Your Heart Out

It Will Never Be Over ... pt.7

2012-01-31T03:51:00.000Z

Right at the heart of this issue is Vicki Wickham's fascinating label Toast, which was active for a short while in the late '60s. There were some heavy hitters involved with the recordings, including the arrangers Ian Green and Derek Wadsworth. Gerry Shury, one of the early YHO heroes, was also involved, doing the arrangements for the Steve & Stevie LP Toast put out. This was a slightly atypical Toast release which generally concentrated on the soul side. The Steve & Stevie sound was rather more baroque, much closer to the Beatles and Bee Gees than Cadet or Calla.

Steve and Stevie were the Australian duo Steve Kipner and Steve Groves who moved to London to seek success. The closeness to the Bee Gees sound, I guess, is understandable as Steve Kipner's dad Nat was very important in the story of the Brothers Gibb. Nat also relocated to London and worked for Major Minor, Toast's parent company, and it's pure speculation but that could have a lot to do with the Steve and Stevie coming out on Vicki Wickham's label.

The Steve and Stevie LP is gorgeous, and Gerry Shury's arrangements on tracks like Sunshine On Snow are totally wonderful. The duo were whisked away by the Robert Stigwood Organisation at the behest of the Bee Gees, and evolved into Tin Tin who occasionally had a bit more of an edge to their sound and it's easy to see their two LPs appealing to fans of Badfinger, Left Banke, Raspberries. Gerry Shury was involved again with orchestral arrangements on the two Tin Tin LPs and this had a lot to do with him being invited to work on the Bee Gees' 2 Years On LP.

Steve Kipner, incidentally, went on to do many more things in music, including the group Friend, and as songwriter he's had a hand in such delights as Olivia Newton John's Physical and Robert Wyatt's favourite Fight For This Love by you know who ...

It Will Never Be Over ... pt.6

2012-01-28T02:53:00.000Z

Right at the heart of this issue is the fascinating label Fresh Air which seems to have been active in 1974 and 1975, and put out around 30 singles and at least four LPs. The man behind the label was legendary industry insider Tony Hall, one of the most significant figures in British popular music. Tony's background was in jazz, and in the late '50s he ran the Tempo label for Decca and was responsible for recording the best of the modernists active on the British jazz scene, such as Dizzy Reece, Victor Feldman, Tubby Hayes and Tony Crombie.

While Dizzy and Victor went to the States to chase their dreams, Tubby stayed in London as hero to some and an unknown to many more. His reputation has grown thanks to a series of reissues and so on. YouTube has helped too, revealing some great footage of Tubby's bands over the years. The general consensus now is that Tubby's 1967 set Mexican Green is his best work. It features a lovely song, A Dedication to Joy, for his girlfriend at the time Joy Marshall.

Joy was an American singer, who moved to England in the early '60s, worked with Johnny Dankworth's orchestra, appeared in Lionel Bart's Maggie May, recorded some sides for Ember and Decca, and had a minor hit with The More I See You. Her Decca releases include the majestic and very dramatic beat ballad Heartaches (Hurry On By) which just oozes class like a Nancy Wilson soul side.

Joy also had a single out on Vicki Wickham's Toast label in 1968 which featured the gorgeous And I'll Find You on the a-side. Sadly Joy died that autumn from an accidental overdose of sleeping tablets. In her book Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This Val Wilmer writes about Joy, her struggles, and the funeral itself. Tubby would be prompted to write another song for Joy, his sad lady ...

It Will Never Be Over ... pt.5

2012-01-25T00:22:00.000Z

Right at the heart of this issue is the fascinating label Fresh Air which seems to have been active in 1974 and 1975, and put out around 30 singles and at least four LPs. The man behind the label was legendary industry insider Tony Hall, one of the most significant figures in British popular music. Fresh Air didn't have any hits in the UK, but had considerable success abroad, particularly with Velvet Glove's Sweet Was My Rose which was a massive success on the Continent. It is one of those songs that will seem curiously familiar to many people. It blends, say, The Band's country rock with Cook and Greenaway earworm qualities. It's also a great example of the '70s passion for 'story' songs, particularly those with a touch of tragedy about them, like Hot Chocolate's Emma.

Velvet Glove were the songwriting duo of Ken Leray and Roger Spooner. As Velvet Glove they put out a great Shel Talmy-produced LP on Fresh Air, but this has pretty much vanished. I can't add much about the duo. Ken Leray I know a little about. He wrote Rose-Coloured Windows which Mandy More recorded as a single for Fresh Air. It was Tony Hall who had been behind Mandy's rediscovered LP But That Is Me which Sunbeam salvaged for us. Ken wrote songs for the much loved Doctor Snuggles cartoon series, but his real success came when Fern Kinney got to number one in the UK with his song Together We Are Beautiful which he'd recorded (in a way that reminds me of the great Peter Skellern) in 1977. Fern's number one came in early 1980, between Blondie's Atomic and The Jam's Going Underground, and that's one beautiful sequence. I am particularly fond of Fern's hit as it's a perfect example of easy listening disco. It's also got an odd lovers rock feel to it. And, yes, inevitably there is a lovers rock version I am particularly fond of by Samantha Rose. As for Fern, she made some other wonderful light disco recordings around the same time, such as Love Me Tonight, but didn't match the success of this again ...

It Will Never Be Over ... pt.4

2012-01-22T00:52:00.000Z

Right at the heart of this issue is the fascinating label Fresh Air which seems to have been active in 1974 and 1975, and was run by legendary industry insider Tony Hall. The label put out four or so LPs, and curiously these are all pretty much out of circulation, even if shall we say more unofficial circles. Among these was a 1975 recording by Mike Cooper, Life and Death in Paradise, which featured Mike Osborne, Louis Moholo and Harry Miller among the line-up. Tony Hall had managed to persuade Mike to record again against a couple of years or so of self-exile in Spain following a falling out with the Pye organisation.

The disagreement had been about the presentation of Mike's fantastic 1971 recordings. Mike wanted to release them as a double LP set, but Pye insisted on issuing them as discrete editions. The first to appear was Places I Know, which showcases Mike in a singer-songwriter role, with a strong country rock feel along the lines of Bob Dylan's New Morning and the Burritos. The songs are strong, but it's a real bonus that Mike Gibbs is involved with the occasional orchestral arrangement (which will particularly interest anyone who loves Bill Fays debut). Pye issued The Machine Gun Company set later which showcased Mike and his group exploring a bit more of a Tim Buckley Lorca or Loaded-era Velvets sound, with some nice free jazz touches. These two LPs were issued on one CD by BGO in the '90s but oddly even this is not generally available nowadays. There's not much on YouTube either, except the gorgeous track The Singing Tree.

Mike's career has been a fascinating one, stretching from the '60s London blues scene, alongside Tony McPhee, Jo Ann Kelly etc. to his present day activities which are very much rooted in abstract electronica and ambient exotica. Mike's recent recordings are really worth exploring ...

It Will Never Be Over ... pt.3

2012-01-19T00:09:00.000Z

Right at the heart of this issue is the fascinating label Fresh Air which seems to have been active in 1974 and 1975, and put out around 30 singles and at least four LPs. The man behind the label was legendary industry insider Tony Hall, one of the most significant figures in British popular music. His story needs telling in-depth, and it goes from running the Tempo label for Decca in the late '50s, recording the best modern jazz players active in Britain at the time (Tubby Hayes, Dizzy Reece, etc.) to being a DJ on Radio Luxembourg, writing for Record Mirror, doing publicity and promotions for Decca and its stable in the '60s (and being a real advocate for American soul sounds) to discovering and nurturing the Real Thing, Loose Ends, and so on.

Fresh Air doesn't seem to have had any hits in the UK but in its short existence it does seem to have been a great example of the era's 'pop without frontiers' outlook. The first release seems to have been by the reggae singer Shark Wilson, and it was produced by Lieber & Stoller (fresh from success with Stealer's Wheel?). One side of this single, Too Much Pain, is posted on YouTube. And remember this was before the 'crossover' success of Ken Boothe and John Holt later in 1974.

A glance at the Fresh Air discography reveals all sorts of gems, from lost LPs by Ram John Holder to names perhaps known only to curious collectors, such as Black Faith, Trax, and Richard Henry Dee. Others may be better known for their later activities. The Abraham Ali who released the lovely If You Need Me and is I believe now better known as the Mersey playwright Dhanil Ali. And there's Nola Fontaine who has had a colourful career. A post-Fresh Air single of hers, produced by Trevor Horn, has become a favourite of cosmic disco lovers.

It does seem quite incredible that Fresh Air didn't have a hit with either of the single they put out by Ellie (Ellie Hope and her sisters). The first of these irresistible 45s, Tip Of My Tongue, was written by the fantastic team of Lynsey De Paul and Barry Blue. The second one, the smooth disco of My Love Is Your Love, was written for the sisters by Mud's Rob Davis and Ray Stiles. Mud also recorded the song as a b-side in 1975 - a hint of what was to come with Shake It Down in 1976. The flip of the second Ellie was composed by Christine Hope and produced by Gerry Shury who gives it a really lovely funky feel along the lines of his work with Biddu's organisation at the time.

Ellie Hope did later have success with Liquid Gold of Dance Yourself Dizzy fame. Oh and for anyone who cannot resist mentioning Groovejet when the words Rob Davis and disco are mentioned let's throw Lucky, a solo Ellie Hope single from 1983, into the pot for some fun.

It Will Never Be Over ... pt.2

2012-01-16T00:45:00.000Z

This issue starts with stumbling across a YouTube posting of the British soul treasure Joe E. Young & the Toniks' Flower In My Hand on the Toast label and setting off on an expedition to find out more about Vicki Wickham's boutique label. This soon led me on to gems like Rosetta Hightower's lethal version of Big Bird and The Coins' cover of Love Power.

Joe E. Young himself would be better known as Colin Young, lead singer with The Foundations, kings of British bubblegum soul, courtesy of Tony Macaulay's compositions. But there was another side to the group, even on the flip of Build Me Up Buttercup where they had a go at stranger psychedelic material of their own on the aptly titled New Direction. One of the later singles, too, was Colin's own composition, the heavier I'm Going To Be A Rich Man. The flip of Colin's own solo single, You're No Good, is another track that's taken on a life of its own among collectors of psychedelic soul sounds.

While exceptions are a wonderful thing the whole Tony Macaulay bubblegum soul phenomenon is a fascinating thing. There is no doubt that the guy had an astonishing gift for knocking together an absurdly catchy song and make it seem effortlessly easy. There are so many subversive examples of his handiwork. One that springs to mind is the unexpected hit for Marmalade in 1976 Falling Apart At The Seams ...

It Will Never Be Over ... pt.1

2012-01-13T01:42:00.000Z

The cover star of this issue is Barry St. John who had the greatest voice of all the British girls in the '60s if not the best of luck. She could sound sophisticated and sultry, and she could come across fierce and ferocious. While she was perhaps too grrritty to be a success commercially some of her recordings went on to become Northern Soul favourites, such as Everything I Touch Turns To Tears and Hey Boy. Barry did at least have the benefit of working with some of the more adventurous arrangers and producers, such as Andrew Loog Oldham, David Whitaker, Mike Leander and Mickie Most.

The tie-in with this edition (as if any excuse were needed) was stumbling across an internet image of Barry's Cry Like A Baby and its astonishing 'country soul' b-side Long and Lonely Night with a picture sleeve for Vicki Wickham's Toast label. Further exploring revealed an old Billboard reporting that Barry was recording an LP for Toast with Emperor Rosko producing. The LP, According To St. John, actually came out on Major Minor, Toast's parent company, and is frustratingly still unavailable. We at least, have access to footage of Barry singing Cry Like A Baby ...

It Will Never Be Over ...

2012-01-10T15:56:00.002Z

It Will Never Be Over ... is the latest edition of YHO which can be downloaded free for all here. It is a riotous romp through the UK's soul undergrowth and pop flowerbeds of the late '60s and early '70s. Featured along the way are the likes of Vicki Wickham's Toast and Tony Hall's Fresh Air labels, Rosetta Hightower and Ian Green, Labi Siffre and Gordon Beck, Doris Troy and Madeline Bell, Alan Parker and Herbie Flowers, Blue Mink and the Brotherhood of Man, Fox and Velvet Glove, Mike Cooper and Mandy More, Tubby Hayes and Joy Marshall, Gerry Shury and Lee Vanderbilt, Colin Young and the Foundations, Barry St. John and the Butterfly Ball.

One thing leads to another, and that is exactly why "it will never be over ...". Please help to spread the word.

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.10

2012-01-07T00:04:00.000Z

Rainsongs and Painsongs is the new edition of YHO which can be downloaded as a pdf here, free for all. It is at heart a celebration of Julie Tippetts' work, very much inspired by her collaboration with Martin Archer on Tales of FiNiN which is undoubtedly the most rewarding record of recent times.

The title of this issue is adapted from words used in or as a title of songs by Julie. I love the words 'rainsong' and 'painsong'. Rain, oddly, intriguingly, seems to be a recurring motif in Julie's lyrics or poetry. If you look back 40 years to Lullaby from the 1969 set this deceptively simple and beautiful song, which is just Julie with Brian Godding on guitar, is about sitting watch the rain fall through a window and feeling warm and cosy. There are few people who could capture something so fundamental so perfectly.

As this cycle of posts ends it is to be hoped that visitors to the site have been encouraged to explore the delights of Tales of FiNiN. If, however, a little more of a nudge is needed, then try this ...

1-07 The Other Side by Discus Music

And, just to prove the underlying belief here at YHO that there is always something new to learn, here's a little bit of Julie I really was unaware of. You have John Reed to thank for this ...

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.9

2012-01-04T02:32:00.001Z

While doing some background reading for this issue I came across a review in International Times (IT) of a concert Julie took part in on 27 February 1970 at The Roundhouse, London. This was organised by Peter Swales (of Sahara publishing/records) and he billed it as The New Day concert. The review itself was gloriously over the top, and fired by the optimism the new decade brought with it. If I had a time machine this very definitely would be one event I'd want to go back and visit.

From what I can piece together Jess Roden's Bronco opened proceedings, and were followed by Peter Swales' proteges Gypsy, who he managed to get signed to United Artists. Gypsy released a couple of great LPs at the start of the '70s and almost had a bit of a hit on their hands with Changes Coming.

Gary Farr and Kevin Westlake were up next to do a set. They'd been writing, recording and hanging out together for a while, and some of Gary's recordings with support from Mighty Baby at the time still sound simply magical. Gary's LP Take Something With You was produced immaculately by Reggie King, and features some real classics like Don't Know Why You Bother Child.

Reggie himself was up next, and by rights should have been backed by his colleagues in Mighty Baby but something went awry at the last moment, and he was instead supported by the guys from B.B. Blunder or the Blossom Toes if you like. This seems just about typical of Reggie's luck. I like to assume this is the show that the photo of Reggie with the B.B. Blunder guys. Reggie played and hung out with Brian Godding, Brian Belshaw etc. quite a bit at this time, and they released a single together of Little Boy and 10,000 Miles.

Julie Driscoll was the headline act on the night, and her set sounds astonishing. Some of it was just Julie solo, some of it was just with Brian Godding on guitar, and the rest with the full B.B. Blunder line-up. The climax of the concert seems to have been Julie leading an emotional rendition of the Blunder song that gave the concert its name and tone. This was from the Worker's Playtime LP which featured Julie quite strongly, particularly on the glorious Seed.

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.8

2012-01-01T01:49:00.000Z

This issue features a fair bit on matters relating to Simon Booth and Working Week/Weekend. This is primarily because I first came across Julie using the name Tippetts when she sang on the second Working Week single, the sultry Storm of Light. It wasn't the only time Julie sang with Working Week: she's featured on the extraordinary 12" Stella Marina with Jalal from the Last Poets. And with Keith Tippett she contributes to the final WW LP, Fire In The Mountain.

Interestingly, despite all the post-punk revisionism, Simon Booth really has not been given the credit for being a genuine pioneer. It's odd that some of the Barthes Boys persist in using phrases like 'faux jazz'. Without getting into a debate about authenticity and what that means and what it's worth it seems strange to dismiss Working Week and Weekend's jazz credentials. You only have to look at the musicians featured. Saxophonist Larry Stabbins, a cornerstone of both groups, had links with Keith Tippett going back to the start of the '70s via Centipede's wonderful Septober Energy. And Keith also played with Weekend, appearing on the Live At Ronnie Scott's set.

I don't think I will ever give up making the case for how important Weekend were as part of a small wave of people who helped broaden musical horizons in that post-punk period, opening minds and ears to jazz, latin sounds, bossa nova and so on. And their performances still seem special ...

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.7

2011-12-29T00:14:00.000Z

Julie's short spell as an international pop icon had a dramatic impact around the world, and it is interesting to note those whom she seems to have influenced such as the excellent Josipa Lisac in Yugoslavia. In Czechoslovakia I think it's fair to suggest that Julie's recordings with Brian Auger and the Trinity and their 1968 visit to the country had an impact on singers like the wonderful Marta Kubisova.

Another Czech singer that's really had an impact on me is the jazz/blues performer Eva Olmerova. There is a great documentary about her turbulent life available through Radio Prague, which is really compelling and moving. There are some great clips of her in performance on YouTube, such as the the very 'noir' 1971 film for Cerna kara. There are some great clips, too, of Eva singing numbers from her debut 1968 LP Jazz Feeling, which featured Jiri Stivin.

I like the fact that Eva was prepared to have a go at any style of music as long as she could exploit the passion in the song, and she did some spectacularly deep country meets gospel numbers. But this is the one I keep coming back to ...

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.6

2011-12-26T00:28:00.000Z

Naturally, being YHO there are a number of diversions and detours along the way. So, for example, mention of Julie's incredibly moving song Czechoslovakia allows an ideal opportunity to ponder upon the Prague Spring and its aftermath in relation to some of the fantastic produced there during that period. A perfect example of this is Slunecny hrob by the group Blue Effect which is just so beautiful and always feels like a prayer to me.

Of course after the Soviet invasion life will have been more difficult for 'progressive' groups, but I don't know for sure if this influenced Blue Effect to become an instrumental outfit. It may have happened, anyway. Plenty of their Western counterparts moved in a similar 'jazz rock' direction, as well. And plenty of what Blue Effect did in the early '70s bears comparison with what was happening with Soft Machine and those acts who threw together heavy guitars and organ with jazz horn sections. The 1970 LP Coniunctio, which Blue Effect recorded with Prague's Jazz Q, is fantastic. Jazz Q at the time featured the flutist Jiri Stivin, who made some pretty incredible records of his own in the '70s too. While I am far from an expert on his work I would particularly recommend the 1976 LP Zodiac which features the Kuhn Mixed Chorus and the Talich Quartet.

With a little of pressure Blue Effect recorded for a while as Modry Efekt, a name that might be familiar to those that might be familiar to those that have studied the infamous and invaluable Nurse With Wound list. In this guise there was a great LP recorded in 1971 with the Czechoslovakian Radio Jazz Orchestra, Nová Syntéza, which will appeal enormously if you love CCS or Septober Energy by Keith Tippett's Centipede.

There is actually some great footage on YouTube of Blue Effect or Modry Efekt performing in 1971 with a small orchestra, and it's wonderful. This will appeal to anyone with a passion for what was happening with the blending of the UK's progressive jazz and rock performers at the time.

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.5

2011-12-23T02:32:00.001Z

One of the great pop revelations for me was finding a copy of the Streetnoise LP by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity in a charity shop for next to nothing. This was in the late '80s. There is so much to love about that LP, but Julie's soul-punch of a song, Czechoslovakia, is the one that gets me every time. Written in response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the crushing of the Prague Spring it is a perfect snapshot of a moment.

In recent years I have become increasingly fascinated by the pop music made in the old eastern Europe, and hate suggestions that this is simply dabbling in exoticism. That's an insulting notion. If you like music you will get excited about inspiring sounds wherever and whenever you find them.

Among my favourite examples of Czech pop from the Communist era are recordings by Hana and Petr Ulrychova with the group Atlantis. They feature in the Czech pop special, The Road That Leads Nowhere, with Don't You Break It Again, which displays a definite debt to Julie, Brian and the Trinity. This film captures something of the excitement and optimism of the Prague Spring. Of course things got more difficult after the Soviet invasion, but the creativity was not stifled.

Fish around on YouTube and you will find plenty of examples of great work by Hana and Petr. Best of all is the Odyssea LP they made as Atlantis in 1970. This was a wonderful mix of psychedelia, soul, folk sounds, jazz and ornate orchestral arrangements. The orchestration came from the great Gustav Brom who has a bit of a reputation for some of his '70s big band work among beat-seekers and lovers of all things funky.

The excessively-sensitive authorities suppressed the Odyssea LP and it didn't get an official release until 1999. Ironically we are not much further forward now, and it takes a certain resourcefulness to find the LP but all efforts to do so are richly rewarded when you find tracks as stunningly beautiful as Ticho and Za vodou, za horou ...

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.4

2011-12-20T01:15:00.000Z

One of the many fascinating things about Julie is the way she has stubbornly stuck to a precarious path when making music. I almost feel guilty for saying this but there is a sense of excitement in piecing together the many things she has been involved in, with a whole host of people. Even putting together this 'celebration' made me feel rather guilty as there is a lot of Julie's work I'm not familiar with. The 1978 LP, Frames, by Keith Tippett's Ark is a great example, although in this case there are posts on YouTube. In many other cases the internet is not so helpful.

On the other hand some of Julie's contributions to other people's recordings and performances are known and loved. She was, for example, one of those involved in the 1999 Soupsongs celebration of Robert Wyatt's music, led by Annie Whitehead. And many years earlier she'd been one of Robert's guests at a special concert at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1974 which featured a heartbreakingly beautiful rendition of Julie's own Mind of a Child.

My own favourite moment among Julie's collaborations (well, of those I've heard at least) is her singing Caucasian Bird Riffles, the words of Paul Haines and the incredibly beautiful music of Carla Bley from the Tropic Appetites LP.

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.3

2011-12-17T00:42:00.000Z

Of course being YHO there are all sorts of wild and winding detours involved in this issue. So, thinking about how Julie has used her voice in exciting ways, attention passes on to others who have done the same thing. Specific mention is made of the great Norma Winstone. When I think of Norma I think immediately of her work with Michael Garrick, mainly because the LP The Heart is a Lotus is such a pivotal thing for me. Buying that record when Vocalion reissued it opened the door to so much great British jazz. And for me Norma's often wordless vocals connected perfectly to so many other things, such as the Swingle Singers and Barbara Moore.

Sadly Michael Garrick died as I was putting together this issue of YHO which added a real poignancy to all the records of his I was listening to over and over. I am a particular fan of the records where he has Norma featuring as the vocalist, stretching herself. Troppo, from 1973, for example is fantastic.

Norma naturally has been the featured singer on many other records. Like Julie Tippetts she has few headlining sets to her name. But these are worth seeking out. The first of these, Edge of Time, features for example the extraordinarily beautiful Song of Love, while every song on 1987's Somewhere Called Home makes you hold your breath in awe. Just dare to breathe when listening to her sing Celeste.

