I came across this the other day. Sad? funny? bizarre…actually most of these people I don’t really give a toss about (this isn’t about to drift off into one of those “what happens after the fame things”..it is what it is and enjoy it while it lasts…at least Pauly can say he had a US Airplay number one, which is more than pretty much everybody else on the planet and there is no point getting bitter and twisted when its gone) but I really did feel for poor old Martin Fry and ABC. Not only did the poor bugger almost snuff it from cancer (diagnosed as terminal I think) from which he made a recovery, he also was one of the flagbearers for a pop revolution, and along the way produced at least half a dozen of the greatest singles of the eighties. Now they will come and have supper and “talk through the old days”….it bought a tear, it really did. Not only that, he’s bringing Glenn Gregory, from the almost as esteemed Heaven 17 (had a drink at the Wag Club once with GG I did)…fuck oh dear…

Those poor maligned 1980s. The decade has been trashed and abused and generally ostracized. With good reason too…the decade was not kind to fashion, to mainstream cinema (with the odd exception, and independent cinema thrived of course..). It was the decade of the bloody legwarmer, Don Johnson and Peking Man…

Musically it was both an irredeemable disaster and a goldmine. I don’t need to extoll the virtues of the decade’s house, soul, funk or the Jamaican work of Gussie Clarke or Sly & Robbie and a swag of others, but the world would’ve undoubtedly have been a richer place if Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Cindi Lauper, Jon Bon Jovi etc had taken different career paths and never made a record. Sadly for the whole decade white American pop / rock was pretty much the aforementioned irredeemable disaster.

But the ABC thing above drove me to put on the 12″ of “How To Be A Millionaire” and from thence into an eighties brit-pop thing for an hour or two. It was a particularly strong (and innovative) time for the great British pop single. We all know about New Order….their singles, one after another were the shit and they still are, but there are dozens. ABC…the obvious ones of course, but also “Be Near Me”,”The Night They murdered Love”, “Millionaire”, “Smokey”, and Martin Fry’s masterpiece “Get Real” by ex-Frankie Goes to Hollywood dancer, Paul Rutherfood; Heaven 17′s “Fascist Groove Thang” and “Lets all Make a Bomb” (best in its album mix); ex Buzzcock Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien” (check the dub); Wham’s 12″ of “Everything She Wants” (with “Last Christmas” on the flip…hate it or love it, it is still a beautifully crafted piece of work); the series of Scritti singles that started with “Sweetest Girl”; “Roadblock”; the first few Pet Shop Boys records; Elvis Costello, Smiths, Style Council, Culture Club (yes indeed…”Church of the Poison Mind” is genius); The Cure..I could go on but no one really wants me to..but you get the gist..

American white pop on the other hand was a wasteland outside NYC and maybe Ohio & San Fran, and pretty much still is..it’s really not hard to work out why….firstly punk didn’t happen stateside as it happened everywhere else in the world (they had a go at it in the late eighties but you can’t leap on a revolution ten years after it finished..they’ve yet to catch up..and the bands that grunge produced were just younger dirtier versions of those they were trying to replace) so the bloat simply hadn’t been exorcised…in Britain Bon Jovi were just a big selling irrelevance, in Ohio they were still cutting edge. The other thing is the racial divide. In Britain’s inner cities young people mix more racially…they live, work, play and romance together far more than they do across the Atlantic. A phrase such as “the biggest black owned business” has no relevance….go to a club in Hackney..look at the crowd…….racial pride is one thing, but separtism is another…

Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be a treatise on race relations or anything of that ilk, rather an aside about some overlooked tracks…nothing too profound

I opened the mailbox on Monday last to find a package from BBE in the UK..lots of bits of pieces. There is nothing better than opening the mail to find a whole bunch of new music..especially when its actually good (got a great deep techy mix CD from Tom Ward this week too that hasn’t left my car yet…). Amongst the bits and pieces was the “Kings of Disco” double cd from Joey Negro & Dimitri. I have to be honest I’d walk a country mile in a 30 degree heat to avoid having to hear a new record by either of these guys in 2005 but their taste on these sorts of things really is impeccable. Joey in particular has massive respect from me, not only for the fact that he recorded for Nu Groove, and for the stuff he released on his mighty Republic label, but for also for the Disco Spectrum series he so carefully crafted with Sean P. I’ve looked at this album in Real Groovy a couple of times and though “I really need to own that” but couldn’t quite make it fit the credit card that week….and I did need it, not least for the mythical “I’ve Been Searching”, very rare Walter Gibbons remix, by Arts & Crafts, that I’ve read slavishly about but not heard..and now I own it..on a comp at least

Well happy….

