A-list (Radio 1 wouldn't dream of A-listing anyone so old...) is Sade's Soldier Of Love, the title track from her forthcoming album. Not so much a capital-S single as an exercise in mood and atmospherics, I'd be fascinated to hear a dubstep treatment of it (a Mala rework would be amazing, if anyone from Sony happens to be reading). Sade clearly has no interest in trying to compete with what's on the radio right now, whether that happens to be Michael Buble, Paolo Nutini, the Saturdays or Chipmunk – the song is six minutes long, after all - so the absence of a clear, strong hook isn't that important. On American r&b radio, where she's still worshipped as a goddess, they'll play it regardless, and the fact that it doesn't sound formatted to fuck and back won't make a blind bit of difference. It isn't just the grown-and-sexy crowd who'll get behind this, either. Within days of the song being premiered on her official site, rappers were falling over one another to be the first to spit a hot sixteen over its meandering groove and get an unofficial remix of some sort circulating around the net.

Characteristically, Soldier Of Love sounds as if it's been built from the groove upwards, the voice and lyrics seeming no more than another component of the song's atmosphere rather than the centre of it, as might be the case with another singer. Like Pearls or I Never Thought I'd See The Day, the vocal sounds as if it came from within the music rather than something that was worked up elsewhere and added at a later date. All the separate elements - the martial drum motif, the combat metaphors, the stuttering guitar near the end that sounds like gunfire - all sound as if they're vibing off everything else in the track and everything sounds exactly where it's supposed to be. It's tremendous stuff, but whether it'll be enough to prevent lazy hacks trotting out a succession of cliches about 80s wine bars when the time comes to review the album remains to be seen. Despite being in the game for almost exactly the same length of time (as well as being around the same age), Sade's never shown any inclination to mimic Madonna's eagerness to be seen to be on top of whatever the cutting-edge sound is. In fact, much like Portishead (who we'll come to in a moment), she continues to strike me as someone who knows precisely what she's aiming for every time and is prepared to shut herself away for as long as it takes, in complete defiance of passing trends, until she gets what she wants. And again, much like Portishead, the finished article will sound as if it couldn't possibly have been made by anyone else.

Within a few days of Soldier Of Love reaching the web, Portishead marked International Human Rights Day by slipping the leash on a new song, Chase The Tear, making it available for download exclusively via 7Digital and donating all profits to Amnesty International. Given that the band usually works at the sort of pace that would make a Tarkovsky flick seem to zip along like Usain Bolt or something, it came as quite a shock that some new material should surface within 18 months of the magnificent Third. Perhaps less surprising is that the wintry analog spookiness of Third’s best track, The Rip, seems to have led them toward something that sounds a little like Can remixed by Giorgio Moroder. Let’s just look at that again, shall we? New Portishead music without the customary years-long wait, and if that wasn’t enough, it’s probably the closest they’ve ever got to a dance record. Oh, no - nothing interesting ever gets released in December…

As sure as night follows day, anything Portishead do will either be described as “moody”, or will be greeted with a chorus of grouchy demands that Beth Gibbons cheer up and try working in a call centre if she wants something to be miserable about. Funny thing is - and I may as well go for the world record on Things You Never Thought You’d Write About Portishead here - Chase The Tear really does sound like a group of musicians having fun again. It’s driven by a surging motorik judder that manages to sound exhilarating and claustrophobic at the same time, and while it isn’t exactly Music Sounds Better With You, it’s still quite a way from what Portishead seemed to have become between their last two albums; a band apparently so repulsed by the idea of their music soundtracking chi-chi dinner parties and “edgy” TV dramas that they were paralysed with fear at the thought of making a record people might actually, y'know, like. Well, I’m quite pleased I was wrong about that, and if 2010 sees the release of a fourth Portishead album, that’ll be another nice surprise.

Not as nice a surprise, however, as a tangible physical release by the most intriguing rapper to emerge in the latter half of the decade would be. Yes, Jay Electronica's handle is an unwieldy one – a little corny, even – but as anyone who’s been following this New Orleans-born emcee for the last few years will tell you, once you hear him, you'll know it really wouldn’t matter a tuppenny fuck if he called himself The Reverend Kenny Carl Jackson-Jones Dominguez IV or Barack Hussein Obama. Web buzz can be a fickle thing in the hip-hop world, as Papoose and Charles Hamilton can probably testify, but Jay Elec has avoided the established path of mixtape after mixtape and more guest verses than Busta and Jadakiss combined. Instead he’s gone for a steady drip-drip of internet-only releases (often an indication that your status most assuredly ain’t hood, although not in this case) punctuated by the odd thing you can buy at iTunes, the most recent being Exhibit C.

Built on an incredible, neck-snapping beat by Just Blaze (one of JE’s earliest champions) crafted from a few diced-and-sliced chunks of Billy Stewart’s gorgeous 1967 soul ballad Cross My Heart, Exhibit C is one of those songs you don’t - can't - listen to just the once. If it had been released back in the days of analog mixtapes, I guarantee you that kids would have been hitting the rewind button again and again on this, trying to catch every last, dazzling syllable of verses that – honestly, it's this good – are almost the equal of vintage Rakim or Illmatic-era Nas in terms of imagination, audacity and self-assurance. "Swagger", I think the kids are calling it now. Just listen to that last verse. I mean, fucking hell. It’s one of those all-too-rare tunes that unites the backpackers and the how-about-some-hardcore types, simply because it deals directly with the fundamentals of rap music – beats and rhymes – and does so with such purpose, intelligence and unwavering, I-don’t-mean-to-brag-I-don’t-mean-to-boast self-confidence that time-served rap fans have described it as “like hearing hip-hop for the first time”. Just Blaze himself orchestrated a Twitter campaign that pushed the song into the top 10 of the US iTunes Hip-Hop chart in the third week of December. Yeah, imagine that, eh? People buying music they like in the hope of livening up the charts at Christmas. I wonder if it’ll catch on? Put it this way; if you like rap, then you can’t not like this.

(* - yeah, like I can talk...)

Jay Sean - a transatlantic success story nobody's talking about

2009-10-09T15:23:00.001+01:00

While everyone (well, not quite everyone) over here has been considering burning questions like; "Is Lady GaGa is packing heavy ordnance?", "Has the arse finally dropped out of the Lene Lovich knock-off industry?" or "Is it time to stop making gags about the newly-reconfigured Sugabugas being the Trigger's Broom of pop?", a UK-born singer with a fistful of hit singles and two hit albums to his name has quietly climbed to the top of the US singles chart, breaking the Black Eyed Peas six-month stranglehold on the number one spot. Not that anyone's making much of a fuss, like.

Jay Sean's Down is a cracking little slice of state-of-the-art pop/r&b with an irresistible hook and a cameo from Yung Money Weezy in full-on Lollipop autotune gurgle mode. It'll be number one over here in no time. Some kid will perform it on the next season of American Idol, and millions of other kids will go screaming nuts. That's how pop music works nowadays, for better or worse. But, yet again, its success once more raises the question: how the fuck is it that a UK artist with actual, bonafide hits can, after getting tucked up by his/her UK label, go to the US, put their career in the hands of the Americans and subsequently clean up? It makes absolutely no sense. It's not as if it's anything especially exotic we're talking about here.

Jay Sean first popped up on my radar in 2003, when he was the featured vocalist on Rishi Rich's excellent Dance With You. For a little while afterwards, it seemed as if Rishi's wired-for-desi take on r&b production signalled the first wave of an emerging voice in British black music, fusing dancehall, r&b, Bengali/Punjabi pop and hip-hop in a way that seemed purpose-built to cross over to mainstream audiences who'd grown up with these sounds all around them. Even Timbaland appeared to be taking notes. Most likely to surf that wave seemed to be acts like Kray Twinz, certified dimepieces like Veronica Mehta, or your boy Jay Sean. Jay went on to have a succession of hit singles with the kind of smooth, likeable, if not particularly startling, pop-tinged r&b that's never struggled to find an audience in the UK. Massive crossover stardom seemed to evade him somehow, and after Virgin Records continued to put his second album on the back burner (after his first had gone Top 20 over here and sold two million in India alone), he did a bunk. The subsequent self-released sophomore joint was a bigger hit than his major label debut, and gave him five consecutive Top 20 hit singles. So why is it that, at a time when it's almost literally staring into the abyss, the UK music industry can't make a superstar out of a homegrown artist who quite clearly can sell records? Or at least as many records as Florence And The Machine?

I used to wander around Rusholme, Manchester during the 80s and see posters for concerts by acts like Alaap and Heera; massive stars in the Asian community over here, yet completely unknown elsewhere in the UK. Perhaps the crossover potential was always going to be limited for acts whose sound was so heavily dependent on South Asian instruments or tunings that sounded odd to Western ears. Nevertheless, at this time it wasn't unusual for bhangra acts to sell upwards of 30,000 cassettes a week - you'd think it might have occurred to someone somewhere in the industry that this could be something worth paying attention to. Nope. Even when an act did cross over, like Apachi Indian, it was widely perceived as a novelty, and it seemed nobody over here ever thought it worth the effort to engage with the Asian community and its music the way Chris Blackwell did with reggae.

Anyway, with the emergence of people like Bally Sagoo, a sort of post-bhangra sound began to emerge and, as the next generation of Anglo-Asian or British-born Asian kids came through, you began to hear music that wasn't really Westernised as such, but in fact reflected the community it came from in much the same way as jungle did, or - perhaps more relevant to the topic - acts like Soul II Soul did in their early days. But, although you can hear the end result of this blasting out of a tricked-out Beemer somewhere in just about any major city in the UK, it's still massively under-represented in the pop charts. Clearly, the scores of desi kids who eat this stuff up are buying it from the little shopfronts and market stalls in their manors - one of the few places where something resembling old-fashioned record shops still flourish, perhaps - but while UK labels look at that market and either don't know how to get into it, or just can't be bothered, Cash Money seems to have seen the growth of urban-desi culture in the States, looked at Jay Sean's impressive numbers, put two-and-two together and thought, let's get it.

Still, let's be honest, though - good as it is, there's little to differentiate Down from any number of releases by the likes of Ne-Yo, Trey Songz, Chris Brown, J. Holiday, Lloyd and them. The strings don't sound as if they've come from an R.D Burman soundtrack or anything like that, and there's barely anything idiomatically desi about the song or its production. But all the same, here we have a UK act abandoned by majors, as ever too preoccupied with the latest half-witted micro-trend from the Shamden/Poxton/Boreditch axis of Barleyism (do any of them actually want to sell records, do you think?), who has effectively managed to sell coals to Newcastle. Given the desi propensity for supporting their own, he might even manage to avoid the one-hit wonder tag that Mark Morrison and Craig David ended up with when they tried to pull off the same trick. At least the next time a so-called urban act is dropped by a major, they can look not just to Est'elle, but to Jay Sean too, and know that all hope is not yet lost.

World to Kanye West: Shut The Eff Up (Hoe)

2009-09-14T14:32:00.004+01:00

I honestly don't understand what gets into some people at awards ceremonies. Booze and drugs will only excuse so much. However, Kanye West appears to need neither to help cement his unique position in the pop firmament as someone you can always rely upon for a display of showboating 'MEMEME' gracelessness. Judging from the responses to his latest episode, it seems that even the people who like him (such as myself, most of the time) think he's a dick.

So why the fuss? Well, last night at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York he took it upon himself to interrupt an acceptance speech by 17-y-o pop-country singer Taylor Swift, as the lass picked up the first major award of her career. As can be seen from the clip above, the reason for this latest blast of righteous anger was that 'Beyonce's video was one of the greatest of all time!' The folks at MTV seemed to think the Single Ladies vid was the best of the year, at least, since Mrs. Carter-Knowles picked up the requisite gong for it later that evening, at which point she gave a first-rate display of Southern Gal manners and invited the crestfallen Ms. Swift back out to say her bit and enjoy her big moment, this time without interruption.

Of course, Kanye has previous for this kind of carry-on. And much as I may enjoy the work of Kanye West The Artist, with the exception of the solipsistic, indulgent, emo-rap dog's breakfast that was 808s and Heartbreak, Kanye West The Celebrity is a complete embarrassment. One wonders also, in these security-conscious times, how it is that events like this can seemingly be derailed by unscheduled interruptions of this nature. And while corporate behemoths like the Viacom-owned MTV frequently bend over backwards to contrive an atmosphere of reckless edginess as set-dressing for what are often tedious events, you can't help thinking that it might be time that Kanye West was a little more closely supervised whenever he's on the red carpet. After all, imagine if someone were to take a public dump all over his next moment of glory, or perhaps even chin him for muscling in on someone else's. That wouldn't be very nice, would it? I said, 'would it!?' Answers on a postcard, please.

UPDATE: It appears that Viacom has asserted its intellectual property rights as regards the above clips, which is fair enough. So instead, let's have a quick look through the Twitter-shaped window at the glorious new dawn that is 'post-racial' America, shall we?

Rather makes me wish I hadn't gone so hard on Kanye now.

The Triumph of Speech Debelle, or War On The Bullshit

2009-09-09T10:40:00.002+01:00

As a general rule I prefer my rap music raw and bloody. If it was a steak, and the waiter asked me how I'd like it, I'd probably say: cut its horns off and wipe its arse. For me, the worst crime a rapper can commit is to be boring, which is the main problem I have with a good 95% of the tedium that passes for so-called 'conscious hip-hop'. I never tire of reminding people who moan about how bloated and corporate rap has become that the cover of the debut album by the greatest rapper ever to walk the earth features him posing in a garish leather Dapper Dan Gucci suit, weighed down by half a ton of tom and waving a huge wad of cash. Turn over the sleeve and he's pictured rubbing shoulders with some of the most fearsome gangsters and drug-dealers to be found in the whole of the five boroughs during the 1980s. This was how Rakim wanted to present himself to the world in 1987. Yet his lyrics remain some of the most densely complex, nuanced, innovative and, yes, conscious examples of the emcee's art you'll ever hear, and amongst the true high-water marks of the form.

