Music Matters

Clubs and Ragga - mid eighties

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 23:49:44 CEST

At the North end of Portobello Road there was a mad club; not the relatively well-known ‘Tabernacle’, that in itself was the strangest mix of Yardie dealers and Roughnecks from All Saints Road (West London’s ‘Front Line’), local Sloanie types and Trustafarians; but ‘The Shop’: hardcore, dark, cramped, and a potential deathtrap with its one small entrance to the squatted house. Packed with intense bodies pulsing to Hip Hop downstairs and feverish ‘acid’ house upstairs; it was a dark box that raved without distraction. Eventually, the heat and sound and the utter absence of any light except the bewildering effects on the dance-floor would overpower you, and you would leave, that is fight your way through the mass of bodies in the old entrance-passage, (that had the same wallpaper design as that of the abandoned cottages by the old factory I worked in) until squeezed tight by the crush of both exiting and entering punters you would suddenly pop out the front door, expelled like a cork from a champagne bottle. The crowd outside was usually huge, and a fist fight would often ensue with an irate youth who was convinced that you had lurched into his face on purpose as you staggered down the short flight of steps; he would cuff and shout, you would extricate yourself into the middle of street, mutter ‘fucking idiot’ under your breath, and decide whether to walk or cab to your next destination.

A few turnings further on, past Goldhawk Road, past the limits of Notting Hill, of ‘Trend’ and ‘Scene’ and ‘Cosmopolitan Glamour’; past the market, past the small café where the emigres from some nation I could never quite identify played dominoes into the small hours, in North Kensington was the ‘Avenues Youth Centre’, located in a single storied concrete building on a corner of the Harrow Road, at the end of a line of shops selling West Indian foods, an off licence, and some shuttered supermarkets. It was to this outpost of the borough council’s efforts to ‘serve’ the community, that I came, as the ‘music worker’, teaching guitar, organising a ‘girl’s rap’ workshop (ten fourteen year old girls sharing a mic while I programmed a drum machine and played some bass, the triumph being the twenty minute version of Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s ‘Push it’) and generally ‘facilitating’ aural mayhem. All the while looking out for some new rhythms and people to work with on my own stuff, because I was convinced by then that ragga was going to be the wave of the future, after House of course. House was perceived in this setting as a purely white-people thing; vainly I told them of the parties in Brooklyn where the beats kept pulsing four on the floor all night long.

The Avenues was a rough place; the music workshops, the chess, the pool, the table tennis, were only a side show to the real business in hand, that of dealing. When I first arrived the product of choice was weed, but by the time I left it was crack-cocaine. This of course reflected the trend everywhere; check the manic and sharp beats that increasingly found favour with the roughneck as time rolled on. Music bounced around the room nightly, and youth did too, handshaking, chatting, squabbling, and as the highs grew more hyper, so did the rhythms.

Occasionally small groups from the Avenues would be seen down at The Shop, or The Tabernacle, or even at Heaven, the club under the railway arches at Charing Cross in London proper, but they were never in attendance for pleasure, or edification (although they were students of human nature in a way I suppose), only business, supplying whatever the drug of the moment was to the punters. For these people this was the possibility offered by London’s centre.

Down at the Avenues we would have visitors, specifically the ‘Posse’, usually to conduct the quiet business of supplying the men and boys who worked the clubs directly, but sometimes looking for those they felt had wronged them in some way; those who had got greedy or reneged on a promise. I didn’t know much about this, and although perhaps I should have, I didn’t care. I just wanted to teach my bit, or hang out with those who wanted to speak with me, keep my nose clean, and leave early enough to catch a meal at the Pollo restaurant on Old Compton Street, thereby completely changing the feel in my body before going home. I found the scene mentally exhausting, but strangely easy to put behind me. Once home I would listen to sounds, or go up to the studio to work until the morning.

One evening the posse came in particularly ‘vex’, a group of them, sudden and fast, blades drawn. I was deep in conversation with Tony the drummer, and hadn’t really registered the situation when I saw a group of guys pushing at the toilet door, where they had holed up their intended target. Dibs, one of ‘our’ lot, was arguing animatedly with them. Feeling I should take the responsibility commensurate with my job-status stepped forward to aid Dibs. It was lucky for me that I was talking with Tony at the time. He grabbed me by the arm and said with an authority I had never heard from him before (I was used to directing him and believed I was the more experienced individual), ‘No-not now. This ain’t our business’. I stopped and looked at him, and around the room again, and then I spotted them all: the boy roaming with the long knife unsheathed and the sweaty look of fear and battle on his face, the man with the shooter sat at the only exit, and the posse staring down Dibs at the toilet door. The atmosphere was hysterical and tense. I had been incredibly stupid; wrapped in myself as only a conversation about music can lead me to be. Tony saved my life, or certainly saved me from hospitalisation, and Dibs saved whoever it was was holed up in the toilet, because it was the time that he bought with his protests that eventually drove them from the building, with the deed undone. They had come expecting to do it quickly and without witnesses and instead the club had stopped still to watch. I learned later that by a complex family lineage Dibs was related to both, the intended victim, and a member of the Posse, hence his ability to withstand them.

There was also an idea mooted that because there was a white guy - me - present, that it was not a good moment for internecine murder.

Some nights were good though. The music was rough and rugged and kicked where it should: so leaping in the dark, close, sweaty, came an embrace; physically separate spirits joined, intertwined through the beat. An electric energy of union coursed around the room. For a moment the coruscating bodies would take on a synergy that was almost an inner, and collective, stillness.

I was proud of my new job, in the thick of things, where it mattered and thought that Jenny could hardly fail to approve. Here I was, back in London amongst our/her people. ‘It’s off the West End loop, yes...,’ I admitted, (this seemed to bother her), ‘but it’s the voice of the street, you watch, this is where the next wave of music will come from’.

She smiled and drained her mineral water and sidestepped my enthusiasm, saying,’come on, we’ll miss the last tube, and then it’ll have to be a taxi. Besides, I said I’d ring Randy tonight, we have to go over some stuff in the old flat this week; before he goes on tour again...’

Jenny and the American singer had separated about the time he acquired permanent working papers and the heroin habit. I’m not sure what happened to the social-worker, but I knew he wasn’t around anymore. She always parried my inquiries with a resounding ‘No!’, and a quick return to the subject-matter of my life, a ploy I could never resist. She was not impressed by the Avenues though, that much was clear. ‘Roughnecks,’ she grumbled.

It amused her that I could deliver the latest lyrics and dance-steps from whatever ’slack’ dancehall track was happening that week, but otherwise she stayed well clear of the place.

Instead she told me about auditions. ‘Say there are over sixty girls and six places open. At best they’re only going to take one black girl, so you just look around at who else is there and then decide if it’s worth staying. I always stay of course, but you know what I mean...’ ‘Well maybe that’s why the Avenues is as it is... ...that is a pretty hopeless ration of places isn’t it?’ ‘Maybe....’ she considered for a minute. ‘But no, I don’t see it, no. There’s no need...’ Then she went on to talk about curtains, or furniture.