Sometimes I think Norma sings like an enchanted chorister, and actually that 'devotional' sense may be quite apt. Michael Garrick, I'm aware, did some fantastic work in combining jazz and the sounds of worship. While his music is not featured on YouTube there is a wonderful, tantalising clip of the Michael Garrick Sextet from 1968 performing one of its jazz praises from St Paul's Cathedral.

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.2

2011-12-14T01:59:00.000Z

Among those contributing to the remarkable Tales of FiNiN is the percussionist Charlie Collins. I have made the not particularly bold assumption that this is the same CC that played with Clock DVA and The Box. In those days, however, he was playing saxophone predominantly. I say predominantly because I have a particular fondness for his flute playing on Impressions of African Winter, the closing track on the group's incredible Thirst LP.

I think Thirst is one of the enduringly great records of the post-punk boom. It is also one of the most under-rated. Aesthetically, it is also spot-on, being on Fetish and coming in a great Neville Brody sleeve. Charlie's sax playing is a vital ingredient of what made that incarnation of Clock DVA so great. His playing on that LP is surprisingly restrained, and this adds to the overall sense of tension and barely-constrained paranoia.

The 'hit' single from the LP was 4 Hours, a perfect example of pop noir. There is on YouTube footage of the group performing the number live at the Futurama festival, but for me that kind of event is so against what the era's adventurous music should be about. Nevertheless it does capture something of the song's anxiety ...

Rainsongs and Painsongs - pt.1

2011-12-11T12:40:00.002Z

Tales of FiNiN is one of those rare recordings which you find something new in every time you revisit it. While Julie and Martin are both firmly rooted in improvisation, this double LP is intricately put together, both musically and lyrically, and it covers a lot of ground in every sense of the phrase. It's beautifully presented too - actually holding the package in your hand is a delight, and there is an exciting attention to detail. It's an incredibly complex work, but completely accessible and hugely enjoyable.
It really should be a work of art that is widely celebrated, and I urge anyone with an appetite for inspiring and adventurous musical creations to seek out Tales of FiNiN.
Here is a taster ...

2-02 Taunts of the Fallen by Discus Music

Rainsongs and Painsongs

2011-12-10T14:13:00.002Z

A Belief in Mischief - #10

2011-12-05T00:58:00.001Z

I don't know if I would agree with Peter about many things, and I have absolutely no concept of what music he might go home and listen to nowadays. Does that matter? So many 'writers' with 'good taste' churn out such dull work, after all. But Style Wars is very much worth seeking out, if you steer clear of the 'tribes' profiled. The pop parts are good, and York includes one of the most perceptive and sympathetic pieces on the 1979 mod thing.

I'll let you into a little secret. I was interviewed about the '79 mod thing, ooh quite some time ago now, for a book that was obviously going to be pretty high profile. During the course of the interview I thought some pretty important ground was covered, and I had a horrible suspicion that some of the best bits just would not fit in this particular book. So I scribbled my thoughts down while they were still fresh in my mind, and those thoughts ended up up in what became the first edition of Your Heart Out.

If there is one thing that stayed with me from being 15 and exploring the modernists' world for the very first time it is the dizzying thrill of learning about something new, and realising that something 'new' doesn't necessarily have to be something 'now'. And let's face it, discovering the music of The Creation, for example, didn't ever preclude listening to the Fire Engines or the Peech Boys. It was, and is, very much part of the same thing.

A Belief in Mischief - #9

2011-12-02T00:12:00.001Z

Of course it is one of the tragedies of our age that Penny Reel hasn't written enough, and a book of his 'mod memories' would be a wonderful thing. We do, at least, have his excellent book, Deep Down, a short story about Dennis Brown. And I'm sure I'm not alone in eternally associating certain songs with that 1979 Penny Reel piece, like Chuck Jackson's I Don't Want To Cry and this ...

A Belief in Mischief - #8

2011-11-29T01:22:00.000Z

One of many articles that has caught my eye is one on reggae from a December 1970 edition. It ties in with Horace Ove's Reggae film, and it's quite a combative, confrontational piece. What is intriguing is that there doesn't seem to be any credit for the writer. It's tempting to mention Penny Reel, because of his IT connections, but I suspect he wasn't involved with the paper until 1973ish.

It's interesting to see a mention for Mrs King of Stamford Hill in terms of being a pioneer of releasing reggae records independently in the UK and putting them in with your groceries. Only recently John Eden's Uncarved site ran Malcolm Imrie's account of the 'secret history' of the R&B record shop and label, based in Stamford Hill and run by Rita & Bennie Isen. The R&B label and its various offshoots (such as Ska Beat) were extremely important in putting out ska and early reggae singles in the UK. Ironically among the first ska singles I bought (from a ramshackle shop near Sidcup station) in 1979 were on R&B (Lee Perry's Mad Head), and something by Clive and Gloria on Ska Beat.

I would suggest you could have hours of fun seeking out old R&B and Ska Beat releases. This Laurel Aitken number has particularly caught my attention. Oddly I've just remembered Laurel Aitken and that old record shack pop up in a short story I wrote some time ago.

A Belief in Mischief - #7

2011-11-26T00:52:00.000Z

A Belief in Mischief is the new edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here as a pdf, free for all. It started out as a meditation on sacred texts, and ended up as a celebration of irregulars, visionaries, mischief makers, and people who just don't get written about enough. As ever when putting YHO together it is something or someone mentioned as an aside in the text that grows to become completely fascinating. So, in this issue, the disc jockey Mike Raven was mentioned in passing. I had been thinking about John Peel, and all the accounts of how something he played 'changed' someone's life. While researching this issue I kept coming across similar testimonies on soul forums about Mike Raven's soul and blues show during the early days of Radio One and how again the music he played changed people's lives. But you don't read much about Mike Raven. Of course there is a major difference, in that Mike was only on Radio One for four years or so, while Peel trundled on and on. But the fact remains Mike Raven was playing (non-hit) black American sounds on national radio in the UK, and that needs to be celebrated.

I have no first hand experience of hearing Mike Raven on the radio. I've heard the occasional clip. I've read some bits and pieces. And he fascinates me. Anyone who has been lucky enough to see Horace Ove's 1970 Reggae film will know he had this exaggeratedly theatrical plummy patrician way of speaking, and if you combine that with the fact he was in his mid-40s when Radio One started, it all gets stranger and stranger.

After his brief spell with Radio One, where he had that specialist blues and soul slot, he went to work as an actor in Hammer horror films, indulging his interest in magic and making the most of his Christopher Lee looks. He subsequently relocated to Cornwall, spending his time as a sheep farmer and sculptor (using his real name of Austin Churton Fairman).

None of this would happen now, so let's celebrate a certain eccentricity. And until there is an official DVD release of Horace Ove's Reggae film we will continue to share clips like this:

A Belief in Mischief - #6

2011-11-23T01:22:00.000Z

The early raw EBB is fantastic on the first couple of LPs, Wasa Wasa and Sing Brother Sing, and I was surprised to find myself thinking of Robert Lloyd and the Prefects/Nightingales when hearing tracks like Why Can't Somebody Love Me? But it was a couple of the later LPs that really struck me. The cover of Inside Out is fantastic and the strikingly stark social realist theme is matched by some of the content on songs like They Took It Away and Homes Fit For Heroes.

I have grown to like the next LP, Oora, even more, and the musical setting here often seems to be approaching a glorious melodic mod soul-storm, infused with a sense of disillusionment and confusion. It really is fantastic, and not at all what I would have expected - which is a useful reminder never to assume anything. The presence of Madeline Bell and Doris Troy on backing vocals gives a useful clue. And there are a few exceptional tracks, including Things On My Mind and Eviction.

It's quite a nice feeling to be able to put down in black and white an acknowledgement that you've got something completely wrong, so while I'm trying to make amends I would like to mention Edgar Broughton's current activities. His site, in particular, is well worth a visit, and his blog makes for a great read. It has to be said Edgar's insightful commentary on the world around us adds additional weight to the political content of some of his early '70s recordings, such as this ...

A Belief in Mischief - #5

2011-11-20T00:54:00.002Z

I don't know how well known Jo Ann's recordings are. I am conscious that there are several I've not heard. But she fascinates me. She didn't take an easy path. And while there may be a few raised eyebrows at the notion of a south Londoner becoming quite so immersed in the country blues tradition there can be no doubt about the extraordinary power and beauty which drove her performances. I guess connections/recordings with John Fahey give her legacy a stamp of approval which might help people sit up and take notice.

Jo Ann's contributions to the Immediate series of modern blues LPs was where I first came across her music. And it was in Val Wilmer's Mama Told Me There'd Be Days Like This that I first read about Jo Ann. While some of her purists' blues works are wonderful, like her recording of Oh Death with T.S. McPhee, I do find myself very much drawn to the occasions where she sings a little outside of the blues' parameters. For example, she helped out the group Tramp (featuring some moonlighting Fleetwood Mac people) with some vocals on the title track of the Put A Record On LP, and it's an incredibly beautiful performance, right up there with the best blue-eyed soul moments. Beggar By Your Side from the same (Spark) LP is wonderful, too.

Jo Ann sadly died in 1990. I wonder if she were still active today whether she would be busy with all sorts of intriguing collaborations, given a resurgence of interest in roots music and English visionaries of different sorts. Who knows? This beautiful piece of film is of Jo Ann singing one of her greatest songs in a Bristol club, when she really did have little time left.

A Belief in Mischief - #4

2011-11-17T01:47:00.000Z

I love how the book starts with the 12-year-old Val walking into the Swing Shop, in Streatham, south London, asking if they have any jazz records. This pivotal moment is the catalyst for a very personal revolution, and the way that jazz and blues music shaped Val's life is put across really powerfully. Now, I hope, we recognise her as an incredibly important photographer and writer, and one of the journalistic highlights of the past year has been Val's illustrated essay for The Wire on Fela in London.

Val has popped up in the back pages of YHO a number of times, particularly in the Enlightenment! edition. In the A Belief in Mischief issue she is mentioned specifically because her book was a huge factor in getting me to listen to blues music. She makes the blues seem warm, human and alive rather than the more typical journalistic approach where the blues becomes shorthand for some dreary, dusty authenticity. And this is the way I like the blues ...

A Belief in Mischief - #3

2011-11-14T01:19:00.001Z

Tracing the story of Shertser and Sippen leads to A=MH2, the remarkable LP by the fantastic duo of Clark-Hutchinson which the Firm produced. It's a mad record, which is up there with the best Impulse! or ECM were putting out at the time (this is the end of the '60s and into the start of the '70s) while simultaneously being rooted in the UK underground acid rock scene, along side Mighty Baby. The opening track, Improvisation on a Modal Scale, is a brilliant dance track, and the funny thing is I doubt if I would ever have heard it were it not for my interest in what Shertser and Sippen got up to.

Against the odds (you've got to read their story) Clark Hutchinson became a proper group and put out a couple more cracking LPs. The final one, Gestalt, from 1971, has got some beautifully desolate songs on, like Come Up Here. The one in-between, Retribution, is a wonderful mixture. I particularly love After Hours which builds on a gorgeous Horace Silver style piano motif, with Mick Hutchinson adding some searing guitar work over the top. It needs to be mentioned Mick had previous form with the excellent Sons of Fred, south London beat noise savages whose too few recordings such as Baby What You Want Me To Do are much admired. So perhaps it's no surprise that Retribution contains a track as unsettling and twisted as Death, The Lover which is incredible. And if Mark E Smith and The Fall, back in the early years, weren't familiar with this astonishing track then I'm Roman Totale ...

A Belief in Mischief - #2

2011-11-11T01:54:00.000Z

A Belief in Mischief is the new edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here as a pdf, free for all. It started out as a meditation on sacred texts, and ended up as a celebration of irregulars, visionaries, mischief makers, and people who just don't get written about enough. One of the people featured is Norman Jopling. He was the first person to rave about the Rolling Stones in print. And Dave Godin, on a number of occasions, took particular care to acknowledge the importance of Norman writing about rhythm & blues music in Record Mirror in the early '60s. Norman also plays a central role in the early part of Neil Rushton's Northern Soul Stories. That book contains some great anecdotes from the time when Norman and Peter Meaden ran a publishing company called New Wave Music. The first new act they signed up was a wonderful group called The Peep Show, and a couple of singles appeared on Polydor. They really are wonderful things, with more of a folk sound than most of the other outfits on the fringes of the psychedelic scene and some wonderfully unusual lyrical themes. There are a couple of wonderful Peep Show compilations around, and they are fantastic. If you are interested in Norman's story I would thoroughly recommend investigating the back pages of Morning magazine, which is beautifully designed and put together by Iker Spozio, whose artwork you might recognise from sources such as records by the very great Colleen (who also helps to make Morning magical).

A Belief in Mischief - #1

2011-11-08T02:55:00.000Z

A Belief in Mischief is the new edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here as a pdf, free for all. It started out as a meditation on sacred texts, and ended up as a celebration of irregulars, visionaries, mischief makers, and people who just don't get written about enough. One of the people featured is Peter Meaden, and I would definitely say that among my sacred texts are the interviews he did with Steve Turner in 1975 and which were published by the NME in November 1979. Meaden’s musings remain eminently quotable, but the comment that grabbed me more than any was the one about him bringing Captain Beefheart to Britain. That seemed so perfect, and I don’t think enough has been made of it. This was at the start of 1968, when Peter had been a massive evangelist for Safe As Milk, which at the time was only available on import. Peter was then running a publishing company with Norman Jopling, and among the related activities were putting out a Donnie Elbert ska/early reggae single on their own New Wave label, as a subsidiary of Melodisc. The excellent Tapir reggae discographies site has an image of the label, with Without You on one side and Baby Come On Home on the other. Deram later picked this single up for release, and I believe it was a big hit in Jamaica. Around the same time Meaden must have got his beloved Jimmy James to record a beautiful version of the Captain’s I’m Glad. Now, that sort of perfection, that beautiful sense of joining the dots, is what makes me believe in the magic of music.

A Belief in Mischief

2011-11-05T20:22:00.003Z

Among those mentioned are Peter Meaden, Norman Jopling, Peter Shertser, Val Wilmer, Edgar Broughton, Jo Ann Kelly, Mick Farren, Martin Stone, Dave Godin and Penny Reel. That gives you some idea of what's included in this issue, and the territory explored. Please spread the word.

Ghosts of Midnight - pt.7

2011-10-27T01:26:00.000+01:00

Ghosts of Midnight is the latest edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here free for all as a pdf. It is an affectionate tribute to the 1950s jazz label Bethlehem and some of its voices. One of Bethlehem’s great voices belonged to Betty Roché, who is one of my very favourite jazz or blues singers. I think it’s fair to say Betty didn’t have a lot of luck in the music business, she didn’t make many records, but there are many people discovering her extraordinarily beautiful voice. She recorded just the one LP for Bethlehem, which had possibly my very favourite Burt Goldblatt sleeve. It’s like the cover of a ‘noir’ crime novel, and really is quite beautiful. The record draws heavily on Betty’s connections with Duke Ellington, with whom she worked for some time as the featured vocalist in his orchestra.

After the Bethlehem set, Betty only recorded a couple more LPs, both for Prestige in the early ‘60s. One of these was Lightly and Politely, and if you like sweet vocal sets where jazz and blues blend exquisitely this is a perfect record, and features some wonderful performances like Rocks In My Bed. She is perfectly complemented by the small group format, including Wally Richardson on guitar who played on many great ‘60s and ‘70s recordings, Bobby Hutcherson’s Now!, Donald Byrd’s Electric Byrd etc., and made his own wonderful Soul Guru LP featuring a gorgeous version of Monday Monday.

The other LP Betty made for Prestige was Singin’ and Swingin’ and features Jack McDuff among others. Betty tackles standards but in a wonderful way, with irresistible scatting on numbers like I Just Got The Message Baby. Betty’s most famous moment, complete with scatting, I guess, is her early ‘50s performance singing on the Duke Ellington Orchestra recording of Take The A Train, with Louis Bellson o drums and Paul Gonsalves on sax. She is captured on film singing the same song with the Ellington band in Reveille with Beverley, and this clip really is glorious.

Ghosts of Midnight - pt.6

2011-10-24T01:52:00.000+01:00

Ghosts of Midnight is the latest edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here free for all as a pdf. It is an affectionate tribute to the 1950s jazz label Bethlehem and some of its voices. Among those voices were those of the Pat Moran Quartet, who recorded a couple of LPs for the label in the mid-'50s, featuring some lovely intricate vocal excursions which hold suggestions of the style that would be popular a decade or so later with the Mamas & Papas, Spanky & Our Gang, etc. Taking the lead on some tracks, like the exquisite Sunday Kind of Love, is Bev Kelly, one of my very favourite jazz singers. Pianist Pat Moran would next lead a new trio, which featured the legendary Scott LaFaro on bass. This line-up recorded a fantastic set for Audio Fidelity in 1957, which demonstrated a wonderful rapport between Scott and Pat. Indeed Scott is on record as saying the sessions with Pat Moran were his favourite recordings. The trio also made an LP backing Bev Kelly, which is an absolute must-have, and its got so many wonderful performances on. In fact, all the Pat Moran 1950s recordings are easy enough to buy in digital form and are great value.

Scott LaFaro died tragically young, though recordings with Bill Evans and Ornette Coleman mean he is rightly revered. There was, for example, a very entertaining BBC Radio3 tribute which is for now available and comes thoroughly recommended. Pat Moran, as far as I know, didn't make any more recordings leading a group of her own. Bev Kelly, however, went on to make what I think is one of the best jazz vocal LPs ever, Love Locked Out, at the start of the '60s, featuring among others Kenny Burrell, and gorgeous performances such as Lonelyville. There isn't as far as I know any vintage footage of Pat Moran or Bev Kelly, but there is a little of Scott LaFaro appearing on a show called Stars of Jazz which has a Bethlehem connection.

Ghosts of Midnight - pt.5

2011-10-21T01:46:00.000+01:00

Ghosts of Midnight is the latest edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here free for all as a pdf. It is an affectionate tribute to the 1950s jazz label Bethlehem and some of its voices. Just as fascinating as the stories of Bethlehem's voices are the tales of its arrangers, such as the very great Russ Garcia, much loved by lovers of lounge and exotica. For Bethlehem he arranged sets by the likes of Frances Faye and Peggy Connelly, and oversaw the extraordinary jazz interpretation of the complete Porgy and Bess, with the wonderful Al Jazzbo Collins as narrator.

Beyond Bethlehem Russ worked with all sorts of great singers, but it is his own work that gets easy listening connoisseurs all excited.

Bethlehem picked up on Russ Garcia's LP Sounds In The Night which is an exceptional collection of jazz choral vocal arrangements, which could easily be from an Italian soundtrack from ten years later. Then there is his imaginary soundtrack work, like the space age pop experimentations on Fantastica, and the actual film scores such as The Time Machine.

Among my own favourite Russ Garcia works is a brace of LPs he arranged for Julie London in 1957, where she expanded on her minimalist template perfectly.

Ghosts of Midnight - pt.4

2011-10-18T02:35:00.000+01:00

Ghosts of Midnight is the latest edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here free for all as a pdf. It is an affectionate tribute to the 1950s jazz label Bethlehem and some of its voices. Among those voices was the fantastic Frances Faye, whom I first came across via a CD that collected a couple of her Bethlehem LPs under the umbrella title of Frances Faye Sings, Russell Garcia Conducts. One of those was of Frances singing folk songs, and is perhaps her least typical work. Nevertheless it is a stunning work, with highlights like Go 'Way From My Window, the John Jacob Niles song.

Frances was a remarkable performer, with a penchant for pounding the piano and hollering like hell. The wise guys in the '30s loved her cabaret spots, and clips posted on YouTube such as the one where she and Martha Raye are scatting away like mad give an idea why the gangsters would have been eating out of her hand.

Bruce Weber has done a great job of immortalising Frances by placing her right at the heart of his own extraordinary film Chop Suey. It includes some amazing footage of Frances, which hasn't surfaced on YouTube (yet), where she seems as dangerous as Jerry Lee Lewis in the late '50s.

Ironically Frances' name may be best known now for a couple of recordings which remain favourites of jazz and soul DJs, such as her early '50s uptempo rendition of Summertime and her astonishing cover of I'm Coming Home from the early '60s (a song that itself has a couple of Bethlehem connections) which was arranged by Shorty Rogers.

I bet Frances was accused of many things during her lifetime, but age did not mellow her as this brief but astonishing clip shows ...

Ghosts of Midnight - pt.3

2011-10-15T02:36:00.000+01:00

Ghosts of Midnight is the latest edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here free for all as a pdf. It is an affectionate tribute to the 1950s jazz label Bethlehem and some of its voices. There is no denying the fact that some of these voices became lost along the way, and were criminally under-recorded. While the advent of the digital age has meant that the Bethlehem sides recorded by singers such as Terry Morel, Betty Blake, Betty Roche, Peggy Connelly, Marilyn Moore, Paula Castle, and Helen Carr are available one way or another, there still seems to be a general lack of awareness about the wonderful talents these ladies had, and background detail is often harder to find. Oddly YouTube is not much help in these cases, and there is little from the Bethlehem back catalogue posted for the casual browser to stumble across. There is even less in the way of rare footage to watch. One glorious exception, however, is a clip from the early '60s of Terry Morel performing on the West Coast jazz TV show, Frankly Jazz. What is particularly wonderful about this piece of film is seeing how the show's host Frank Evans is so visibly moved that he can hardly speak when Terry has finished singing What Is There To Say ...

Ghosts of Midnight - pt.2

2011-10-12T16:46:00.000+01:00

Ghosts of Midnight is the latest edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here free for all as a pdf. It is an affectionate tribute to the 1950s jazz label Bethlehem and some of its voices. Bethlehem as a record company hit on something magical in 1954 when Creed Taylor took Gus Wildi's label and set some great ideas in motion. First and foremost among these was to get the jazz singer Chris Connor to record a set of intimate songs in a small group setting, capturing an after-hours feel, and promote this 10" LP in a gorgeous sleeve designed by Burt Goldblatt. It set the tone for how Bethlehem would conduct itself as a label, and that combination of ideas and talents is still an intoxicating one. Chris Connor went on to sing on many special records. Creed Taylor would come up with many great schemes. Burt Goldblatt would design many wonderful sleeves. Bethlehem would release many more fantastic jazz LPs. And it was the magic of those early Chris Connor recordings on Bethlehem that changed so much. Chris certainly inspired a whole host of other singers, and brought out the best in many musicians. If you twisted my arm and asked me to pick a particular favourite Chris Connor record it would be the third set she recorded for Bethlehem, from 1955, with a group featuring Ralph Sharon on piano, Herbie Mann on flute, and Joe Puma on guitar. It's got some really special moments on ...