Rap has always been full of contradictions, and its those contradictions that continue to draw me to it almost thirty years after I bought my first Kurtis Blow record. But I still find myself infuriated by the enduring and widespread refusal to accept rap on anything like its own terms. After Sylvia Robinson strongarmed Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five (or more accurately, Melle Mel) into recording The Message, there began to emerge a school of thought which asserted that rap ought to possess an explicit political agenda if it was to have any real worth. These kind of criticisms have been levelled at black music for donkeys years - look at the reverence in which Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield are still held compared to Barry White or Isaac Hayes, for example. All four were great artists, but the main difference is that the former pair would occasionally sing and write about social issues, whilst the latter generally chose relationships as their preferred subject matter. The end result of which was that Barry White became the basis for a running gag on Ally McBeal, the passing of Isaac Hayes was widely reported as 'South Park's Chef Dies', and neither are ever likely to be taken as seriously as Curtis or Marvin are.

Last night, Speech Debelle won the 2009 Barclaycard Mercury Music Prize for her debut album, Speech Therapy. Almost immediately, Twatter was overwhelmed by comments from people perhaps too young to remember Hazel O'Connor or 400 Blows, all convinced that the likes of La Roux, Florence and the Machine or Friendly Fires had been robbed. Damning it with a mixture of faint praise and jaw-droppingly cretinous reductionism, the Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick described it on his Twitter feed as "the committee choice, [a] liberal hard life coffee table hip hop album no one could argue against." Elsewhere amongst the 'can't see further than the end of my nose' crowd, she was dismissed as 'this year's Ms Dynamite', as if to say, 'what's so innovative and original about this, then?' This conveniently sidesteps the idea that acts like La Roux or Friendly Fires might actually be riding a sort of voguish wave of familiar faux-80s nostalgia rather than acting as standard-bearers for any sort of originality, yet there seems to be a constant clamour for rap to be more 'innovative'. This is essentially a demand that the music be less like rap and more like something else, and it's often based on a fairly narrow familiarity with the music itself. But this insistence on measuring rap against the artistic yardsticks of other musical forms misses a major point about black music; that sometimes it's just about having a voice - any sort of voice - and being heard. 'Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat', anyone? After all, there's nothing more unique than your own voice, and that in itself can be much more of a political statement than all the earnest 'message' rhymes and revolutionary rhetoric in the world.

Such unvarnished sincerity is one of the strengths of Speech Therapy - it doesn't sound forced or unnatural. It isn't the sound of someone speaking in a voice that's not really theirs, nor does it try especially hard to draw attention to itself. In fact, it often sounds as if you're eavesdropping on a young woman having a conversation with herself (perhaps because she's all too familiar with not being listened to?). When I first heard it, I began to imagine Speech Debelle riding around South London on the top deck of a bus, little white buds in her ears, absent-mindedly working up lyrics while she listened to Young Marble Giants, one of those mid-70s John Betjeman albums or the soundtrack to Kes on her iPod, rather than 2Pac or Lil' Wayne. There's a welcoming contrast between the music's carefree, loose-limbed effortlessness and the rather more earthbound nature of the words that sit on top of it. A couple of listens in, and I was beginning to be reminded of Devin The Dude, whose daydreamy, introspective self-deprecation usually concerns itself with running out of weed, being stuck driving a clapped-out car or trying to explain to the kid of the single mother you're dating why it is you drink, swear and grab your dick so much on stage. Speech's preoccupations are a little grimmer - homelessness (Searching), absent fathers (Daddy's Little Girl), self-doubt (Finish This Album) - and the kind of Too Short-inspired slackness that often characterises Devin's material is nowhere to be heard. Instead, Speech manages to strike that delicate balance between documenting the humdrum banality of familiar trials and tribulations, and submitting herself to the kind of harsh, hypertension-inducing self-examination that's a hallmark of giants of the game like Beanie Sigel or Scarface. It is, as they say, a beautiful thing.

For me, rap will always be at its love-it-or-shove-it best when, for better or worse, it's being itself, and let's be clear about this, Speech Therapy is a rap record. Even though it couldn't be more different on a superficial level, it still sits comfortably alongside DJ Quik and Kurupt's superb BlaQKout as one of the very few albums of 2009 that I'm happy to give up an hour of my time for. I couldn't give a tuppenny fuck for the opinions of people who prefer to cheerlead for artfully-styled, Trustafarian, stage-school 'kookiness' or 'oh, is it 1981 again already?' art-rock that pretends it's never heard of XTC. I have nothing but contempt for anyone peddling the witless, moronic canard that Speech Debelle's moment of glory is somehow a sop to 'political correctness'. Judging by many of the responses to her triumph, there are still a lot of people out there who haven't got to grips with the notion that it mightn't be a bad idea to say fuck-all when you don't actually know what you're on about. Not only that, but it's rude to interrupt when somebody else is talking. Right now, Speech Debelle is talking, so shut your yap and listen.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

Downtime

2009-08-05T00:12:00.003+01:00

Back soon. Promise.

'And when the groove is dead and gone...'

2009-06-26T13:42:00.008+01:00

So, where were you when you heard Michael Jackson had died?

It was about 11pm, and my girlfriend had turned in for the night. I'd just told her about the report on TMZ that Michael Jackson had suffered a heart attack and been rushed to hospital. It had been a strange day, one that had already brought news of several deaths; iconoclastic music journalist Steven Wells, actress/70s icon Farrah Fawcett and psych legend Sky Saxon. Not necessarily major figures in the grander scheme of things, but all people who'd made enough of a mark on my life to prompt a Facebook status update saying, 'can the great and the good please stop dying now?' The thought that such a day might end with the sudden and unexpected death of one of the 20th century's landmark artists didn't seem worthy of consideration. I was all set to chill out for a while, watching Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World on the Discovery Channel, when the phone rang. It was my girlfriend's mother. 'Paul, turn on the news. Michael Jackson is dead.' I woke my girlfriend up and, for the next hour or so, we both sat on the sofa, stunned and in almost complete silence, as we watched the 24-hour rolling news channels struggling to fill their airtime as they waited for the inevitable confirmation.

The first time I saw Michael Jackson was on The Andy Williams Show in 1970, and it was absolutely spine-tingling. I couldn't believe that this kid, hardly older than me, was able to sing and dance so expressively and soulfully - as much as any adult, if not more so. And the song. Man, what a song. Almost 40 years later, I struggle to think of too many songs as full of joy and life-affirming energy as 'I Want You Back'. Even in my pre-adolescence, I still had a sense that I'd just had my first sight of a major talent and, as the 70s progressed, this was borne out by a succession of glorious singles, both from the Jackson 5 and Michael himself. When the Osmonds - like the Jacksons, another family group who got their first break courtesy of Andy Williams - hit their peak in the early 70s, the Jackson 5 became the cool kids' alternative, the teen-girl pin-ups it was OK to like. Even as their first wave of success began to plateau and the pop hits became less frequent, they were still coming with gems like 'Dancing Machine' or 'Mirrors Of My Mind', and a disco-era move from Motown to CBS (leaving Jermaine behind) seemed to galvanise them once more as they ended the 70s on a high. However, at the end of the 70s, Michael was about to leave his brothers, and everyone else, far behind.

I bought one of the 20 million copies of 'Off The Wall' in late '79, some five or six months after it had first came out. Punk was still a significant musical force, and a few of my friends sneered at me, wisecracking about how they didn't know I was into disco now. 'Fuck that, it's just a good record', I said. And it still is; for me, arguably his best. This was where he became an adult as an artist, where all those idiosyncratic ad-libs - the little whoops, squeals and hiccups - that had peppered his vocals on songs like 'Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground) or 'Show You The Way To Go' had developed into an arsenal that was to mark him out as one of the great vocal stylists of the era, as unique and original as James Brown or Elvis. 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough' was a thrilling two-chord jam that can still smash dancefloors to this day, and the combination of the songs, Quincy Jones' flawless production, and that voice, was the absolute zenith of turn-of-the-decade r&b. And then he fucking topped it. Christ, did he top it...

One of the things I remember most about 'Thriller', apart from the rapid-fire succession of dazzling hit singles, the groundbreaking videos, and its almost supernatural perfection, was that it marked the point where Michael Jackson ceased to be the best r&b singer out there, and became instead 'the biggest rock star (my italics) in the world'. It was as if, by virtue of breaking the MTV colour bar and getting Eddie Van Halen to play on 'Beat It', he was now deemed sufficiently important to sit at the big people's table. Never mind that he'd just released one of the richest, most vibrant albums of the decade, in any genre; he was now worthy of 'serious' analysis. The cultural and racial implications of his success, questions about whether visuals were becoming more important than music, and the whole MJ phenomenon, right down to those crummy LA Gear trainers, all went under the microscope. I don't think that's ever happened to a black artist, either before or since - at least, not to anything like the same extent. There used to be a lot written about how Ray Charles' innovative album 'Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music' did a phenomenal amount to dissolve racial barriers during the early days of the civil rights movement in the US, and it occurs to me that 'Thriller' did something similar - about 42 million times over. All those kids, particularly white kids, who wanted to look, dress and dance like - ah, fuck it, who wanted to be Michael Jackson. I think we might have forgotten just what a big deal that was.

It still amazes me that CBS execs actually rejected MJ's follow-up to 'Thriller'. Here was a man who'd effectively just put the next few generations of their families through school, and they were sending him back to the lab with a note saying, 'must do better'. Whether 'Bad' actually was better than what he first delivered, we don't know (although I suspect we'll find out before much longer). All the same, its release was An Event, and it lived up to its billing, even if it didn't surpass 'Thriller' in sales terms; five US number ones, a Scorsese-directed video for the title track, and the whole thing backed up by a wildly successful world tour that cemented his status as the biggest pop superstar in the world. 'Dangerous' actually managed to outstrip it; Quincy was gone, but as a parting shot, he'd put in a word for Teddy Riley, whose production nudged Jackson in a more explicit r&b direction than the one he'd taken for much of 'Bad'. It's a decent album, and it sold well - better than its predecessor - but just as it was peaking, the stories of Jackson's well-documented eccentricities and increasingly bizarre lifestyle began to take on a much uglier tone.

I suppose it's inevitable that a lot of the comment following his death will focus on the persistent allegations of sexual abuse that dogged his career for much of the 90s and beyond, leading up to the trial in which he was acquitted of all charges brought against him. There were already enduring rumours - which turned out to be true - that he was living beyond what must have been considerable means, and even after beating the rap in 2005, he still seemed to be facing certain artistic and financial ruin. But I think that, at some point, you have to try and separate the art from the artist. There's no end of testimony which suggests, for example, that Miles Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, John Lennon, Marvin Gaye and Pablo Picasso were all fairly unpleasant human beings, to say the least. But does such knowledge diminish the greatness of their art? Indeed, should we allow it to? Is it because we now demand so much more of artists, beyond just their work, that we end up learning things about them that we'd really rather not know? I don't want to seem as if I'm ignoring the less savoury aspects of Michael Jackson's lifestyle, but I can't help thinking what a shame it would be for someone as clearly troubled as he was, who'd been brutalised by his father as a child, and who'd lived virtually his entire life in the public eye to be remembered first for his transgressions, rather than for a body of work that, at its best, is at least the equal of anything in the realm of modern popular music. Y'know, forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I can understand why some people would feel differently, but equally, I can't help looking for whatever good there might be in the circumstances, if indeed any remains. Given that there's certain to be a plethora of books examining the darker side of Jackson's life, I see no possibility of an end to the debate for quite some time.

After he was acquitted in 2005, me and a few friends played a game of 'Fantasy A&R', wherein we talked about what we'd do if we were given the job of revitalising Michael Jackson's career. I suggested that he hooked up with the Neptunes and made a straight-up modern r&b record that would put him back on every dancefloor and radio station in the world, or perhaps followed Outkast's lead and struck out in an altogether more adventurous direction to see if he could turn pop music on its head the way he'd done in the 80s. Someone else came up with an absolute, can't-fail, shoo-in - an album of Beatles covers, something which, if he'd reined in his latter-day tendency towards lachrymose schmaltz, would surely have sold shitloads. Even though I struggled to see any way back for him after the trial, regardless of its outcome, I still hung onto the possibility that he might yet have had a career-saving comeback in him. The planned season of shows at the O2 could possibly have kickstarted a revival in his fortunes, but, equally likely, it could have pointed to a bleak vision of a possible future where an increasingly-isolated Jackson ran down the clock of his twilight years as a living jukebox amidst the buffets, slots and tables of some high-end Vegas resort like Caesar's or the MGM Grand, redeemed financially, but artistically a spent force. We'll never know.

Still, there's always the music...

The Jackson 5: Never Can Say Goodbye

The Jackson 5: It's Great To Be Here

Michael Jackson: Almost There

The Jackson 5: Mirrors Of My Mind

The Jacksons: Living Together (Ron Hardy Tribute Edit)

Michael Jackson: Rock With You

Michael Jackson: I Just Can't Stop Loving You

Michael Jackson: Remember The Time

Goodbye, Michael.

Fin(n).