Hammersmith 1987

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 21:25:39 CET

Hammersmith 1987.

In situ dream?

…..overlooking the train tracks that carriages rattle away on, the night rains on gleaming flooded lines flowing behind an Old White Schoolhouse. This house glowers, a little anonymous perhaps, or more accurately described it is secretive whilst hiding those tracks. It is secretive in the space before the road, peering over the large black fence. It is secretive in that it has a ramshackle elegance (a hint of an older and in some aspects more leisurely paced time?) not revealed so easily to the hasty morning commuters or drunk night revellers of the Shepard's Bush Road the other side of that black fence.

So picture yourself now, - early winter morning say – stood in the back bathroom on the second floor landing hearing that wind and watching the waters fall and flow in the tracks in this lamplight. Shivering though you are, you are arrested momentarily to stare at the stark bleakness of the landscape unfurled beneath. The flitting of shadows and the calling of the wind to the traffic stirs your mind down less well traveled avenues. A tube train, beaming yellow windows in the dark morning gloom departs north.

Down less travelled avenues – this phrase reverberates in your mind with implications of perhaps say, surrealistic fantasy or turgid narrative yet it strikes you that the strangeness, the truly ridiculous reality is that which you have lived for the last few months. Ever since you left NYC for the first time in a year those few short months ago (May to today's October) life has not stopped storming through you like a writhing river of joys griefs passions altercations and loves whilst looming ahead always some nameless, formless, but so very present destination. A purposeful blind drive.

Back now in the front bedroom of the house she still sleeps. Unusual for her, brought up as she was in less indolent mores than you hold. Perhaps indeed you have just risen to pee in the middle of the night and will climb back in bed beside her once this strange mood has forsaken you. But isn't that the dawn that cracks the sky open across the road in the green opposite?

London 1987

Guitar Improvisation

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 12:37:01 CET

I need to see you again

like yesterday

it's like you are the lifebuoy

in all this turmoil of troubled water

I cling to you

you are the guide

I need the ocean to wash over me

as I grasp for where you stand

I will pour out for you

but I'm lost away in muddy sand

clarify the sensations

please reach for me with your hand

October 2015 Berlin

2011 On Registering as a Berlin Resident

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 01:42:27 CEST

so this is some act of faith a little death again before a death

this discarding of possession place casting off what is hopefully extraneous to requirements

watching myself

in an office wait after the waiting room of that hotel I wait again

is this courage or foolishness we leave stagnancy for sure step into the flow looking for the paddle still

nearer home for sure

and maybe that is the most important thing of all

and I don't have anything really relevant to say to you even as I expect you to afford me into your daily expectations

there's a sign that tells me or asks rather, do I know that there are more nightingales in Berlin than in the whole of Bayern?

Berlin March 2011

African Brother on the U Bahn

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 00:18:47 CEST

I think of you my African brother

On the train lost from home

Exiled in five languages

And you

Spanish speaker man in the rain

Asking for the airport home

I can tell you

I have lived far from home

Far from love

I hear your song

I know you belong

There and everywhere

But "not here," they cry

You cry

"Where is my heart to rest then?"

Human brothers

I sigh

Wend my way

Little left to say

Berlin 2014

Jenny, Muhtar, Flip

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 23:27:00 CEST

At the end of the summer I went to London, alone. V’s rent had become an agony, as had the heat and the arguments: C.and I, T and C, T and I.

Once back in the city I stayed at my fathers house, as his second marriage disintegrated, and he roared and grumbled at all and everything around him. ‘Why is it all my boys are such wasters and my daughters not?’ he cried, pounding the table with a wine bottle, until I, the oldest, and not the child of the woman who grumbled back at him that day, pointed out that all his elder daughters had ever managed to do was marry, and his youngest, both sons and daughters were still in school. “You get back to New York and do your music’ he growled back, ‘and stop wasting time here’. In this of course, he was right.

Rather than take action I sought solace. I went to Covent Garden, to look for Jenny. Whenever not on the road working, she was auditioning at the Pineapple Dance centre. As I turned the corner at Langley street she came bustling round. Easy. We hugged and kissed, and hugged again, like the almost lovers we were, and ate together and then she told me something of her life. She was married to an American singer who needed working papers, and living in Chelsea. At least, that was how she told it, despite the softness in her eye when she said his name.

“O yeh?” I said, peeved.

“ Yeh, “ she answered, striking a boxers pose, pummelling my biceps. “Gonna make something of it?“

I squared up too, but then squeezed her leg, remembering my American singer, faraway in every sense, envying the closeness I believed her to have with hers. She smiled and put her hand on mine, and wriggled in her chair, lazy and thoughtful.

I pushed on, flattering her, “He does realise how special you are, though?“ “Well do you, and did you--ever?” she countered, flaring for a moment, but then she softened, eyes dreaming again.

“Come on, let’s go, my place” she said. “And we’ll go clubbing later...”

Jenny felt like both a lover and a family member that day, as integral to my life as I was:

You’ve taken this boy far from home under your wing. This is my city, come, run with me a little; is this what you told him? You who are all drive and a simple push to be what and who you are, I see none of the complication that I bring to my life in you, just your tight and sometimes inflexible body, and middling voice, not bad, not exceptional, and none of it stops you, and I remember you barely past your childhood, becoming you, searching out your own madness; yes you remember too: all those crazy parties and that effervescent kissing under the stairs in the big manor house you squatted in Bromley, those long and intimate embraces, and now I see you again at last, grown, older, loosed back into the cruelty of London’s night that you negotiate so well; fly free angel, but let me caress your brown and wondrous hands and remember, before you leave... and you do, you take me with you once again and warm me, as before, now I am calm, now I know what I am feeling....

London’s mire crept and throttled: one afternoon sat on a suburban train as the summer wore on, between homes, I could feel the brown and grey comfort of England harassing me, ‘stay’ whispered the golden leaves on the trees at Clapham, and the shining wet slate roof of the junior school by Lavender hill that looked as innocent as mine must have all those years ago. I had cried when my plane landed at Gatwick, circling the farmhouses and fallow fiefs of England; glinting up from the lakes came sunlight, why should I not remain here? ‘Stay,’ cried the Pen ponds in Richmond park where I walked searching out respite from my father’s hassles, the dogs crazily chasing the sticks and geese and reindeer, but no, I was lonely and ambitious, no squat-life for me. Young and hungry, I despised the cold welcome I had been given (all and everyone too wrapped in angst to welcome the prodigal home), only Flip had asked me to stay. ‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ he pleaded, but I knew how desperately he wanted to leave his home at the end of a shit-smeared council estate walkway, where only the young and virulent were comfortable...

We, the remaining band members had built a studio in Flip’s flat. Finn obtained the eight track via various dubious runnins in North London. This treasure he brought down to Stockwell and I uncovered some old speakers in my father’s attic and Flip a mixer. So we assembled, and the old magic was at hand, or so it seemed for a moment, but Finn still all pop star dreams in his projects in Camden wasn’t going to stick it, and I was slipping too deeply back....