Ghosts of Midnight - pt.1

2011-10-09T11:47:00.003+01:00

Ghosts of Midnight is the latest edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here free for all as a pdf. It is an affectionate tribute to the 1950s jazz label Bethlehem and some of its voices. One of these voices is that of Audrey Morris'. She recorded one LP for Bethlehem in the mid-'50s, which featured some gorgeous tracks. The LP was recorded out in Hollywood and arranged by the great Marty Paich. Audrey had recorded one earlier LP, which is a particular favourite of mine, called Bistro Ballads. And, yes, Audrey is particularly wonderful singing the intimate torch songs on this record, such as Where Are You? Incidentally Audrey is accompanied on this LP by the great Johnny Pate on bass long before he had success with The Impressions. A lot of the Bethlehem singers sort of drifted out of music, but Audrey has carved a niche for herself as a cabaret performer in her native Chicago. After a long recording hiatus, she would make a series of LPs including one of old Film Noir numbers. Among those included on that LP is a particular favourite, Ace In The Hole, which Gloria Grahame is seen performing in The Naked Alibi. Torch songs and film noir ... these are two of my favourite things.

Ghosts of Midnight

2011-10-06T20:04:00.003+01:00

Ghosts of Midnight is the latest edition of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded here free for all as a pdf. It is an affectionate tribute to the 1950s jazz label Bethlehem and some of its voices. Bethlehem was an extraordinary record company, and its roster featured a wide range of singers: from intimate torch singers to be-bopping scat specialists. Some seem to have been lost along the way. Others have doggedly stuck with the jazz thing. In recent years the voices of Bethlehem have become a bit of an obsession, so this is an attempt at sharing that enthusiasm ...

Form & Function #8

2011-09-21T02:23:00.001+01:00

Form & Function is the latest edition of Your Heart Out, and it can be downloaded as a free pdf here. It was great to have a chance to refer to the work of Don Harper. I guess if the name Don Harper is mentioned it will be in connection with the KPM library LP Electrosonic which featured Don with Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson moonlighting from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. People seem a bit sniffy about the jazz violinist Don's involvement in that, but his credentials were first class. His own early '70s experimental LP Homo Electronicus is as 'out there' as any record you could care to name. It veers from a jazz rock reworking of the Dr Who theme to a few extended mood pieces featuring Alan Branscombe on sax and keyboards.

Norma Winstone appears briefly on Homo Electronicus, and oddly the sound and feel is pretty close to some of the astonishingly beautiful material she would go on to record with John Taylor and Kenny Wheeler as Azumith for ECM. Norma is one of my favourite vocalists, and I love the way her wordless singing links the experimental with exotica in a way that makes a mockery of labels. I love it where she pops up on recordings with Mike Westbrook, say, or Michael Garrick. My personal favourite Norma moment is her contribution to 1969's Hum Dono set by Joe Harriott and Amancio D'Silva.

Now those who know YHO will be aware it thrives on connections, and so it is appropriate that the Homo Electronicus set and Hum Dono were 'supervised' by one of our patron saints Denis Preston. Don Harper and Denis Preston would certainly have known each other from the 1950s London jazz scene. Another link between the two was Denny Wright. Dennis had got jazz guitarist to play on early skiffle sides by Lonnie Donegan and Johnny Duncan. Many years later Denny recorded the now infamous Shout About Pepsi (for the Non-Stop Pepsi Party on MFP) which would appear on the classic comp The Sound Gallery which helped open the door on the wonders of easy listening and library music etc. Denny Wright and Don Harper would in the late '70s perform as a jazz duo and if you search YouTube there's footage of them performing on TV, introduced by the great Annie Ross.

Don Harper is or should be much loved for his library recordings, and there are plenty of examples for the casual listener on YouTube naturally, covering different eras, from light disco back to late '60s beat variations of the sort used as incidental music in TV dramas.

Form & Function #7

2011-09-18T01:52:00.001+01:00

Form & Function is the latest edition of Your Heart Out, and it can be downloaded as a free pdf here. Sudden Sway are right at the heart of this issue, mainly because they did more than anyone to mess with traditional ideas of 'form' and 'function'. Where some artists may do something different as a promotional exercise Sudden Sway did things differently pretty much each and every time. Much of the Sudden Sway related material featured in this issue is collated from a variety of sources. And I was delighted to stumble across an entry on The Sound Projector site where Ed Pinsent refers to buying a copy of Sudden Sway's To You With ReGard 12" and finding tucked inside a review and a Sudden Sway interview by Dave McCullough in Sounds. This was a pretty special discovery as it was Dave's enthusiasm for the group in print that pulled me in. And it should be remembered that Dave was THE top pop writer of the time, reGardless of what the history books say, so his enthusiasm carried considerable weight and was certainly a considerable factor in Sudden Sway getting signed to Blanco y Negro (with whom DMcC was involved early on). I always liked the way Dave disappeared after a brief stint at City Limits (the London listings mag), and never resorted to appearing as an irritating talking head on TV documentaries, joining the Oxbridge brigade as an over-revered Guardian columnist, or as a panellist at a Simon Reynolds book launch. I wrote something about him a few years ago, and failed to mention that he actually took the time and trouble to write encouraging words when I first started dabbling in writing about pop music. That meant a hell of a lot at the time. I can recall the impact Dave's words on Sudden Sway had on me. The music itself just improves with time. One of the Sudden Sway critical default positions is that they were about style over content. But this destroys that line completely ...

Form & Function #6

2011-09-16T01:55:00.000+01:00

Form & Function is the latest edition of Your Heart Out, and it can be downloaded as a free pdf here. There is a fair old bit about library or production music in this issue. I guess the general consensus among pop aesthetes is that the golden age of library music is late ‘60s and through the ‘70s. But increasingly there is demand for production music as more and more of us have the ability to make our own films for whatever purpose. We, however, are not in a position to pay a fortune for rights to a well-known artist’s music. So people look for alternatives, and there are plenty of companies willing to offer music for ‘movies’. By the law of averages some of this music is going to be fantastic. And there may come a time when the library music of today is as admired as the old KPM catalogue.

While doing a bit of research for the latest YHO I came across an article by (I think) Gregory Steirer on the Cultural Production site which dealt with ‘imaginary soundtracks’. In it he mentions the strong demand for the production music being put out on CD by the LA-based company Epic Score. The organisation seems to have stumbled on to something, and with its distinctive looking products and its own special sound it seems to be thriving. So the music is not just used for films, ads, TV shows, but also is available on CD through Amazon and has a definite cult following. Interestingly, too, the term ‘trailer music’ is used where we might use ‘library music’. The language Epic Scores use is interesting: pounding, unrelenting, adventure, dramatic, and so on.

A cursory look on YouTube would demonstrate the amount of enthusiasm there is out there for the aptly titled Epic Score, and there is a whole host of examples of the label’s output posted on there. In fact, the phrase ‘epic music’ seems to be used as a genre description. I followed a couple of links and landed on a site where daily posts of ‘epic music’ are shared, and bizarrely the first post I saw was Rob Dougan’s Clubbed To Death, one of the old Mo’ Wax favourites from way back when which I hadn’t heard in ages. But listening to a number of Epic Score clips its easy to see a connection. It all gets a bit Carl Orff at times. The use of graphics in pretty much all of the Epic Score tracks posted on YouTube tens towards the world of fantasy/comic book art so I guess that's where the audience lies. Thankfully this is an exception ...

Form & Function #5

2011-09-14T02:02:00.001+01:00

Form & Function is the latest edition of Your Heart Out, and it can be downloaded as a free pdf here. With a rather elegant move, at one stage, Form & Function sashays from Shackleton soundtracking a Sonic Journey on Devon’s railways to Simon Fisher Turner soundtracking ancient film footage of Scott’s Antarctic expedition. I am a huge fan of Simon Fisher Turner, and approve wholeheartedly of anyone who can simultaneously be composing scores for Derek Jarman movies and cavorting around in the guise of The King of Luxembourg for él records.

I am a massive fan of the él label, both ancient and modern variations (though confess I am not sure if the label is still active). In fact I would go so far as to argue that Mike Alway is a far more significant character in pop culture than Derek Jarman. In YHO I suggest part of Alway’s appeal is that he was more Woody Allen in Casino Royale than Dirk Bogarde in Modesty Blaise. It is that ‘nerdish nonentity’s revenge’ aspect to él that makes it more intriguing.

I admire pluralists like Simon Fisher Turner. One of the things I don’t mention in YHO is the LP he put out Creation in 1990, which was one of those more interesting releases the label was putting out at the time (e.g. Hypnotone, Tangerine, etc.). It’s a pretty odd affair, sort of blatantly ambient in a just before it became fashionable with The Orb, Biosphere, HIA kind of a way. How Creation came to put it out I have no idea. I imagine McGee found SFT to be quite a character and a great raconteur, which was probably enough at that time to secure a Creation release at the time. Perhaps it was a swap/loan deal with Lawrence and Felt going back to él for a final fling with Me And A Monkey On The Moon?

Among my favourite él recordings are those by Bad Dream Fancy Dress, the real life ‘deux filles’ for whom SFT acted as Svengali:

Form & Function #4

2011-09-12T02:27:00.001+01:00

Form & Function is the latest edition of Your Heart Out, and it can be downloaded as a free pdf here. Another mystery mentioned within its pages is the dearth of Barbara Moore music readily available or that's been made available outside of Japan since the surge of interest in library recordings began. I hope I am missing something really obvious when saying that, but it is a bit of an odd situation. Her old LPs like the astonishing Vocal Shades and Tones go for silly money in certain quarters, and she featured strongly in the Jonny Trunk radio documentary on library music. I am sure there is a horribly practical reason for the lack of salvaged sounds around.

I confess to being an absolutely fool for the type of work Barbara produced - the choral arrangements, the jazzy latin sound, and so on. The Vocal Patterns LP the Barbara Moore Singers made with the Roger Webb Sound is a particular favourite, as is the Voices In Latin LP.

I really don't want to start any conspiracy theories here, but it's not just the lack of Barbara Moore products that worry me, it's the lack of information full stop that bugs me. Even the one Barbara Moore compilation I do have has sleevenotes in Japanese. And I can't see any in-depth articles on the web either. Again I could be wrong. But it would be good to read a detailed piece that pulls together all the different activities Barbara was involved in - backing singer, session work, composing, etc. One of the few places that mentions Barbara outside of the library music thing is the Jackie Lee site which mentions Jackie and Barbara wrote a number of great songs together. The Jackie Lee story is another one that fascinates me, and if you're patient you can piece together some lovely anecdotes from the charming comments Jackie leaves for fans on YouTube posts of her music. I love the occasional confusion that's emerged as one Jackie Lee gets mixed up with another Jackie Lee. The White Horses lady recorded some fantastic tracks, and it's good fun piecing together what she did. Like this one under the name Emma Rede ...

Form & Function #3

2011-09-10T03:15:00.000+01:00

Form & Function is the latest edition of Your Heart Out, and it can be downloaded as a free pdf here. One of the recurring themes is that of music that is appropriate active background music. In other words, what works well on a brisk morning rush-hour walk, what is effective to listen to when travelling on the train. This was partly prompted by a resurgence of interest in b'n'b music - electronic bass and beats, if you like. That in turn was sort of triggered by a growing infatuation with an old (1992) CD I found in a charity shop - Voices In My Head by Some Other People on the Infinite Mass label. I took a chance and it paid off wonderfully. I particularly like the fact that one track is titled Ghost House, which makes it sound suspiciously like a four-page feature in the next issue of The Wire. I still know pretty much nothing about Some Other People. There was another later S.O.P. record, Orbitality, which is just as fantastic. It features perhaps more numbers tending towards the ambient/downtempo but it is brilliant nonetheless. There's a few tracks from it posted, inevitably, on YouTube, though amusingly one post for the title track is accompanied by a comment about not knowing anything bout S.O.P.

There is another CD on Infinite Mass by Crowbar called The Day The Furniture Argued (1993), which again features some brilliant b'n'b tracks. From the credits and the quality of the music I'd say Crowbar was/were Some Other People. From a post of YouTube I gather the title track also got a release on R&S, but beyond that I'm none the wiser, even with the nods on the sleeve to Lord Sabre and Leftfield. I would love to know more about Some Other People.

Form & Function #2

2011-09-08T02:18:00.001+01:00

Form & Function is the latest edition of Your Heart Out, and it can be downloaded as a free pdf here. One of the dominant themes is 'active background music' which I would suggest is a subject that deserves some very in-depth analysis. There is a great tradition of music being used as an accompaniment for activities. The BBC, for example, had its long-running radio show Music While You Work, which was originally designed during WW2 to motivate workers in munitions factories and raise morale. Over the course of many years the music that would be associated with the programme was light music, or in other words orchestral works that were neither serious classical compositions or out-and-out pop creations.

I have over a period of time become increasingly fascinated with the functionality of light music, and I think it's a seriously under-appreciated art form. It's easy to see how the form and its composers of mood music adapted so well to film music, incidental music for TV and radio, and on to the development of library music or production music. It's also interesting the way serious classical types look down on light music, but some of the themes and titles of light music are particularly fascinating with recurring references to city life, movement and mechanisation. I could mention Charles Williams' Rhythm On Rails, Robert Farnon's Mobile Pursuit, Sidney Torch's Wagon Lit, and so on. And unsurprisingly I'm fond of all the London references there are in light music, such as Eric Coates' suites (the Langham Place - Elegie is gorgeous), Albert Ketelbey's Cockney Suite, and Sidney Torch's London Transport Suite.

Of the later examples of light music as it entered the pop era particular mention is made of the work of Ron Goodwin, as composer and orchestra leader, where the interests merge with those of the easy listening/lounge arena. He was particularly successful with his film work, which include the Miss Marple theme and a number of very successful scores for war movies.

The enduring functional nature of light music is demonstrated by its continued use as themes for long-running radio shows. An earlier example of its usefulness as background or mood music was as interlude music in early TV broadcasts where we were subjected to less intense programming. Here is a famous example, featuring light music classics composed by Charles Williams and Haydn Wood.

Form & Function #1

2011-09-06T01:10:00.002+01:00

Form & Function is the latest edition of Your Heart Out, and it can be downloaded as a free pdf here. I did have some searching conversations with myself about whether to use Form & Function as a title, but it did seem too perfect a fit to resist. And the direct musical reference seemed apt too as the issue starts and ends with Photek. That is it starts with rediscovering my old Photek CDs and ends with me realising that Photek had recently released a 12" on the Bristol label Tectonic. In between there are plenty of thoughts about how bass 'n' beats-based electronic music (b'n'b) is used and can be enjoyed away from the club environment. This J. Sparrow mix of that recent Photek single for example has that 'meditative' feel that makes it the perfect soundtrack for certain activities ...

Photek -Closer-J.Sparrow's chilled mix (Tectonic)

Form & Function

2011-09-03T15:04:00.003+01:00

Form & Function is the new issue of Your Heart Out which can be downloaded as a free pdf here. It is a collection of thoughts and fragments about how music is used and how it is presented. It was put together over the course of the summer, so there is a sense of the journal about it. I confess I feel like not explaining its contents too explicitly as we are overrun by labels and hashtags. So please take the plunge and explore the contents of Form & Function. And spread the word.

Be Back Soon ...

2011-07-31T01:05:00.000+01:00

Having successfully completed the YHO around-the-world disco challenge (the findings of which can be downloaded as a delightful pdf) it’s time to take a breather. In other words, before setting out on a new adventure, it’s time to press ‘pause’.

Be assured, however, there are still plenty of rabbit holes to disappear down, so the YHO explorations will continue. In fact, there are a jumble of ideas and a tangle of leads which are being made sense of even as you read this holding message. And sometime soon this should all emerge as a new edition of YHO.

You see, I really do still believe passionately that investigating the past illuminates the present, and YHO remains very much about secret histories, chance discoveries, unexpected connections, that enable us to put things together in a new way and challenge existing narratives. That’s about enlightenment. It’s got nothing to do with nostalgia.

I was trying to think up something smart to leave you with, and then stumbled across this video of the UK group Cool Notes, who started out as a London lovers rock group in the late ‘70s and then had a glorious string of hits in the mid-‘80s with more of a modern soul/funk sound on the wonderfully named Abstract Dance label. Somehow that seems to draw together a number of strands from recent adventures. And this video has London written all over it …

Disco No Disco Yes

2011-07-28T00:18:00.000+01:00

Disco No Disco Yes is the latest edition of Your Heart Out and it can be downloaded free for all. It collects together the articles written as part of The Disco Ball's a Globe series. This adventure was prompted by a realisation that in its way the disco phenomenon of the late '70s was essentially a force for good in a mad world intent on tearing itself apart. The music and its universal symbols (e.g. a spinning disco ball or a Roland synthesizer) were civilising influences, and contrast sharply with the influence of nationalism, religion and political parties. And let's face it, there was some incredibly inventive and uplifting music created under the universal banner of disco. This series celebrates some of those sounds. So, grab your silk stockings and your dance invitation ...

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 15

2011-07-25T01:31:00.004+01:00

No matter how rewarding it may be exploring elsewhere, it’s good to get back home. And sometimes when you examine what’s on your doorstep you find it hard to believe the treasures hidden there. So, for example, I recently stumbled across a Marti Caine track from 1981, called Snowbird City, which had a gorgeous disco/lovers rock thing going on. It reminded me of the Carly Simon/Chic collaboration on Why, but it seemed to be from a year or so earlier. The indications were that this was from an LP of Marti’s, Point of View, overseen by Barry Blue, which made a bit more sense. Barry may have enjoyed success as a teeny bop idol, but he was also a songwriter and producer of some stature. He was certainly no stranger to disco, having produced the early Heatwave LPs. He’d also made functional and familiar disco recordings with his fellow former Bell Records heartthrob Miki Anthony for the Bruton Music Library, including what are now much sought-after tracks on the Disco Happening LP.

Marti herself at the time would have been one of the stalwart stars of British light entertainment, a regular on TV variety shows, and a big success on the cabaret circuit with her singing, dancing and comic turns. So in a way it’s no surprise she made some disco recordings. I suspect pretty much everyone who did a bit of singing on the TV variety shows recorded some disco flavoured material in the late ‘70s or in the very early ‘80s. A lot of it is quality stuff, which sounds genuinely great now – not in an ironic or camp way - because they were good singers with access to decent songwriters, musicians, arrangers, studios and session players. And the kick, swish and orchestral swing of disco suited such artists naturally. You just may not come across mentions of such sounds in the books on the history of disco. But those of us who prefer some songs by The Dooleys or The Nolans to, say, hits by Heaven 17 or ABC take a certain delight in unearthing hidden examples of ‘variety show’ disco.

I guess you could call these disco recordings ‘adult oriented’, but I know that term’s been co-opted by Prins Thomas & co. and refers more to the overlap between AOR and disco on US radio. This is something different. I guess very few of the tracks mentioned here were hits, and some languished as b-sides or album fillers. But there is a distinct charm that raises the recordings to another level. While perhaps not every track featured here transformed disco in the same way as Scott Walker did on Nite Flights, there is nevertheless much to celebrate.

The disco phenomenon certainly gave the old school Brit girls a new lease of life. Tucked away on a 1977 b-side, for example, is a gorgeous Cilla Black recording of Kenny Lynch’s Keep Your Mind On Love. The track was produced by Mike Hurst, and his old colleague Dusty Springfield also made a magnificent disco recording in 1979, Baby Blue, which just about reached the very bottom reaches of the charts. In 1983 Kenny Lynch, incidentally, had his own eyebrow-raising delayed disco smash with the astonishing Half The Day Is Gone And We Haven’t Earned A Penny. Lulu it could be said had a little more of a disco pedigree than most of her variety show contemporaries, having worked with Kenny Nolan at Chelsea in the mid-‘70s, and getting a hit with Take Your Mama For A Ride. Towards the end of the decade she may have been a fixture on light entertainment circuit, but she did also make a great LP, produced by Elton John for his Rocket label. Among the highlights of this lost LP is Nice And Slow, which was one of the tracks from Elton’s 1976 Thom Bell sessions which were ‘shelved’ for many years, oddly.

If you were going to generalise about variety show disco then you might mention a mature singer having a whale of a time dancing their way through the number thoroughly enjoying the company of a group of dancers of the opposite sex trying not to look too ridiculous. Something for everyone, you might say. Hunt around on the internet, and you’ll find a particularly fine example of this featuring Clodagh Rodgers singing Your Love Is Deep Inside of Me. Others of, shall we say, a similar vintage managed to keep it a little more ‘real’ like Elkie Brooks with a gloriously sophisticated take on soft disco with tracks like Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Of the new generation Lorraine Chase had a very different career trajectory to Elkie, and found fame via adverts for Campari. As a family favourite she had the chance to make a novelty disco record and eerily 'invented' Lily Allen on It's Nice 'Ere Innit, which was arranged and conducted by Roger Webb, and it shows.

There are so many great examples of ‘experienced’ pop acts naturally adapting to a disco sound, when they wanted to. ELO’s Last Train To London, Paul McCartney & Wings’ Goodnight Tonight, Mike Oldfield with Guilty, the Glitter Band with Makes You Blind, and so on. But it was really the Bee Gees that changed the whole game with Jive Talking and everything that came after. And naturally Bee Gees connections and covers became a vital part of the adult contemporary disco equation. Australian singer Samantha Sang was blessed by the Brothers and so had a hit with the gorgeous Emotions. Yvonne Elliman had If I Can’t Have You. And Blonde On Blonde covered the Bee Gees’ Subway quite beautifully. Not to be confused with the late ‘60s prog/psych outfit, this Blonde On Blonde were Page 3 glamour models Jilly Johnson and Nina Carter, who became national treasures in their own way. Another Page 3 family favourite Linda Lusardi as far as I know didn’t make a disco record in the late ‘70s, which is a terrible shame considering her brother Mark Lusardi was at the time a pioneering engineer in the world of reggae and post-punk. What a missed opportunity!

I think people forget how strange the Bee Gees’ new lease of life courtesy of disco actually was. Saturday Night Fever was such a huge phenomenon. And naturally the film inspired a number of budget copies, like the UK’s charming Music Machine. One of the stars of this very English film was Patti Boulaye, who has been credited with making it possible for a new generation of Nigerian female singers to have pop success in their own country. Patti may not have had much in the way of chart success in the UK but she became a stalwart of TV variety shows, and made some fantastic disco recordings along the way. Patti first found success in the UK on the TV talent show New Faces, as did Marti Caine. The other big TV talent show of the time was Opportunity Knocks, and a couple of its success stories would make some cracking disco recordings long after the hits had dried up. Peters & Lee, for example, released a fantastic country soul-ish disco single in 1976, called Save Me (Feel Myself A-Falling) which was co-written by Mark Wirtz. And former child star Lena Zavaroni made a great lost disco LP in 1979 which featured Somebody Should Have Told Me, a track also recorded quite perfectly by Cissy Houston.

The whole ‘variety show’ disco thing was a truly international phenomenon. Sacha Distel, for example, was a singer who often appeared on British variety shows, effortlessly exuding Gallic charm and elegance. Back home in France in 1979 he recorded the surprisingly avant garde disco number On ne peut plus se cacher. It’s up there as a slice of extraordinary French disco with Franḉoise Hardy’s J'ecoute De La Musique Saoule. Another French variety star Claude Francois worked with Biddu at the end of the 1970s, and in true Biddu fashion the tune Laisse Une Chance a Notre Amour will seem naggingly familiar, particularly to Jimmy James fans. This French disco milieu it should be remembered is one from which Sheila & B Devotion stepped to record Spacer with the Chic Organisation, and the French girls adapted well too, as France Gall demonstrated particularly well. Incidentally our own Petula Clark recorded some very nice French disco in the late ‘70s.