Finally..this story in the NYT states the obvious but puts it rather well and is at least vaguely optimistic unlike the UK terminal doom & gloom fluff in the last few months…electronic music is alive and well and, if not thriving, is fine thank you

Sorry Yoko if I’ve Breached copyright but he would’ve approved…

Sometimes I feel like a real, dyed in the wool commie posting all this stuff, and I’m sure there are those who would scream that others have died to let me express my opinion, so I should keep it to myself…so, further to my earlier post about the end of empire or something like that, comes this MSNBC / Newsweek piece that I found via Danielle (who got it off Russell Brown whom I usually read but have been a little slack with recently..time constraints etc) which is succinct but sadly seems will only appear in the international run of the mag..not that a US domestic printing would make the slightest difference. We already know about 26% of the US adult population are reasonably well informed and intelligent global citizens, another 28% or so are none of those things (no one who had even the most slender grasp on global realities would even contemplate voting for Bush), the balance didn’t bother to vote so they exist on a level below that or simply don’t count as we have no idea what they thought or think. I guess those that voted for Bush need to find their freedom cannon fodder somewhere, and I think its a reasonable guess that much of it comes from that mass…I wonder if there are any figures for enlisted soldiers’ voting percentages..not who they voted for but what percentage actually voted. My understanding was that it was fairly much compulsory in Iraq but I imagine back home it would be fairly low.

Juan Cole has this imaginary moment where Bush tells the truth back in 2002.

And then there is this piece of rabid duck & cover scaremongering from the good old DHS

When you can’t really function you’re so full of fear
…..you think you’re so clever and classless and free
but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see

To quote Long John
(little bit out of context but you get the drift)

My Piece of Heaven…..

Once upon a time, a decade of so ago, I splashed out on the wonderful Rhino doo wop box set…several cds of young black and hispanic, mostly, male vocal groups from the north eastern USA in the fifties. Young street corner hoodlums harmonising like angels for dodgy mafia run record labels and then disappearing into history. I still play it fairly routinely, especially on a winter morning when I need to be enticed out by something warm and spiritual.

The classic male soul / r’n'b group does similar things, but suits a really warm evening more, or a car with the windows down. The Impressions, The Drifters, The Miracles (now that one makes me shiver..just the words “The Miracles” does the trick), Eugene Record’s electric Chi-lites, The Temptations (but I didn’t really quite get The Four Tops), Delphonics, O’Jays, Ravens, Elgins, Chairmen of the Board, Dramatics…there were dozens, actually hundreds, the list goes on and on…one of the joyous things about soul is the semingly endless supply of new, old, acts to discover. I guess you could successfully argue that some of the early hip acts like the Furious Five, continued the classic tradition …. But, despite the odd exception that proves the rule, the genre has largely died out in recent years.

Which segues nicely into Ten City…..the missing link between The Chords and Carl Craig, courtesy of the genius that was and is Marshall Jeffferson. Ten City remain, 20 years into the genre, the only vocal group to have succesfully made a series of vocal harmony soul albums in the house style. To my mind, house, techno and hip hop are the heirs to the r&b and jazz mantles, the great American rhythmic artforms of the last thirty years. Shamefully much of this is unrecognised in its homeland. Hip hop gets it’s rightful due but people like Jefferson, Knuckles, Craig, Pierre, Saunderson and the others, people who have probably exerted more global influence than just about any other living musican, are unknown in the USA. But go anywhere in the world…anywhere at all, even the places where hip hop hadn’t penetrated until recent years (Australia is an example) and the repercussions of Detroit and Chicago are felt. As big as the Beatles and Elvis to put it in simple terms…..