Hence, a surreptitious phone call in the night to my friend Muhtar, in Manhattan, who knew the game and the trap too well. We shared certain antecedents, Muhtar and I: paternal roots in the Durham mines, fathers who had explored alternative spiritual ways, including work with JGBennett, and a need to wander. Finally, we had both (independently of each other) opted to follow the spiritual practice of Subud, a ‘way’ that had come to the West in the late fifties. It was through this that we had met.

He sent the ticket and then I was gone, rising above the English West country. When I came down Newfoundland way hours later, I saw a single road appear in tundra, and then slide through trees and around rivers, and then fork, two roads curling away, one towards the sea, the other through a ribboned village and more clearings, and more roads (a tee junction this time). A maze grew out of the land and towns appeared and then, at last, against the glimmering ocean horizon, came the city of Boston, and then I knew the descent was to begin, back into the never relenting city of New York, which I would now call home.

Flip phoned a few weeks later to say that the studio had been ransacked, and the eight track stolen, with our master tapes on it. This, despite the fact that the window of the room in which he kept the gear overlooked the police station...

Cedric 1978

Sun, 4 Oct 2020 00:25:36 CEST

1978

Cedric was a guitarist and singer, who during the late seventies turned up at my house to jam whenever he felt like it, and then always played with spontaneous and inspired abandonment. He never left a phone-number or address, so our get-togethers were dependent on chance meetings and messages relayed through mutual friends.

’I am not Jamaican, my parents are from Antigua, and anyway I’m English,’ he proclaimed, all in the one breathless sentence, in answer to some observation of mine about his taste in music. He disdained reggae for years, preferring rock or jazz or funk or soul. Punk never entered his lexicon of style. Cedric and I would go and hear bands at the Half Moon pub in Herne Hill, which brought back memories for us of the earlier part of the decade.

‘Remember that crew of freaks who were starting an ‘art gallery’ on the corner of Railton road? By the alley behind the station where Maltese Ray was stabbed chasing down the trilby hat they took off him at the fair in Brockwell Park? They nicked it off his head and legged it down the passage? He took off after them (he always had a lot of guts) but then he saw the blades...

...anyway, this art gallery: someone had got this shop space and because I was chasing some girl who was having it off with one of these guys I started to show my face. They never showed any art at all, this lot, all they did was lie around listening to Pink Floyd, except when there was no smoke and then they would go to the Half Moon. Long before it became the ‘pub-rock venue’ we was there drinking bitter and checking out the trio that had the weekend residency. This trio you ask? Oh, the instruments? It was an ‘organist’, the double bass, and swishy swinging ride cymbals. They went from one old tune to another and all the old people nodded along, quite funny really. But the beer was good and sometimes one of our lot, ‘Little Rick’ would get up and blow ‘Traintime’ with them, on his harmonica. Yeah him, the one what looks like a hunch-back when he plays, you know him? Yeh, very coarse sound, plays fast though. Always looks like a boxer trying to win the last round. But the way it felt when he played was like the future was, like, well, ours, instead of all that other....

Remember the black out? Them power cuts and three day weeks? It was scary going home at night, kids whistling to each other through the dark dark. Street-gangs, or so they said. By the time I got home I would realise just how piss-drunk I was, and then I had to creep up the stairs that creaked like crazy, and I always felt like I was going to fall over and wake everyone. Once in bed I’d get the earphones in place and travel until sleep swept me away....’

It was strange to be back only a couple of years later and see the dank old room full of trendies grooving to jazz-funk, and down the end, lent up against the stage-left speaker column: the guitarist. His fingers stroke a Gibson semi-solid, the notes are golden and warm, they burst from under his hand and spray the listeners, he stands back to appraise the impact as he straddles the bass and drum. Other players come and go--this is a ‘jam’ session--but he is constant, always on hand to catch the faltering chord change or the enervated solo and set it right and send the music on its way. Eventually he too tires, and then the band must break, and sit at their table, nurse drinks through the smoke and clutter of talk until re-energised they clamber back, carried on the approving yelps of the crowd. Little Rick walked up on the stand one of the nights that Cedric and I were there. We wanted to be up there with him.

We organised our own jam, in a Nissan hut owned by the Council that was dedicated to ‘youth activities’. Marck came, glowering out from his black beard, coaxing endless melody from his horn and I marveled that he wasn’t already a star. When not blowing he was busy at the keyboard analysing, defining and rewriting everybody else’s parts. The ‘real’ keyboard player was a kid who was leaving for Berklee, the jazz school in North America. He and Marck talked in a rarefied zone as equals, whilst I fiddled with the tuning of my guitar. Then Cedric came, Cedric who knew the least of chords, extensions, odd metred time signatures and the like, but played sweet solos with his eyes screwed shut and his tongue lolling out, forcing notes into places they had no business being. He was very assertive too, stepping out as often as possible with flurries and clusters of sound, and I receded further in the face of him, and hated it.

‘Why can’t I just close my eyes and lay it all out as the only thing in the world worth doing--as he does?’ I wondered.

I didn’t see Cedric for a while after, although I did see Marck as he and I played on some demos together, down in Ashford at some ‘famous’ producer’s country house. At least, he was famous enough to have a swimming pool in the back garden in which I exhausted myself at lunch time, thereby ruining my performance on the later takes. Marck got drunk, but somehow as always, his playing remained steady.

The bass guitar in many ways defines the sound of the seventies, as the guitar did for the sixties. The instrument gathered reputation throughout the decade. Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius had fostered respectability for the instrument as a ‘real axe’; one worthy of the attention of a virtuoso. The influential Steel Pulse were able to bring a militant, ‘bottom-heavy’, ‘sound system’ sensibility into the wider public eye. Sting wielded the bass as a rock symbol in the way that only the guitar had been until then. Funk, and the slap of disco, were ubiquitous throughout the period.

Public Image Limited, grounded by the dub influenced sound of Jah Wobble, were big. From the first muezzin like cries and the dark rumbling bottom end of the eponymous debut single it was clear that out of the interactive ritual of abuse that typified any good Punk performance in the late seventies, music was beginning to appear, music that conveyed varied and complex emotions. Texture abounded, and although there was terrible power and aggression about the whole project, you were invited, even seduced in, rather than bludgeoned.

Not wishing to be left out, I picked up the bass again, the instrument I had started with at school, as well as continuing as a guitarist. Coincident with the arrival of recordings by the likes of Steel Pulse and Misty in Roots in my house (and the sound of the Police on the radio) Cedric began to visit more often, and now he was playing reggae. ’But this is “musical” reggae--major 7 chords, unison lines, chord breaks,’ he said, when I teased him about his earlier reluctance to draw on the genre. ‘British reggae’. It was a sensible choice really, the only viable alternative to Punk.