There will be many more examples of ‘variety show’ disco. One particular favourite is a fantastic if lost Twiggy single from 1978, called Falling Angel, which David Essex arranged, produced and co-wrote. Now David was always a bit of an enigma who played around with his image, and his relationship to disco was a bit ambivalent. He recorded a great track called I Don’t Wanna Go To The Disco which I am pretty sure you could convince people is a great lost Ian Dury & The Blockheads recording. But then pretty much concurrently David recorded the theme for the film Silver Dream Machine which is pretty much the pinnacle of inventive MOR disco, and indeed Scars, the Edinburgh group, realised this and did a pretty much concurrent cover.

Twiggy is more usually associated with country/MOR sounds, but rather wonderfully she did make an LP in 1979 which was produced by (her then new friend) Donna Summer and Juergen Koppers in Hollywood. Munich disco legends Keith Forsey and Harold Faltermeyer are among the musicians who worked on the sessions. This was at the time when the Munich stalwarts were moving to the US and adopting more of a rock sound. The LP itself was strangely ‘shelved’ for the next 30 years. It does at least help explain why Twiggy featured prominently in the video for Donna Summer’s Bad Girls. Of course by then the world was in the grip of disco.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 14

2011-07-22T02:34:00.006+01:00

In 1978 60% of the pop hits in Japan were disco recordings, apparently. Naturally, a large proportion of these will have been international sensations. But inevitably there will have been an efficient home grown disco industry. Certainly the swish and sophistication of disco would have suited Japanese girl singers, and no doubt there are special interest groups dedicated to such sounds. I, however, wouldn’t want to be quizzed too closely about J-Disco. And searches can be hampered by what can be called the Sylvian question.

Thankfully there are clues out there to be followed, leading to introductions to singers like Hiromi Iwasaki, Hiromi Ohta and Junko Yagami. I confess I can share little information about these performers, but Junko Yagami’s Wonderful City, from her 1980 LP Mr Metropolis is particularly recommended. I’m certain these names are the tip of an iceberg. Once you have a key to unlock any treasure trove there’s fun to be had and J-Disco is no different to any other area of activity. Flounder around blindly and you will stumble across unfamiliar pleasures and treasures. For example, Yoko Katori singing Going Back To China is particularly striking. Fei Fei Ouyang from Taiwan seems to have been something of a disco queen in Japan, and I am very taken with some of her ‘70s recordings that have been posted on YouTube, especially when she’s urging us to do the Sexy Bus Stop.

In another direction there are the more serious-minded jazz/funk oriented performers, and that’s a whole other gold mine to explore. But I do have a real passion for the work of the exceptional jazz singer Kamiko Kasai, who features on the YHO Lonely Clouds mixtape of Japanese sounds. Kamiko made some fantastic records in the ‘70s, working with the likes of Richard Evans in 1976 and then Herbie Hancock and his full first team on the exceptional Butterfly LP. I’ve also made a mental note to explore further among the works of Haruko Kawana and Junko Ohashi when the opportunities arise.

At the other end of the disco spectrum there was the J-Pop phenomenon Pink Lady. The Japanese idols Mie and Kei took the pop world by storm in the late ‘70s with their ultra-energetic synchronised dance routines, playing up the stereotypical cute pop doll image something rotten. Watching their astonishing performances now you really can’t help but smile at the hyper surreal nature of it all. And their hit singles have pop art titles that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Davy Henderson record: Pepper Keibu, Carmen ’77, Southpaw, Chameleon Army, Zipangu, Pink Typhoon, Monday Mona Lisa Club. They even had a degree of success in the US with the excellent single Kiss In The Dark, appearing on the Leif Garrett TV show and making a series for NBC with comedian Jeff Altman which it seems was not the happiest of experiences for the pair but oh what a lovely idea.

I guess the exaggerated cartoon nature of Pink Lady is more what the West might expect from Japanese disco. And, yeah, look hard enough and you’ll find the novelty hits like Popeye The Sailor Man by Spinach Power. Of course given the fact that disco music, synthesizers and computer games were all getting into their stride at the same time, Japan’s Funny Stuff inevitably had its novelty hit Disco Space Invaders . Certainly in the late ‘70s the Space Invaders game took the world by storm, so it’s no surprise it infiltrated popular music too, from Scientist’s dub excursions to Yellow Magic Orchestra’s only UK hit.

It was with the advent of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s techno pop that the more fashionable end of the UK’s music press took notice of Japanese music. The Face in particular took a close interest in developments from Japan. The Plastics, quite rightly, caught the attention with their eccentric take on pop. Unfortunately this lost something in translation when Island teamed them with Alex Sadkin. In this they were not alone, as what was a magic touch in the Compass Point studios didn’t necessarily travel well, as Vic Godard and Paul Haig might testify.

Among those snippets in The Face was a particular photo of Sandii, from the Japanese pop group Sandii and the Sunsetz, which made a particular impression upon me. I think I have to say the Japanese artists of the time made more of a visual impact on me than the records did. I know, for example, that YMO protégé Susan had a track on the NME cassette Dancin’ Master, but it would be many years before I heard more of her work, like the excellent I Only Come Out At Night from her second LP The Girl Can’t Help It, which still sounds like the futuristic disco or techno pop you would hope 1981 was harbouring. Actually it’s still pretty well hidden 30 odd years on, which is stranger still.

Sandii and the Sunsetz, too, are a group whose music I took some time to discover and who at times still sound like the future that never arrived. It would be easy to dwell on YMO associations, or the fact that Sandii and the Sunsetz may be viewed as the missing link between Blondie and Madonna. What is more interesting is that buried away on their early LPs are a number of wonderfully strange and pretty abstract tracks that would have worked wonderfully on any of the Disco Not Disco collections that were being put together some years back. I am thinking specifically of tracks like Zoot Kook and Drip Dry Eyes with their reggae/dub influences bubbling away. Sandi and the gang later took more of an explicit reggae direction, interestingly enough. And because YHO thrives on strange connections, it has to be mentioned that Babylon, a song by Sandii and Makoto Kubota (from the Sunsetz) was recorded by Akina Nakamori in the mid-‘80s. Akina also recorded some songs around that time that had been written by Biddu, including Blonde.

Yellow Magic Orchestra, I suspect, will need little said about them, but it is worth mentioning nevertheless how perfectly they fit the outsiders’ view of Japan, in terms of mixing new technology smartly with pop influences from just about everywhere. It’s interesting that they were coming to pop prominence just as Japan’s own Roland corporation was increasing its influence on the world of music with its new products. And while it is normal for YMO to be mentioned in connection with the roots of techno and hip hop, it should also be mentioned how very much of the moment they were too. Their second LP, for example, Solid State Survivor is packed full with tracks that could serve as terrifyingly efficient disco hits with the right vocals welded on. When you see clips of them playing live Yukihiro Takahashi is working away with all the compulsion of Keith Forsey on any number of Munich disco classics you might care to put in a mix. But oh imagine the joy of YMO matched with a vocalist as magnificent as Ruriko Ohgami.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 13

2011-07-19T01:56:00.001+01:00

Disco Dhol Waja is a song from the 1986 Lollywood musical Qaidi. It’s a riotous number sung by Pakistan’s ‘melody queen’ Noor Jehan, composed by Nazir Ali, and Anjuman is the star dancing madly in the clip posted on YouTube. Stripped of its context, standing alone, it’s a high energy, highly entertaining romp, as camp as hell but great fun. Noor must have been nearly 60 when she sang this number, and she had been at the top of her profession as playback singer for years and years. Nazir Ali was himself a long established composer. And Anjuman was a highly successful actress throughout the 1980s. So, this film was pretty high profile, I guess, but there seems a certain mischief at work, not least with the deeply traditional dhol drum rigged up with electric lights and emitting syndrum sounds.

I have to confess I knew next-to-nothing about Pakistan’s Lahore-based film industry until the excellent folk at Finders Keepers released their The Sound of Wonder collection of tracks from the Lollywood vaults, which was a revelation. That set, covering the period 1973-1980, supplied plenty of clues about the characters involved in making these fantastic soundtracks, and almost inevitably YouTube revealed in its unique way a treasure trove of clips from old Pakistani films. The one thing that seemed to be missing was a site along the lines of Music From The Third Floor which would provide ready access to Lollywood soundtracks for those of us keen to explore in more detail, but life’s not perfect.

Recently I came across a fascinating article, written for Granta by the novelist Kamila Shamsie about growing up in Karichi in the late 1980s, and the relationship between pop music and the political climate in Pakistan. The turning point for the teenage Kamila seems to have been the arrival of the young pop group Vital Signs in 1987 with their strangely subversive synthpop song Dil Dil Pakistan. She refers, however, to the earlier buzz created by the success in 1981 of Disco Deewane by the Pakistan-born duo Nazia and Zoheb Hassan, and the unease the London-based pair’s natural glamour created among the religious right and allies of Pakistan’s military dictator, Zia ul-Haq: “These were the early days of Islamization, when the censors were confused about what was permissible. A few years later, the process of Islamization was sufficiently advanced that a video such as Disco Deewane would have no chance of airing. Although Nazia and Zoheb continued to release albums, the censorship laws and official attitudes towards pop meant they never gave concerts, received limited airtime on PTV, never released another video with the energy and sensuality of Disco Deewane, and were seen as a leftover from the days before Zia’s soulless rule sucked the life out of Pakistan’s youth culture.”

Kamila doesn’t mention Pakistan’s cinema industry in her article. But the Finders Keepers collection definitely gave the impression a golden age ended with the 1970s, and the little I’d read elsewhere had mentioned Lollywood’s decline in the 1980s as it tried to come to terms with censorship and restrictions on what was allowed. So, I must admit that while I wondered about what response the success of Disco Deewane may have triggered in Lollywood I wasn’t particularly hopeful that I would readily find much of interest. Experience, however, should have told me things are never that simple, and people will always find a way to entertain. So, inevitably, YouTube also hosts a nice store of 1980s disco-related clips from Lollywood movies. And while I happily concede these song and dance routines may well be carved from excruciatingly awful ‘exploitation’ films they are nevertheless often wonderful pieces of nonsense or high art in their own right, and I salute those involved for what they got away with.

So, for example, songs from the Biddu-produced Disco Deewane were used in the 1982 film Sangdil, including my particular favourite, the pop reggae flavoured Aao na. The dancer in the film is I believe Babra Sharif, doing her best in ‘difficult circumstances’. Barbra was one of the more glamorous and resilient stars of 1980s Pakistani cinema, and she appeared for example in a series of films which were Miss this or Miss that. Again, there are some disco gems on the soundtracks of these, such as Main chand khwab sajaloon from Miss Bangkok, sung by Naheed Akhter and composed by the great M. Ashraf, names that will be familiar to anyone who has The Sound of Wonder. Miss Colombia is another film in that series with a great M. Ashraf soundtrack.

Naheed Akhter was perhaps the only playback singer in Pakistan to rival Noor Jehan, and there seem to be plenty of examples of great 1980s recordings she made with a disco flavour. My own personal favourite is a number I know as Disco Deewane Mera Naam from the film Aik Din Bahu Ka. The music again is by M. Ashraf and in this particular clip the actress dancing is Bindiya. Another Nahid Akhtar/M. Ashraf disco number that’s made a great impression upon me is the glorious Mere dil main tera dil hai from the film Saathi. This time it’s Babra Sharif dancing.

Probably the best Bollywood disco number I’ve heard is Come Closer from the 1984 film Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki, written by Bappi Lahiri and sung by Salma Agha. Salma was actually from Pakistan, but she sang on Bollywood soundtracks after she and her sister made an LP of Abba covers. She later moved back to Pakistan where she acted and sang for the Lollywood industry. Ruby was one of the films she sang on, and the disco number Humsa meri jaan is fantastic, with music by Amjad Bobby. The dancer is Sabitha Perera, who I believe was the only actress from Sri Lanka who gained popularity in Pakistani films in the 1980s. Another fantastic number from that film, sung by Naheed Akhter is Ye tanhai main aur tu.

Accompanying commentary on these clips refer to films being formulaic or flops, and I accept that. But the fact that people have gone to so much trouble to extract these dance numbers and upload them to YouTube indicates they have value. On a personal level, I have a real fondness for female ensemble disco workouts from these old Lollywood films. With Noor Jehan singing and the cast doing its thing, it’s impossible not to succumb, and I have to suggest again that there really does seem to be a sense of mischief at work on numbers like Nazir Ali’s Disco Jugni Kandi Ae or Disco Che Been Wajee. It’s as if they’re saying: “Right we can’t do this or wear that, so we’ll send the whole thing up and celebrate the glorious absurdity of where we are”. Perhaps.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 12

2011-07-16T01:30:00.002+01:00

If there is one thing that fuels the Your Heart Out adventure it’s making unexpected but entirely perfect connections. So, for example, watching a series of enchanting videos of Nazia and Zoheb Hassan on YouTube which had been posted by someone involved in their making, it suddenly occurred to me that this was the same person who’d put up the startlingly wonderful promo video of The Mo-dettes’ White Mice which had been made in the basement of my old alma mater the London College of Printing back in 1979. These clips it turned out had been shared by David Rose, who with his wife Kathy has been involved with the making of many a pop video.

There is a certain perfection to there being an explicit link between The Mo-Dettes and Nazia Hassan. Nazia’s Disco Deewane and The Mo-Dettes’ White Mice are immaculate examples of disco inspired pop confectionary. White Mice had an incredible impact on my world, and Disco Deewane had rather more of an impact around the world, but they are both irresistible and great examples of how elements of disco music were absorbed and used in different ways.

Musically, the driving force behind Disco Deewane was Biddu, the great pop alchemist, and it must have been a sweet irony for him to enjoy a new wave of success with that record in south east Asia having left India penniless many years before to seek his fortune in the London pop world. Biddu’s genius is rooted in working in very prescribed, often proscribed, areas of music, creating art out of froth. Many of his early recordings, for example, at the start of the ‘70s were unashamedly ultra-poppy bubblegum soul sides which found favour among the less snobbish Northern Soul fans. His discography is littered with lost classics from that time, like Melting Pot's Girl I'm Getting Hip, and cuts by acts he’d later have great success with, like Jimmy James’ A Man Like Me and Carl Douglas’ Somebody Stop This Madness.

During the disco era the determined populist Biddu hit on a winning formula, and recordings with Tina Charles and his own orchestral disco excursions were huge successes. Biddu was smart enough to surround himself with people who could make his schemes come to life, like the fantastic arranger Gerry Shury who was featured in The Enormity of Small Things, an earlier edition of YHO. When Gerry tragically died in a car crash, things began to unravel for Biddu and his stable. So it was fate intervening that gave him the chance to try a new market by contributing to the soundtrack of a Bollywood film, Qurbani, in 1979. Rather brilliantly he transposed his own unique disco formula with the 15-year-old Pakistan born Nazia Hassan singing with him in London taking on the Tina Charles role singing the lovely Aap Jaisa Koi. Together they struck gold.

Biddu went on to work further with Nazia and her brother Zoheb in the ‘80s. I don’t know if the presence of Zoheb softened the impact of Nazia as a controversially independent, smart and natural teenager, but the image of the two together was rather Mac & Katie Kissoon-like (a huge compliment in my book). The delightful 1981 Disco Deewane LP was an extraordinary success, particularly in India. The fact that it was a couple of young Pakistan-born Londoners turning things upside down just makes it all the more wonderfully strange. There’s a lovely passage about Nazia shattering stereotypes in the 1984 (Sue Steward/Sheryl Garrett) Signed Sealed And Delivered book on women in pop, which is highly recommended.

Beyond south east Asia Disco Deewane was a massive hit intriguingly in places such as Brazil, the West Indies and Russia. The old Soviet Union seems to have had a massive appetite for Bollywood extravaganzas, and there was a trend for some of these to be dubbed into Russian, like the evergreen 1982 blockbuster Disco Dancer. This film has a soundtrack by the Bollywood disco king Bappi Lahiri, and one of its hit songs, Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja, had a new lease of life recently when MIA adapted it. The song itself originally borrowed heavily from Ottawan’s T’Es OK, which was a bit of a feature of Bappi’s work, it seems. Even the gorgeous Come Closer sung by Salma Agha, from the soundtrack of Kasam Paida Karnewale Ki, has strong suggestions of Imagination’s Body Talk.

Much of what I know about Bollywood sounds has been gleaned from the superb site Music From The Third Floor, which is overseen by PC, a man of immaculate and very varied taste who has also designed the striking covers for the various YHO mixtapes. I always approve enormously of any project that is adhered to doggedly, and there is a lot to explore among the rare and out-of-print titles on the site. The impact of MFTTF has resonated around the world from its base in Norway, and there has even been a radio show in Alaska that draws on the project’s archives. Some of the commentary on the site is as entertaining as the music, and it’s fascinating to observe how Bollywood sounds have flitted in and out of fashion in recent times, causing the value of certain titles to fluctuate wildly.

Not all of Bappi Lahiri’s soundtracks get the MFTTF seal of approval, and PC is keen to draw our attention to his work before Disco Dancer. One that caught my attention was the soundtrack for College Girl, which opens with an incredible mod rave-up incorporating In a Gadda da Vida and Wild Thing that leads into the ‘tropical’ flavoured College Girl ‘I Love You’ with its Moroder/Summer references and synth motif. It’s odd hearing that now in the context of the Charanjit Singh record, Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, which created a frenzy in 2010 when it was salvaged by the Bombay Connection label, which was great as it’s an amazing record and it was great to see the label itself active again as its earlier collections are essential. The Charanjit Singh record provoked lots of animated web chat about its use of Roland synths, 808s and 303s. As time has passed the pendulum has begun to swing another way, leading to sniffy commentators declaring that it’s interesting the record exists, of course, but it’s not significant as it didn’t actually lead to anything directly related to acid house. Tsk.

One thing the reissue did lead to was a flurry of interest in whether there were other Indian recordings of a similar nature, and almost inevitably Biddu’s glorious 1982 recording of Boom Boom with Nazia Hassan has been cited. It’s striking that some people were clearly coming at this from an angle where they suddenly knew more about Charanjit Singh than Biddu, which is fair enough. Recorded in London, Boom Boom was the highlight of Nazia and Zohar’s second LP, which was to be the soundtrack of the Bollywood film Star. Given Biddu’s populist tendencies it would be inevitable he’d try a Munich disco thing with Nazia. But back in 1978 he’d been mixing sitars, synths and Munich disco propulsion together on the delightfully rum Futuristic Journey LP. And then there’s his heavily electronic production on Captain Zorro’s disco version of the theme from Phantasm, and my particular favourite the exceptional 1979 single, Voodoo Man.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 11

2011-07-13T01:28:00.000+01:00

Zur by Boban Petrovic is a remarkable record. Released in 1981 in the former Yugoslavia, it’s one of the great blue-eyed soul/funk records. It’s undeniably very much in that immediate post-Off The Wall way of working, but it’s luxurious and strongly suggestive of the new pop gloss to come from Scritti Politti, say. Fashion’s Zeus B Held-produced Fabrique would be a good reference point, but then so would the rather later It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way by the Blow Monkeys or Shampoo Tears by Win.

Predictably, I stumbled across Zur through YouTube, having chanced upon a series of videos from the LP which seemed to string together and tell a story. Zur I believe means party and that’s certainly the theme of the video sequence, with Boban at the centre looking lupine in a louche lounge lizard kind of Klaus Nomi way. The setting and tone is delightfully decadent, and the feel is very much that of an early 1981 fantasy photo-shoot for The Face, complete with Blitz/Club For Heroes clientele on a weekend away in Belgrade. You expect Martin Degville to emerge at any moment, before remembering this is supposedly the austere Eastern Europe of old and nothing this risqué or outlandish was supposed to exist there.

Unlike Green Gartside in 1981 Boban Petrovic had been long steeped in black American funk and disco music. At a young age he’d started the group Zdravo who’d released some outstanding singles in the late ‘70s before Boban went solo. Zur was his first LP, but there was another one in 1984 (Zora) I believe. After that Boban seems to have published a hedonistic novel, moved to Cyprus, made billions in construction and financial trading, then moved to Marbella where he lived the jet-set party lifestyle, buying the local football team along the way, as you do.

One other record I know he was involved with was Perfektan dan za banana ribe by the Yugoslavian new wave outfit Talas or VIA Talas (that’s vocal-instrumental ensemble, which is a prefix used by a lot of Eastern Europe groups). The title of this 1983 LP translates as A Perfect Day For Bananafish, which will delight the Salinger fans among us who grew up on the notion of Holden Caulfield Universal. A lot of the LP is perky Martha & The Muffins pop, but there is some great stuff on there like the more dubby, disco infused post-punk of Gorke suze L.M. (Lady Mackbet).

A couple of tracks from Zur pop up on an unofficial collection, Idi, igraj!: Funk,soul, jazz funk & disco from ex-Yugoslavia 1969-1987, lovingly compiled by a certain DJ Funky Junkie. It’s an amazing insight into some of the music that was being made in Yugoslavia during that era, and more surprisingly there is very little overlap with my own fumbling and bumbling about in the music of the former Yu. I’d already been amazed at the soul/r’n’b influences that seemed so pronounced in old ‘60s recordings, like Nada Knezevic singing Garnet Mimms’ Cry Baby. But the names on this collection were new to me, with the exception of Zdenka Kovacicek who was one of the stars of the Anywhere Else But Here Today project singing Mi Volimo Soul.

Zdenka has a reputation for being the missing link between Yma Sumac and Janis Joplin, and a 1978 LP she made with the Igor Savin Big Band is rightly revered. Most of the LP is funky and bluesy, but there is one totally unexpected track, the amazing Elektra, where there is a real Moroder bubbling synth thing going on with Zdenka scat singing. Igor himself made his own Yu Disco Expres LP in 1979 which has some fantastic stuff on, and is a useful reminder of how the world over the disco explosion was underpinned by the precision playing of big bands and orchestras led by the likes of Igor Savin.

Of course the opposite end of the disco spectrum was where another sort of technology came into play, with the advent of electro, rap and the birth of hip hop, which caused considerable friction throughout the disco world. Yugoslavia was no exception, and there in the early ‘80s the Master Scratch Band were pioneers of electro, and their Degout EP, released in 1984, is wonderful. I gather that they didn’t have all the technology to hand that counterparts, say, in New York might have had, so necessity was very much the mother of invention, and I suspect that improvisational spirit is what makes the tracks seem so fresh now.