But I’m heading off on a formless stagger through my thoughts, so back to Ten City. Wonderful, majestic, sensual Ten City. Three guys, two of whom were called Byron for gods sake, who first turned up my turntable back at the Playground. We used to have free access to all the Warner Music 12″ samples, there were dozens every week, and amongst those one day in 1987 was one a little different and I really don’t think Roger and I quite knew what to make of it. Acid house was about to break and house music was all Roland grooves. This had all that but sitting on top of it…actually, no, soaring above it, were these voices “Devotion” and it didn’t hit us until that evening until we tried the thing out on the club system…I think…its a vague memory..that we just looked at each other without saying a word and played it again and again..four times that evening. Then bam bam bam, they came at us..”Right Back to you”,”That’s the Way Love is”, “Suspicious”, “Where do we Go?”, and the albums: every one a monumental merging of all that is wondeful about soul music and house, the intense gospel vocals with acid basslines or shimmering keyboards.

I also discovered the intense, exhausting and dark earlier single, “I Can’t Stay Away” as Ragtyme (there were two but this is the one), mixed by Ron Hardy & Frankie Knuckles.

And eleven years on from their last release, every damned song still sounds as essential and vital as they did back in the day, in the same way the first Miracles album is so gloriously timeless. But I guess they were The Miracles of their age – the last of the great US soul vocal groups in the grand tradition – and sadly the successsful experiment that was Ten City has never really been repeated.

The stone age man cometh

You really need to look at the rather odd pronouncements of the leader of her majesty’s opposition, Donald Brash, and scratch your head and wonder. Where on earth does this strange man come from? A man who allegedly washes his own socks on hotel basins to save money. What on earth is going through his head as he makes his bizarre and lordly pronouncements from the pulpit every year. Does he truly believe this complete nonsense or is he just saying these things because, like Winston Peters, the ultimate political tart with no personal convictions at all, he thinks they might get him a vote or ten.

I guess I’ve thought about this a little bit on and off over the past year, since last year’s Orewa speech (“state of the nation”?..sorry but it makes you sound like a pompous wanker Don..I think you’re both of those but far more dangerous than that implies), which really could be summed up in those two overused words “cheekie darkies”, playing on the good old fashioned political truism of joseph average thinking “who the hell do they think they are”, “they” being anyone perceived as getting something for nothing. A little bit of hateful envy always gets a few votes. This year’s speech plays on more of the same, being “bloody bludgers”, but more especially “bloody cheeky darky bludgers”, a good old traditional National Party policy platform since the days of Holyoake and before. Positive, forward looking, policy has never been a strong point for the Nats. And like the earlier lecture, the essense of it is scaremongering with a purpose and little substance.

Which brings me back to Brash. Does he really believe all this negative crap or does he do it to get votes? Don Brash, for all his faults (and if he ever becomes prime minister of our nation, those, god help us all will quickly become evident for all) is simply a good old fashioned conservative ideologue, like Ruth Richardson- cold, determined, driven and unable to see the wood for the ideological trees (and those on the hard left suffer exactly that too). Far more dangerous than the likes of Winston. Conservativism by its nature is a reaction against change, a longing for the good old days when things were better..the good old days which more often than not never actually existed.

Hitler offered this to the German people in the thirties. For Bush et al, it’s a longing for the days where America was great, had done its bit to free the world from the threat of Nazis (most Americans still seem to believe they did it single handedly) and those other “funny looking” (remember when they couldn’t really be a threat because they had bad eyesight) people from the east, was a bastion of decency against the evil empire and TV was good with Mr Ed and Lucy..in other words before they were humiliated by a third world nation in the making in the sixties. That was part of what Gulf War One was about…look we are still great..look..look.

And that is a substantial part of the appeal of Bush, with his grotesque inauguration parade, to the Fox generation now.

Brash too, truly believes there were better days, the days when pregnant daughters were sent up north and their unspoken offspring were adopted out to decent families, when Maori knew their place and paid their dog taxes with pleasure and handed their land over for public works without compensation and white middle class men..you know, good Christian working men, quietly ran a solid crime free nation and kept a close benevolent eye on the natives who weren’t quite up to looking after themselves.

A soulless but righteous society.

But as most of us know, this world never really existed but the myth is enough for the conservative ideologue like Brash, never one to let a little human decency get in the way of an ideological position. And history is often little more conservatives pulling backwards with a dream of a return to their mythical better world, grasping at the past while, hopefully, the rest of the conscious planet is trying to work out how to create some kind of better world, even if we stumble now and again .