NYC 1997

Piano Dream

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 00:37:56 CEST

A couple of nights back I dreamt that an acquaintance (to whom in actuality I gave a fairly decent piece of recording equipment before leaving NYC the last time) came to visit, bringing a piano for me..... a piano with a couple of stuck keys, but an extraordinarily intimate and delicate touch, and a candlelight burning within. Before I sat and touched the piano I had thought not to keep it, but loving where it was placed in my room, and the feel of playing it I decided to keep it for deeply personal moments, away from work. Then my acquaintance asked me for advice about lyric writing, and I replied with three points. A good lyric had to one, be truthful, two, hone in in an exaggerated manner on some detail somewhere, and three at some point have a brilliant metaphor. In my dream I had concrete examples of all three, but of course I have forgotten now. The stuff of dreams…..

Berlin February 27, 2013

Kennington 2 - NYC to London

Thu, 3 Sep 2020 22:30:06 CEST

Outside my room, London has reverted into one of its New York phases. A few years ago, during the earlier part of the decade, the heyday of Thatcher and Reagan, the ‘hip’ section of the city was solidly determined in its English identity, and deeply anti-American in its imagery. American speech was rigorously eschewed in favour of newly acquired working class accents and polished rhyming slang. American music was ‘shit’, although to the chagrin of the hip and wannabes, Bruce Springsteen could sell out Wembley for nights on end. But it was to Dingwalls that I came in 1984 to hear Finn play, with a band called ‘Siberia’ or ‘Polar’ or somesuch, and Finn was good: warm, sweaty, and raucous, as indeed was Keith, the lead singer. Finn afterwards was opaque. ‘Performin is a job innit,’ was his flat retort, when I suggested that he had done it rather well. Keith however sat elsewhere, and when I commented on his obvious charisma, Finn suggested that I should tell him myself. ‘He’s been feeling a bit down about things lately’.

I approached, opened my mouth to speak, and tried to remember to purge any newly-acquired Americanisms from my language. But even so, I found myself saying it, not once but twice, the very word that I had promised myself not to say. Yeah, Keith maan, great maan, really, great.... Keith shuffled and awkwardly thanked me and somebody else laughed and I overheard one girl sneer to another, Didja hear that...? I had done it. I had uttered American Hippy speak.

So it is with wry amusement, as well as fear, that a couple of years later I step out of Flip’s house in Stockwell to be accosted by trendy teenagers calling, ‘Yo, wassup maan, lend me some bread for smokes, YO!’, their language an extreme parody of New York street talk. Their hats are backward, their sneakers are for basketball, and their jackets are baggy and imported. Ludicrous appearance not withstanding, this particular group can get nasty, and I think about legging it up the alleyway, but as I don’t have to come back there regularly and make a habit of it, I stop and give them a couple of pounds. They leer at me a minute and attempt to pat down my pockets for the wallet, but I spin away, and put a serious look on my face.

‘Yo, don’t back off from me man,’ the main guy threatens, a skinny-faced pale kid of about sixteen, but he doesn’t push it further. They sprint towards the shops. After they turn the corner I hurry in the other direction, past the tube station that beckons me into Central London, the London of Soho and Covent Garden, past the comprehensive school where other kids are milling outside kicking footballs and comparing knives and 12” record collections, back to Kennington. The shock hits me when I arrive, and I have to sit down for a few minutes before the shaking stops.

I am going to the nightclub RAW this evening, with Jenny. She wants to see what’s being done for dance steps these days. When we get there she says, ‘I feels old, these kids are so young’, but when the music is playing I feel timeless. Perhaps I look ridiculous, but she’s happy to be with me, and there is no way she looks out of place. But then for me, she is timeless.

RAW is a sweat box dance floor, the sound system crude and large with a rugged harsh pumping midrange, you feel the attack of the kick in your chest rather than the ooze of the bass in your whole torso, but it’s good, the floor is rammed and the vibe peaceful, and perhaps a little flirtatious. I get shivery when records name check Brooklyn or Manhattan locations, as in a peculiar way I feel far from home, away from the familiar. I am like an expatriate delving into a local scene that is attempting to construct a facsimile of something I know well. Part of me is away from home. RAW could never be in New York, details of body language and large plastic pint-glasses of brown beer create a different vibe. Also, I have never seen such a combination of, well, uptown and downtown, in New York. RAW is an apt name for this particular gathering of the tribes. Still, it is New York styled, so I am wearing bicycle shorts and braces, and, oh yeah, a pair of hi-top basketball sneakers. Over by the bar I spot a man who is obviously a body builder, and as our eyes meet we smile and nod, it seems congruent with the geniality of the night. A few years earlier, his kind of overly glowing health was unacceptable as a ‘look’ on the scene, better wan, gaunt even, certainly skinny and marginally unhealthy. He passes me later and pulls on my braces, letting them ping back on my chest, saying, ‘yeh, safe look man’ or some argot laden compliment I couldn’t quite catch. London and its fashions...

Later that evening, back in my rooms, Jenny puts the radio on and hears that King Tubby, the producer and dub mix-master has been shot to death in Jamaica. We are both quite crumbled by the news. It’s something to do with the era he represents for us, the memory of back in South London school or Laban days, before either of us had really done anything. I hadn’t thought about King Tubby for years, but when the station started playing the old dubs in tribute, I recognised the sounds immediately.

The August sun is peaking. and it's time for the Notting Hill Carnival, which is an opportunity to get reacquainted with the Sound-System, something I would very much like, given the events of earlier this year in Jamaica. When you leave the main parade route you’ll find them, DJ’s, dancers, technicians, assorted hanger’s on, all circling huge speakers. The sound of bass and drums competes for every crossroads, every venerable Victorian terrace. Most likely it is reggae, or some bastardised descendant, dub, ragga, or Hip-Hop perhaps, that pours from the stacked boxes. I wander and look for a corner of deep, bass-heavy dub, one that is a throwback, an echo full of back in the days.

The ‘Selector’ cues another disc and guitars fade in and out of focus, twisting and writhing under the torture of phase and slider effects. Voices disembody and float senseless in the reverb laden sky, soaring above mountains of drums, and the ricochet of sidestick on snare. The rhythm stops. The rhythm starts and dancers bounce and twist, while away on the side an ancient Rasta nods his head in calm agreement. There is comfort in the unsteady perspective and the steady rocking rhythm, as if hearing in some inchoate and blurred manner through amniotic fluid the measured step of the mother, and the song of the world that awaits. The ‘Selector’ grabs the mic and starts to declaim in the tones of black London some message or another; the voice is the cadence of a Jamaican waterfall, each word is light dancing a complex course on a mosaic pathway that winds between water, plants, and windows open to the Caribbean breeze... dusty roads in the midday sun... and now, back in the English gloaming, cloudy between dark terraces once white now dirty city grey I look up and, climbing from a window onto the already packed veranda above the milling procession she smiles her greeting to Carnival. I wave as the ‘one drop’ beat explodes into a smoky melee of voices and chants, until emerges a shout, trapped in an echo chamber; ‘conquer conquer conquer...’ until the rhythm lopes again, and I leave, pushing towards Powys Square where there will be other systems, stages, dancers, and... somosas, because I am suddenly very hungry.