Before the Master Scratch Band EP was released the group had some success in the charts with Sizike, a project where they got three inexperienced singers to front a recording with rather spectacular success. It’s all very reminiscent of the Bananrama story, and indeed if that trio had recorded for Mute they would very likely have sounded like Sizike. The hit single was the electro pop wonder Don’t Stop, and it was a decidedly slinky affair. There was a fantastic accompanying LP too, but sadly the project was a one-off. I suspect this is not what people immediately think of when Balkan disco is mentioned.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 10

2011-07-10T00:51:00.002+01:00

Footage from the funeral of Austrian disco legend Kurt Hauenstein shows a massive turnout of Hell’s Angels and bikers alongside the music business greats the Supermax leader had worked with like Frank Farian of Boney M fame. Rockers Revenge was always an interesting choice of name for Arthur Baker’s activities given the image he cultivated. And yet his story is rather more straightforward than those of many of the people who were involved in the disco scene. I keep hoping to come across a definitive history of the German disco scene because I am particularly interested in the backgrounds of those involved and the different roads they’d taken to get there. How many were refugees from the Krautrock world? How many had been members of the German big bands playing interpretations of funk and jazz? And so on.

I would admit that I know very little about the pop music of Austria. I had to make a conscious effort to do some investigative work for the Anywhere But Here Today project, and fortunately I stumbled across the strange world of ‘Austropop’ which was wonderfully disorientating. Along the way I came across clips of the (Goethe-inspired?) Austrian disco group Ganymed which made me laugh out in delight. The music was great, in what would inevitably now be described as a ‘space disco’ way, but the performances were even better, complete with outlandish alien costumes which reminded me of the KLF. Despite the daft adopted names like Kroonk and Pulsaria the songs stand up really well, poised somewhere between prog and Eurovision, and the existence of Ganymed was enough to make Austropop worth celebrating.

But then I discovered Supermax. I really had never come across Supermax or Kurt Hauenstein until recently. And I’m sure it’s not just an allergy to groups called Super-this-or-that. It’s just that our paths never crossed. The cruel irony is that I only discovered the pleasures of Supermax shortly after Kurt Hauenstein died in March 2011. Oh the shame of it, as I bet all the cosmic disco hipsters were well up-to-speed on the Supermax legend. But I was blissfully unaware of the genius of King Kurt until I saw YouTube clips of the group performing its hits Love Machine and World of Today which set me off on a quest to find out more.

I was particularly intrigued because while it was not that unusual to have someone looking like an unreconstructed rocker on keyboards as part of a Euro disco group line-up, Supermax in contrast had such a guy stage centre looking and sounding like a refugee from Humble Pie, surrounded by some seriously funky souls, and seemingly singing about the world being full of pollution and kids taking pills and that the world’s a mess ‘cos the police are doing it too. This was clearly not your average disco fodderstomp, and I’ve been having a ball playing catch up with the Supermax catalogue. It just makes me smile that apparently the whole of eastern Europe was 30 years ahead of me.

Kurt Hauenstein may have been from Austria but like most of the greats he was a true internationalist. He moved to Germany while still young to play bass, and yes he was in Krautrock/prog outfits (e.g. Rigoni/Schoenherz) and then got involved with Frank Farian in Frankfurt where he was setting up his Boney M project which is where Kurt learned his studio skills. In 1976 he started his own Supermax project, with the Don’t Stop The Music LP from which the title track gives a wonderful indication of the mad mix of elements swirling around in the Supermax sound with a particular emphasis on African and reggae influences counterbalancing the synths and the more prog rock traits. This, and other Supermax titles, was produced by Peter Hauke, who was from a similar prog background. The Supermax reggae influences became more pronounced in the early ‘80s, and Kurt being a bass player by trade perhaps helped this manifest itself in some very deep dubby excursions. Indeed any biog will mention Supermax were the first white group to play at the legendary Sunsplash festival.

Beyond Supermax Kurt did get involved in some extra-curricular activity. He helped out on Bernt Mohrles’ Chilly project, but best of all was his work on the Bamboo LP which he masterminded for WEA in 1979 which is simply astonishing. He had the opportunity to produce a trio of singers from Suriname, and let his imagination run riot. He came up with an outlandish creation that’s up there with the best of Chic and Ze Records’ output. Cosmic disco exoticists no doubt drool over this LP, but it’s the slower, dubby track Hustlers of Life Will Never Survive that gets me everytime. One other project of Kurt’s that I am aware of is the London Aircraaft one from 1984, with Supermax backing singer Larry London out front, which has some wonderful electro tracks on and the rather more characteristic reggae driven Rocket in my Pocket. I guess it should also be mentioned that in more recent years Supermax collaborated with Buddha Monk of the Wu Tang Clan, which seems just about perfect really.

I do wonder what my teenage punk self would have made of Supermax if I had been aware of their work in the late ‘70s. I suspect I might have struggled with Kurt’s image, which would have been pretty daft as the guy was infinitely cooler than I could ever hope to be. And Kurt would have been pretty contemptuous of ridiculous engrained prejudices. On a more meaningful note, for example, even the first Supermax LP has the outstanding Watch Out South Africa, Here We Come. It’s not just a striking piece of anti-apartheid disco stomp, there’s real menace in the delivery. And it wasn’t just an empty threat, as Supermax did tour South Africa in 1981 where controversially Kurt took the full racially-mixed entourage, defiantly becoming the first group to do so, I believe, ruffling many feathers along the way and attracting all sorts of hostility and threats. A true rocker's revenge.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 9

2011-07-07T02:31:00.001+01:00

Long, long ago when car boot sales were a relatively new phenomenon and CDs were just coming in vinyl seekers had a field day. On one occasion I can remember picking up a 50p copy of Joe Gibbs’ Majestic Dub in mint condition, with really thick cardboard sleeve and the works. I knew my hip reference points, and about the African Dub series, so I was delighted. Eagerly anticipating some heavyweight dub excursions I put the needle on the record as soon as I got home, and suddenly out from my battered hi-fi oozed some squelchy synth straight off Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. I was rather confused.

Majestic Dub is a strange old record. While most of it is orthodox dub (if you’ll excuse what should be an oxymoron) there are definite disco elements here and there and generous use of bubbling synths. These days I would probably be desperate to hear more of those disco elements, and perversely have more recently come unstuck time and time again with the way ‘disco’ as a phrase is used in reggae music. I mean, for example, if you come across a Sly & Robbie record called Disco Dub you’d think it would be a bit, well, McFadden and Whitehead at least knowing what we know about Bits and Pieces, Boops, etc. but nah.

When I think of reggae meeting disco uptown I tend to think of Third World’s Now That We’ve Found Love, Inner Circle’s Everything Is Great, and that whole late ‘70s Island, Chris Blackwell, Alex Sadkin, Steve Stanley scene. It’s easy to forget that such ‘crossover’ sounds were a bit controversial at the time. Kris Needs was one of the few journalists in the late ‘70s enthusiastically writing about punk, reggae and disco all mixed in together, but even he in a Zigzag review of Sly Dunbar’s Sly, Wicked and Slick LP expressed caution about “the preoccupation with distilled disco”.

In an interview Kris did with Jacob Miller of Inner Circle, published in the April 1979 issue of Zigzag, there is considerable discussion about making reggae for the disco market, with reference to a Peter Tosh quote about not approving of disco music as “disco means to ‘get down’ which wasn’t a good thing”. And yet that same year Peter Tosh was in Byron Lee’s Dynamic Sounds studio with Sly, Robbie, Sticky, Mikey Chung making the Mystic Man LP for the Rolling Stones’ label with its centrepiece Buk-in-hamm Palace which is just about thee definitive disco reggae recording.

There is a time-honoured reggae tradition of reinterpreting the hits of the day, so it’s no surprise that long before Chris Blackwell’s masterplan was put into operation there were Jamaican takes on disco smashes. In 1975, for example, Byron Lee was redoing The Hustle and Disco Stomp. And I have to confess to being the type of person who gets irrationally excited at finding reggae disco versions of Silver Convention’s Fly Robin Fly. There’s a great one by Toney and the Sweet Bunch. Derrick Harriott did a fantastic version on his Reggae Disco Rockers LP, as did Harold Butler on his Gold Connection LP. There seems to be quite a lot of overlap between those two LPs in terms of personnel, and they were both released in the UK by Lloyd Charmers, interestingly enough.

Gold Connection, in particular, seems to be a record rated by devotees of Jamaican disco reggae who have looked beyond that great Soul Jazz Hustle compilation. I confess to being a massive fan, and like the fact that it’s only the odd track here and there that gets everything right. More knowledgeable people than me will point you in the direction of cuts like the Royal Rasses’ Unconventional People, Freak by Tapper Zukie, The Rebels’ Rhodesia, the wonderful It’s My House by Storm, and my particular favourite Hey Mister by Althea Fo(r)rest & Togetherness. And that is the Althea, yes, and quite possibly before Uptown Top Ranking on a cut she wrote with Derrick Harriott, who also produced it.

The overlap between disco and reggae was touched upon in Skimming Stones, an earlier edition of Your Heart Out, which looked at it more from a British perspective, starting with the Disco Dub Band and Mike Dorane’s Island-sponsored adventures with his Rockers and Movers labels which the more I think about it seem the blueprint for what Chris Blackwell did with Compass Point. Then there is Eddy Grant, who was once so popular he almost became invisible, but if you listen back to things like his original version of Walking On Sunshine they sound phenomenal in the way he mixed up elements. That track was perhaps his most out-and-out disco moment, but it’s hardly standard dancefloor fare.

Dennis Bovell may not have enjoyed Eddy Grant’s success, but he is rightly revered. I would still love to see a definitive database of his productions, but on the other hand it is fun finding them independently. So, for example, his production for his own Matumbi label of Guardian Angel’s Self-Service Love is a pretty special slice of disco reggae. And his steering of I-Roy (Roy Reid) down an explicitly disco path on Whap’n Bap’n is quite simply extraordinary.

Dennis Bovell’s engineer on a number of sessions was Mark Lusardi, who was another central character of that Skimming Stones edition of YHO. Mark worked on all sorts of sessions, some deep underground and some which were successful crossovers like Black Slate’s Amigo, a genuine success in charts and discos around the world. It could be argued that the UK reggae groups were able to provide perfect disco material because of versatility often acquired the hard way through years of experience doing session work and providing live support for all sorts of artists. The Reggae Regulars’ Where Is Jah?/Black Star Liner is another UK reggae 12” that springs to mind as an example of a record you’re likely to find featured on disco forums.

Among the pioneering recordings Mark Lusardi worked on was TW Funkmasters’ Love Money, a project of London reggae radio show presenter Tony Williams who used contacts among the reggae community to make an early electro track. Peter Shapiro in his disco history Turn The Beat Around cites the dub of Love Money as a huge club hit in New York and the track which woke Francois Kervorkian up to “the power dub effects had over the dance floor”. Peter mentions that Kervorkian’s own experiments with dub peaked on Snakecharmer, Jah Wobble and his group’s collaboration with Holger Czukay and The Edge. Ironically, going full circle, Mark Lusardi was a long-time colleague of Wobble’s and had worked with him and Czukay (and Jaki Liebezeit) previously on the How Much Are They? EP. Wobble has mentioned how “typically, Mark Lusardi was the unsung hero on that recording. He gave it a ‘tough’ disco sound, and some nice dub touches”.

Francois Kervorkian’s immortal disco reggae mixes include Jimmy Cliff’s Treat The Youths Right. His fellow champion of disco’s darker, dubbier side, Larry Levan, has similarly become more than legendary for his mixes. The ‘dubs’ of some of Gwen Guthrie’s Compass Point recordings spring to mind, like Peanut Butter, featuring Sly and Robbie etc. I think I’m right in saying that Gwen first worked with Sly and Robbie while recording with Peter Tosh in New York. She would certainly go on to feature on his classic Mystic Man set with its Buk-in-hamm Palace show stealer.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 8

2011-07-04T01:19:00.003+01:00

It’s one of the more dependable devices in crime fiction: the hiding of something specific in the middle of the very general. And so in much the same way how many people would immediately recognise Ralph MacDonald’s Calypso Breakdown? Yet many millions of people have owned it as part of the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. I wonder how many who heard that track would go on to investigate other works by the New York percussionist?

I like the idea of a casual disco fan stumbling upon Ralph’s 1978 LP The Path, and really getting into its conceptual side as it traces a journey, spiritually and musically, from Africa through the Caribbean to New York. It’s a hell of a record, and features a heavyweight cast including Chuck Rainey, Bob James, Gwen Guthrie, Miriam Makeba and Grover Washington. Its follow-up, the excellent Counterpoint, was rather more dancefloor-friendly with the track Discolypso giving an indication of the musical area it was having its fun in.

Another Hollywood blockbuster that had its disco calypso moment was The Deep, which featured Beckett, the soca star from St Vincent, on an irresistible track arranged by close collaborator Frankie McIntosh. I would love to be able to say my life was changed by Calypso Disco when I saw the film as a kid, but I confess Jacqueline Bisset made rather more of an impression upon me. Beckett got to release an accompanying LP on Casablanca, one of my favourite labels which released a host of classic disco sides, most notably the remarkable string of Donna Summer hits. It often confounded expectations though, with for example its Wildflowers series of recordings from New York’s Loft jazz scene which I bet has caught out a few disco neophytes who think they know their David Mancuso history.

I have to admit I am not familiar with Beckett’s other recordings, and I would willingly concede that soca is bit of a weak spot for me. One record I did stumble across which made me sit up and pay attention is a collection called Rebel Soca, which has an astonishing track on it by Safi Abdullah called Afrika Is Burning. Ostensibly it’s an attack on disco hedonism: “Under screams of a boiling overdose systematically controlled by idiots of the White House with twisted grins and stale peanuts. Africa is burning, and the Black Man is doing the Freak ”. It goes on to point a finger at party-goers and their “tight jeans and Elton John sunglasses, Pierre Cardin sneakers and a bag of smoke.” While the sermon is delivered in the finest Gil Scott-Heron tradition, ironically the music which is a glorious mix of reggae, calypso, funk, highlife and much more makes it a pretty unique disco classic itself. There seems to be ridiculously little out there about or by Safi Abdullah beyond an old compilation.

There is a lot of interest in what happened when disco music met Caribbean sounds, and there are plenty of people better qualified than me to write about ‘tropical disco’. But one thing that does particularly appeal is that any ‘tropical disco’ collection or mix is likely to include tracks from beyond the Caribbean itself. The term ‘disco lypso’ itself has been adopted by Mandrill and by Bunny Mack, and used for a compilation put out by Trans Air, a label that is carving out a nice niche in salvaging lost Caribbean funk. And you’ll find ‘tropical disco’ sounds in various locations. To give a great example, Harry Mosco was leader of Nigerian afro rock outfit The Funkees who moved to London to try their luck following the success of Osibisa (and if Sunshine Day isn’t the most glorious example of ‘tropical disco’ I’ll retire hurt!). Harry went on to make some solo recordings for the Nigerian market, including the excellent early ‘80s LP Sugar Cane Baby which had a glorious Caribbean infused title track.

Many writers have tried to untangle the roots of disco, but have only succeeded in tying themselves up in knots with their references to salsa, merengue (is that an excuse to mention Les Chicas del Can?), reggae, boogaloo, samba, gospel, African rhythms and Soul Makossa. I came across a fascinating piece by Alastair Bird in The Caribbean Review of Books, which was prompted by the re-release of Eddie Hooper’s Pass It On and Tomorrow’s Sun, in which he acknowledges: “The problem with trying to impose an elegantly simple, chronologically reciprocating, and intercultural global narrative on the evolution of musical genres such as disco and soca is that the narrative never quite fits. Contemporary influences are multiple, and the dialogue is gleefully messy; it’s rarely possible to identify where one wave of influence concludes and another begins.”

If you take Caribbean sounds and ‘tropical disco’ in their loosest senses then it’s fascinating to see how influences have pinged back and forth. Even the most casual of music fans will be able to identify songs with a ‘tropical disco’ flavour: Boney M, Goombay Dance Band, and perhaps Lobo’s Caribbean Disco Show which was memorably interpreted by Legs & Co. Then there are the projects of inveterate cultural magpies Daniel Vangarde and Jean Kluger, from Le Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki to Black Blood to La Compagnie Creole via the Gibson Brothers and Ottawan. While disco snobs may be snooty about the popular appeal of songs like the Gibson Brothers’ Cuba and Ottawan’s D.I.S.C.O. there is no denying the pleasure they’ve brought to millions around the world, and there is a very strong case for the subversive way in which Vangarde and Kluger made Caribbean exiles famous with a mad miscegenation of musical styles which has made its presence felt worldwide, from Josef K to Bollywood.

Vangarde, in particular, is one of my favourite pop figures. Among other things he is said to have been responsible for Chic working with Sheila & B Devotion and for introducing Wally Badarou to Chris Blackwell when the Island patron was putting together his Compass Point team personnel. The whole Compass Point phenomenon was a literal case of disco and Caribbean cultures colliding. Ironically, however, it is a struggle to think of examples where the local funky Nassau sound impacted on what was being created, except perhaps if you count Monte Browne, a former guitarist with T-Connection, working on the Tom Tom Club LP. And then again T-Connection had a major impact on the development of disco with Do What You Wanna Do and other classics.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 7

2011-07-01T00:30:00.001+01:00

Brand New Wayo, the first release from Comb & Razor Sound, is a beautiful thing. It’s subtitled “Funk, Fast Times & Nigerian Boogie Badness 1979-1983”, or as compiler Uchenne Ikonne puts it: “We called it Disco”. And the CD edition comes clad in a sumptuous box which contains an 80-page beautifully put-together mock magazine in which Uchenne tells the story of the Nigerian recording industry during that ‘boom’ period, with some lovely vintage advertisements for authentic flavour. If more compact discs were issued with such flair, flamboyance and fun the sorry old recording industry just might find itself in a much healthier position. We might even spend more of the money we don't have on its physical products.

There are some fantastic tracks on Brand New Wayo. It’s impossible not to mention Kris Okotie’s Show Me Your Backside. The music is as glorious as the title, with a bubbling, unmistakably early ‘80s synth sound added to the it has to be said highly Off The Wall influenced funk flavourings. It’s a mix that makes Dizzy K. Falola’s Excuse Me Baby just as irresistible, and underlines yet again how much there is to learn about the music that is out there. There’s little chance of us running out of history for quite some time, unless we choose to limit our horizons.

It is the ladies on Brand New Wayo that steal the show. Joe Moks’ Boys And Girls and Oby Onyioha’s I Want To Feel your Love are both incredible tracks that in a perverse way work perfectly along side anything from Mambo Nassau by Lizzy Mercier Descloux or the Tom Tom Club, or perhaps something on Prelude or West End. Ironically there is probably the same mix of influences, just approached from a different perspective. And in the case of Tony Okoroji’s astonishing production on the Joe Moks track you have to remind yourself this was made a couple of years before Genius of Love.

In his excellent accompanying booklet Uchenne features a piece on Ladies of the Eighties which gives a brief overview of some of the singers who turned the tables on prevailing notions of a woman’s place in Nigerian pop music. It’s a theme he had explored earlier on his legendary blog With Comb and Razor in a post I would cite as one of the best pieces of writing on pop music ever. This particular piece, from November 2007, was entitled ‘On: The Quincy Jones of Nigeria, woman singers and the London Era of Nigerian music’, and it still makes my head spin with its elegance and the abundance of information it contains. In short, it is an article that opens up so many new vistas it’s intoxicating.

The main thrust of the article was about becoming aware of the producer’s role within Nigerian disco/pop sounds, with a specific focus on the work of Lemmy Jackson: “Jackson's rep as ‘the man with the magic fingers’ took off in 1981, a banner year in which three landmark albums bore his production credit: Christy Essien-Igbokwe's Ever Liked My Person?, I Want To Feel Your Love, by Oby Onyioha, and under his own name, Tonight.” The piece had a great tangential theme about how in the early ‘80s some Nigerian recordings were overdubbed and mixed in London, where there were plenty of connections via Osibisa, The Funkees, etc. Appropriately for YHO readers among the musicians featured on some of these sessions was Annie Whitehead. And, even better, the featured vocalist on Jackson own LP, Tonight, was Dan-I of Monkey Chop fame, who may be the only person about whom you can get away with using the names Linton Kwesi Johnson and Trevor Horn in the same sentence.

Mention of Christy Essien-Igbokwe and Oby Onyioha allows Uchenne to explain the impact female singers had on Nigerian pop in the early ‘80s: “A score of educated modern ladies holding their heads high and singing the liberated songs of the New Woman--and some of them even wearing trousers as they did it! After the decidedly austere presentation of the folk singers, to have a woman like Oby Onyioha wearing red lipstick and a perm, cooing I Want To Feel Your Love and exhorting her sisters to Enjoy Your Life while decadent strings swooped around her was a deliciously radical change of pace, forerunning a substantial cultural shift.” Another singer mentioned is the elusive Theadora Isudu, whose second LP was actually recorded in the US and opens with the absolute classic It’s Easy. If there is a degree of caution in saying that it will be because you can’t exactly walk into a record shop and easily buy the record, which is criminal when you hear something as wonderful as Ada, which at the risk of being repetitive really has a touch of the Lizzy Mercier Descloux about it.

The great thing about the With Comb and Razor site is that it challenged some of my own ideas about Nigerian music. I guess like a lot of people I’d trundled along, knowing a bit of Fela and king Sunny Ade, gradually learning more about the sound of funky Lagos in the ‘70s via labels like Strut, and overdosing on highlife and frenetic dancefloor sounds. To then come across something like Christy Essien Igbokwe singing Ever Liked My Person? and sounding suspiciously Tammy Wynette-esque or the mix of country and funk on Kris Okotie’s I Need Someone was decidedly disorientating, which is actually a good thing.

The other website I would visit frequently to get a fill of African sounds was the excellent Voodoo Funk, where its host New York DJ Frank Gossner would detail his adventures travels in West Africa in search of abandoned vinyl. The site remains an invaluable resource offering some superb mixtapes collated from the records Frank has found. Among the mixtapes are a number of Nigerian 'disco' sets which are glorious, and it's fascinating to see the evolution from an almost apologetic tone for posting some of this music to a growing realisation that people are desperate to hear more. And we are! Last year Frank compiled some of these sounds for the Lagos Disco Inferno set which is another absolutely essential collection, where again the show is stolen by Doris Ebong's magnificent Boogie Trip ...

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 6

2011-06-28T00:32:00.001+01:00

Those of us in thrall to charity shops will know the feeling of staring all too often at shelves crammed with commonly discarded CDs. Occasionally, just occasionally, something will magically appear which seems so spectacularly out-of-place that the imagination whirls with wonderment: “How on earth did that end up there?” It’s what keeps us looking. It’s what we pretty much live for. One such gloriously illogical example is when a CD of Gerson King Combo Volume II popped up in the local British Heart Foundation shop. What was that all about?

I like to think I know a thing or two about Brazilian music, but I have to confess this record was one I was completely unfamiliar with. There was no way I was going to leave it behind though. The Samba & Soul stamp was enough of a clue, but the cover photo of an imperious Mr Combo resplendent in white top hat and tails and massive gold chain pretty much clinched it. And it’s one of the best spur of the moment ‘blind’ purchases I’ve ever indulged in. A lot of it is glorious James Brown-style exhortations and Barry White rumbling thunder ‘n’ satin sheets seduction. But there are a few tracks that veer towards more of a disco sound as befits its 1978 vintage. The opener, Pro Que Der e Vier, in particular is a winner.