2009-05-05T09:08:00.002+01:00

Jäähyväiset, Sami. You'll be missed.

MP3 of the Week - The Human Beinz: "Nobody But Me (Pilooski Edit)"

2009-04-30T14:27:00.010+01:00

I really ought to have made this an mp3 of the week ages ago.

Remixes (and more recently, re-edits) of classic tunes are very often little more than exercises in gilding the lily. Of course, there are a few instances where such overhauls aren't completely superfluous, even if they never come close to supplanting the original, but it's still pretty rare to find a remix which enhances the source material to such an extent that the end product is better.

Pilooski's re-edit of 'Nobody But Me', the Human Beinz' 1967 cover of the old Isley Brothers tune, is a few years old now. Released on a white label in 2006 as part of the D.I.R.T.Y Sound System's essential 'Dark and Lovely' edits series, its limited availability makes it a fiendishly tough catch nowadays, even on the 'Dirty Edits Vol. 1' compilation (which wasn't much easier to get hold of either). For me, though, it's the best single of the noughties by miles, and one of the best remixes I've ever heard - it doesn't compromise the integrity of the original one bit, and actually manages to improve on it. Pilooski twists, warps and stretches the song into a snarling, swaggering, relentless beast of a tune, wrenching it from its freakbeat roots (check the YouTube clip above) and turning it into something closer to Neu!'s 'Hallogallo' on crystal meth - all juddering, motorik pulse and dubbed-out space-rock noise. I'm a fairly clean-living soul these days, yet whenever I listen to this, I'm overwhelmed with the urge to take drugs. Lots of them. In fact, on one occasion when I played it out in public, a young woman came over to the decks and, with a somewhat horrified expression on her face, said; "Can you please take off this fucking awful drug music?" The sort of ringing endorsement that's worth aspiring to.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a proper rock'n'roll record, and precisely the kind of thing modern rock bands should be using as a jump-off point. Those who refuse, or can't hack it, or who'd simply rather carry on pretending they're Joy Division, should have their instruments forcibly taken away from them and they should be made to work in some other field of endeavour, preferably one where being suffocatingly average is the minimum requirement, and is less likely to produce a blight on the cultural landscape.

The Human Beinz: Nobody But Me (Pilooski Edit) (Dark and Lovely Vol.3, 2006)

MP3 of the Week - Olivia Byington: "Lobo do Mar"

2009-04-24T16:29:00.008+01:00

It's back! BACK!! BAAA*sniiiiiippp*

Despite my good intentions, this has turned out to be as regular a feature as a Jamie Carragher hat-trick, but I intend to rectify this over the next few weeks. So let's bring it back with something which is both absurdly obscure and a bit of a cracker, eh?

I've written about Brazilian music and (relatively speaking) my recently-developed enthusiasm for it on here before. Incidentally, I checked my Divshare account the other day, and discovered that those DJ Nuts links have had tons of downloads, so either someone's sharing them elsewhere (without even the courtesy of a comment, I might add), or this blog gets more traffic than I thought. Anyway, I digress. When you're as long in the tooth as I am, it's easy to get a bit jaded and start thinking you've heard all the good swag you're ever going to hear. Not true. I found this tune on the excellent Donna Slut mp3 blog, and found the album it's from on Loronix (check the blogroll). It features a lot of the things I like about Brazilian music - slightly melancholy, hippyish vibe, lots of interesting musical flourishes, and in the case of this tune, an overall feel not far removed from that of some lost prog-rock gem from somewhere in Northern Europe. The flute's very Tull, and it reminds me a little bit of female-fronted prog outfits like Earth and Fire or Atlantis. I know not much more than the sum total of fuck-all about Olivia Byington, other than that she used to sing with Brazilian proggers A Barca do Sol, and went on to have a long and distinguished solo career in her home country, where she still performs today. I wouldn't expect anyone to take much interest in the joy I find in discovering music that was being made half a world away, back when I thought Generation X were a big deal, but I can assure you that joy is substantial. Furthermore, I can offer no great insight into the cultural context of this song, and of course I don't understand a bloody word she's singing, but it sounds great on a day like today, when the sun's high in the sky and things (or some of them) seem exactly the way they ought to be. Enjoy.

Olivia Byington: Lobo do Mar ('Corra o Risco', 1978)

Never Forget.

2009-04-15T11:44:00.009+01:00

I was born in Liverpool, and I'm a Liverpool fan. Although Fonthill Road, Kirkdale, where we lived when I was a nipper, is pretty much equidistant from Anfield and Goodison Park, ours was nonetheless a Red family. Growing up, my main passion was for music, so I was pretty much the armchair supporter of the family compared to my younger brothers, both of whom went to the match on a more regular basis. Despite that, I was still enough of a fan to cry like a baby when Charlie George scored Arsenal's second goal in the 1971 FA Cup Final, denying a great Shankly team their first chance of domestic silverware since 1965.

I remember exactly where I was on the afternoon of April 15th, 1989. I was sat in the Queens in Winsford, having a bevvy with a few mates when, not long after kick-off time, a Man United fan we knew wandered into the lounge from the bar next door. He looked over at us, shaking his head and muttering, "Fuckin' scousers..."

"What are you on about?", one of us asked.

"It's all gone off at Hillsborough. Your lot are on the pitch, players are back in the dressing room. Fuckin' typical. Don't know how to behave yourselves, you lot, do yer? It's on the telly next door - go and have a look."

My heart sank. At first, I thought we were in for another repeat performance of Heysel, where a dilapidated stadium, non-existent crowd control and several hundred Liverpool fans spoiling for a fight resulted in the death of thirty-nine people, mainly Juventus fans. We took our pints into the bar, where the BBC had temporarily abandoned their Saturday afternoon horse racing coverage to go live to Hillsborough. By this time, it had become apparent that this wasn't another incident of two rival firms going up against one another, but something much more awful. The pictures showed scenes of absolute chaos. Someone in the bar called out as he spotted a lad we all knew helping a few others carry someone (who was clearly in a bad way) away from the Leppings Lane end towards the centre of the pitch. People were wandering round near the goal, dazed and in obvious distress. Others were using advertising hoardings as makeshift stretchers. The commentary spoke of unconfirmed reports that people had actually died. The mood in the pub changed, and it stayed changed. Winsford was a Cheshire overspill town, full of Scouse families who'd moved there during the 60s, and the local LFCSC branch used to take a coach from the Queens to all the home games. Nobody was quite sure how many of the regulars had made their way over to Sheffield that day.

Although I knew his face from around town, I never knew Vinny Fitzsimmons personally. My youngest brother Billy did, though. Vinny played in goal for his Sunday league team, and Billy used to describe him as "one of the best reflex keepers I've ever seen". Vinny went to Hillsborough that afternoon with his young son. Although his lad came home, Vinny never did. I'll never forget picking up the phone the following afternoon, and hearing my brother in tears, as he told me that he'd just had it confirmed that Vinny was amongst those who'd died. Personally, I find "me too" attempts at muscling in on the grief of others to be pretty tasteless on the whole, but when you see someone you love in pain, how can you help but be affected by it? I began to think, not only about the (at that point) ninety-four others who'd died along with my brother's dear friend, but also about all the other people whose lives would never be the same again. A few months later, I was at a family party back in Liverpool, and got talking to a cousin I hadn't seen for a few years. The subject turned to Hillsborough, and she told me that a friend of hers, Gary Church, was amongst those who never came home from Hillsborough. Years after that, when I was down in London, I met an Evertonian who, despite his allegiances, is the model of a sound lad, and someone who's since become a firm friend. I remember him telling me of how he went to three funerals in the same week, for three friends who left their homes on the morning of April 15th 1989, expecting to enjoy a game of football and be back home talking about it in the pub that evening.

In the twenty years since Hillsborough, a widely-held view of Scousers has emerged. Many frequently refer to Liverpool as "self-pity city", or call us whingers, or sneer at what they see as a "victim mentality". I can't be bothered dignifying those views, particularly when they come from other football fans; after all, there but for the grace of God. But something I've seen and heard a lot over the last few days (and indeed the last couple of decades) is people musing upon why the anniversary of the Heysel disaster never seems to be marked with the same reverence. Now, this is just my personal opinion, but I imagine it to be because, collectively, Liverpool fans are ashamed of their involvement in that tragic episode. And rightly or wrongly, people tend not to dwell upon things they're ashamed of. Sad, but there it is. Personally, I think that waiting fifteen years before an official commemoration of the tragedy is something to be ashamed of as well, and, although the significant public display of contrition at 2005's Champions League game between Liverpool and Juve at Anfield was both appropriate and profoundly moving, I'm not going to pretend that I can't understand the feelings of those bianconeri who thought such a gesture was too long coming. But regardless of all that, there are other reasons why Hillsborough resonates in a way that perhaps Heysel doesn't. It's because, above all else, Hillsborough represented a massive dereliction of duty on the part of the South Yorkshire Police, an institution which supposedly exists to protect people as well as to uphold law and order. Yet there are scores of reports from the scene which claim that, once it became apparent there was something seriously wrong in the Leppings Lane end, the police did nothing to help, and in some cases even prevented people from escaping the crush or helping the injured, dead and dying. This was further compounded by an attempt to cover up the culpablity of the police, and, with the aid of certain sections of the media, shift all blame for the disaster onto the fans. After all, we all saw what they did at Heysel, didn't we..?

Kelvin Mackenzie is very high up on a very short list of people whom I truly despise. As editor of The Slum at the time of Hillsborough, he was directly responsible for an unforgivable smear on both the Liverpool fans who were at the game, as well as the victims and their families. Suffice to say that the content of this smear, which was widely repeated, were subsequently revealed to have been outright lies. Across Merseyside, a widespread boycott of The Slum soon followed in the wake of their April 19th front page story, which remains to this day. Kelvin Mackenzie has since been revealed as a craven liar on numerous occasions, but for him to withdraw, as he did in 2006, the half-hearted apology he made in front of a Commons Select Committee in 1993 with the words, "I was not sorry then, and I'm not sorry now", reveals a lack of basic human decency that most of us would consider reprehensible in anyone. It beggars belief that someone like him, who would use a position of influence to mock and abuse the dead and the suffering, continues to have any credibility at all within his profession, much less that others still consider him worthy of being given a platform to espouse his view of the world on otherwise credible programmes such as the BBC's Question Time. My contempt for him knows no bounds, and I'm certain I'm not alone. Fuck him.

But enough of that. Today is about the 96 people who died just because they wanted to watch a game of football. It's about their families and their friends. But it's also about those who went to the game that day, but who came home different people, whose lives were irreparably damaged, who couldn't come to terms with why they survived when others weren't so fortunate, and who carried the guilt with them for years afterwards. It's about those people who did the right thing and tried to help in whatever way they could, however small. It's about those rival fans who set aside their allegiances to offer sympathy, tributes and support, knowing that it could so easily have been, say, 96 Celtic, Forest, Everton or Arsenal fans who lost their lives that spring afternoon. It's about those who strive to overturn the shameful cover-up, who struggle to reopen the inquiry, who continue to ask the many questions that still remain unanswered about Hillsborough. It's about those who seek the real truth about what happened on April 15th 1989. Remember them all; not just today, but every day.

Justice For The 96. YNWA.

Beautiful Scarlett

2009-04-13T14:51:00.007+01:00

As I imagine to be the case with any number of heterosexual males, I find Scarlett Johansson rather easy on the eye, and I have no problem admitting this. She may not be as consistently impressive an actress as Cate Blanchett, or blessed with Tilda Swinton's remarkable ability to make you forget sometimes that you're watching a shit film (check her Archangel Gabriel in the otherwise awful Constantine if you don't agree). But she was great in Ghost World, The Man Who Wasn't There and Lost In Translation, and did a likeable screwball turn in The Nanny Diaries, a film which, although entertaining enough, wasn't quite as clever as it thought it was. All that said, she seems to have appeared in a few too many movies lately where her performances have been kind of flat. The Island is a case in point. I don't want to be too hard on her for that one - after all, it wasn't so much just another crappy, dystopian, sci-fi/action thriller as it was just another crappy Michael Bay movie. All the same, there were moments in that particular flick when, seemingly called upon to convey something like panic, confusion or some kind of realisation that the world her character inhabited was something altogether more terrifying, her expression was more like, "Now, did I remember to turn off the bathroom light? I'm sure I did..." No matter. Like I say, 'crappy Michael Bay movie'.

No, the real subject of this post is 'Scarlett Johansson - chantoozie'. About a year ago, she released an album of Tom Waits covers called Anywhere I Lay My Head, produced by Dave Sitek (token white dude in the best black rock band in the world). I'm not sure how it sold - Wikipedia claims it's done less than 25k worldwide (which is pretty fucking rotten), but it's Wikipedia, so whatever. I do know that the level of critical opprobrium heaped upon it was wildly out of proportion to what is by no means a bad album ('butchery' and 'trainwreck' were amongst the choicest descriptions). It isn't anything earth-shattering, but, as a Tom Waits fan, I liked it, and was surprised at just how much better it was than I expected. I certainly couldn't imagine people queuing up to take a Forrest Gump all over it with quite the same enthusiasm, had it been by some Pitchfuck-endorsed Hope Sandoval wannabe rather than a Hollywood actress. Sadly, its reception, broadly speaking, does tend to typify the "how dare she..?" attitude, not only of people who considered the record to be yet another vanity project by a piece of Hollywood eye-candy with ideas above her station, but also of those rock snobs and music geeks who seem unable to comprehend that a "gurl" might be familiar enough with the work of Tom Waits to do an album's worth of his songs. I mean, how could that be possible..?