NYC 1998

1985 Sting

Sun, 30 Aug 2020 22:26:10 CEST

Shortly after I first arrived in New York, ‘Every Breath You Take’ became the big hit; a bitter song of reclamation soon to be mangled by countless ‘cover’ singers in ‘singles’ bars on the Upper East side of Manhattan. People seem to think it a simpering love-ballad; it’s not, it’s cruel and about possession. I would watch C on the stand and wish to rush out and grab her, to bring her home and slam the door behind us, saying ‘you are mine, and nothing and nobody should share this’. However much ‘maturity’ you have gained over the years, still comes the irrational and fierce desire to possess and control…

There were other incongruities in how people heard the sound. ‘Those war yelps, are they African or something?‘, asked C, referring to Sting’s distinctive glossalalia on early hits. ‘Hmmm,‘ I mused, and eventually ventured, ‘maybe he got that from calypso?’. I didn’t have full confidence in my own theory, which was that they were the sounds of Newcastle school-playgrounds during Gordon Sumner’s childhood.

Lost in the rapture of the past I journeyed to the North of England again, in the minds eye. Writing them out: Newcastle, Durham, Tynemouth:

The voice of the Tyne
Pours into the cold seas
That bridge the Northern countries,

A boarding stage of brooding
Looks out from Tynemouth cemetery
At the grey waves,

Remember the ships that sailed there;
A brief day to sniff the air and stretch muscles against the bitter cold.

Someday, somewhere,
That sea will claim me,

I carry a restless spirit everywhere,
And watch the tides run in the southern harbour,
And the pubs where the sailors go when returned from Norway,

I pass out under old arches onto the snow and leave my footprints, soon to be covered, and stand on the graveyard peninsula and stare at the yellow crane bedecked pier that stretches from the yacht club to the deep and busy water a quarter mile distant. The town glows beneath the towering snow laden skies, docks are cartooned and minuscule: a coal barge pulls upstream to the bridges. Behind me Tynemouth has white seaside houses: standing stones that border the balustraded front. Lustrous yellow sand, black rock demarcates the white flecked sea-strand.

The weather numbs any reality but its own.

NYC 1999

Music is a Food

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 18:29:24 CEST

Music is a food, nutrition for the soul, nurture for the heart. And like food, it comes in varying levels of goodness. So, as with junk food, certain musics taste wonderful on imbibing, almost to the point of addiction very quickly; but they are actually not very good for you. Some may even contain toxins. Some musics provide a very quick and intense hit, but leave with an empty evacuated feeling, something un-satiated. Other musics may be initially more difficult to digest, although once a 'taste acquired,' something in you responds and acknowledges the nurture thus provided. The initial effort is rewarded. And last but not least whereas some musics may lead you to 'find yourself,' others very definitely are created in order for you to lose yourself. Just saying, nothing serious now. Early on a Saturday morning…..

Berlin 2020

The Conga Dream

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 12:59:21 CEST

I have been having issues with my right hand.

It was a dusty wooden storage room, recently unlocked. Summer’s end. I retrieved the Conga from the far corner where I’d left it in the Spring, and noted, barely surprised, that the head was split. It’s always a risk, leaving instruments in storage in relatively public spaces like studios or backstages, however securely supervised they seem to be. Sometimes one can rely on the Insurance to pay up, other times, well, you are on your own. In this case it would be, what, 40 Euro to repair, or I could attempt it myself. I squinted at the rim, and decided that knowing my own levels of mechanical (in)competence I’d be better off having a professional do it. A secondary but important factor was the question: had the drum warped. The summer had been ferociously hot and that room must have broiled. One could still feel the heat in the splintered pillars and dusty floor a month after the heatwave. This, and not vandalism was the source of the damage. The drum needed careful handling by a profi. Which, whom, where though?

I mused a couple of possibilities but then realised, of course, Olly. The guy I had bought it from. The guy who made his living healing and refurbishing old Congas and Djembes in his flat by Teltow. He’d do it well, with love and care, and could use the business in his one man operation. He’s a family to feed.

I got round to Olly’s yard and it was bigger than before, busier, bustling even. Professional yes, but with a new business feeling of edge. Who were these people, where was Olly? Oh he’ll be back soon, just wait. Well can I leave this Conga for him, he will know it. No no, one of our other guys can take it, but no, I wasn’t happy with that. I wanted Olly to look at it. Eventually he arrived, a little harassed, greeted me and then asked if I could wait for a few minutes.

What else could I do? I needed the Conga.

But at a certain moment, I realised, that it was okay not to have the Conga for a while, even play on the dry slappy dappy ping of the Bongo skin instead - it was all acceptable. I left the Conga, knowing I’d be back for it, it was well taken care of, and woke to play the Bongos.

And indeed, my intact Conga.

Berlin

August 2019

Cedric-brief return

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 18:33:54 CEST

I ran into Cedric again, this time doing a ‘percussion’ overdub on a keyboard at Falconer's; still with that feel and instinct he carves his own path. Blissfully funky, lost in a rapture and rap with himself; in the mid-stream of music as it flows through and around him his fingers dance on the instrument, with a multitude of sampled percussion sounds his fingers add the missing parts. The music becomes whole. I want to kiss him in his beauty. His skin, a luminescent coal, shines in the harsh and naked bulb light of Falconer’s second and cheaper studio; animated and liquid he glides through the keys.

We hugged and made respectful and reproachful noises at each other.

“Sounds great... ...where have you been all these years.. ...what are you working on now?’

He smiled and laughed and danced a little as his drums played back, and told me nothing of the time that had passed, but I knew that sometimes it had been less than kind; and I found the resilience hard to swallow.

‘You really don’t feel it do you; the pain of losing?’ I wanted to ask, disbelieving.

You don’t show it, I think, but I wonder what goes on in those silent moments, when alone in your room you listen to a final disc and then file it away in its sleeve. As you turn away you see once again that your recordings languish in a separate box, awaiting addresses to which you can send them. Your rejection slips are there too, carefully piled in anticipation of the day when you will be able to exhume them and laugh, saying ‘but I was so low then, look at me now’... ...but tonight that moment is yet to come. Now they stare accusingly, an indictment of all you haven’t done, the measure of everything you are not. You are not wanted, they say: invalid, irrelevant, out of time, out of touch, baby. I too know that moment, and cannot believe that when you arrive there, it treats you any differently.

Why should it? I believe the gulf of loneliness opens for you too, with the knowledge that your beautiful work is still not for the belonging in this world. You are alone with it. But then again, you are so imbued with the spirit of a music that you know is ‘true’, and as you showed me so often in the long ago youth-man past, bitterness is not your creed. You know your hand should have been better, ‘but in this world you cannot choose these things’ you tell me. Wait though: Your next project you say? I should just wait and see? Ah, you crack; this last boast reveals your desperation and sadness, your are human after all; only an angel can submit a healthy heart to the blade, then continue on unwounded.

