Cocaine 80s are the best band in the world (this month).

Nowhere in the 2012 best-of round-ups could you have found even the mildest suggestion that the universal acclaim heaped upon Channel Orange may have been just a little bit for the backstory as for the music. I liked it, although not as much as some people, and possibly not even as much as I liked 2011's Nostalgia, Ultra. In any event, it was frustrating for me personally to observe the way that black pop music which was at least as interesting, if not more so, than Frank (or the equally effusively-praised Abel Tesfaye p/k/a The Weeknd) was being largely ignored amidst an apparent rush amongst commentators eager to assert their impeccable liberal credentials by endorsing a black r&b singer who might or might not be gay. Speaking of which, you'd think it might have occurred to a few more people to ask Rahsaan Patterson what he thought of all this?



I have my suspicions that the concept for Cocaine 80s may have arisen from, of all things, No ID's production gig on ex-Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft's most recent solo album United Nations of Sound, a couple of years back. As hook-ups go, it wasn't an obvious one; the man Kanye West has described as a mentor, responsible for a bunch of the most notable hip-hop tunes of the last two decades, and rock's leading Cosmic Woolyback. Despite the album being Ashcroft's least successful to date, it does seem to have had the side benefit of encouraging No ID's more experimental instincts. Certainly, both projects appear to involve a number of the same musicians, with guitarist Steve Wyreman's contribution being particularly outstanding. Otherwise it's multi-platinum singer-songwriter James Fauntleroy doing the singing and songwriting instead of Mad Richard, with vocal support from Makeba Riddick and, on their latest The Flower Of Life, the excellent Jhene Aiko. It's been spun as a Common project in some quarters, but it really isn't. If anything, Com seems unusually content just to play his position here (as does Nas on Chainglow), and his contributions are probably the most vital he's made to anything in quite some time.



It seems to me that the original five-word pitch might have been indie-rock/r&b/rap fusion, which admittedly sounds horrifying on paper. Yet, instead of the usual Mr. Potatohead shit you often get with things of this nature, everything's actually in the right proportion for a change. The writing's imaginative and a bit unpredictable, instead of the tedious four-chord looping Coldplay knock-offs that many rap/r&b acts fall into when they want to invoke a stadium rock vibe. Even the standard lyrical tropes sound fresher simply for being placed in a different musical context. I've actually been wanting someone to do something like this for a few years now - at least since Lewis Taylor went off the grid.



Cocaine 80s debuted with zero fuss whatsoever somewhere around June 2011 with The Pursuit EP, thus making them roughly contemporaneous to Frank Ocean's emergence with Nostalgia, Ultra, give or take a few months. Three EPs and plenty of accumulated word-of-mouth later, there's a little more weight lent to my belief that they're representative of how black artists have begun to draw upon a much broader palette than they might perhaps have done a decade ago. Back in the early 00s, performers like Anthony Hamilton appeared to be the ones swimming against the tide and the prevailing trends, even if they were still essentially traditionalists. Now there's suddenly more artists coming from a loosely similar angle, where the song is still central, but who along the way are drawing in strands from Radiohead, Nick Drake, Pink Floyd, Cocteau Twins, Elliott Smith and all kinds of strange textural shit that people wouldn't normally expect to hear referenced in black pop. And it works.



You can download all four EPs here, and you should.

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

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.

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

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.