And that's another interesting thing about the record. You might expect there to be a few of The Hits on there, mightn't you? I did. Yet there's no 'Innocent When You Dream', no 'Kentucky Avenue', no 'Jockey Full of Bourbon', and certainly no 'Downtown Train'. The tracklisting looks like the kind of thing a serious Waits fan would come up with, albeit one perhaps a little less familiar with his 70s output. So what does it sound like? Well, it sounds like This Mortal Coil to me, which is no bad thing at all (Ivo Watts-Russell had some involvement, I understand), and there are moments when Sitek's production sounds to me as if he might have had in mind a more modern take on the kind of kitchen-sink-and-all sonic overload that Phil Spector almost drowned Leonard Cohen in on Death Of A Ladies Man, with Nyquil and absinthe taking the place of Quaaludes and pharmaceutical chang. Scarlett's voice isn't the most astonishing thing you'll ever hear, and sometimes it gets a little swamped by the densely-textured arrangements, but I get the impression she prefers being just another component of the whole thing, as opposed to her acting work, when she's usually further up front. Even though it's her name on the cover, the enterprise itself isn't dependent on her being a virtuoso singer in order for it to work. Entertainment Weekly declared it 'the worst album of 2008'; an editorial decision I suspect was arrived at before they'd even cracked the cellophane on the CD, and one which confirms, for me any road, that it's a periodical far better suited to analysis of things like the finer details of Lindsay Lohan's love-life, rather than of music.

It isn't that Scarlett's a bad singer either, because she isn't. Her recording of Gershwin's 'Summertime', from a 2006 compilation 'Unexpected Dreams: Songs From The Stars' is proof she's more than capable of carrying a tune, even if the enduring impression is of someone who was unlikely ever to have much of a career in musical theatre. In fact, I put her original take on a couple of summer-themed mixtapes I did for friends last year as a hidden track. When they found out who it was, a couple of them were pleasantly surprised. Along with 'No One Knows I'm Gone' from Anywhere I Lay My Head, I've posted it below, so you can hear for yourself. As a little extra, I've also posted one of my summer mixtape secret weapons; a remix of 'Summertime' I did in an afternoon last year. It isn't something I've circulated all that widely, but if you happen to like it, then you're more than welcome to share it wherever.

Scarlett Johansson: No One Knows I'm Gone - Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008)

Scarlett Johansson: Summertime - 'Unexpected Dreams: Songs From The Stars' (2006)

Scarlett Johansson: Summertime (Mighty Love Remix) - unreleased

Groovin' With Jesus

2009-04-12T17:48:00.007+01:00

Being something of a lapsed Catholic, the thing I most associate with Easter these days is the shops actually being shut of a Sunday. Since this has left me with a little more time on my hands than I anticipated, I've thrown together another mix for download. I originally intended for it to follow a vaguely seasonal theme, but I soon got bored with that, so it's all pretty random stuff. I wasn't going to make a habit of doing these, but a very old friend of mine has recently started a regular podcast thingum (to which I suggest you subscribe), so I thought this would be an excuse to follow his splendid example. Sort of.

Dig in, and Happy Easter.

Intro - Mighty Love: Spam Piccolo
Humble Pie: Groovin' With Jesus
Redbone: Judgement Day
Queens of the Stone Age: I'm Designer (Adrian Sherwood & Primal Scream Remix)
Bob Dylan: Most Likely You'll Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine
Lee Perry: Cow Thief Skank
Roxy Music: The Bogus Man
George Harrison: Beware of Darkness
The Beach Boys: The Trader
David Ruffin: Heaven Help Us All
Elvis Presley: Mystery Train
The Steve Miller Band: Superbyrd
The Adverts: My Place
Ila Van: Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man
Joe Cuba: Bang Bang
Gene Page: All Our Dreams Are Coming True
Gabor Szabo: Love Theme From 'Spartacus'

'Groovin' With Jesus' (Easter '09)

PS: If you're reading this on Farceberk, click on 'View Original Post' - you should be able to work out the rest for yourself.

Reflections of a Haçienda O.G.

2009-04-11T20:22:00.012+01:00

I was scanning some old photographs the other day, and came across my long-lost membership card for the Haçienda (reproduced above for your amusement). This one is the second year membership, from 1983 to 1984. I think they finally stopped issuing membership cards in 1985. The original 82/83 membership, which I also had, was a credit card job in a yellow, black and silver-grey colourway, possibly with some pale blue in there as well - I can't exactly remember. Anyway, although I hung on to it long after it had expired, it eventually broke in half, and went permanently missing years ago. Since it wasn't a photo ID card, it lacks the 80s quiff-action comedy potential of the one above in any event. Just as well, as I suspect my barnet would have looked much worse otherwise. Around then I used to have a combination of a grown-out wedge/flick and what notorious Liverpool FC fanzine The End once famously described as the 'ten-bob haircut'. In my case, this meant a standard-issue short-back-and-sides, with the top and fringe remaining untouched. Pictorial evidence of this still exists, but if you think I'm posting it here...

Needless to say, all this has led to my reminiscing about the many nights I spent at the Haçienda in the pre-Madchester years. The received wisdom seems to be that, prior to the arrival in Manchester of ecstasy and the corresponding rise of acid house, it used to be perpetually empty, but that's not entirely true; far from it, in fact. Certainly, it was often possible to tip up at the Haç at peak time on a Saturday night and walk straight in, to find just a handful of people dotted around the place. Given how vast and cavernous it was, this had the effect of making it all look a bit miserable. Arriving to find it so sparsely attended would usually be followed by a swift decision to hit the bricks, heading a little way back up Whitworth Street to the Venue (later rechristened the State, and once the location of the legendary Northern Soul club The Twisted Wheel) or maybe the Man Alive further out towards Rusholme. Nevertheless, when the Haçienda was rammed and rockin', there was nowhere else I'd have rather been.

Inspired by New York clubs like Danceteria (whose DJ Mark Kamins was an early resident), Area and the Limelight, the Haçienda was generating controversy even before it opened its doors. Initially, it adopted a strict 'members and guests only' policy, which wasn't all that unusual. But what really boiled the piss of a lot of people at the time was the cost of membership. Unlike other Manchester clubs, such as the labyrinthine Pips ('Fennel St, behind the Cathedral') where annual membership was something like £1.50, the Haçienda charged £5.15 (rising to £5.51 the following year). Now bear in mind this was 1982, when the riots in Brixton, St. Pauls, Toxteth and Moss Side were still fresh in the memory. At the very point when Thatcherism was beginning to bite, the idea that people should have to pay such an extortionate amount, simply to be able to gain admission to a nightclub, was considered outrageous. Leading the charge was the vinegary, irreverent and often hilarious Manchester zine City Fun, which never shrank from any opportunity to take a pop at Factory, accusing its capo Tony Wilson of being the model of a hippy capitalist (amongst many other things). City Fun's position was widely echoed elsewhere, in places like the then still massively-influential NME, where a bit of an editorial schism had begun to develop. The first stirrings of Club Culture, much of which was taking place in the South, were already being documented in magazines like i-D, The Face, Blitz and the short-lived New Sounds New Styles. To place, as these mags did, the emphasis on nightclubs over live bands, cutting-edge street style over post-punk austerity, and electronic music over guitar/bass/drums, was considered a craven betrayal of the punk ethos by some, and the 'members only' approach was seen as a return to a kind of Studio 54-style elitism at odds with punk's inclusiveness. Others believed (erroneously, in my opinion) that the NME was trying to buy into this, even though they often mercilessly took the piss out of scenesters like Steve Strange, Robert Elms and Chris Sullivan. But at the other end of the country, the response to the launch of the Haçienda was one of the first indications that a cultural, as well as socio-political, North-South divide was beginning to emerge.

At this time, I lived in Winsford, Cheshire, which had grown from its origins as a salt-mining town to become home for an large overspill of displaced Scousers and Mancs whose families had moved there during the 1960s, when their employers had received generous tax breaks from Harold Wilson's government to move their operations into the cowshit-scented Cheshire countryside. In comparison with its hayseed neighbours, many of which were like Deliverance with buses instead of canoes, Winsford was actually a pretty clued-up place, and quite a few of us were reading about what was going on in London and trying to do something similar ourselves, throwing impromptu parties at local youth centres and social clubs. We had a lot of fun, as it goes. Still, now and again, some of us would regularly traipse down to London, usually to Colin Faver's monthly Final Solution nights at Heaven. Being young and largely liberal-minded, but nevertheless straight, we weren't the least bit intimidated by gay clubs (the gloriously debauched Jody's on Liverpool's Stanley Street was another favourite hangout around then), but the big attraction of the Monday nights at Heaven was the music you'd hear there; early rap, electro-funk, Canadian disco, loads of Patrick Cowley and Bobby O records, and the kind of sleek, dubbed-out proto-garage that labels like Prelude and West End were dealing in. You weren't hearing too much of this in Northern clubs at the time, certainly not in many straight clubs. But once the Haçienda opened, that was it for Heaven, and for London generally - there was now an infinitely better option, virtually on our own doorsteps.

I can't recall exactly when I went for the first time, although it might have been to see Simple Minds, when I remember it being rammed. It wasn't long after it first opened, either way. And famous as it later became for its historic influence on the club scene, I saw some great gigs there as well. It was at the Haçienda that I first saw the Smiths, who were supported by James (who'd just released their first single on Factory), on a night which wasn't as well-attended as history might lead you to believe. The night Troublefunk played there was one of the ten best gigs I've ever been to; an absolute riotous sweatbox of an evening. Shortly after the release of their second album, I saw Run DMC perform to an audience of about 200, most of whom were nascent goths, there in anticipation of a night doing the 'shake the funky moisture off your hands' dance to stuff like Theatre of Hate's 'Liberator'. Run, D and Jay wandered around the club after their set, all in matching skimmers and burgundy Def Jam bomber jackets. I remember asking D if their 'Hard Times' was a cover of the Kurtis Blow song, and he seemed shocked that I even knew of the original. I saw Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five demolish the place just a couple of weeks after seeing them at the Venue in Victoria (which is now Pacha, I think), and I caught Whodini there a couple of times as well. On one occasion, UTFO were their opening act, and they had a couple of dancers with them, one of whom I later learnt was future rap mogul Jermaine Dupri. In fact, the first time I saw Whodini, Run DMC were supposed to be the support, but they pulled at the last minute. That particular evening was co-promoted by the great Greg Wilson, an occasional Haçienda resident DJ and something of a pioneer on the scene. At one point in the show, he was invited on stage by Whodini's DJ Grandmaster Dee to demonstrate his skills on the decks. Much to the amusement of Dee, Jalil and Ecstacy, it quickly became apparent that they weren't quite as advanced as they are now. British DJs didn't really understand what cutting and scratching were back then, and although he took it in good humour, Greg did look all at sea.

Some more random memories, then. Falling asleep during a performance by Roman Holliday; being legged round the club when one of the bouncers clocked me recording Orange Juice's set on my then incredibly hi-tech, if somewhat difficult to conceal, Panasonic Walkman recorder; spending the whole of the Gun Club's set gazing longingly up at Patricia Morrison when she was the apex of Goth glamour, which is all the more remarkable if you recall what a compelling live performer Jeffrey Lee Pierce could be; walking out on a dog-awful performance by what had been billed as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, but which was actually only half the original line-up, with a handful of random makeweights and someone they tried to pass off as Flash without realising there were smart-alecs like me in the audience, who knew that Flash's trademark was three turntables, rather than the imposter's two. Another great moment was the evening that a then barely-known Frankie Goes To Hollywood did a PA, which basically involved them miming to 'Relax', which had only just been released. The thing I remember most about it was the ramp which had been set up to the right of the stage, the purpose of which became apparent when a huge motorbike with Holly Johnson on the back of it came roaring onto the dancefloor and up the ramp onto the stage. Now that's how you make an entrance.

Unfortunately, I missed the famous 'Live from the Haçienda' edition of The Tube, which featured Madonna's first-ever UK television appearance. This was because, rather than make tickets available to club regulars first as promised, they instead dished them out to random scallies on Market Street and Piccadilly, or in the Arndale Centre, so by the time my girlfriend got down to the club to grab a couple for us, they'd all gone. A week or so later, I got talking to PC of legendary Hulme jazz-dance troupe the Jazz Defectors. The JDs were Saturday night regulars back when the Haçienda clientele was about 75% black, and were the best dancers in Manchester. Their ballet-influenced, free-form style was miles ahead of anything their London equivalents were doing, and I admired them immensely. I asked him why they hadn't been on the show, as advertised. He told me they got bumped by the producers at Madonna's request, although she'd offered to let them dance behind her as part of her performance. They told her to fuck off.

Everyone knows about the acid-house era DJs, but many of the earlier original DJs were great, too. Hewan Clarke, particularly, was a lovely guy, a big, friendly bear of a man, never too busy to tell you what that last amazing record he played was, and most of the stuff he played was amazing. John Tracy, who was from across the Pennines in Sheffield, used to do the Saturday nights after Hewan moved on, and he was every bit the antithesis of the 'moody DJ' stereotype as Hewan was. One particular evening, he played five tracks in one night from Luther Vandross' classic 'Busy Body' album, which had been in the country less than a week. I bombed up to the DJ booth and asked him why he was playing so much Luther, and he replied, "It's just a fucking brilliant album, mate. Best thing I've heard in years - I wish I could play the whole thing!" Even then, people would still come to the Haçienda expecting to hear non-stop New Order and Joy Division, and would be put out to find the DJs playing cutting-edge hip-hop, slick modern soul and just about anything else with a groove. Original vocalist with A Certain Ratio Simon Topping had left the band to live in Brooklyn and study percussion, but when he returned to Manchester, he brought a shitpile of latin jazz, salsa, boogaloo and Brazilian records back with him. For a period on Saturday nights, he'd do these little half-hour sets where he'd play all this stuff - 'the Latin Break' was how they billed it - and his spots soon became the cue for the amateurs to step back and let the serious dancers do their thing. It was during one of these sessions that I first heard Carmen McRae's cover of Stevie's 'Don't You Worry Bout A Thing', which rapidly became a Haçienda classic and was later covered by ACR on the b-side of their 'I Need Someone Tonite' 12".