A good reference point for the Gerson King Combo sound would be Tim Maia’s Disco Club from pretty much the same time. Disco Club, however, has rather more of a full-on disco sound which makes it completely irresistible. In terms of Brazilian soul/funk sounds Tim Maia has a pretty much untouchable position, and you can’t go wrong with any of his ‘70s recordings. But the exuberant Earth Wind & Fire big band feel to Disco Club is exhilarating. And there is a kind of appropriateness to that as Kool & The Gang in their world domination enterprise phase were closely associated with Eumir Deodato whom I’m sure someone somewhere has argued laid foundations for disco with his funky reworking of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Brazil and disco were not words I always immediately put together. After all, if you can’t dance to ‘classic’ Brazilian sounds you can’t dance, so why worry about the disco beat? But it was thanks to the unique logic of YouTube that several doors opened at once. I’d looked up Restricted Code’s Love To Meet You, a reforgotten classic pop single from 1981 by an Edinburgh group Paul Morley had included in his new pop manifesto at the end of 1980, describing them as “for radio, dancing and escaping from this room into that room, the fall popped up: pop to fall over with, still young (and) so right ...” YouTube then helpfully suggested I play the video of Corações a Mil by Marina, which turned out to be a glorious slice of Brazilian disco-infused pop from 1981, and if there is anything that should sum up what that year was supposed to be about it would be playing Restricted Code followed by Marina.

Again I have to confess I wasn’t familiar with Marina (Lima) or the TV show Fantástico on which the adorable video had been shown. But looking for clips from the programme of a similar vintage was a revelation, not least because it led to a cache of clips from another show at the height of the disco explosion, Mofo, featuring the irrepressibly over-the-top host Carlos Imperial and some of the most gloriously anarchic TV stage settings ever as Brazilian pop stars struggled to perform their hits amid a mass of showgirls and a screaming audience all keen to steal the show. If you think of Brazilian clichés, from Carnival to Copacabana, and magnify them by a thousand, you get a sense of the madness on these shows.

Nevertheless the mayhem did lead to some joyous discoveries, such as the fantastically named As Freneticas, an all-singing all-dancing troupe whose take on disco was rather on the Emotions’ Best of My Love anything-but understated side with definite Hollywood musical leanings along the lines of Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday or Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. I guess the Ritchie Family might be an apt reference point, particularly as that outfit started out with a disco take on Brazil which I’m sure is not entirely irrelevant and it is particularly fascinating when musical ideas ping back and forth. An even better discovery was Lady Zu, who was conveniently cast as Brazil’s answer to Donna Summer though that only hints at her magnificence. Her two late ‘70s LPs, A Noite Vai Chegar and Femea Brasileira, are absolutely essential Brazilian soul masterpieces.

Sifting through the clips from Fantástico I came across Sandra de Sa in 1980 singing Demônio Colorido. Sandra’s was another name I was unfamiliar with, underlining how much there is still to learn about Brazilian music. Sandra’s early ‘80s LPs are really worth exploring, particularly where they head into the treacly ‘last days of disco’ territory of, say, Shalamar’s Night To Remember or Patrice Rushen’s Forget-Me-Nots on tracks like the superb Guarde Minha Voz. It’s tempting to collar a Brazilian soul freak and force them to hand over details of other ‘secret’ 1980s works in a similar style.

Flirt with Brazilian disco sounds and you’ll inevitably come across Rita Lee, a far more familiar name for those of us who have approached via bossa and tropicalia. I love Rita’s post Os Mutantes work as it’s a bit of a confusing mess, particularly her late ‘70s recordings where you’ll get a fantastic mix of punchy, crunchy rockers and infectiously slinky disco pop. Search in the Fantástico archives and you’ll hopefully stumble across a glorious video of a rollerskating Rita singing Lancia Perfume. Rita’s disco numbers were incredibly popular in clubs, but not I understand to the liking of the funk/soul purists. That’s life!

You could spend a lifetime untangling disco’s roots, and it all depends where you start your untangling from. Jorge Ben’s 1973 LP Ben for example begat the track Taj Mahal that was later used infamously by Rod Stewart on one of his disco hits. In the late ‘70s and into the early ‘80s Jorge Ben himself recorded more explicitly disco-infused material, and as with all his other work up until that point you really can’t go wrong. A quick search on YouTube using the Fantástico code will bring you to a glorious 1979 video of Jorge Ben I think we can safely say thoroughly enjoying his work, singing Waimea 55000, a number that is by all accounts a bit of a lost b-side and had been something of a secret weapon in the armoury of those DJs inclined to play the best in Brazilian disco sounds . Now we can all know ...

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 5

2011-06-25T01:27:00.004+01:00

OPM - Manila Sound Machine is the latest in the special YHO series of mixtapes, and it’s available to download for free here. This collection of thrillers from Manila captures the sound of the Philippines in the 1970s. Drawing on the archives of the Manila Sound and O.P.M. (Original Pilipino Music) it will appeal particularly to those with a fondness for, say, the Starland Vocal Band’s Afternoon Delight, the Four Seasons’ Silver Star, and so on.

The Manila Sound was a phenomenon that took off when the music industry in the Philippines developed its own thriving scene with homegrown recordings, drawing very heavily on American pop trends but with songs delivered using lyrics in the Tagalog language with English phrases often wonderfully interjected at odd moments. Prior to this a lot of Pilipino pop was straight copies of the American sounds which flooded the airwaves. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that, and the teen outfit the Rocky Fellers were particularly successful with the classic Killer Joe, for example, in the early ‘60s.

I have to admit I was completely unaware of the Manila Sound and its successor O.P.M. until I chanced upon a video of VST & Co. performing Step No, Step Yes, and had to rub my eyes in disbelief at such exquisite execution of the late ‘70s disco/soft pop sound, complete with synchronised poolside dance sequence, and a melody as ridiculously addictive as Todd Rundgren’s I Saw The Light. There were a couple of other clips of VST & Co. in action to prove this was not a one-off, and from there I confess I was hooked on the Manila Sound.

The 1970s in the Philippines was a time of martial law under the Marcos regime and a time when the islands’ tourist industry was thriving. That sort of contradiction captures the Manila Sound quite nicely. VST & Co. were massive stars with their re-imaginings of US stylings. The irony is they were actually better at the whole thing than some of the people who inspired them (and rather brilliantly I saw an interview where Roger Rigor from the group mentions Dan Fogelberg and England Dan & John Ford Coley as influences). There are mentions too of Diana Ross being a fan of the VST & Co. track Awitin Mo At Isasayaw Ko which got played quite a lot at Studio 54 apparently.

The mix starts with a track from the group Cinderella, who have become particular favourites of mine. The influence of the Carpenters is inescapable, and singer Yolly Samson has one of those voices that just makes you melt in the same way Karen’s can or Françoise Hardy’s singing can. But vocal duties were swapped around, and when the guys took to the mic it entered David Cassidy sinisterly sweet territory. The sound of Cinderella is almost overly saccharine at times, but for that very reason it is fatally fascinating. Yolly, I’m afraid, died rather too young, and there seems frustratingly little about her instantly accessible, though perhaps that adds to the mystery.

Despite the appeal of soft pop and disco there was much more to the Manila Sound or OPM. Asin, in particular, mixed pop with Pinoy folk roots in a pretty radical way. The name Asin itself apparently derives from the Joan Baez cover of the Stones’ Salt of the Earth, which gives a pretty good clue to the group’s sound and the singing of the gloriously named Lolita Carbon. The Stones’ lyrics (“Raise your glass to the hard working people. Let's drink to the uncounted heads. Let's think of the wavering millions who need leading but get gamblers instead”) taken at face value summed up the Asin stance, identifying with the mass of people in the Philippines who didn’t have a voice under the Marcos regime. From what I can gather their songs were not explicitly political but their late ‘70s recordings struck a chord with people and their particularly Pilipino identity was something people could claim as their own. The track featured here, Himig Ng Pag-Ibig, is from Asin’s second LP and I’ve seen it described as “the favourite Pinoy love song of all time.” Freddie Aguilar was another successful singer who mixed folk forms and pop, and his version of the patriotic song Bayan Ko was an important part of the 1986 People Power Revolution leading to Cory Aquino’s election after the downfall of the Marcos regime. The song itself dates back to a 1929 poem by Jose Corazon de Jesus, protesting at the American occupation of the Philippines.

Elsewhere there are strong suggestions of a Brazilian influence. Bong Penera, for instance, was responsible for popularising bossa nova/samba jazz sounds in the Philippines, and you will usually see him mentioned as the Pilipino Sergio Mendes or Deodato. Again, nothing should be taken away from the excellence of his own recordings which could easily nestle along more celebrated sets on CTI. Interestingly both Cinderella and VST & Co. would later controversially redo their hits in a bossa nova style which would not be to everyone’s liking.

This mixtape comes with a huge health warning: there are many people who will know much more than me about Manila Sound and OPM. But these are songs that have thrilled and filled me with genuine joy and I desperately wanted to share a sense of some of the things I’d discovered. They are as you can imagine from ‘a variety of sources’ and you can hear a reference at one stage to Wilbert’s Music Library, which is deliberately left in as a tribute to the people who share their valuable resources with the world. Let's go Pinoy Disco ...

With thanks to Per-Christian Hille for another great cover design.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 4

2011-06-22T01:36:00.001+01:00

Disco Around The World is the title of a 1977 LP by the great Eurodisco group Voyage, and a statement of intent. Plenty of other disco-related acts shared Voyage’s passion for syncopated cultural tourism, and the Middle East in the broadest sense is one area that was flirted with outrageously, from La Bionda’s Sandstorm to Cabaret Voltaire’s Yashar. There will be many other examples of Middle Eastern disco hybrids, from camp exotica to genuine groundbreaking adventuresomeness, which could be wheeled out as evidence of this phenomenon.

The Ritchie Family tackled an extended Arabian Nights theme, but the Abdul Hassan Orchestra was an altogether more elaborate conceit concocted by keyboard-player Hans van Eijck (a former member of Dutch pop group The Tee-Set), featuring belly dancer Yonina, and giving us late ‘70s Middle Eastern flavoured delights such as the irresistible Disco Arab. Mike Batt covered similar ground when he composed the theme for the film Caravans, though with rather more logic as it was part of a superb and specific soundtrack, albeit one for a film set in a very indistinct Middle Eastern location.

The flipside of the same pop coin to the Abdul Hassan Orchestra is the pervasive Middle Eastern influence on Cabaret Voltaire’s early 1980s recordings, such as the Red Mecca LP and very definitely Yashar from the 2x45 set. The Cabs could claim with some conviction the Middle Eastern elements were in their music to reflect a changing political climate and explore its sinister implications. From much the same era the early Suns of Arqa took, among much else, aspects of disco music and Middle Eastern elements to create something genuinely strange and beautiful.

There is something too about words or phrases in music having a certain Middle Eastern exoticism. Hudson County’s Bim Sala Bim springs to mind. The song itself you might say has a history that is pretty odd, evolving from its mid-‘70s disco funk origins to being bootlegged as the Fantastic Soul Inventions to being covered by the James Last Orchestra as Welcome To The Party to being covered again by the Soviet Disco big band. In the USSR itself in the mid-‘70s there are examples of Middle Eastern disco exoticism, too, such as the bizarre bazaar scene from the 1976 film The Brave Chirac with a soundtrack by the great composer Alexander Zatsepin.

As for Egypt and its eternal mysteries? Well, Eurodisco queen Amanda Lear sang about aspiring to be The Sphinx, while Harry Thuman similarly evoked the spirit of The Sphinx. Alec R Costadinos used the alias of Sphinx for one of his unique style of over-the-top extravaganzas, the retelling of the New Testament stories about Judas Iscariot and Simon Peter set to disco suites which really do settle into flowing grooves that feel like they could comfortably go on forever. Costadinos was, at least, born in Egypt, so there was some logic to assuming the name of Sphinx during his remarkable progress through the disco world, via Kongas, Cerrone, Love and Kisses, the Syncophonic Orchestra, and so on. Another Egyptian born pop figure who has an important place in the history of disco is Dalida, a remarkable internationalist in a similar way to Shakira today. She is credited with having some of the earliest disco successes in France, and her song Salma ya Salama, based on an Egyptian folk song, in its Arabic version was a massive hit in the Middle East.

And then there’s the allure of glamour by proxy in the adoption of an exotic name, like the disco outfit Arabesque who, while undeniably delightful, were more Abbaesque than the name implies. Blue-eyed soul legend Kenny Nolan, for example, surfaced at the height of the disco boom recording for Casablanca (but of course!) as part of Persia who as far as I know recorded just the one fantastic LP in 1979, which included the irresistible Inch By Inch. Nolan by that stage had quite a track record, as a writer with Bob Crewe (including Lady Marmalade and My Eyes Adored You) and for the bubblegum soul he came up with for the Chelsea label (Jim Gilstrap, Linda Carr, and Dee Clark). He was also behind the remarkable Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes and The Eleventh Hour. For the Persia project Nolan paired up with German producer Jurgen Koppers who had been involved with so many of the great Munich disco creations, a considerable number of which were also released on the Casablanca label.

The irony is that the inventiveness and precision playing of the musicians on the Persia LP could have been perfectly replicated by Persian session men in the pre-revolutionary Iran of the late’70s. Thankfully we are now becoming more aware of this, and the Pomegranates compilation from Finders Keepers has been invaluable in providing clues to the wealth of incredible pop recordings made in 1970s Persia, like Googoosh’s astonishing Talagh and Nooshafarin’s wonderful Gol-e Aftab Gardoon. YouTube, naturally, is an invaluable resource for investigating the delights of Persian pop, and it’s completely compelling how great a lot of the music is. The mix of Western dance sounds and Persian orchestrations is a winning combination, and it is heartbreaking to wonder where the music might have gone if the 1979 revolution had not have happened.

It is so easy to succumb to music from around the world when it has absorbed stylings we are very close to, hence the particular appeal of the funk-infused tracks on the Pomegranates LP. The disco era was only really beginning to have an impact when the conservative clerics came to power in the new Iran, and ironically it would be Algeria that would forge ahead with rai music as the unique blend of traditional melodies and new technologies which would have an impact on Western dancefloors in the 1980s.

There is nevertheless an irresistible selection of disco inspired Persian pop sounds to enjoy in the nether world of YouTube, and particular fun can be had following the trail of Ramesh, described in the Pomegranates sleevenotes as an “elusive femme rocker”. I hope one day soon Finders Keepers will do a Ramesh compilation, including the likes of the gorgeous ballad Nemigam and the propulsive Mondanam az Boodanete. There is a particularly fascinating clip of Ramesh appearing on a live TV show, from I think 1978, singing Asmar Yaaram where the group is ultra-tight and there are what seems spontaneous outbursts of dancing among the audience which is amusingly almost reminiscent of that American Bandstand TV performance by PiL from 1980 where Lydon is urging some shall we say audience participation, and the crowd really gets into Poptones and Careering.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 3

2011-06-19T01:58:00.002+01:00

The forgotten book on “world music, politics and social change” which inadvertently triggered this global disco excursion includes a fascinating paper by Anna Szemere, “‘I get frightened of my voice’: on avant-garde rock in Hungary”, which focuses on the new wave or post-punk underground area of activity. It was with a small shiver of delight and self-satisfaction that I recognised the names Trabant and Balaton, and I was particularly excited by Anna’s description of these groups: “The Trabant/Balaton celebrate the precarious boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’, a floating sensation, by immersing themselves in a completely self-enclosed space of their own. Musical and lyrical trivia from 1960s pop styles are re-worked by exaggerated simplicity and also disrupted by micro-dissonances and the insertion of entirely alien textual elements.”

Not so long ago I stumbled across clips of Trabant on YouTube and was mesmerised. The song that really caught my attention was Ragaszthatatlan szív, a sort of reggae-underpinned piece of post-punk minimalism, with a hint of disco, not far removed from an early ‘80s Rough Trade YMGs/The Gist feel. Itt van, pedig senki se hívta covered similar ground. It all just seemed too good to be true. Further investigation revealed the songs were from the soundtrack of the 1984 Janos Xanthus film Eskimo Woman Feels Cold which featured Trabant and in particular singer Marietta Mehes in a lead role. As the Hungarian new wave blog No More Victim puts it: “It's a difficult story, with Trabant music. In this movie, we can watch a bit sex, we can watch difficult circumstances of life and we can listen new wave musics ... It's a great film!” You can’t argue with that.

An EP of Trabant songs from the film was I believe the only recording the group officially released. There, however, are scattered around tapes and video footage of rehearsals which are fantastic. From Trabant (and what a great name for an Eastern European group that is) it was a short hop to Balaton who it seemed covered similar ground, which makes sense as Anna Szemere mentions a shared history and overlap of members between Balaton and Trabant. I’m not sure Balaton ever made a record but there are some intriguing live recordings if you search around.

One other name I recognised from Anna’s article was Beatrice. In the context of the book Beatrice were Hungary’s leading punk rock outfit. In her paper Anna refers to a January 1981 NME feature by Chris Bohn on the Hungarian new wave, and in this he describes Beatrice as “a strange sight, a raggedy four-piece all pushing 30; curly, rattish hair falling to their shoulders, balding heads and gringo moustaches seem defiantly at odds with their status as most popular punk band in Hungary.” That’s not the strangest thing about Beatrice, though. I got very confused as the Beatrice I was familiar with from fishing around on YouTube played wonderful funky sounds like Gyere Kislany, Gyere, one of the songs that popularised disco music in Hungary.

With so much nonsense having been written about the funk/punk and disco-not-disco overlaps it’s amusing that Beatrice made the transition from disco pioneers to punk caricature. That messes up the story lines doesn’t it? But the Beatrice story is wonderfully strange, full stop. The group started back in the ‘60s as an all female outfit, led by Monika Czuka. In 1976 her husband Feró Nagy joined the group, and Beatrice gradually evolved into a funky outfit before disbanding, allowing Feró to start a new punk/heavy rock line-up. Ironically in Anna’s paper on the Hungarian new wave she refers to tensions and occasional violence between ‘hard rockers’ and ‘disco kids’, disparate tribes of working-class youths.

With the rise in popularity of disco music and the opening of more discos in Hungary in the latter years of the ‘70s the country’s singers and players naturally rode the wave. The glorious Judith Szucs (who I believe played keyboards with Beatrice at some stage) seems to have been the queen of the Magyar disco scene, and judging by the vintage clips posted on YouTube her charms would have been hard to resist. Is it wrong to be childishly delighted that Judith’s finest moment seems to have been the 1979 hit Urdiszko? It just seems so perfect after the number of times we have endured writers wittering on about so-and-so being ur-punk or proto-punk. Well, here’s Ur-diszko in all its infectious Biddu-bounce-along glory with quite possibly the finest opening 15-seconds ever in pop music.

Another phenomenally successful Hungarian disco ensemble was Neoton Familia. The group’s roots reached back to the ‘60s when the group Neoton was formed, taking their name from a brand of Czechoslovakian guitars (one for the Orange Juice fans there), and they seem to have created some fantastic psych-pop along the way. In the 1970s they merged with the female singing trio Kócbabák, and became Neoton Familia creating some outward-looking, gloriously inventive and very commercial disco pop which intriguingly proved to be very popular in the Far East.

It’s interesting that in Anna’s paper on the Hungarian new wave there’s nary a mention of the ‘60s generation that features on Well Hung, the wonderful Finders Keepers compilation of funky Hungarian rock. I guess that by that stage the established acts were viewed with the same disdain and despair that their counterparts were in the UK, say. One of the groups featured on that collection was Omega, and their keyboards player Laszlo Benko interestingly went on to make a wonderful record in 1982, the first part of his Lexicon (an A-Z of songs), which is pure electronic rock or what would now be called space disco. In the making of this record it is carefully noted that in the making of this record Laszlo used Roland drum-computer Roland Sh-1000; Roland Jupiter 4; Korg Polisix; Korg Mono / Poly; Yamaha CS 70M; Minimoog; ARP omni. The civilising effects of synthesizers and disco sounds ...

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 2

2011-06-16T01:32:00.002+01:00

The old Soviet Union had its appeal for pop and disco exoticists: from Telex and Moskow Diskow to Nina Hagen’s Russian Reggae to Manicured Noise and Moscow 1980 to The Lonely Spy by Lori & The Chameleons. But it wasn’t all one way traffic. The Soviet Union absorbed western disco music in its broadest sense and returned it with love and interest. For example, there are, quite rightly, those that swear by the recordings of the Latvian group Zodiac. Anyone hearing their early ’80 records now, for the first time, may understandably suspect an elaborate hoax. Their electronic rock fits almost too perfectly into the ‘space disco’ category, evoking what are already distant memories of Studio’s West Coast, Lindstrom, Prins Thomas and all those great tracks that helped spark a major resurgence of interest in disco sounds with a cosmic twist.

Zodiac’s first LP from 1980 was wonderfully titled Disco Alliance, though anyone anticipating a full-on dancefloor extravaganza may feel misled. Listening to this wonderful record it’s no surprise to learn that Magic Fly by Space was a massive success in the Soviet Union. It’s no surprise either to learn that there is a thriving market in vintage Soviet synths, but that’s another matter, especially as you sense Janis Lusens and Zodiac were outward looking and more interested in their ARPs and Yamaha keyboards. Zodiac’s second LP, Music in the Universe from 1982, was apparently very much inspired by stories the group heard from cosmonauts and this is certainly reflected in titles like The Mysterious Galaxy and The Other Side of Heaven. Both these LPs have been made available on CD in recent years, and YouTube has some fantastic footage of the group performing, in an early incarnation and somewhat later with appropriately a spinning disco ball in the background of the Russian TV set. Brilliantly one of the early Zodiac songs was called Provincial Disco which reminds me of ‘disco scholar’ Peter Shapiro describing 5000 Volts’ I’m On Fire as “somehow reminiscent of Cossacks dancing at a provincial disco in Staffordshire”. Withering put-down or irresistible selling-point?

The fourth Zodiac LP at the end of the ‘80s was a celebration of their Latvian roots, while at the start of the decade another Latvian pop outfit Eolika had celebrated their home on the fantastic LP Dreams of Riga. Piecing together Eolika’s story is a tricky business, but this record has some wonderful disco infused pop on, which will particularly appeal to lovers of the Silver Convention swish/kick sound, and that exquisite mix of the symphonic and the minimalist. Another track from the LP, Falling Stars or Zvezdopad, has groove collectors from around the world quite rightly drooling.

Another Latvian collective, Modo also captured the disco thing pretty perfectly, albeit approached from more of a jazz/funk direction. Zigmars Liepins, one of the group’s members, has made available some of the fantastic music Modo recorded via his website, and there’s a lot of fun to be had exploring the tracks posted from the Modo EPs, like the gorgeous Spele Vel from 1980. The tracks from Modo singer Mirdza Zivere’s 1979 solo LP are particularly recommended, especially the gorgeous Zozefino. The tracks from Zigmars’ own 1985 LP, Pulse 2, are also well worth investigating to get a taste of the Soviet take on electro (with a jazz rock/fusion imaginary soundtrack slant). That particular LP, part of a series on sport and music, also has one of the best covers ever.