Extended Play on George 260105

Jay Dee-Strange Funky Games & Things-Warner Bros-1974
Stetsasonic-Talking All that Jazz (Dominoes Mix)-Breakout-1988
Chi-lites-Are You My Woman-Brunswick-1972
Melba Moore-It’s a Peach Melba (Moxie)-Moxie-2003
Norman Cook-The Invasion Of the Estate Agents-Go Beat-1989
EPMD-You Gots To Chill-Fresh-1986
Gap Band-Big Fun (Serious Dub)-Total Experience-1986
Brenda & The Tabulations-Tabulator (Moxie)-Moxie-2003
Gladys Knight-Love Overboard-MCA-1987
New Young Pony Club-Ice Cream -Tirk-2004
The Rappin Reverend-I Ain’t Into That-Fantasy-1987
Fatback-Lover Undercover-Cotillion-1985
Prins Thomas-Edit #2-Rong-2005
Luther Vandross-She Won’t Talk to me (Acid House Dub)-Epic-1988
Patti Labelle-More Than Materiel-Restricted Access-2004
Ten City-Only Time Will Tell (demo)-East West-1992
House Neegroz-I wanna Say-Nu Groove-1992
Herb Martin-Soul Drums-Ibadan-2004
Ralphi Rosario-An Instrumental Need-Gosa Lo-1992
Ralphi Rosario-You Used To Hold Me (MAW Main Pass)-Strictly Hype-1994
Holland Dozier Holland-Baby Don’t Leave -Invictus-1972
Frankie Goes to Hollywood-Two Tribes (Annihilation mix)-ZTT-1984
Inner City-Ahnonghay (Original Reese mix)-6 x 6-1995
Bam Bam-Where is Your Child-Desire-1988
LCD Soundsystem-Daft Punk is Playing at my House (album mix)-DFA-2004
Prins Thomas-Edit # 1-Rong-2005
S2-Slide-UR-2005
Lazyboy-Police Dogs Bonfire (Linus Loves mix)-Sunday Best-2005
Prins Thomas-Edit # 4-Rong-2005

OOOPS

If there is any doubt that Osama Bin Laden or whoever or whatever he may be is winning, and controlling, his battle against “the great satan”… and must be eternally grateful for the US presidential election result…. you only need to look at stories like this

Another bloody radio show….Extended Play on George 190105

Brass Construction-Movin’-United Artists-1975
Booker T & The MGS-Melting Pot-Stax-1971
Keith Barrow-Turn Me Up-Columbia-1978
Mid Air-Ease Out-Full Scope-???
Tony Terry -Lovey Dovey-Epic-1987
Whodini-Magic Wand (Tee Scott Extended)-Jive-1982
Dust Brothers-Song to the Siren (Sabre of Paradise Full Sabre Mix)-JBO-1993
Cherelle-I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On (Extended)-Tabu-1984
Doug E Fresh-The Show-Reality-1985
Larry Heard-Premonition of Love Lost (extended adult mix)-La Casa-1994
Jus Friends-As One (Original mix)-Massive B-1992
Fingers-Dead End Alley (Sanchez Jazzy Dub)-BMI-1992
Kerri Chandler-Back to the Raw (Ruff Mix)-DRH-2004
Beats International-Change Your Mind (Tenaglia ragga dub)-London-1992
Seven Grand Housing Authority-Loves Got Me High-Fresh Fruit-1995
Herb Martin-Soul Drums-Ibadan-2004
Sparks`-Number One Song In Heaven (12” Mix)-Virgin-1979
Phuture-Rise From Your Grave-Strictly Rhythm-1993
Abe Duque-Slaves-Gigolo-2005
Ferrer & Sydenham-Road to Calabar-Ibadan-2005
69-Desire-Planet E-1994
The Reese Project-The Colour Of Love (Deep Reese Mix)-Network-1992
Electric Fro-Theme from the Electric Fro (Full Fro mix)-Tribal-1994
Dajae-You Got Me Up (Danny T Club)-Cajual-1993
Chemical Bros-Galvanize (Abe Duque mix)-White-2005