However, my favourite DJ memory was when I actually got to play there myself in 1990. I'd been asked by a friend to join a tour by Jimmy Somerville in support of the AIDS awareness organisation ACT UP. They were trying to keep costs down, so in lieu of a support act, I was asked if I'd bring along a couple of cases of records in return for food and lodgings. As soon as I was told the first gig of the tour was at the Haçienda, I was in. I have countless great memories of that tour, but none have stuck with me in quite the same way as when I found myself gazing down from the famous DJ booth at the very same dancefloor I'd spent so many nights on. It was a bit like what I imagine playing in the FA Cup Final must be like. It was made all the more sweet by the numerous Haçienda staffers who came up to me later and told me I'd played some great stuff. Coming from people who were used to hearing Graeme Park, Mike Pickering, Jon da Silva and Laurent Garnier play week-in, week-out, it was some compliment. I wish I'd taped it.

Lazyitis shall not prevail.

2009-04-02T11:32:00.011+01:00

These are hardly the kind of times in which one can afford the luxury of being unproductive, and it's an accepted truth that, in order to be a writer, one needs to write. I mean, no shit, Sherlock? That said, part of the reason there aren't new entries on here every other day is because, for whatever reason, I hold on to this notion that, if you don't have anything to say, then you should probably keep it buttoned. I've resisted the urge to turn this blog into one long brainfart, as blogs can sometimes be, but it occurs to me that updating it as infrequently as I do is a bit like only doing the hoovering once a month, because, well, who else is going to notice? Not really the right attitude, is it? So, here's something that's been rolling around my head over the last week or so.

How did Channel 4 manage to fuck up Red Riding?

After reading David Peace's excellent The Damned Utd a couple of years back, I had to investigate his earlier novels, if only to discover whether or not his tale of Brian Clough's ill-starred 44-day reign at Elland Road was just an inspired one-off. It wasn't. The Red Riding Quartet, a series of densely-plotted, nerve-shredding nightmares set in South Yorkshire between 1974 and 1983, may be the best and most original examples of British crime fiction I've ever come across. Not that I'm especially widely-read in that area these days; I no longer eat up quite so much of the stuff since Mark Timlin stopped writing (if indeed he has stopped - anyone know?), but I feel fairly certain there can't be too much out there that's the equal of Peace's writing in terms of its relentless, horrifying intensity. It's a lazy comparison to make, but the Red Riding books do have a lot in common with James Ellroy's LA Quartet, certainly in terms of subject matter. Corrupt police forces, appalling miscarriages of justice, venal, self-serving public figures, unimaginable levels of violence and sexual depravity, hardly anything resembling a sympathetic character, and no happy endings. Much like Ellroy's books, they take some getting to grips with at first; the style and structure is a little unusual, but once you're used to the rhythm of the writing, you're not getting off until the last stop. By the time I'd finished Nineteen Eighty Three, I found myself wondering what incredible television the stories might make in the hands of someone with sufficient ambition and reach to take a proper run at it. Enter Channel 4...

One of the most widespread criticisms of Season 5 of The Wire was that it all seemed a little too rushed. Even a hopeless Wire junkie like myself will admit to having a bit of sympathy for this point of view; the show's characteristic measured pacing seemed to have been sacrificed in service of a need to pack in as much as possible, and new characters like Gutierrez, Haynes and Templeton were one-dimensional and underwritten in comparison with, say, the Sobotkas in Season 2. Since HBO would only give David Simon and Ed Burns enough money for ten episodes, rather than the twelve or thirteen of the earlier seasons, the relative dip in form of the final season is perhaps more understandable. I was reminded of all this when I watched Channel 4's adaptation of the Red Riding Quartet a few weeks back. Now, I have never worked in television at all, so I've neither experience nor understanding of whatever issues are involved in the production and financing of an ambitious, non-mainstream TV drama like Red Riding. But I do tend to think that, if you're going to tackle something on that kind of scale, you should at least set out with the intention of doing justice to the source material. I'm sure that the producers had every intention of doing just that, but, presumably at some point between the idea and the execution, something seemed to have gone missing. I'd imagine that adapting something as heavy on multiple narrators and complex internal dialogue as these particular stories wouldn't be an easy job in any case. But even taking into account the sort of scaling-down of plot that's unavoidable if you're to make the whole thing a decent fit for TV, there were far too many short cuts taken for Red Riding to come off, much less make enough dramatic sense for an audience that mightn't be familiar with the books. Often, the plot didn't seem compressed as much as pounded flat. To be fair, the cast was excellent on the whole; certainly, Paddy Considine, Warren Clarke, Sean Bean, Saskia Reeves, David Morrissey and Peter Mullan all did as good a job as they could with what was in front of them, which wasn't bad by any stretch; just much, much less that I'd hoped it'd be. Moreover, more than one person of my acquaintance has observed that it all appeared a little too concerned with snagging a few BAFTAs than with snagging an audience. Personally, I began to have misgivings after I read that one of the books had been binned off completely, meaning the story arc had taken a 25% knock before anyone had seen a single frame. But still, I wasn't not going to watch it.

Given the sanctimonious relish with which those hateful puritans at The Daily Mail regularly lay into anything they perceive as representing an erosion of decent, wholesome Middle England values, I can well believe that the Channel 4 brass might have been a little uneasy about committing to a full-bore depiction of the Red Riding Quartet's manifold horrors, post-watershed or not. After all, they've done a bang-up job of fashioning a rod for their own backs on that front over the last few years. Still, I wish to God someone over there had taken a metaphorical glance in the direction of Derry Street (and Wapping, for that matter) and said, "You know what, you lot can go and fuck yourselves", because I can't help thinking Red Riding might have been infinitely better if someone had. Of course, not everyone is going to have the stomach for the levels of hideousness at the awful heart of David Peace's South Yorkshire, and that's fair enough - there's no shortage of brutal scenes in all three films anyway - but you have to wonder what point there is in half-measures when you're trying to tell a story that takes in police and local government corruption on a massive scale, pornography, child abduction and murder, paedophile rings, the failure of the justice system and the Yorkshire Ripper's reign of terror. You're never going to make it look like Midsomer Murders in a thousand lifetimes. That so many of these elements came across as underdeveloped, skimmed over or hastily tossed off seemed to betray a lack of nerve as much as a lack of budget, and the whole thing ended up going off at half-cock. Never did you get a tangible sense of the all-encompassing evil that Peace had so unflinchingly catalogued in his books. On the screen, you see a bunch of people who are, at best, comprehensively bent, and who are certainly involved in some pretty nasty business. In the books, you read about the same characters and (many of) the same goings-on, and you think, "These people are fucking monsters..."

Red Riding ought to have been utterly terrifying, but the sense of disappointment I felt over its failure to measure up to the books was far greater. Other than a few moments in the second film (by far the best), where the superb Paddy Considine nails his character's rising panic as he begins to see the level of corruption he's dealing with and realises he can no longer trust anybody, it never came close to hitting as hard as it should have, and ultimately it all felt like a wasted opportunity. The days of British TV drama with the depth and weight of Edge Of Darkness or Our Friends In The North, things which were capable of leaving a lasting, powerful impression on the viewer as well as telling you something about the kind of country Britain has become (and winning a sackful of awards in the process, it should be pointed out), now appear more distant than ever. You really do get what you pay for, it seems.

Winter into Spring.

2009-03-07T16:54:00.014Z

It's a nice day in London today and, while out in the back garden earlier, I noticed some early-flowering cherry blossom on the trees just the other side of the garden wall, which usually means another winter has finally come to an end.

Since I haven't posted any music for a while, I quickly put together a mix in a couple of hours this afternoon. It's all fairly laid-back, mellow swag (are we still allowed to use terms like 'laid-back' and 'mellow'?) which I hope will make it good iPod food for those early-spring walks, commutes or whatever.

(Incidentally, if you're reading this on my Facebook page rather than the blog itself, and you can't see the download link, then just click on "view original post" at the bottom and you should be good to go.)

Instructions for use; download, skin up (optional), uncork/crack open a bottle, sit back, listen and (hopefully) enjoy.

Tracklisting:

Steve Tibbetts: The Big Wind (excerpt)
Bobbie Gentry: Hurry Tuesday Child
Darondo: Didn't I
Gal Costa: Borzeguim
Milton Nascimento & Lo Borges: Cravo e Canela
Walter Murphy: Afternoon of a Faun
Del Richardson: Jigsaw
Karen Carpenter: It's Really You (Cole's Funk Down Mix)
John Martyn: Go Easy
The Ju-Par Orchestra: Is Anyone Listening?
Jeff Beck: The Pump
Theo Parrish: The Motor City
Kenny Rankin: In The Name Of Love
Alan White: Ooooh Baby
Joni Mitchell: Help Me
The Hollies: Draggin' My Heels
Ned Doheny: A Love Of Your Own
Isaac Hayes: I Can't Help It If I'm Still In Love With You
David Crosby: I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here

Winter Into Spring (March 09)

This Facebook '25 albums' thing.

2009-03-01T23:40:00.008Z

Proof that social networking sites are occasionally good for something other than simply wasting time. I've been mulling over this for about a week now, and found it quite inspiring. The brief is something like this;

Think of 25 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were, musically shaped your world. Not necessarily your favourite albums of all time, but the ones that shaped your life.

Now, since I don't do brevity, I'm going to post this in stages, and more or less chronologically. So, here goes...

The Beatles: Please Please Me

Or; Why I Listen To Music. My earliest, clearest memory is of my ma taking me into town to the NEMS record shop in Whitechapel (which Brian Epstein owned) and buying me this album for my fourth birthday, so the die was cast for me at a very early age. This was early 60s Liverpool, and everybody loved the Beatles, so it was a no-brainer. I know every last note of this record. I wore the grooves grey and spent hours poring over the sleevenotes and the credits, all of which seemed a bit gnomic and beyond my understanding (even though I learnt to read early as a kid), as well as the strange-looking and now iconic photo on the cover. To this day, whenever I hear that "Ah-one-two-three-FAH!" that sets off "I Saw Her Standing There", I get all "recherche du temps perdu".

Frank Sinatra: Songs For Swinging Lovers

This one just reminds me of my ma. She adored Sinatra like no other singer, and had a bunch of his records, but this one and the Days of Wine and Roses album were probably her favourites. As a kid, I'd often sit around the house listening to it with her during the school holidays or at weekends, without ever realising that that peerless voice and those lush Nelson Riddle arrangements were subconsciously helping develop my ear for the kind of music I wouldn't even discover until I was much older. Strangely enough, of all the great songs on this album, the one I love most is widely considered to be one of the fillers, "We'll Be Together Again";

No tears, no fears,
remember there's always tomorrow.
So what if we have to part,
we'll be together again.
Your kiss, your smile,
are memories I'll treasure forever
So try thinking with your heart,
we'll be together again.
Times when I know you'll be lonesome,
times when I know you'll be sad.
Don't let temptation surround you,
don't let the blues make you bad.
Someday, someway,
we both have a lifetime before us.
For parting is not good-bye,
we'll be together again.

But you really need to hear Frank sing it.

David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

The first record that I truly felt was mine in more than just the obvious proprietorial sense. It's difficult to explain the impact that Bowie had on British teenagers in the early 70s. Like the Isleys said, if you were there, you'd know, but suffice it to say that, for an entire generation of us, Bowie was The Man. He had a minimum eleven-year hot streak of albums, most of which were stone-cold game changers. Everybody wanted to know what he was going to do next, and you could literally see the effect he was having, not only on music, but on youth culture too, such as it was then. Often these effects wouldn't become apparent until years later, but everyone knew who was in the driving seat. I remember reading the famous Rolling Stone double-header interview between Bowie and William Burroughs around this time, or maybe a little later, wherein he broke down the concepts behind "Ziggy Stardust", as well as acknowledging the extent to which Burroughs had influenced the album and his work as a whole. Having this, as well as a whole load of other stuff, laid out in such a way was mind-blowing. Up until then, I'd thought "Ziggy" was just a collection of cool, somewhat otherworldly pop songs, but after reading about cut-ups and black hole jumpers, I began to listen harder and more closely, not just to Bowie, but to everything else as well. The way the album closes out, with Rock 'n' Roll Suicide building to a spectacular, dramatic crescendo before dying on a huge, resonant D major, is up there with A Day In The Life as the best ending to a rock record ever. When it's over, you feel like you've been somewhere you'd never even have imagined existed otherwise.