Look up Eolika or Modo and the chances are you will come across a reference to Raimonds Pauls, the Latvian maestro and pioneering pop composer in the wider Soviet Union. His soundtrack work, such as for the score of a Soviet adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, is rated highly by crate-diggers and beat-seekers around the world that know a lot more than me about such things. And among the great Soviet artists his name is associated with is Alla Pugacheva, a singer who for once seems to suit the term diva and who has played a fantastically important role in Soviet pop history. She seems like one of those great contradictions whom the State sanctioned but grew increasingly wary of. Ironically in the West many of us will only have come across her name when 50 Cent’s people sampled her superb song Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and for that unlikely introduction I am enormously grateful to the rapper as it inadvertently led to a lot of pleasure rummaging around on YouTube among the old clips of Alla. And if the propulsive groove on those Soviet recordings sounds as tight and as metronomic as the finest Philly players then that’s because those guys could really perform with precision and flair. And I realise we are only aware of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Soviet and Eastern European funk and disco sounds.

Another great Soviet composer associated with Alla Pugacheva is Alexander Zatsepin. Among the songs they recorded together in, I believe, the mid-to-late ‘70s is the phenomenally titled The Shaman’s Tambourine and some great numbers from films like The Woman Who Sings. It is worth scouring around for whatever fragments you can find of Zatsepin’s soundtrack work (and he was by all accounts an electronics enthusiast so there's lots of wonderfully odd effects!), and particularly recommended is the astonishing 31^st June, a late ‘70s film about what happens when you mix futures and pasts, based on a J.B. Priestley story, featuring dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet and a wonderful and bizarre disco-infused soundtrack sung by among others the delightfully named Tatyana Antisiferova ...

The Disco Ball's a Globe - pt. 1

2011-06-13T01:52:00.003+01:00

Nothing is ever straight forward is it? I sometimes wish it was. Life would be simpler ... but a lot less fun. Let me give you an example of how nothing is ever straight forward. Recently I was engrossed in compiling a sequence of vintage Afghan pop for the Anywhere Else But Here Today project when I was distracted by one clip that featured a troupe of young girls performing a pop/traditional dance to an astonishing number that almost defied description. It was quite simply the best thing I’d found since stumbling on the video of girls from an Algerian high school dancing to the pioneering rai pop track Ya Salah by Noureddine Staifi. And there were very definite similarities, in terms of time, the mutant disco sound, clash between ancient and modern, the mixture of innocence and knowingness, the pure intoxicating glory of being alive.

The video itself had very little information, except being titled Gulshan Ey Sanam and being labelled simply “Tajik ‘80s video”. Putting together what information I could I began to understand that this was a performance in Kabul by musicians and dancers from Tajikistan, presumably in the early ‘80s. What amazed me though was learning the song itself was a cover or reinterpretation of a 1978 disco classic, Sandstorm by La Bionda. I wish I was clever enough to have spotted that straight off. That wonderful piece of information in itself raises more questions. After all, as far as I know, La Bionda didn’t have any hits in the UK. So somehow a mock-middle eastern flavoured track recorded at the height of the Munich disco explosion, produced by two Italian bothers (who also worked as D.D. Sound), written by Charly Ricanek from Czechoslovakia (who also worked with the great Amanda Lear), engineered by Harry Thumann of Underwater fame (who later returned to the middle east theme on Sphinx), made it to Tajikistan in the Soviet era and was seized upon and reinvented as something to share culturally.

But who had made the astonishing music featured on the video? Were the girls dancing to a recording? Were the musicians shown the ones that played on this? And who were Gulshan? You see! These things can keep you awake at night. Ah the thrill of the chase. Well, from what I can gather Gulshan was an ensemble put together by Karomatullo Qurbonov, a legendary figure in Tajik pop history who, with members of his group, was murdered in 1992 by militia during the civil war that followed the break-up of the old Soviet Union. There is footage on YouTube of Karomatullo talking about Gulshan, but my linguisitic skills fail me dismally so I can’t really add any more. There, however, are some great clips of Karomatullo performing, and the dancers from the Ey Sanam clip seem to feature. There are also a number of other clips of Gulshan (or Golssan as it seems to be translated on occasions) performing at various events with a variety of singers.

Hearing Ey Sanam I thought immediately of PiL’s Flowers of Romance. I almost feel ashamed saying that, clutching at convenient references, but there was something about the hypnotic swirl of sound, the thud of the drums, the mystery, the menace. Then I thought perhaps Death Disco with that guitar sound. And curiously when I sent the Gulshan link to the YHO artistic guru PC (of Music From The Third Floor) fame it was the shuddering bass he picked up on, suggesting it was as if Jah Wobble had spent the ‘80s in Eastern Europe. And there’s something in that. Eastern and disco influences certainly permeated Wobble’s works during that time: if you think of, say, the decadent disco mix of Invaders of the Heart and so on. The great man has also referred to getting inspiration from the mix of sounds from around the world he’d hear on his shortwave radio, like Egyptian singer Om Kalsoum. It’s tempting to play with the idea of Wobble hearing Ey Sanam through the crackle back home in his East London flat.

The sound on Ey Sanam is so fantastic that it makes you wonder what else Gulshan came up with? I have heard one other song on a Soviet disco mix. But were there records? Are they available anywhere? And was the Gulshan version the only reworking of Sandstorm around at that time in Tajikistan? I’ve heard an instrumental uptempo disco version which I think is by Na-Na, but I’m unsure of the vintage of that one. The song itself, Ey Sanam, seems to have a life of its own. Search around and you’ll find contemporary 'house' remixes and cover versions from around the world. But there is something enchanting about the grainy salvaged from VHS quality of the Kabul clip that captures perfectly a pop moment.

The Disco Ball's a Globe - intro

2011-06-10T02:13:00.001+01:00

Searching for clues in the library of a drama college, I recently stumbled upon an unloved book from 1989 on “world music, politics and social change”, edited by Simon Frith, featuring papers from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and published by the Manchester University Press. Flicking through it out of curiosity I was struck by its totally topical opening sentence: “We live, we are often told, in a museum culture, clinging on to the artefacts of the past because we cannot invent appropriate ones ourselves.”

The general editors’ preface continued, pretty much capturing what I feel at the moment: “Yet even if this is true, it is also true that more people than ever before are interested in and enjoy some form of music: people who attend concerts of some or other kind and people who play music themselves, as well as the countless millions who buy records and tapes (themselves the products of a major industry) or simply experience the pervasive effects of music on radio and television and in films. Though heterogeneous, this public is enormous, including both those who are professionally involved in the production of masterworks and those who just ‘know what they like’ when they chance to hear it. For despite another of the claims often made about contemporary societies – that their rationalistic and utilitarian values have all but erased the spiritual, the emotional, in a word the distinctively human qualities of life – it is evident that the clamour for music not only survives but indeed is intensified, in such societies. In short, music matters ...”

While much of the book reeks of academia there is a prevailing sense of genuinely wanting to learn and share information about popular music and culture from around the world. I can understand that. It’s what I thrive on. It’s the opposite of nostalgia. And it’s what motivates me. There is no escaping the fact that I am ridiculously excited about discovering new information and new areas of music I know next-to-nothing about. But with the thrill of discovery there comes an ever-increasing sense that ‘the more you learn, the more there is to learn’. That’s why the thrill of the chase will never end.

Let me give an example: by chance on YouTube I chanced upon a whole cache of wonderful clips of Afghan pop music, predominantly I presume from the late ‘70s or very early ‘80s. There is an incredible number of these great videos, salvaged from the archives of RTA, the Afghan radio and TV station, posted by various people, featuring some incredible music and charming performances. But I would have to put my hands up and admit to knowing pretty much nothing at all about Afghan pop music, and to be honest I know very little more now.

You can see some of these clips for yourself over at the Anywhere Else But Here Today project. They are, I think, fantastic. The music is brilliant, the singers mesmerising. It’s tempting to draw comparisons with the Persian clips posted previously as part of that project. There are certainly similarities in the way traditional elements are fused with a more worldly pop approach. It’s tempting too to wonder what might have transpired in both Iran and Afghanistan if history hadn’t taken such ridiculous turnings. Certainly the sophisticated stylings captured in these videos could have had a similar impact on the pop music world as a whole in the way, say, Algerian rai music did in the 1980s.

I am assuming that many of the Afghan pop singers and players went into exile or gave up performing when such a horrible sequence of events followed the Soviet invasion. I have frequently fallen into despair while working on the Anywhere Else But Here Today project, angry at the way the world has turned out. Progress is not really what’s been achieved is it? One of the persistent themes in the book on world music, politics and social change is how pop music remains a democratising or civilising force. Well, compared to religion or nationalism that’s certainly true. It’s also a unifying force. And if you want a symbol of that you could choose an early portable Roland synth or electronic keyboard or an equivalent brand which was utilised by musicians pretty much everywhere by the start of the 1980s. Look at or listen to the clips on the Anywhere Else But Here Today site, from Iran to Afghanistan, from the Eritrean freedom fighters to the Algerian rai producers, from Ethiopia to Pakistan to the USSR, the keyboard’s there and it’s been part of some pretty incredible music.

There’s another great passage in that book, in a paper by Alenka Barber-Kersovan on “tradition and acculturation as polarities of Slovenian popular music” where in the context of The Beatles being replaced by Saturday Night Fever or disco as the prime shaping force she writes: “Since it is continually present in the media, pop has lost its exclusive character. It is not the Leitmotiv of a generation any more, but simply ‘pop music’, suitable for any situation and a medicine for every single disease. Pop music no longer has only one central value; it is multifunctional. It can be background noise, a possibility for enjoyment, a fashionable attitude, a means to self-realisation, identification and communication as well as a way to express discomfort when everyday life puts too much pressure on”.

Pressure? Pleasure? When you consider the damage done to the world in the name of religion and nationalism then the idea of disco music, itself an amorphous concept, taking hold without regard for frontiers seems incredibly appealing. And there are times when it would seem tempting to listen solely to vintage disco sounds and be set adrift on disco bliss (to borrow a title from the excellent Maria Minerva). Disco’s preoccupation with cosmic concerns is well documented, but its participants also had a healthy interest in globetrotting. So to celebrate the worldwide disco impulse we will, in the words, of Mexican model turned New York diva Martina “disco around the world” with a series of irregular stops for refuelling along the way. Come on let’s go ...

Hiss & Shake - Legg's Eleven (collated)

2011-06-07T01:16:00.001+01:00

Hiss & Shake – Legg’s Eleven is the latest edition of Your Heart Out, and it can be downloaded as a PDF for free here. It draws together a series of articles celebrating the studio work of Phil Legg, providing the perfect opportunity to share sounds and stories, from Essential Logic and The Gist to Baby Ford and Rodney P, via Ut and Terence Trent D’Arby, Cold Storage and No U-Turn, and much, much more. In other words if you believe pop music should defy compartmentalisation, then this is for you.

Enjoy the fully interactive digital version, or print a copy off and take it down to your local park or favourite cafe. And please spread the word and share your thoughts.

Hiss & Shake - Legg's Eleven pt. 11

2011-06-04T00:53:00.003+01:00

Follow in the footsteps of Phil Legg and at some stage you’ll end up at Rhythm King. Any label that released Hey DJ/ I Can’t Dance (To That Music You’re Playing) by the Beatmasters and Betty Boo would have a special place in pop culture. But Rhythm King got off to a flying start with a selection of smartly chosen tracks they licensed (Taffy, Viola Wills, Denise Motto) and some pioneering UK productions like Renegade Soundwave’s Kray Twins, Pablo Gad’s Who Are The Terrorists?, argumentative hip hop from Three Wise Men, and the early North East house work of Hotline.

Then came Rhythm King’s pop assemblage explosion, riding the wave of hip hop and acid house, which resulted in a string of hits for the Beatmasters, Bomb The Bass, S’Express and Baby Ford. Rule books were gleefully ripped up, as all involved used new technology, DIY techniques and punk irreverence to transform the pop scene. The Rhythm King brand of rave pop thrived on creating havoc, and its acts were responsible for a number of exuberantly anarchic and memorably madcap performances on Top of the Pops. More to the point though, its chart successes still seem like a blast of fresh air, even stripped of their context.

Rhythm King started out as a subsidiary of Daniel Miller’s Mute label. He tells a brilliant story about the chance meeting that led to the setting up of Rhythm King: “There were two English guys I knew. I remember seeing one of them walking down the street one day with a bunch of 12-inches. ‘Where are you going with all of those records?’ ‘Oh, I've got a label and we're trying to do a deal. This house music thing is just about to explode.’ ‘House music? What's that?’ He explained what it was, came back to the office and played me some records, and I said that it sounded quite interesting. I didn't quite get it. It sounded like disco to me...but it sounded quite good. But it seemed like he had a passion for it, and he really knew it, so I had him start the label that became Rhythm King.”

The fact that Daniel had Rhythm King on one hand, and Blast First (home of Sonic Youth, Ut, Big Stick, Big Black, etc.) on the other as offshoots of Mute seems perfect looking back. After all Mute initially had an uneasy if brilliant balance between pop and noise: the Silicon Teens and Fad Gadget up alongside D.A.F. and Non. And the subversive ultra-pop approach of Betty Boo is a perfect complement for what Die Doraus und die Marinas were doing ten years earlier.

The story of Mute is a fascinating one, full stop. The turning point was succeeding in signing Depeche Mode, or maybe more pertinently Depeche Mode opting to sign and stay with Mute. The story of what happened to Depeche Mode is stranger still. The descent into darkness is one thing, but the resilience of the recalcitrant and retiring Vince Clarke is more remarkable. From the pop confectionary of Just Can’t Get Enough to the sheer oddness of Yazoo’s success to the brief liaison with Paul Quinn to the enduring Erasure, Vince is unvanquished. A lot has been made of the Pet Shop Boys artful perversity, but the stubbornness of Vince in the pop marketplace is extraordinary. And even the harshest critic of Clarke’s work will grudgingly concede his success has helped fund what might ungraciously and probably inaccurately be considered more substantial fare.

After that early burst of chart activity the Rhythm King stars didn’t take the easy options. Bomb The Bass, for example, literally headed for Unknown Territory on the 1991 LP of the same name. It featured two themes that would be commodified and become much more dominant as the decade progressed: trip hop and big beat. Among the people who worked with Tim Simenon on this great record were J. Saul Kane (Depth Charge) and Doug Wimbish of the Sugarhill Gang/On- U Sound peerless legacy. John Coxon was on there, too, around the time he was working on the Betty Boo phenomenon and before Springhill Jack got off the ground. Simenon also covered ESG’s Moody, suggesting he was several steps ahead in looking back in the post-punk funk direction.

And then there was Baby Ford, the precocious raver who crashed the charts and was almost too smart for his own good. Not only could he recreate the Chicago sound with an English twist but he just happened to come up with some irresistible bubblegum smashes which he’d occasionally sing on in a curiously appealing Prince meets Green voice. This approach pretty much reached its peak on Beach Bump (there’s a Phil Legg connection, for the record) and then things started to get stranger as Baby Ford gradually started to erase himself from the pop sphere.

BFord9, Baby Ford’s 1992 LP on Transglobal, a Rhythm King offshoot, was a brilliant and defiantly uncompromising techno set, which pretty much defined the direction his work would take. When he sang on this record it sounded strangely like Shaun Ryder fronting the early Cabaret Voltaire, or what Davy Henderson would sound like when he re-emerged with the Nectarine No. 9. Indeed Sashay Around The Fuzzbox sounds suspiciously like an NN9 title. Ford would revisit three of the BFord9 tracks on Normal Re, an EP for Rephlex in 1998, including the mesmerising Normal (Changed Version) which just may be the best thing he’s done. There’s a Phil Legg connection there too.

Among the things Baby Ford did after leaving Rhythm King and the pop contest behind was record as Twig Bud for the Mo’ Wax Excursions series. Other participants in the series were Steve Picton (aka the fantastic Stasis), Mark Broom and Dave Hill (together as Midnight Funk Association). This trio were very much kindred spirits of Peter ‘Baby’ Ford, and in various permutations they would continue to be part of the UK’s techno underground. Baby Ford, for example, has doggedly kept on with his music, releasing his take on minimalist techno on the occasional record for a loyal following.

It is fascinating how as each musical moment passes determined souls dig in and continue to plough their own particular furrow, do their own peculiar or particular thing regardless of what else is going on. They stick around. It is easy to lose track, though. It is impossible to keep up with everything. It can be all-consuming chasing after new information, foraging around in forgotten corners, following up clues from unknown territories. So, if you immerse yourself in something, inevitably other things pass by unnoticed. But it can be fun playing catch-up ...

Hiss & Shake - Legg's Eleven pt. 10

2011-06-01T03:05:00.002+01:00

The Stylistics, Manhattans, Moments, Tavares, Trammps, Tymes, O’Jays, Chi-Lites, Floaters: names that instantly conjure up a wonderful ‘70s soul soundtrack and images of black American male vocal groups with immaculate afros, intricate harmonies, ornate matching suits, and perfectly choreographed dance moves. It’s a pop phenomenon that formed such an essential part of that era, and is still regarded with enormous affection by people of all ages and from all sorts of backgrounds. Yet the UK never really succeeded in exploiting this market with homegrown produce. Manchester’s Sweet Sensation are the only act that springs immediately to mind as an exception, with the right sound, moves and look. Were there others? The Real Thing and Imagination really were far too esoteric to fit the bill.

Sweet Sensation first tasted success after appearing on the TV talent show New Faces (which also gave us Lenny Henry and Showaddywaddy), and were then taken under the wing of one of the programme’s judges Tony Hatch. The young group had a couple of classic hit singles, Sad Sweet Dreamer and Purely By Coincidence, in the mid-‘70s but soon faded from view. Singer Marcel King briefly re-emerged with a wonderful defiant anthem of optimism on Factory Records, produced by Bernard Sumner and Donald Johnson. Marcel topped the bill at the Hacienda on the occasion Madonna appeared there for a performance filmed for the The Tube, but the single was a one-off on Factory and sadly not part of an on-going celebration of the city’s soul underground. Thus acts like Chapter And The Verse and A Guy Called Gerald emerged on the Merseyside label Rham! but that’s another story.

The Pasadenas, when they exploded onto the UK pop scene in the late ‘80s, were blatantly ‘knowing’, consciously referencing the vocal soul group tradition in their sound and image. But early hits like the still glorious Riding On A Train were very much of their time, with its irresistible Italo piano house motif and infectious chorus, and it was only one or two steps removed from the likes of Ten City and Inner City. The Pasadenas’ meticulously choreographed moves, however, were a world away from Howard Melvin & the Bluenotes. The acrobatics and abundant energy were in part close to the jazz dance virtuoso displays of club outfits like Manchester’s Jazz Defektors and London’s IDJ, and in part what would become the boy band entertainment staple: The Jackson 5 led to the Osmonds, as New Kids On The Block followed New Edition in the States, so Take That followed The Pasadenas, you could argue. To Whom It May Concern, the first LP by The Pasadenas, stands the test of time pretty well. It was partly produced by Phil Legg, presumably hot on the heels of the success of Terence Trent D’Arby’s debut. The main producer, however, was Pete Wingfield, and it’s easy to see how the opportunity to work with a young London vocal soul group would appeal to someone who as a teenager in the ‘60s produced a soul music fanzine.

Somewhere around the same time that Pete Wingfield worked with The Pasadenas he would have been producing an LP for The Blue Ox Babes which would not be properly released until 20-odd years later when Cherry Red included the tracks on an excellent round-up of the group’s recordings. The Blue Ox Babes were the group put together by Kevin Archer, one-time core member of the Dexys Midnight Runners team. A lot has been said and written about the relationship between the two Kevins, Archer and Rowland. The excellent Young Guns TV documentary on Dexys, for example, focused on what happened. Well, we have all made mistakes and hurt people. But what does need restating is what an incredible combination Rowland and Archer were, their approach, their creations, everything. Together they were phenomenal, and apart they were still special. Kevin Archer’s Blue Ox Babes were a great group, criminally ignored at the time. Live they were wonderfully entertaining, with Yasmin Saleh a whirl of energy and the perfect foil to Kevin. On record, Kevin’s gift for song writing shone through, with some of the most addictive bubblegum soul not composed by Greenaway & Cook.

It was both natural and touching that Kevin Archer should turn to Pete Wingfield to capture what he was trying to express. Pete had played such an integral part in the creation of Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, what is still the greatest debut LP of all time, that the trust everyone involved with that record had in him endured. So, for example, when after the astonishing Keep It (Part Two) the two Kevins and Big Jimmy were left alone, the breakaway faction formed The Bureau and chose Pete Wingfield as producer for an LP which still managed to match much of the power and pugnacity of Dexys. The Bureau’s signature tune Only For Sheep still has a remarkable intensity, and Archie Brown’s vocals make it a wonderful match for Clock DVA’s Four Hours. Pete Wingfield would much later play keyboards on the opening two tracks of Kevin Rowland’s cathartic My Beauty, including the incredible cover of Rag Doll.

Pete Wingfield was the perfect choice as Dexys’ producer. The name was best known from his one-off solo hit 18 With A Bullet, and perhaps from his involvement with the Olympic Runners who had a couple of minor disco hits in the late ‘70s. That group, however, has a history stretching back to 1973 when it formed almost accidentally when a group of session musicians began jamming for fun. Vocalion has paired up the first couple of Olympic Runners LPs on a CD reissue, and they are a revelation in terms of clipped funk workouts, with repetitive riffs, minimal embellishments, very tight grooves and occasional reggae leanings. Pete Wingfield’s accompanying essay is equally revealing, as he admits part of the inspiration for the name came from a Soul Runners single by an early incarnation of Charles Wright’s Watts 103^rd St. Rhythm Band (note the Runners connection!), and how they came to record at Mike Vernon’s Chipping Norton studio with Barry Hammond as engineer.

Initially the Olympic Runners deliberately remained anonymous. The anonymity, combined with the shall we say striking covers, was because as Wingfield put it: “We were aiming at black US consumers, who, in the early ‘70s at least, were notoriously suspicious of anything remotely alien; conversely, British soul fans tended to apply reverse snobbery and dismiss any domestic effort as a pale imitation of the real thing.” It’s a familiar theme now. Dennis Bovell employed similar subterfuge with his early releases. And that British snobbery about black music has affected many artists and meant that truly great works by, for example, British jazz, soul, reggae, and hip hop acts remain woefully undervalued.

The Pasadenas’ biographical notes reveal that one of their sisters, Susie Banfield, was in the Cookie Crew, the pioneering British rap outfit who faced persistent struggles in being taken seriously by the UK’s hip hop audience and trying to fend off record business pressures to make them more pop . Thankfully along the way they got to record most of their debut LP, Born This Way!, with Daddy-O and DBC from the Stetsasonic team, and it retains a ragged charm that is enormously appealing. Nevertheless the Cookie Crew are best remembered (with genuine affection, though no doubt to the Cookies’ chagrin) for the part they played in the creation of hip house on the Beatmasters’ Rok Da House, which pioneered a tradition that occasionally still tears the chart apart, with the likes of Rolex and Bonkers etc.