I used to fantasise that you would change your name, meet a well known DJ walking on Clapham Common and become a star, but not no more….

NYC 1996

Kennington (part 1)

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 14:40:49 CEST

The light rises, expands, and envelops, a synaesthetic moment sent from Africa. It sings, and takes rest in my soul. It steams from the speakers and becomes the room, and the room now becomes music, and the music is Africa, and Africa is everywhere and anywhere, and sings from the very first time that humanity sang, but it also sings with the voice of now, and the voice of Islam, and the voice of African soil, where humanity first became more than mere sentience. But the sound is digital stereo designed in Tokyo, and the album recorded in Paris, the middle of Europe, the gateway of ‘new’ Africa.

This room is mine, and it is in Kennington. I have found my way back. Inexorably, home has called, and with a slow, dragging step, I have returned. In the beginning I resisted: first staying in Notting Hill, and then Camden, in a squat originally ‘found’ by Finn, before his name came up on the Council House waiting list (marriage and a child, combined with years of semi-legal residence in the borough did the trick). There I was within earshot of the dawn-chorus at London Zoo, the roof leaked rain-water onto my sleeping bag, and the junkie who occupied the room below always looked likely to steal my clothes. The situation was definitely temporary.

Camden Town Tube station contained the Northern Line that dropped towards South London. Within it, destination boards winked and explained that the next train to Kennington left in one minute. Hesitantly, I went to visit friends who had recently moved there. They were not South Londoners by birth or even upbringing; they had migrated from Kent. I knew them from Berlin days, and at one point they had even followed me to New York for a few weeks. A room was available in their shared flat, and to my simultaneous relief and horror, they offered it to me. Cheap, close to the Centre, and near the tube station. Gratefully, nervously, I accepted. South London had reclaimed its own.

In many ways everything was as I remembered it. Behind our house was the ubiquitous Council estate, in fact one of many in which former school-friends, acquaintances and enemies had lived. I looked out for them as I walked down the Walworth Road, and through East Lane market, on a nostalgic, abhorrent, yet compelling walk. Here was the Aylesbury estate, a scene of endless throbbing threat, parties, sadness, desperation, disturbance, circumscription, stoicism. This grey and featureless complex had once been touted as an architectural showpiece city within a city. I’d worked here as a ‘music-worker-teacher-leader’ in ‘units’ that ‘treated’ criminal adolescents. You’ve been a naughty boy and next time we’ll put you away. This time you get to go to special school featuring smaller classes and specialists. Maybe they will sort you out. I walked past a place where I’d performed ten years earlier. I saw no-one I knew, everyone had moved away, or (hopefully) been imprisoned after their criminal tendencies had back-fired. What they get you on in the end, son? Grievous Bodily Harm? Taking and Driving Away?

South London; I don’t have a lot of love for you do I? Just a bitter pride because I’ve survived you. A question mark as to whether I want to know you again. This road we live on could be called beautiful: a terrace, small trees, hedgerows, roses. In the mid-morning mist of eleven ‘o’ clock a milkman walks from door to door, three pints here, two and a pot of cream there, slowly ambling in the direction of a verdant park, but it was only last night on the same pavement that I saw a man about my own age, swinging a golf club above his head screaming obscene threats as he ran after another. The pristine windows stared on, silent and unblinking. No light flashed on, no curtain stirred to reveal an indignant face to witness the scene. I passed quickly, taking another route to the corner shop that is fortified by dirty steel shutters and bullet-proof plexiglass, and the shouts receded behind.

However, life has been good lately. I’ve been working and playing a lot. I’ve regularly taken my bike across to to the Centre and home again, as days have been warm, nights cool and kind. When I’ve needed them the tube-trains have come and moved me to Camden, to Notting Hill, to Covent Garden, at speed. The streets on which I have exited are broad, and people have walked with the spring and arrogance that only London bequeaths. So I have walked that way too and remembered what it is I take with me everywhere I go: an insouciance and surety of touch that comes with being a denizen at the centre of the pop universe. London on a sunny day. Fuck you world, you can’t touch me. I am one of these, at one with this, I belong here, I make this place rock, I make it move, without me it’s poorer. The city has charm and I do too, with this inheritance I go anywhere and do anything...

Even as I scuttle nervously into my front-door, and slam the locks back in place, I still feel this, and take the glow into my rooms.

I get comfortable, and start to think. Thoughts have lives of their own, and when you are out your inner ones subside from your conscious mind. Getting out can be a way of vanquishing unimportant, but nagging thoughts. Important ones keep going though, quietly within, autonomous and lively. Sometimes when you return you find they’ve moved on, developed with no assistance from yourself. I think that’s why some people spend an inordinate amount of time out; they don’t like their thoughts. But I like mine, so I like getting home to them.

Besides, I’ve found new music, or rather, rediscovered things in music, and through it the potential of my music-making; and although it’s most definitely not London that created this sound (but arguably the London pop world has been part of it’s advent), it is here that I have found it. London, you bring me hope again, albeit in the creations and dreams of far-off places....

(To be Continued)

NYC 1998

House

Sat, 8 Aug 2020 16:36:38 CEST

As we talked outside, I watched the snow turning a trace of blue in the moonlight on the rooftops opposite. Eventually it was the freezing weather that drove us, past the thick curtain and the coat-check girls, until in the warmth of the main dance-floor I heard, or rather, truly felt House for the first time.

And a sound that gave permission to dissolve form in a way that hadn’t been granted in pop since the days of Jimi Hendrix or Can.

It was the beat that initially pulled you, a subtle skip that was the evolvement beyond Disco, an African element, Swing, something you just floated on, and it just kept going, and you could do anything over the top of it, and people were, or so it seemed for a moment. All those records: stirring, anthemic, ecstatic, endlessly optimistic and full of fierce determination. The singers sang with a new social and political awareness; the world shall be a better place! Ce Ce Rogers, Marshall Jefferson, Stirling Void were the names on these discs, and they were a thrilling combination of played and computer generated music, of equal intensity to the early Rap records; a poised balance of technology and human action.

I flew back to London full of ideas and enthusiasm, and set about making my own version.

Whenever the opportunity arose I collated the riffs and sequences that best fit the sound I had in my head. When ready I would wend up to my friend Reynard Falconers’s studios, and the ideas would transfer to the computer, and to tape. Luckily, I had a sympathetic engineer. Andy Falconer was willing to work long and energetic hours before breaking to the old working men's café where we would consume vast quantities of beans, eggs, toast, before staggering back for more work, or when exhausted beyond all repair, towards home to sleep the day away. The sound took shape, a peculiar hybrid, stamped with my particulars: a thick voiced straining white vocal, a springy stomp for rhythm, quietly chinking and riffing guitars. It was not House, it never would be, it was something uniquely different, pop, lush, epic, ethnic, diffuse, difficult. I wanted to take the integrity of the early House sound and make pop music of it.