Django Reinhardt & Sidney Bechet: Deux Geants du Jazz / The Mahavishnu Orchestra: Birds of Fire

The first of a few double shots. These two were the "bonding with my dad" records. He was a jazz fan, mainly dixieland, swing and big-band stuff. His cut-off point was when Duke Ellington started to get "weird", as he put it, so he wasn't into be-bop or beyond. Because I never knew there was a difference at that point, I'd go to the local library and bring home records by Charlie Parker, Roland Kirk or Miles Davis, play them to him and ask him what he thought. Invariably, the response would be, "where's the melody?", so there was still this gulf between what he considered jazz, and the stuff I was trying to find my way through off my own bat in my adolescent eagerness to absorb music which was beyond my realm, and which, perhaps subconsciously, I thought might bring me closer to him. I was trying to be a guitar player at this point, and my dad's idea of a great guitar player was Django. He had this compilation of Django and Sidney Bechet stuff, which we'd listen to a lot. My dad liked clarinetists, people like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw or Sid Phillips. Bechet played the soprano, which isn't a wildly dissimilar instrument from the clarinet, and my dad enjoyed the style in which he played. I suppose he was trying to give me a bit of an education in where someone like Roland Kirk was coming from (even though he didn't like Kirk's music), as well as pointing me in a direction which might help my nascent aspirations as a guitarist. When I got my first electric, he hipped me to Charlie Christian and Barney Kessel too, but that's another story. The first time I heard Phone Tap by The Firm, with its sample of Petite Fleur (a song which was pretty much Bechet's theme tune), I had another of those Proustian rushes. It's a little strange to hear a piece of classic 90s coked-out East Coast (bi-coastal?) gangsta rap and be reminded, in however small a way, of your dad, but there it is.

So, anyway, I'd seen this BBC2 In Concert broadcast featuring the Mahavishnu Orchestra in about 1972, around the time Birds of Fire came out, and had been knocked out by it. I remembered seeing John McLaughlin's name on some of those Miles albums I'd lent out from the library, and I was like, OK, well this must be jazz, too. My dad hated it. Noise, he called it - no melody, just an over-amplified racket. This was when I began to dig my heels in and argue back, giving him my under-developed two-bob ideas and opinions about what I thought was jazz (or what was jazz, too). We were still having these arguments years later, when I was about 19 or 20 and bringing home records like Blue Train and Relativity Suite, or stuff by Keith Jarrett or AEC. But if I hadn't had my ear for jazz shaped and developed through the music my dad shared with me (conservative though his tastes may have been), I might never have found any of those artists in the first place. So, thanks, dad. Something else I owe you.

Roxy Music: Roxy Music/For Your Pleasure

The first band I ever saw live. In fact, the first band that I instinctively knew would be great before I'd even heard a note of their music. Richard Williams' piece in Melody Maker (the first major feature on them in the music press) had already got me hooked, and by the time I heard Virginia Plain (which wasn't even on the album), it was a done deal. Great as they were, Roxy Music were always kind of in Bowie's slipstream a little, especially after Eno left, and I don't think it was entirely coincidental that Bowie and Eno began working together just as Roxy was beginning to turn into more of a conventional rock band, and later into The Bryan Ferry Show. I like all their 70s material to some degree, but the first two were particularly extraordinary; records which left you with a sense that here was something you really hadn't heard before. Or, if you had, then not in this order. I'm sure me and my friends weren't the only ones who sought out the music of the Velvets through Roxy citing them as an influence. There used to be a tape recording of the 13-y-o me singing "In Every Dream Home A Heartache", the lyrics to which I couldn't have possibly fully comprehended, while a friend of mine played the keyboard part on a Bontempi organ. It was fucking awful, and is (I hope to God) long gone. The first two Roxy albums are anything but.

More later...

Enter the scene, DJ Supreme...

2009-02-18T12:04:00.007Z

No, it's not a post about Hijack.

DJ Mr. Supreme a/k/a DJ Supreme La Rock has been a big wheel on the Northwest Pacific DJ/record digging scene for a good while now. I wish I'd been able to find a picture of him showing off his legendarily deep collection, said to number between 60,000 - 75,000 pieces's worth of A-list swag, but record nerds worldwide will be able to tell from the ringwear that it's an original copy of the rarer-than-hen's-teeth "East Of Underground" that he's flossing in the accompanying photo.

Anyway, Supreme's CV is pretty impressive; globetrotting club DJ, founder of Conception Records, one-half of the Sharpshooters, co-creator (along with his Seattle homeboy Jake One) of the much sought-after Conmen series of mixtapes, and perhaps most impressive of all, contributor to the soundtrack for The Wire. He was also the presenter of the Soul, Style and Truth internet radio show on the now-defunct Groovetech site. He's made available an mp3 of one of those shows, along with permission to share it far and wide if anyone's so inclined (and I am). I've no idea of the date, and I only recognise a handful of the tunes, but it's all top-quality 80s dancefloor soul/boogie/gospel. Dig out your Bally slip-ons, yer Farahs and yer Gabicci v-necks and get your Kashif on.

DJ Mr. Supreme: Soul, Style & Truth radio show (boogie edition)

Cash Rules Everything Around Me

2009-02-10T14:09:00.011Z

It never fails to amaze me how the music industry continues to come up with new ways of shooting itself in the arse.

There's a scene near the end of "Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story", where the misfiring career of John C. Reilly's washed-up c&w singer is revitalised after one of his songs is sampled as the basis for a multi-million selling rap hit. The difference between this scenario, and the wretched failure of good taste that is 'Johnny Cash Remixed', is that Dewey Cox's serendipitous good fortune is the punchline to the film's central joke. Not only that, but they had sufficient smarts to get Ghostface on the track in the movie.

Whilst you'd hope that, in the name of all that is good and decent, "Johnny Cash Remixed" would die like the dog it surely is, it's nevertheless difficult to look at it and not think; how on Earth could anybody think this was an idea worth spending money on in the first place? By its very nature, there's going to be a degree of gilding the lily involved with any remix project involving a Heritage Artist, particularly when the work of said artist doesn't immediately lend itself to such treatment. In this case, though, it seems particularly pointless. After all, it's no exaggeration to describe Johnny Cash as a giant of American popular music. Even if you were to disregard the recent, somewhat sanitised, biopic "Walk The Line" and the widely-acclaimed American Recordings series, made in his twilight years under the aegis of Rick Rubin - things which actually did bring the man and his music to a new, younger audience - Cash is hardly somebody you'd describe as a forgotten man in any event. Furthermore, it's unlikely anybody discovering Cash since his death in 2003 would need, or want, to have been met halfway by something as godawful as this

Compare such a shambles to the altogether more respectful treatment Cash's Columbia back catalogue continues to receive at the hands of Sony BMG's appropriately-named Legacy division, and you begin to see it for what it undoubtedly is. After somehow finagling access to a bunch of Sun-era Cash masters, the guilty parties - amongst others, Snoop Dogg, Matthew Knowles (father/manager of Beyonce) and John Carter Cash (who really ought to know better) - have decided that these recordings would benefit enormously from the musical equivalent of a "Pimp My Ride" makeover. Thus, the spare, introspective menace of I Walk The Line is obliterated beneath an unremarkable off-the-peg backing track that does its creators (Snoop, DJ Quik and Teddy Riley) no favours at all. In fact, the list of participants on each remix tells its own story; two-thirds of them are what you'd politely describe as "marginal" figures, many of whom seem to have little form beyond having contributed to several other projects of a similar nature (Kennedy? Count De Money? Mocean Worker? Me neither). You're left with the impression that any genuine A-list names who'd been asked to contribute had suddenly found themselves with prior commitments. No wonder, since virtually everything on here is barely listenable hackery of the shabbiest kind.

Worst of a very bad bunch indeed is Pete Rock's awful "will this do?" take on Folsom Prison Blues. Now, Pete Rock is without question one of the greatest and most innovative producers in the history of hip-hop, and I have to admit that I was at least curious to hear what he'd done with the source material. A filtered SP1200 bassline from some obscure Fania record? A few signature growls and ad-libs from The Chocolate Boy Wonder as a high lonesome horn sample pans back and forth across the stereo picture? The snare from Mountain's Long Red? Nope. What we get is the kind of rhythm track that probably took a minute to punch up, and which was then thrown into ProTools along with the master recording and, a few tweaks later, being FedEx-ed back to the label, doubtless within the hour. In fact, Compadre Records (let's name names here) could just as likely have found someone in their own mailroom every bit as capable of delivering something just as cheap and shoddy-sounding for a tenth of what they paid Pete Rock.

Whilst the debate continues to rage on both sides of the Atlantic over whether the copyright period for sound recordings should be extended, you'd think that the so-called custodians of some of the touchstones of modern popular music would be a little more eager to show they were up to the job. In their haste to squeeze more mileage out of these recordings in such an ill-advised manner, they've succeeded only in producing something destined to end up as road surfacing in a far-flung province of China.

Doo-doo-do, lookin' out my back door...

2009-02-02T14:05:00.009Z

My block, at around 8 a.m. this morning;

London is covered in snow today. As a Northerner, I've always been amused at the way in which a comparatively small amount of snow can be enough to cause the infrastructure in the nation's capital to snarl up and fall in on itself. As an adopted Londoner, I usually have a less benign reaction to the city's apparent inability to cope with the extremes of weather. Still, if nothing else, it makes for pretty pictures on this occasion.

It was fascinating too to see the kids on my block playing out in the snow with the kind of unfettered enthusiasm kids rarely seem to display nowadays. The last time this much snow fell on the city was eighteen years ago, and many of them - even the older ones - may never have seen anything like this. I expect to be dodging snowballs for the next couple of days.

A couple of things which are somewhat in keeping with the weather and the attendant mood. Winterbreeze is the lead track from Kenny Dixon Jr.'s Soul Sounds EP from 1996. It's yer typical KDJ/Moodymann steez; a shuffling 4/4 loop with a fistful of grimy samples weaving in and out of the mix like drifting snow (the more observant will notice a few fragments of George Benson's Love X Love amongst them). It's the kind of thing you can just as easily lose yourself in on headphones as on a dancefloor, making it perfect iPod material when you're trudging through six inches of snow with your parka zipped all the way up and its hood obscuring two-thirds of your vision.

John Fahey's interpretation of the traditional Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, from his 1980 album Yes! Jesus Loves Me; Guitar Hymns, is the kind of music you might imagine hearing at three in the morning, walking alone through deserted, lamp-lit streets, with the snow barely broken and still falling. A little bit ghostly, and a lot beautiful. Wrap up warm.

Kenny Dixon Jr.: Winterbreeze, 1996

John Fahey: Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, 1980

John Martyn (1948 - 2009)

2009-01-29T15:29:00.004Z

I think I was about 13 when I first discovered John Martyn. Back in the days when there were only three television channels in the UK, and the concept of music television was little more than a weak joke, I'd regularly try and sweet-talk my parents into letting me stay up late to watch The Old Grey Whistle Test, which was broadcast at an ungodly hour on BBC2. Most of the time, they'd say no, but on one of the occasions they relented, John Martyn was amongst the performers. I didn't have much of an idea who he was, although I'd seen his name mentioned in NME, Melody Maker or Sounds from time to time. I remember he did two songs, the first of which might have been Solid Air, although I couldn't be certain. What I'm certain I do remember was his version of Skip James' I'd Rather Be The Devil, because I'd never heard anything like it - clouds of Echoplexed wah-wah guitar, tinged with feedback and a slurring, whisky-drenched, sandpaper growl over the top of it. From then on, I made a point of saving my pleas to watch OGWT so's they'd coincide with his appearances on the show.

John Martyn belonged to another age, one when musicians seemed to take a more pluralist approach to their craft than perhaps they do now. I remember him mentioning people like Lester Young in interviews, which although a little unexpected from someone who was, to my ears, ostensibly a folk musician, still sent me scurrying to my dad's record collection for further enlightenment. His sense of adventurousness, which led him to work with people as diverse as Lee Perry, Phil Collins and Sister Bliss of Faithless, seemed to characterise the broader approach of his generation. He and many of his peers, such as Pentangle (home of his one-time sparring partner Danny Thompson) would think nothing of working the jazz, folk and blues forms they grew up with into something modern and original, occasionally throwing a curve ball by applying a more free-form, experimental approach, which in Martyn's case led to some pioneering excursions into dub and what later became ambient music.

He also wrote many beautiful songs, a few of which I've posted below. Solid Air was written as a tribute to his friend and label-mate Nick Drake, and I once remember a Saturday morning kids' TV show where I was gobsmacked to hear Marti Pellow and another member of Wet Wet Wet do a lovingly faithful take on May You Never (they later got into trouble for hoisting a big chunk of Martyn's Sweet Little Mystery without permission, but that's another story).

I'm a bit pissed off at myself that the first thing proper I get around to writing for this blog in 2009 should turn out to be an obit for a musician whose work has given me pleasure for almost as long as I've been seriously listening to music, but that's how it goes sometimes. We're now at a point in time where many of the true greats and genuine mavericks of modern popular music are leaving us at an alarming rate. In John Martyn's case, there's left a hole that's unlikely to be filled anytime soon. I shall miss him, and I won't be the only one.

Solid Air (Solid Air, 1973)

May You Never (Solid Air, 1973)

Bless The Weather (Bless The Weather, 1971)

Small Hours (One World, 1977)

It's a new day...

2009-01-20T20:04:00.006Z

See ya...

Jay-Z performing Young Jeezy's 'My President Is Black' remix at Love Da Club in Washington DC a couple of nights ago. He needs to put this out sharpish.

Normal service will be resumed later this week.

A Christmas Double Shot (Bonus Beat)

2008-12-24T19:52:00.004Z

It's late, and I've still got presents to wrap, so I'm off. All you need to know about this is that it's Donny Hathaway, and it's one of the best Christmas songs ever. Have a good one, and don't forget to tell the people you love that you love them.