Hiss & Shake - Legg's Eleven pt. 9

2011-05-29T01:00:00.002+01:00

“I find it interesting that some of the things I’ve been learning seem to be similar to the way I was playing in the Raincoats. Not knowing the standard chord progressions, and many of the rock tricks on the guitar, and not learning through, say, folk guitar, I had to invent ways of playing it. And I found that those connected up with some of the rhythm playing in the African style (actually the Zairois style soukous) – obvious things like using just three strings instead of all six, playing the top part of a chord on the bottom part of the string, picking out little figures and playing them repeatedly, and playing a fairly assymetrical pattern that starts and stops, and starts again, without taking any notice of the bar lines ... which is what we did in the Raincoats anyway.” - Quote attributed to Vicky Aspinall, in Signed, Sealed and Delivered (Sue Steward and Sheryl Garrett)

"A few words on Ut? I don’t rightly know. Seeing bands should be about enjoying yourself. I remember when I used to go out and see bands like the Young Marble Giants and the Raincoats and just stand there with a big, idiotic grin on my face. Ut are like that. I put the grin into my feet and dance the night away. Enjoyment, first and foremost. The fact that they, to me, are pushing through at the boundaries of ‘normality’ and just sound so good is ... well, terrific. Like falling in love every time you see them, only there’s no risk of getting hurt (I don’t know, though – just look what happened to the Raincoats). Inspirational, yeah inspirational. If they hit upon a tuning they like (by chance?) they stick to it, instead of following other people’s standards. And why not, if it sounds good? Refusal to be hurried by any demands from the audience is refreshing, also – only the highest self-determined standards here. No manipulation either, you can take ‘em or leave ‘em (and that would just be your loss). The spirit of independence.” - Jerry T. Communication Blur No. 2 1983

“I was really into Television’s first single Little Johnny Jewel —and that sound inspired Ut. I'd take records out from the library where I discovered this Daglar wedding song which was in fact the saddest song I'd ever heard. I taped [the song] and carried it around in early days of London exile but I misplaced it long ago.” Jacqui Ham, Warped Reality

“I was fortunate enough to see them them live on a handful of occasions in the mid-80s & it's fair to say that they made absolutely no concessions on stage - swapping instruments, teetering on the brink of a liberating chaos, dissecting & spitting out their ferocious, primal guitar-scraping abstractions to disconcerted, slack jawed crowds who'd much rather have been watching The Flatmates. Though they'd appear at the outset to be freely, & somewhat awkwardly, improvising, the realisation would gradually dawn that, actually, the songs they were playing had been meticulously arranged to sound that way: fractured, forensic, remote & slightly cantankerous.” – I Love Total Destruction

“Steve Rickard, a friend of Art Bears drummer and Recommended Records founder Chris Cutler, ended up as the engineer/manager of the new, commercial Cold Storage, with Phil Legg in charge of recording the more pop-oriented groups.” - Mike Barnes, Once Upon a Time in Brixton, The Wire, August 2005.

UT – Confidential/Bedouin/Tell It. Label:Out Records. Catalog: OUT R 02. Format: Vinyl, 12".

Bass – Nina Canal (tracks: B1), Sally Young (tracks: B1)
Drums – Nina Canal (tracks: A, B1), Sally Young (tracks: B2)
Engineer – Phil Legg
Guitar – Jacqui Ham (tracks: A, B1, B2), Sally Young (tracks: A)
Horn – Tim Hodgkinson (tracks: B2)
Mixed By – Scott Piering
Producer – Ut
Recorded By – Tim Hodgkinson
Vocals – Jacqui Ham (tracks: B1), Nina Canal (tracks: B2), Sally Young (tracks: A)
Recorded at Cold Storage, July 1984

“For me, Ut represent one of the most intense musical experiences in the known universe. Are you ready to have your head trip with infinite velocity, sheer and primal ferocity? Run and get a copy of Ut’s debut LP Conviction (Out Records), and check out Confidential; this is no joke, Ut will make you work through a tortuous weaving of purely physical vocal/guitar wars.” - Elizabeth Johnson, Debris issue 14

“With ruthless insistence they attack the senses and subvert the concept of music with their hideous agitation of our nomadic fears and dissonance. With discord comes the unearthly howl of warning, of unease, curtailing its power through its own abstraction. Without edges or form and wrought with tension this is a musical sculpture of sorts, or is it just pretence?” – review of Ut, Early Live Life by Alex Kadis, Underground June 1987

“I defy you: find me one conventional guitar solo in all of Ut's works, from the early scratchy noise on 'Early Live Life' through to the awesome 'Griller', and I'll go buy every single Rush LP. That is what's always struck me; the Ut sound works as rhythms and patterns, sequences of sound, weaving like the best techno. No matter how dissonant and vengeful the guitars got, there is still the opportunity to trace shapes and sense. "Repetition in our music, and we're never gonna lose it", as The Fall were wont to say.” - Kevin Pearce, Tangents, 1996

“They weren’t interested in having a single focal point, a Star in the spotlight, center stage. Their goals were slyer, and deeply radical: to find the beauty in chaos, the calm at the center of the storm. To wrest the purest expression out of potential anarchy. Their name may have been deceptively simple and declarative, but the music was hardly easily reduced. But then, with Ut the journey was more important than the destination. You never knew where a song might veer next —they weren’t built linearly but ran scattershot, pell-mell.” - Andrea Feldman, Warped Reality

“Everett True interviews Ut:
Motivation: “Compulsion.”
Inspiration: “Contempt.”
Confrontation: “Revelation.”
Realisation: “The goalie’s anxiety at the penalty kick.” - Everett True, Plan B #13

“I always think of Ut as the last soldiers of the No Wave. They stayed true ‘til the end.” – Glen Morrow quoted in No Wave – Thurston Moore/Byron Coley

Hiss & Shake - Legg's Eleven pt. 8

2011-05-26T01:04:00.003+01:00

History works in mysterious ways, and if you refer now to a Dorothy single the chances are the clued-up pop aesthete is going to think you’re referring to a wonderful old Industrial pop curiosity. Once upon a time, however, if you were talking about a Dorothy record it would have been related to a late ‘80s project by Gina Birch and Vicky Aspinall, once of The Raincoats, which seems to have vanished almost completely off the pop radar despite considerable interest in Raincoats related activity.

I recall seeing a couple of Dorothy singles around in a local record shop, unwanted, for ages, with the covers of Gina and Vicky, all glammed up, looking very striking. The singles themselves were not really what I wanted from pop music at the time. This was 1988-ish, and I probably would have been too busy putting together tapes of old Raincoats, Kleenex, Blue Orchids and old soul singles to play at gigs, rummaging in charity shops for abandoned 45s, with the pirate radio stations on at home to provide background noise.

Gina and Vicky in Dorothy (and I somehow always assumed the name was related to Dorothy Parker) were exploring ideas about gloss and sophistication, in a wonderfully ambiguous way. You got the impression they were having a lot of fun, and thoroughly enjoying messing with the minds of people who missed the unique glamour in The Raincoats’ approach. The sound of Dorothy on singles like Loving Feeling was swish pop, recorded with Phil Legg in Robin Millar’s Powerplant studios, in a climate where Madonna and Prince were all-conquering, though the delivery was laced with Ze/Cristina style satire, as shown in the video featuring the pair vogueing and vamping it up which is now available through Gina’s website.

While Taja Sevelle was (and is!) infinitely more appealing than the House of Love and Pixies, I nevertheless didn’t take too much interest in the Paisley Parkish Dorothy singles. Illogically I took against them because of their record label, Blue Guitar, which I hated vehemently. Blue Guitar was one of those major label sponsored ‘faux independent’ labels which were springing up at the time. And Blue Guitar was a Geoff Travis affair set up through Chrysalis. That wasn’t a problem in itself. Far from it. Indeed, at the other end of the decade Chrysalis had a similar thing going with Pre, which had a roster featuring Scars, Manicured Noise, Delta 5, Prince Far I, Gregory Isaacs, and even Little Nell singing about wanting to be a Beauty Queen.

The trouble was Blue Guitar had a roster that relied on the Shop Assistants and Mighty Lemon Drops, two popular but incredibly dreary outfits that filtered out strangeness and benefitted from a trend for lumping all guitar-based pop together in a grimly non-discriminatory way. The Shoppies and Droppies were associated with the one-size fits all approach to promoting the non-discerning Cerne Canning advocated at London’s Bay 63. I hated all that, too. It was no coincidence that Canning re-emerged as the manager of Franz Ferdinand, another outfit that while spectacularly dull shamelessly flirted with intriguing reference points which bore no relation to the FF sound or approach.

Not that I realised at the time, but there was a third Dorothy single that appeared on (another Chrysalis subsidiary) Cooltempo in 1989, and this was a cover of the Supremes’ Reflections. It’s the Dorothy single you are most likely to find mentioned anywhere as it included an excellent Smith & Mighty mix, an early illustration of their Bristol sound, along with Fresh Four’s Wishing On A Star, their own cover of Anyone Who Had A Heart, the first Massive Attack single, and the phenomenal and criminally ignored LP they did with Carlton for London Records who really didn’t get what Smith & Mighty were doing.

Ironically around the time Dorothy were label mates with Adeva on Cooltempo there was increasing interest in their old group The Raincoats as new American rock acts mentioned them, and so began the strange sequence of events that brought Gina back together with Ana da Silva to play again as The Raincoats supporting Nirvana, and recording for a new incarnation of Rough Trade records. Vicky Aspinall chose not to get involved in the reactivated Raincoats, and the sleeve notes she contributed to the reissue of Moving were wise: “It’s hard to find much in common with today’s Riot Grrl – the music sounds so fragile, so unrelated to a conventional approach to song, both in form and content, that it’s hard to see where the line, if there is one, continues into the present day. But in spirit there’s a continuation, perhaps in a desire to do things your own way and not be moulded by others’ expectations.”

There were very practical reasons why Vicky didn’t get involved in The Raincoats’ return. She was at the time very busy with Fresh, the label she ran with (a) Dave Morgan which specialised in club-oriented sounds. Dance music? Grrr, I hate that term. But, yeah, dance music? That made sense, because if you couldn’t dance to The Raincoats you didn’t like pop music. Appropriately the Dennis Bovell mix of The Raincoats’ Animal Rhapsody turned up on the excellent DJ-Kicks mix by Chicken Lips (who had started out as rave posters Bizarre Inc.). Fresh was partly a vehicle for the Lovestation productions Vicky was involved with. And the roster included some familiar names, like (arranger of Dorothy’s Reflections) Noel Watson’s 909 Project and Urge’s Immune To Your Emotions which was written by Phil Legg. Phil also contributed keyboards to Slow Dirty Tears by Gina Birch’s group The Hangovers. The Hangovers’ LP featured the lost Dorothy song Sweetest Pain, from an unreleased LP Gina and Vicky had worked on for Blue Guitar.

Fresh is partly known now for being the place where Richard X got a start, and among the successes the label had in the 1990s was U Sure Do by Strike which featured Matt Cantor who also recorded as Cut And Paste and went on to be part of the Freestylers, the phenomenally successful outfit whose early recordings were on Fresh and its subsidiary Freskanova. Freskanova was set up by Vicky and Dave to promote the more populist breakbeat related releases from the likes of Hal 9000, Agent Sumo, Soul Hooligan and Mad Doctor X. Ironically in many ways Fresh and Freskanova succeeded where many other labels in the past have fallen from grace. And there are, of course, a lot of people out there who are passionate about and protective of the Fresh/Freskanova legacy in the same way people pore over details of Rough Trade/Industrial pasts.

Hiss & Shake - Legg's Eleven pt. 8 - a dub version

History works in mysterious ways, and if you refer now to a Dorothy single the chances are the clued-up pop aesthete is going to think you’re referring to the late ‘80s glossy pop project by Gina Birch and Vicky Aspinall, once of The Raincoats. But there was an earlier Dorothy (whose name I assumed was a reference to the Wizard of Oz) who confessed to liking musique concrete, the Dixiecups and Subway Sect, Sinatra’s Songs For Swinging Lovers, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. and magazines in shrink-wrapped covers.

I would be a liar if I said I heard I Confess by Dorothy when it was first released. I do, however, remember reading about it in a fanzine from Glasgow called Sunset Gun which came out sometime in 1981. I’ve still got a copy. This, oddly given the time and place, was a fanzine that didn’t really feature Glasgow bands (apart from a very early Pastels review which mentions Stephen spitting out the words of Subway Sect’s Don’t Split It with venom). Instead it had articles relating to Belgian pop, Japanese girls, plus the de rigeur send-up of Blitz culture/futurists. And it had a tribute to Rema Rema, which mentioned how drummer Max had “a brief flirtation in the saccharine affairs of bubblegum pop with the schoolgirl wide-eyed innocence and seductive charms of I Confess, an experimental one-off single released under the pseudonym of Dorothy on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records under the watchful eye and nurturing hand of Alex Fergusson.”

The Rema Rema piece was by Mick Parker, who wrote: “But how should success be measured? Should it be gauged by financial fruitfulness hinged on commercial acceptance, or should innovation, musical dexterity and inventive accomplishments merit higher accolades? Look behind the masked smiles and the vacuum closeness of celebrity elitism to the crimped ochre pages of discarded works, cocooned and catalogued in time’s forgotten vaults. Herein are the parallel eclipses to the blind spots of vision and the convenient amnesia of the mind. Overshadowed by the hallowed and pedastalled rock icons, the unique important contributions of such bands as Pearls Before Swine, Nirvana, Slapp Happy, the beautiful frailty of Nick Drake, and more recently This Heat, Doll By Doll, Television, I’m So Hollow, Ludus and Rema Rema remain relatively unsung.”

Mick mentions that the only other article published about Rema Rema had been in (the March 1979 edition of) Zigzag. This was by Kris Needs, which mentions how Max joined the group as drummer after responding to a “no hi-hats” ad, having previously auditioned for Subway Sect. The group refer to a song called Laurence Harvey, which is “a list of people we like, things we like. But it has to be four syllables, or it doesn’t fit. It changes night to night ...” The same issue of Zigzag featured a Robin Banks piece on Vic Godard which contained the memorable passage: “He arrives at my flat dressed as a man on his way to play tennis, and immediately delves through my singles collection, pouncing upon Chris Montez’ Let’s Dance with an exclamation of pure glee. ‘Til 4am we play old Stones, Faces, and Kinks records, talk of Maupassant, Eckersund-Smith and Mickey Mouse, and Vic reveals his ambition is ‘to eat tripe in the house opposite’.”

Mick Parker was someone I vaguely knew. He was a penpal for a while. Colin from Black put us in touch. He was good like that, connecting people with similar tastes. We would send letters. I was 17–ish, and Mick was older. He lived in Deal, down on the Kent coast, but he was in touch with lots of groups, and wrote for various fanzines. One I remember was Vox, a Dublin fanzine, for whom he did some very detailed Felt articles. Morrissey was a contributor, as well, using the pen name Sheridan Whiteside. I recall a Ludus article, from which several phrases later cropped up in The Smiths’ first press releases, like the line about a blend of melody and havoc. I remember Mick doing me a tape of odd pre-punk things, stating that if I liked Tracey Thorn I should listen to Bridget St John.

Mick was a keen photographer as well, and one of his shots was featured on the sleeve of The Fall’s Grotesque. In 1982 he went to Liverpool on holiday, and was kind enough to send me a fantastic photo he took of Pete Wylie looking very mod in a studio, plus some snaps of the Pale Fountains at Plato’s Ballroom, along with one of the luggage labels Nathan McGough had produced as tickets. These are things I still treasure. And I regret losing touch with Mick, though it was my own youthful arrogance that was to blame.

That edition of the Sunset Gun fanzine used photos by Mick for its interview with The Fall where MES has a right go at Scritti, Wah! Heat and Crispy Ambulance. Mark says he’s mainly listening to Dexys and describes a chat he had with their lead singer. There’s another interview with Subway Sect, which again uses Mick’s pics, where Vic Godard seems distinctly unimpressed by Orange Juice, but likes Linx, The Whispers’ It’s A Love Thing, and Making Your Mind Up by Bucks Fizz. I was never sure who was behind the Sunset Gun fanzine. There was later a Glasgow group called Sunset Gun. Now, two things named after the same Dorothy Parker volume of poetry is a huge coincidence. And Sunset Gun featured the Rutkowski Sisters who had previously sung in the curiously country-flavoured incarnation of the Jazzateers that recorded the lost Lee LP for Postcard.

Around the same time Alex Fergusson had created the Dorothy single with Max, he was also the producer for a couple of Postcard singles (Orange Juice’s Blue Boy and the Go-Betweens I Need Two Heads, if I remember rightly). Shortly after that he was briefly reunited with his old partner Mark Perry to come up with the still astonishing Alternative TV LP Strange Kicks, where Alex set Mark’s words in a series of sickly sweet bubblegum or absurdly catchy Racey-style Eurovision singalong settings. The combination was remarkable and irresistible. The potential hits on Strange Kicks included Communicate, which was like Blue Monday a couple of years too early.

The song Commmunicate provided the title for a live compilation LP from the year Leigh Goorney spent as Social Secretary at the Thames Poly in 1984/1985. Leigh had earlier, in 1983, interviewed Mark Perry for a fanzine I helped with, triggering a strange sequence of events where Leigh encouraged Mark to perform again, leading to a new era of Alternative TV (whom Leigh managed for several years) and recordings like the criminally underrated Peep Show, featuring Allison Phillips on drums. Allison had been in other groups, including The Eels who did some great shows at the Thames Poly that year. She also played occasionally with Ut.

Hiss & Shake - Legg's Eleven pt. 7

2011-05-23T01:15:00.004+01:00

“Unfinished Sympathy’s more politicised and less agonised twin entered the charts on the same day – signalling a new start for British black music,” stated Garry Mulholland boldly, writing about the Young Disciples’ Apparently Nothin’, in his excellent book This Is Uncool. Much has been written about Massive Attack and the Bristol blues and roots. It is a fascinating subject, after all. But the Young Disciples’ story has a similarly rewarding tangle of sources to explore. And in many ways it covers stranger territory because of the way they only left us the one big statement, the Road To Freedom LP, which they have resolutely refused to expand upon or follow-up.

The Young Disciples’ Femi and Marco emerged from the late ‘80s London rare groove and hip hop scenes, and this background is as celebrated in their music as the reggae sound systems and post-punk influences in the Massive Attack mix. Road To Freedom was an unapologetically fragmented work, featuring contributions from London’s ‘positivity’ pioneers I.G. Culture (then with Dodge City productions), Outlaw Posse, and M.C. Mell ‘O’ (whose Thoughts Released has been salvaged by Original Dope imprint and sounds amazing, with Mell ‘O’ and DJ Pogo giving the Gang Starr guys some competition ... I wish I had realised that at the time), and a drift towards the jazzy abstract hip hop instrumentals which would come to the fore as the ‘90s progressed.

The performances of Shara Nelson and Carleen Anderson on Unfinished Sympathy and Apparently Nothin’, respectively, still grab the listener by the throat. It’s interesting that both singers had impeccable credentials. Shara had links with On-U Sound through the ‘80s, and Carleen’s parents had been part of James Brown’s inner circle. You can just imagine the ‘click’ moment when Femi and Marco met Carleen, heard her sing, and realised who her parents were. The same thing must have happened when Neneh Cherry met The Pop Group crowd. But whereas Neneh was a wild child, Carleen when she met the YDs had endured trouble and strife, and she caught something of that in her lyrics magnificently. Apparently Nothin’, in particular, has one of the most uncompromising of openings: “A popularity of invasion. Handed down through centuries. A force of arms called gentle persuasion. What have we learned from history?”

One young singer who perhaps did benefit from the success of the Young Disciples and Massive Attack was Des’ree. There is a direct link, too, as Sun of ’79 on her debut LP Mind Adventures was produced by the Young Disciples and engineered by Brendan Lynch. Oddly it is the only track on that LP that sounds tied to a particular place and time. The LP’s main producers, Phil Legg and/or Ashley Ingram, generally captured a very classy sound that is strangely warm and wonderfully understated. Perhaps Phil Legg had learned some valuable lessons about restraint from his time working at Robin Millar’s Powerplant studios in the late ‘80s.

While Des’ree’s debut certainly connects with the British radical tradition of Joan Armatrading and Linda Lewis, there is something about it that suggests the work of singer/songwriters like Carole King and Laura Nyro in the 1970s where their work was so steeped in soul music, the same soul music their songs helped shape. I am thinking of records like Fantasy, Music, Rhymes & Reasons, Smile, Nested ( light pop’s principle!); the sort of record that gradually improves with each subsequent listening over the years, like Des’ree’s Mind Adventures. I am also trying to resist picking up on any coincidence about Laura singing Desiree on Gonna Take A Miracle.

Feel So High was the song that introduced Des’ree to the world. It was one of those songs that seemed to come out of nowhere, and every time it came on the radio you found yourself holding your breath. There were a few soul records around in the early ‘90s that had the same effect, like Dreams by Gabrielle and Revival by Martine Girault, and still do. Maybe it was something in the air at the time, a certain climate. Since then there’s been a great procession of subversive soul (or call it what you like) that has often been the most inventive music around if not always the most successful in terms of sales and recognition.

Ashley Ingram as one of the producers behind Mind Adventures was well placed to bring a touch of subtle subversion to the proceedings. He was a member of Imagination, who turned pop music upside down when they appeared on the scene in the early ‘80s. The story of Imagination is one of the strangest in pop. Three guys with a very definite idea about what they want to do in terms of creating a slinky, erotic sound enter a partnership with unknown producers Swain & Jolley and hit the jackpot straight away with Body Talk. A string of hits followed, which sounded fantastic on the radio but the impact of Imagination reverberated right around.

You can hear the influence of Imagination on some of the other acts of the day. Orange Juice, circa Rip It Up, spring to mind (with the squelchy bass lines) as typical of groups graduating through punk and wanting to stretch themselves. While Edwyn and the OJs camped it up to annoy neds, Imagination vamped it up altogether more spectacularly with a series of provocative prime time Top of the Pops appearances that played havoc with traditional ideas about black pop presentation and which no doubt had many Sun readers spluttering in disbelief. Prince, I’m sure, would have been taking notes about the Imagination approach.

Imagination’s masterstroke was to release Nightdubbing, a collection of disco dub reworkings of their hits. More than just clever punning, these were fantastic re-imaginings of what were already adventurous works. What made the move even more bizarre was that the production team of Swain & Jolley were not known as experimentalists in the way, say, Martin Rushent or Martin Hannett were. Indeed the acts Swain & Jolley are most closely associated with are Spandau Ballet and Bananarama. Larry Levan was responsible for one of the Nightdubbing mixes (despite the tricks of history neither he nor Paradise Garage were household names in the UK in 1983), and it’s not exactly stretching things to note similarities between what Imagination were doing and what Levan would do with the Peech Boys. And, it has to be mentioned, the Peech Boys’ Bernard Fowler would become involved with Adrian Sherwood and the On-U Sound family whose influence on Massive Attack has been well noted.