I returned to New York, and sought a label or producer, walking the downtown streets. After evening sleep, exhausted from playing dance classes, or attending meetings, I would head out, to the circus. Here, in the halls and caves of Manhattan, I would dance for hours, alone or with friend, following the route from club to café to after hours club, seeing the right people, and sometimes being seen. I would slouch around DJ booths, and watch the coming and going, the handshakes, the hugs, the kisses. Promises and intents were proclaimed across the din, or whispered intimately, sex, money, deals. Here I met F, producer and DJ, and he agreed to take on my project.

Word of this got around the scene that congregates around F and for a while I was granted a kind of ‘guest’ status, so I too kissed and hugged and shook hands. I was perceived (I perceived myself) as a potential Sting or Bono type figure, within the House framework, and as such an important personage. Bridges were being built too. I fancied myself as something of an ambassador for the developing ‘rave’ culture. When back in England I would take the reverse path and tell stories of New York club life whilst frequenting the growing scene in London. Already though, the shadows were lengthening on the ‘innocent’ days of the scene. There was money to be made.

In the studio carefully laid creations of earlier sessions were wiped off the tape, leaving space for F to do his thing. It was painful, this dismemberment of the result of some months projection of emotion and self-hood into instruments and microphones. Where once I was active and authoritative I became passive. The single that was to be my ambassador evolved into someone else’s creation. Still, it was for the greater good I reasoned, a better ‘product,’ and bank balance. As I was paying the bills.

Some of the work was good, some wasn’t. He changed the bass sound, and rewrote the drums yet somehow took away the individual character of the tune, leaving the record in a much less distinctive place.

The relationship slowly unraveled.

He would ask me to stop in at his studio apartment in the East Village, before heading to the club he was playing that night. I would sit in his small living room, and eventually he would appear with a sweet smile and a svelte, black dressing-gown, saying something like, ‘Great shirt,’, whilst caressing my shoulder. Shifting uneasily, I would steer the conversation away from my appearance, toward our project. Frowning, he would move away, saying something like, “I’ve got lots of ideas for that, a whole new direction”. I would feel like I had just failed a test. I admired him, and the whole milieu that he was a part of, but had no wish to consummate my involvement. If my music wasn’t going to ‘make it’ on its own recognisance so be it.

Drained by travel, studio costs, and the lack of any real income while I concentrated on transatlantic gallivanting and creativity, I lost the initiative. The moment passed and the project died half-realised, with little prospect of resuscitation. The music industry continued on, without my collaboration with F. We still say hello and hug effusively in the local supermarket when we meet. Even star DJ’s have to stock the fridge.

Back in London... ...and making that House music... ...ker, boom boom boom, chicker boom, I’ll house you, yeh!, I’ll house you, yeh!, aaaaoooooh, yeh boom booom booom, sssssssssssssssssssssschk, chk, chk, chk, unnchikka, unnchik, unnchik, BOOM! boom, boom,

at ‘High on Hope’ (how that jacket came back to visit again), the club in Camden by the lock, the one that used to be Dingwalls, where Finn played so often in the early eighties, and now tonight, Black-Market Frankly is dee-jaying,
yeh he can mix, and Norman Jay has all those records man, it don’t matter if he can mix or no, cos he got them Sounds, know what I mean,
and there’s Ray all stringy pale dancing his spastic joy under the groove, and we’re talking talking talking, because we’re gonna make records and stuff innit,

that’ll really work because we know why we’re here and we’re not faking no not this time,
and didja meet Devonne? she’s over from New York, singer? no, just dancing, clubbing, and look at this energy cos there’s nothing like this in New York now, except maybe at those parties in Brooklyn we used to go to, now it’s tired there, man, but... yeh, yo Tony! easy now, you goin’ down Choice on Monday?
I, can’t think that far ahead, but tomorrow I’ll be down Brixton so I’ll go the Fridge....

The dee-jay worked under a huge tapestry hanging, that proclaimed 'Temple: One Love.' The booth was a small praesidium, surrounded by a low wall, in which were placed the turntables, tape recorders and all important mix consoles from which the evening's entertainment was manifested. I pushed through the crowd. A dry ice machine started to discharge plumes of white smoke into the already opaque atmosphere. The dee-jay segued effortlessly, from a dreamily pulsating record, into a more up front number, propelled by a Black man's voice:

'Some day we got to rise, Got to get wise, Got to prise a better way, It must happen, and today, Before the world just fades away...'

At first it seemed too general to have any potency, but the lyric took on an immense energy when framed within the emergency of the voice, and the elegant scaffold of the percussion and bass. The crowd on the dance floor seemed to think so too, judging by the frenzy that the music was lifting out of them. I felt a wave of excitement pass through my body, as if imbibing the energy by osmosis.

A dark, rumbling bass spread itself over the people dancing, oozing into every corner of the room. The sound cut to a girl's scream, one of ecstasy, not panic, then back to the darkness, only now her song was sliding over the top, in breathless, truncated, phrases.

The crowd liked it. Some directed their approval towards the booth, with gestures or hand claps. With fanatical concentration others drove themselves to bigger, faster, more complex dance steps. One boy, his face exhibiting a sublime peace, was somehow moving his torso in what looked like a thousand gyrating segments. Others were doing a strangely awkward, almost robotic dance, their arms flailing the air like animated scarecrows.

The piece on the turntable was coming to an end. The dee-jay cued another. The new record pushed its rude rhythm into the crowd.

The best moments in Dance Music are the wildly appropriate non-sequiturs, mixed into all the unexpectedly right places. Organised anarchy.

Ah, House, you crept into me, immobilising so much of my taste for anything else, your insidious rhythm, your pulse in my blood, your textures floating like Buddha’s clouds, ‘close your eyes, close, dream, let the bass lift...,’ the moan of your singers, all sweet despair echoed through a distorted prism, voices raised in sonic architecture of impossible dimensions, immured in citadels of hi hat, razed by samples barely pinned into shape by your one hundred and twenty beats per minute. Even when you became too much, and I ran to Holland to escape you, needing the quiet of the polder lands, I slipped out to a club, and a couple of record shops...

House seduces: narrative is maintained, but it’s the skippy framework of a journey into itself, as one seamless texture segues into another, the voices disembodied, the perspective disoriented; it’s the narrative of Kundera or Garcia-Marquez, a limpid examination of a theme from all possible angles. From the get go it was about destroying ‘ Form’ in the traditional sense beloved of New-Wave and post-Punk orthodoxy. The tyranny of the three minute song structure. Blown away at last, and along came whole new revelations of textural landscape. Soul met Psychedelic Rock met Electronic Collage. In a mainstream form. Even when personality reared its head (House Divas and the like), the imperative of the Dance Floor kicked back in a roar of groove.