Donny Hathaway: This Christmas (single, 1970)

A Christmas Double Shot (Part 2)

2008-12-24T18:41:00.009Z

Primal Scream are a band it isn't always easy to like. Their near-fundamentalist adherence to the tenets of The Rock'n'Roll Lifestyle can sometimes make them appear little more than a bunch of dicks suffering from an advanced case of arrested development rather than a group of people with a sincere belief in the redemptive power of music. Yet both live and on record, they're often capable of shoving such doubts right back down the throats of those who hold them. One of the best live shows I've ever seen was their performance at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool in April 2000. So often you'll hear bands say how they're influenced by this or that, or that their new direction is like X meets Y, and when you actually hear the end product, you wonder what the fucking hell they were talking about. But if Bobby Gillespie had said in 2000 that the new Primal Scream sound was like a Krautrock Stooges scrapping in a pub car-park with Sun Ra's Arkestra, Charles Mingus, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth...well, after that show, I'd have believed him, because that's exactly what they sounded like, and it was fucking astounding. I've seen them three times since, and they've never come close to matching the thrilling, terrifying, remorseless racket they made that night. They divided our party right down the middle and all; half thought it was near-transcendent in its magnificence. The other half thought it was a load of shite. Well, so long as you get a reaction, eh?

The album they were touring back then, XTRMNTR, is, for me, probably their best. I've never entirely bought the argument that Screamadelica is one of the great creative touchstones of late 20th century rock music, although I do like it. What's interesting when you play those two records alongside each other is just how radically different they are. Essentially, it's the same band on both albums, and this is the thing I admire most about Primal Scream; they don't stay in the same place for too long and, for a band that supposedly once typified the intensely conservative indie ethos of the 80s and 90s, this is pretty remarkable if you ask me.

They've also long been market leaders when it comes to mucking around with dance-music idioms, drafting in DJs and remixers like David Holmes, Andrew Weatherall and Jagz Kooner to not only remix their material, but to produce it as well. As a result, those less conventionally rock'n'roll/dancefloor aspects of their sound never give the impression of having been bolted-on as an afterthought for marketing purposes, as was often the case with some of their peers, back when "indie dance" was the buzzword of the day. Consequently, what you end up with is dance music which properly rocks out, and rock'n'roll with the kind of pilled-up, hip-twitching groove that today's pop kids are really diggin', daddy-o! Jagz Kooner's Spectre Mix of Swastika Eyes is absolutely fucking brutal. Imagine Neu! if they'd grown up on a Salford sink estate listening to nothing but Belgian techno from 1990 and Fun House by the Stooges. If you can't, then I suggest you play it as loud as you possibly can and find out what such a thing might have sounded like.

Primal Scream: Swastika Eyes [Spectre Mix] (single, 2000)

A Christmas Double Shot (Part 1)

2008-12-24T17:59:00.009Z

I've been slacking off, and I plan on slacking off even more over the Christmas period, but since there wasn't an MP3 of the Week last week, I'm doubling up this week and throwing in an extra treat for Christmas.

In the spirit of the season, me and a few fellow internerds recently did a seasonal CD pool, whereby we divided ourselves up into groups and each person made a compilation for everyone in their respective group. In some cases (mine, for instance) it wasn't so much "seasonal" as "seasonally affected disorder", but it was interesting to learn a bit more about some of my friends' musical tastes, and it was fascinating to see where and how often they overlapped with my own. Not only that, I ended up with a lot of good music I mightn't have otherwise heard, and, all things being equal, hopefully they did too.

Anyway, although she wasn't in my group for the purposes of this lark, my friend Niki posted her compilation up on the net. Now Niki is an amazing woman, one of the most remarkable people I know; strong, fiercely intelligent, with a mind as big as God, and a heart to match. However, like many people when in the company of hardcore music geeks, she sometimes feels as if she needs to apologise for not having especially esoteric tastes. This is no big deal as far as I'm concerned, because I know she has good taste anyway, and one of the best things about this whole "make a CD for a few random friends" idea are those moments when you hear something you hadn't heard in years, in a way you'd never heard it before. So it was courtesy of Niki that, while wandering through the Covent Garden Xmas shopping chaos last weekend, "Let Me In" by the Osmonds came up on the iPod, and I really wasn't expecting it to have the kind of effect upon me that it did. I hesitate to use terms like "Proustian" to describe my reaction, but as I heard the song's opening line, followed by the strings playing a slow falling arpeggio with a warmth and richness worthy of Van Dyke Parks, I suddenly became...a little overwhelmed, shall we say. I was 13 again, and back in a world of unspoken teenage crushes, long summers and somewhat simpler (if occasionally guilty) pleasures.

The Osmonds got a bit of a raw deal in the 1970s. Even though they were enormously successful, and adored by countless teenage girls, it was clear they longed to be taken seriously as musicians and to receive the kind of critical plaudits that their immediate peers, the Jackson Five, were already enjoying. "Let Me In" was the lead single from "The Plan", a somewhat misfiring attempt at a prog-rock concept album, and was a much bigger hit in the UK than in the States, where their popularity had perhaps reached a plateau. When I hear it now, and its chorus swells to its gorgeous, heart-bursting peak, I no longer think about how fatally uncool it would have been at the time for a teenage boy to admit liking a song by the Osmonds, nor do I give any thought to what was then the hipster consensus, that it was all just saccharine MOR schmaltz. Instead, I hear something which doesn't contain the faintest trace of cynicism, and which wears its heart on its sleeve in a way that pop music rarely dares to do anymore. A little gem, in fact.

The Osmonds: Let Me In (The Plan 1973)

Bricks Are For Kids.

2008-12-12T15:21:00.007Z

Over at hip-hop website Format, someone has been inspired to recreate twenty classic hip-hop album covers via the medium of Lego. Whilst I happen to think they're stretching the definition of "classic" almost to breaking point ("Stillmatic"? Common's "Be"?? Jedi Mind Tricks???), and some of the figures are, er, less than anatomically accurate, this is still a great idea. I've posted a few favourites below, but follow the above link for more of that good-good.

MP3 of the Week - The Mahavishnu Orchestra: "You Know You Know"

2008-12-10T10:34:00.008Z

I'm sure I'm not the only person to have discovered the Mahavishnu Orchestra via their appearance on BBC2's In Concert series in 1972. Not knowing much about music at that age, I was impressed more by the speed of their playing rather than what it was they played, and the combined musical pedigree of the various members didn't really register much with me either. Still, the performance was enough to have me seeking out their second album, Birds Of Fire, pretty much upon its release. There are a multitude of clips from the broadcast on YouTube and, while the term "ground-breaking jazz-rock-fusion" alone will be enough to send some people running, screaming, to the hills, it has to be said that, along with Tony Williams' Lifetime (of which Mahavishnu John McLaughlin was a member), they more or less wrote the book. They ended up becoming victims of their own somewhat unprecedented success, though, and the original line-up dissolved in 1973, due to internal strife which bassist Rick Laird later described as "too many chiefs and not enough Indians".

What I like about their stuff now, which I didn't get at all at the time, is its intensity and euphoria. Sure, it's incredibly complex on a technical level, and a lot more structured and disciplined than it might sometimes appear but, at its best, you do get the sense of a group of musicians genuinely aiming for something transcendent. Their instinctive jazzer's tendency towards improvisation could easily have led them into a world of jam-band tedium, something that disciples of theirs such as the Mars Volta occasionally fall foul of. Even now it can sound a little too full-on sometimes, but quite a lot of their stuff has held up well, as the good stuff generally does.

This tune from their debut album "The Inner Mounting Flame" is amongst the easiest to digest for non-believers - a simple circular melody over a spare, funky groove, which steadily builds in intensity without over-complicating itself, and is a great example of how effective they could be when they took their foot off the gas for five minutes. Fans of Massive Attack may like to pay particular attention at the 1'54" mark...

The Mahavishnu Orchestra: You Know You Know (The Inner Mounting Flame, 1971)

Captain Beefheart meets T-Pain.

2008-12-08T20:12:00.004Z

Amazing.

Brazil, Nuts.

2008-12-03T23:57:00.007Z

It used to be that, as far as Brazilian music was concerned, my familiarity didn't extend a great deal further than Sergio Mendes, "The Girl From Ipanema", the handful of Jobim tunes everybody knows, the correct pronunciation of "batucada" and who Bebel Gilberto's dad was. Thanks mainly to guidance and suggestions from numerous friends, or DJs like Gilles Peterson, Patrick Forge and Jez Nelson, and Soul Jazz's superb "Tropicalia" compilations, but particularly to the sterling work of the good people who maintain blogs and websites such as Loronix, Um Que Tenha, Brazilian Nuggets and Sabadabada, this is no longer the case. I now know a bit more about the differences between MPB, Tropicalismo and Jovem Guarda (or even that there is a difference), or that the Roberto Carlos who played full-back for Real Madrid isn't the only famous Roberto Carlos to have come out of Brazil in my lifetime. I can even tell you which track from the first O Terco album was sampled in Madvillain's "Untitled". Oh, well done, I hear you say. Bully for you. We're supposed to be impressed by this why, exactly? Well, you're not, not really. But you might be impressed by DJ Nuts. Nuts is a native of Sao Paulo, has been a key player on the city's hip-hop scene since the early 1990s, and is considered to be the leading turntablist in the country. In short, this fella is pretty much the Brazilian equivalent of someone like J-Rocc or Babu, with skills to match. Except that he also has an ace or two up his sleeve, the nature of which may become apparent from this clip.

Now, while I was busy acting all pleased with myself a paragraph ago, I neglected to mention that I hadn't even heard of DJ Nuts until a few months ago, much less heard any of his astonishing mix CDs. Then I discovered that Nuts can haz blog, whereupon he'd posted half a dozen of the bleeders. However, he'd chosen to host them on Zshare, which used to be a reliable enough host, but has become increasingly shonky in recent months, so unfortunately you can't download them from there until Nuts fixes the links. However, thanks to the efforts of another Sao Paulisto who posts on the Soul Strut messageboard under the handle MoogMan, I can now share a few of them with you, and trust me, you've never heard Brazilian music played like this. Being that Nuts is essentially a hip-hop DJ, he plays the music of his home country just as you'd expect a hip-hop DJ to play it - Disco e Cultura Vol. 2, for example, features sixty-three tracks - and the breaks-heavy, ADD, quick-mixing style he often utilises, particularly on 2004's face-melting Cultura Copia, may not be for everyone. Similarly, if you download any of them in the expectation of an hours-worth of variations on "Mas Que Nada", you might be disappointed. But if you can set those considerations to one side, then not only are these mixes great fun, but they also feature plenty of fabulous and often quite beautiful music.

Cultura Copia comes partially tagged, with a full tracklisting in the zip file, but Disco e Cultura Vols 1 & 2 (both 2005) are untagged, and 2006's Disco e Cultura Vol. 3 (which is chocka with classic Brazilian dancefloor jazz) is just one big file, so please be aware of this when opening them in iTunes or wherever. All come with gorgeous artwork, should you want to burn them to CD. If I happen upon full tracklistings for any or all of the Disco e Cultura volumes, I'll post an update as soon as. In the meantime, get stuck in.

DJ Nuts: Cultura Copia (2004) - 105mb

DJ Nuts: Disco e Cultura Vol. 1 (2005) - 142mb

DJ Nuts: Disco e Cultura Vol. 2 (2005) - 142mb

DJ Nuts: Disco e Cultura Vol. 3 (2006) - 171mb

MP3 of the Week - Iggy & the Stooges: "Gimme Some Skin"

2008-12-03T19:37:00.020Z

This record cost me a (then) prohibitively expensive £1.50 on a French Skydog import when I bought it from Probe Records in Liverpool during the summer of 1977. I can't remember whether the person who actually sold it to me was a future pop star or not, but Probe being what it was around that time, the odds are it probably would have been.

If you're anything like me, you're probably sick of reading a seemingly endless stream of absolute guff about how this bunch of herberts or that shower of slumming Tristram Trustfunders are this week's Living Embodiment of the True Spirit of Rock'n'Roll - they're dangerous, they're wild, they bunk taxis, they date fashion models, they appear in the gossip weeklies, and they all look exactly the fucking same. Invariably, when you hear the music, it sounds just as you'd imagine from a band who've probably hired a PR company first and built everything else arse-backwards from there. It therefore becomes difficult to imagine that any such band would ever - indeed, could ever - make a record as terrifyingly, psychotically good as this as long as they had holes in their arses.

Recorded sometime in 1972 by my favourite Stooges line-up - Iggy, Ron Asheton on bass, his brother Scott on drums, and the great, great James Williamson on guitar - but unreleased until around five years later, "Gimme Some Skin" sounds less the work of a rock band than it does the end product of supplying musical instruments and studio time to a gang of delinquents, sociopaths and sexual perverts. Iggy's vocal sounds depraved, becoming ever more hysterical to the point where he's almost literally gibbering by the final verse. Scott Asheton pounds the kit like he just caught it robbing his stash, and Williamson's primitive, slashing riffs are closer to threats of violence than to music. It probably cost about $50 to record, and it sounds completely out of control. There was a particular reason the Stooges remained at the fringes of the music scene for as long as they did; they disgusted people, and it isn't difficult to hear why. Every time some knobber has tried to convince me that, say, "Appetite For Destruction" is a great rock'n'roll record because it supposedly signalled the death of Corporate Rock - as if a record that sold 28 million copies could signal the death of anything - I'd have loved to have played them this. Over thirty-five years after it was recorded, it still sounds as if you could catch something unpleasant just by listening to it.

Iggy & the Stooges: "Gimme Some Skin" (1972)

'I'm as raw as pickin' cotton with your bare hands...'

2008-11-26T19:00:00.007Z

Two Roc-related videos in a week? If anyone senses a pattern beginning to develop, they're probably on the right track. Anyway, this is fucking proper. It's easy to find yourself an argument regarding what is or isn't real hip-hop on the internet, and I'm not about to start another one, but this ticks all the boxes for me. Although the features emcees are Philly's own Freeway and Brother Ali of the Minnesota-based Rhymesayers crew, "The Truth" is actually taken from "White Van Music", the debut album by highly-regarded Seattle beatsmith and DJ Jake One. Jake has been, as they say, making Real World Moves for a minute, and this album features yer actual Who's Who from both the mainstream and underground spheres of rap music; MOP, Busta Rhymes, Young Buck, Prodigy, MF Doom, Little Brother, Pos from De La, etc., etc. It's also one of the strongest and most consistent rap albums of a year that hasn't seen too many strong or consistent rap albums. You can buy it here if this scratches whatever itch you might have in this regard. I don't know if I want to add further fuel to the rumours that Jake may be doing an entire album with Freeway, so I won't. But I wouldn't mind some more of this.

Gold And Popcorn's Inaugural MP3 of the Week.

2008-11-26T18:57:00.005Z

I'm going to try to make this a regular item. It shouldn't need much explaining, really; each week, I'll endeavour to post something good, or at least interesting, from the bowels of the external hard drive. And so we begin.

Patrick "Sleepy" Brown is one-third of the God-like Atlanta hip-hop/r&b production house known as Organized Noise. You might know him as the Ving Rhames-lookin' geezer who sings the hook on Outkast's "The Way You Move". He's also a solo artist in his own right, although his fortunes in that area have been a little chequered, courtesy of Tha Politricks Of Tha Bizniz. His records are worth picking up if you happen upon them, although they seem to be a bit thin on the ground this side of the Atlantic.

I've upped probably my favourite track off his independently-released "The Vinyl Room" from 1998, which came out under the artist name Sleepy's Theme, for what I assume to be contractual reasons. I was put up on the album by a gent on the now-deceased Boundless NY messageboard who used to post under the name Feedback Loop, so all credit is due, because it's a fucking great album and I'm sure I'm not the only person whose radar it sailed right under. "Curse On You" is soulful, languid, yet slightly menacing in that "Every Breath You Take"/restraining-order-pending kind of way. The Organized Noise m.o. is evident from the jump - the characteristic blend of live instrumentation and head-bop programming, and the kind of swampy, atmospheric groove which has you reaching for cliches like "Southern-fried", "dripping with chicken grease", etc., etc. I'd love to be able to tell you where you can get hold of the album, but I still haven't formulated an official blog policy as regards offering up someone else's shit for download (he said, offering up someone else's shit for download...). All I will say is; a) Google Blog Search is your friend, and b) buy the album if you do manage to find it anywhere.

Sleepy's Theme: Curse On You (The Vinyl Room, 1998)

Guy Peellaert (1934 - 2008)

2008-11-24T11:31:00.004Z

Guy Peellaert has died in Paris, aged 74.

Who hell he, you may ask? Well, if you own a copy of Bowie's "Diamond Dogs", then you've seen his work. He first came to my attention as a schoolboy, when I bought a copy of his book "Rock Dreams" in the sale at a local bookstore. It featured text by Nik Cohn alongside Belgian-born Peellaert's astoundingly vivid paintings and illustrations, images which were amongst the first to explore and examine the burgeoning mythology of rock'n'roll using a medium other than the written word.

Being barely in my teens when "Rock Dreams" came out, and having no concept that the book might be the kind of thing worth looking after and keeping in one piece, I relentlessly cannibalised my copy, decorating my bedroom walls with Peellaert's representations of the Stones, Hendrix, the Beatles and so on. The book was such a critical and commercial success that Peellaert was later commissioned to do the cover art for one of David Bowie's greatest albums,"Diamond Dogs". Controversially, Peellaert represented Bowie as half-man, half-dog, canine genitalia and all. These latter details had to be airbrushed out for the cover of the final release. Original unretouched copies are as rare as rocking-horse shit, and will doubtless become a little more sought-after now.

Peellaert's work was more far-ranging than just "Rock Dreams" and the "Diamond Dogs" sleeve, covering comics and movie posters as well as paintings and the kind of illustrations which brought him fame, but it's for these that I knew him best. RIP.

What's Young Chris been up to?

2008-11-24T10:29:00.007Z

Yep, I've lost count of the amount of times I've heard people asking that question since the Young Gunz' last album, 2005's uneven "Rapid Fire". Actually, I haven't really, but I have myself occasionally wondered what's up with Chris and Neef. Well, it turns out that the Gunnaz are sort of on sabbatical, and that Young Chris' debut solo album is finally due out sometime within the next two or three months. If this video is any indication of its contents, it's going to be worth catching, because as you can hear, the boy remains Nice With His. New albums from both the Gunnaz and State Property are also scheduled for next year, but I refuse to officially anticipate anything until the Saigon album finally surfaces.

'Chinese Democracy' - the rock equivalent of 'The Phantom Menace'?

2008-11-22T16:23:00.015Z

Tomorrow, on November 23rd 2008, Guns 'n' Roses finally release "Chinese Democracy". If you've ever wondered what an album which took almost fifteen years and cost $11m to make would actually sound like, fill yer boots.

I can't stand Guns 'n' Roses, for reasons I can't be bothered to go into here - the "blogosphere" is already overrun with peanutheads who'll tell you at great length why Band X/Movie Y/Celebrity Z sucks, is an oxygen thief, or holds a metaphorical pillow over the face of "real" talent, so I'll pass on this opportunity, thanks. Nonetheless, it's undeniable that G'n'R are A Big Deal to many, including several people whose opinions I respect, and whatever else one may think of the band, their music and the Hammer-Of-The-Gods-turned-up-to-11 universe they inhabit, it's equally undeniable that "Chinese Democracy" is that rare thing nowadays - an Event Record.

I like Event Records, or more precisely, I like the idea of them. I mean, I can't remember the last time I was startled by an Oasis record, for example, but each time a new one comes around, I'm curious to hear whether Noel Gallagher's managed to pull anything out of his arse that's near the measure of "Slide Away" or "Rock'n'Roll Star". Likewise, with every new Madonna album comes a degree of certainty that it won't sound too much like the previous one. Which is to say that Event Records often hold a fascination for both fans and non-fans, even if only, in the latter case, to shore up an existing belief that the performers in question are no more than charlatans, fanfarons and snake-oil salesmen. Being somewhat long of tooth and grey of beard, I can remember when Event Records seemed a good deal more plentiful and frequent than they are now. The two-year gestation of Stevie Wonder's masterpiece "Songs In The Key Of Life" is a good example; how on God's Green Earth, people asked at the time, can an album take two years to make? When the end product finally arrived, though, and everyone got to hear it at the same time (more or less), the wait was, in the case of "Songs...", definitely worth it. Now, if you'll please briefly excuse me while I draw a discreet veil over "The Second Coming"...

Anyway, content notwithstanding, it could be that "Chinese Democracy" marks the passing of the Event Record, on some level at least. Reviewing it for The Onion's AV Club, Chuck Klosterman makes a very astute point to this effect;

"For one thing, Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we'll ever contemplate in this context—it's the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file. This is the end of that."

I think this is dead-on. Peer-to-peer trading of watermarked copy-protected advance promos, the drip-drip of officially-sanctioned leaks, being able to treat albums like the buffet at a wedding (courtesy of iTunes et al), where we pick and choose what we want with no obligation to take anything we don't - all have rendered the notion of the album as a self-contained 'Grand Artistic Statement Which Has Something Important To Say About The World And That' rather redundant. It appears that nobody's told Axl Rose any of this - or if they have, he wasn't listening - because "Chinese Democracy" has 'Grand Artistic Statement, etc.' embedded in its very DNA. But the inherent risk in giving the world advance notice, as Rose has done, that the next one will be The Magnum Opus is this; what if it turns out to be a load of shite? What if, after all this time, Axl Rose has completely lost sight of whatever it is he wanted to say, to the extent that the making of the statement has now become as, or more, important than the statement itself? After all, Rose's megalomaniac tendencies have been well-documented, and megalomania can do funny things to one's sense of perspective. Now, I should add at this point that I'm not much of a "Star Wars" fan, so I could never quite fathom the eagerness with which the arrival of "The Phantom Menace" was anticipated by those for whom "Star Wars" was a formative part of their childhood. But one comment made upon its release by a bitterly disappointed fanboy has stayed with me; "It's official - I have wasted my life". So, to return to the doubtless not-terribly-original observation at the top, has a decade-and-a-half of sitting on your hands been worth it? Or is "Chinese Democracy" rock music's equivalent of "The Phantom Menace"?

Well...yes. And no. If it was ever Axl Rose's intention to cause a paradigm shift in rock music with this record, then I'm afraid he's fallen flat on his arse. I've often been told by fans of G'n'R that it was the stripped-back directness of "Appetite For Destruction", and its preference for the fundamentals of rock'n'roll (or G'n'R's idea thereof) over stadium-rock hair-metal bombast, which caused it to have such a seismic impact (I'm still not buying that line, but that's another story). Well, guess what? In the bombast stakes, this makes the complete works of Richard Wagner, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Jim Steinman sound like a Nick Drake demo. Minimalist it most assuredly is not. And, like most modern rock records, it's been ProTooled to fuck and back - Rose's vocals are clinically on-the-money throughout, and every riff, bass line and drum fill has been arranged with draughtsman's precision; a sure-fire indicator that several hundred man-hours have been spent in post-production. There is nothing raw about "Chinese Democracy"; the dirty fingernails, cracked lips and calloused fingers of G'n'R's previous manifestations have been comprehensively excised. You could eat your dinner off this album. It's been polished, buffed and polished again, almost to the point of blandness. But here's a funny thing - when it works, it sounds fantastic. Case in point being "Street of Dreams", a spectacularly over-written mid-tempo rock ballad that's a dead cert to be bashed out at "American Idol" auditions from now until the franchise utters its death-rattle. "Madagascar", one of several songs with somewhat gnomic titles, is the sort of swaggering, roided-up, industrial trip-hop you could've heard on umpteen movie and videogame soundtracks over the last decade or so, but the twist here is that, instead of yet another guitar solo that sounds like a massacre in a poultry farm, there's a spoken-word collage featuring snippets from "Cool Hand Luke" and Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. Yet when you hear it, rather than thinking, "Oh, for fuck's sake!", you instead begin to think that, despite the played-out nature of this and other devices, such as the dated nu-metal grind which drives a number of songs, "Chinese Democracy" is actually a very coherent-sounding record. The cliches make sense. There's plenty of light and shade, a first-rate grasp of modern hard-rock dynamics that might conceivably have Josh Homme rushing back to the drawing board, and any number of surprising and even affecting melodic and compositional flourishes. When you think about what a maddening clusterfuck its creation must have been, this is pretty remarkable. Imagine if the best thing that could have been said about it was, "Well, at least it's not completely fucking awful..."

And, you know, it isn't. In fact, it's pretty good. Whether or not Jimmy Iovine and the board of directors at Interscope feel they've got their money's worth now that Rose has finally delivered the bloody thing is moot. One thing's for certain; somebody did a bang-up job of keeping advance copies out of the reach of mp3 blogs, so there's a genuine likelihood it'll actually sell. If there's enough about it to have a committed naysayer like me conceding that, yes, this record is a qualified success which will perform well on its own merits rather than on the reputation of its creators, and no, it is nothing like the bloated, sprawling, unfocused, Ishtar-like monstrosity that many people might have expected, then it probably deserves to. I might even buy it myself. If it recoups, mind you, then I'll show my arse in the Vatican.

Yeah, it's funny now, isn't it?

2008-11-21T20:50:00.001Z

Emory Douglas.

2008-11-21T17:54:00.010Z

Emory Douglas, one-time Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, has an exhibition of his design work on show at the Urbis in Manchester until March 2009. As you might expect, the bulk of it is Panther-related; flyers, handbills, posters, copies of The Black Panther newspaper, as well as a ton of archive material such as photographs, video, audio and even something about the BPP house band, the Lumpen, who I'd never previously heard of, but who sounded a bit like the Chambers Brothers-meets-early-Sly-Stone on the evidence of the recording on offer during the exhibition.

The whole thing does a good job of contextualising not only Douglas' contribution to the BPP, but also the conditions and circumstances that led to the rise of the Panthers in the first place. It starts off pretty grim, but gradually turns into something very inspiring and uplifting, or at least I thought so. I visited it on the Saturday before America elected its first black president and proved that it can still sometimes deliver on its founding principles, so in a way the timing couldn't have been better. It's free, too, so if you happen to be in Manchester between now and next spring, you should go.

I took some photos as well. They're fairly standard camera-phone snaps, but hopefully they'll offer a flavour of it.

Intro: More droppings on the ever-growing pile of cultural bird-shite.

2008-11-21T16:39:00.002Z

Well, not yet, at any rate. There will be soon, though. Music and popular culture mainly, football and politics occasionally, and anything else I feel like gobbing off about should the mood take me. After all, this is the brave new fuckin' world, anyone with a broadband connection and an opinion is now a cultural commentator, and the internet is one big pub argument. God spare us...

"You wear a lotta gold, but you're eatin' popcorn" - Jesse Bonds Weaver Jr., Philadelphia, USA, 1986.