“A ‘funky beat’ over which one can put anything:”

Those moments when hands raised, a strange unity would infect the crowd, and many would fuse into one, with the universe present in the single dancer’s footstep. As quickly as it came the moment would leave, and dissipate into the oceanic dance floor. It’s like walking up Ladbroke Grove during the Notting Hill Carnival, when there’s a sudden humbling of self before the on-rushing common purpose, an involuntary communality that sweeps all before it. This is the stuff of fascist rallies, as well as churches. A crowd, in abandonment, is dangerous; who or what is driving it? There is catharsis here, but if much of the pop/rock-music culture of this century, has been about a drive towards individuation, freedom, and self-expression, then what are these moments about?

NYC 1997

Anita Baker:

Sat, 8 Aug 2020 14:45:06 CEST

Baby, I believe in this honey brown love you spread on the world, still. I believed ever since I first wrote about you, on the plane (you know how it is when you are suspended between worlds, momentarily lightened of the loads of national and cultural modality), a place where I had clarity of distance. In some strange epiphany, I wrote that you could sing everything, that you could sing the dog shit in the gutter, and the sound would be that of all the Blues in the world, the sound of all the people who ever journeyed from Goreé to Georgia to Chicago and back, the sound of a Blues in a battered white mansion in London. In other words, anything you sang would become beauty, and I would shiver. Ever since then I have been drunk on you. You taught me solace, that is, how Soul music is solace. How Soul is healing music, and how even in these crazy diffused (dissipated?) and corporate marketing product driven days, something still comes through a voice like yours. What else can I say? I was there, you were too, and it was a difficult moment made easy, over and over. Like when I finally got to hear ‘Giving you the best I got’ on a rainy night in London, and I played it again and again, rocking in the arm of your voice that seems to extend out and on and around every moment. Sometimes it’s so difficult to know that you can only epitomise a moment, however long it may last, before the world reasserts itself as sovereign in my life. Why can’t I live in your voice forever?

NYC 1996

Return of the Mack 1996

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:13:23 CEST

He swings back into London, all svelte leather and success; he has his white label pre-release 12” for all his youth to hear.

Yet she has moved on...

I can smell those dank under the railway arches where we used to dance...

He chews on his words in the time honoured soul singer fashion over silly infectious poppy groove and ‘urban’ scratching, ‘jazzy’ piano and guitars, and oh, studio trickery: processed vocals drape like a candy floss pad through the whole piece...

This is pop construction and I am caught on the seventh floor again, in a slew of memories, both of situations like that implied (that I choose to infer), and of days and nights making (this is the right word for the piecing together of samples and loops and bass playing and piano groove) throw-away music like this. Music that makes me want to return to the dance-floor, to the everlasting night of sweat and sound, pressed close to warm bodies, maybe alone, maybe with a special friend, maybe,

‘You lied to me...,’ intones the singer.

’It’s too much like Bobby Brown,’ I can hear Jenny snort derisively, from thousands of miles away.

‘You used to like Bobby Brown!’

‘Me? Never! And this record is foolish!’.

She’s right of course, yet it encapsulates so much. From sexual sub-text, love and ambition, to images of the Diaspora (this constant shuttle between continents), from days in South London to nights in clubs everywhere, to questions about just what might inspire love after all, for even with all the ‘success’ he’s brought to town, she in the video doesn’t respond. So it’s both the fantasy: the boast, the cars, the gold, the Concorde, and the caveat: in the last scene on the one way system, the cars stream out and away from London, away from her....

link Video - Return of the Mack 1996

Sumizu in Tokyo

Sat, 18 Jul 2020 00:33:38 CEST

Tokyo - 1992

It was in Tokyo that I first discovered the virtues of the Smiths, in the car of my friend Chio. As we left the hotel on Meiji Dorii she pressed ‘play’ on the cassette deck. I gazed out of the window at the steaming streets and pretty people walking slowly by. We were heading for ‘her’ park (Harumi), along the inevitably jammed streets; past the moated and reclusive Imperial palace; through the seductive elegance of the Ginza, and the endlessly simonised megalopolis, all viewed from the cool of our car interior. Then on, through industry and harbours, to a small refuge of green facing the water. As she drove she played me The Smiths, but a tune I didn’t recognise. The only other time I had heard them was in London, again driving, this time the Old Kent Road, the docklands district of Bermondsey coursing away to my left. There the music had seemed unrelentingly grey, like the sky that lowered itself onto the squat and hundred year old sooted buildings. In the chromium heat of a Tokyo summer it slowly began to appeal. The sound rolled around the car. I leaned back and day dreamed, secure with my friend, comfortable for a moment.

“Who’s this?”

“ Sumizu”

“ What?”

“ You know--they’re from your country--Sumizu”

The singer pleaded his story as the guitar screamed and shook its circular way around and back again; carrying a load of rainy and sorrowful songs set in a peculiar ad-mixture of sixties pop, seventies glam-rock and Irish folk tradition. Lyrical guitar lines and melismatic vocalising, intertwined with a poignantly layered dissonance.

Then I got it.

“The Smiths!”

Once back in New York, after the painful and final goodbyes and futile promises that we would meet again, soon, I procured copies of The Smith’s music for myself. Living on Saint Marks Place, that counter cultural strip of a market place at the entrance to the East Village, made it easy. Down the stairs from my apartment and into the record store in the adjoining building, to have a chat with Mike, who worked the afternoons and was an ardent fan of all the new underground bands; who had introduced me to quite a few things over time.

A funny thing about New York is the kind of isolation that one can get into when living there, a parochial feeling that the world begins and ends at the border of Manhattan. During the eighties I got caught by this too. Unlike London or Tokyo, where the media positively bombard one with the doings of everywhere else the world, in New York you really have to work at finding out about anything. It’s only too easy to get lazy, to sink into the morass of one’s own activities, problems, and pleasures. Hence my late arrival at the table of The Smiths....

Except for that moment on the Old Kent road I have never heard the band in England and wonder if in some way it would change my feeling about their music if I was to do so. When I listen to them I am engaged with the part that looks back with an edgy and wary nostalgia to times that were--and are--gladly left behind. I suspect that if I went back to the reality underlying those memories, the band's commentary would prove too sour, too close an evocation of reality.

So it’s not surprising that somehow I was available to the sound in Tokyo in a way that I hadn’t been in New York or London, because Tokyo is pop culture play land, and for me, the visiting artist, the honoured guest, it is definitely removed from the exigency of ‘real’ life. In a hotel room in the late eighties I watched television ‘punks’, dressed as perfect replicas of their seventies London brethren flail through the motions and attitudes of despair and anger; in the early nineties it was designer Rappers and Rastas posing in Harajuku and Shibuya, and the groomed population buying CD’s from all over the world in Wave, the beautiful multi-story music store in Roppongi. In many ways Japan represented a sanitised and safe version of England for me, and in some ways this country is far more similar to England than say, the United States or Germany are. Chio concurred. After studying mime in England she traveled to New York to dance, as she felt that she had ‘never left home’ in England. Too many similarities. Gleefully we sat down and enumerated, and eventually came up with this:

‘Japan and Britain are islands,

Traditionally vigilant of predatory continental empires yet not successfully invaded subjugated or dominated for many hundreds of years at a time.

There is a love of green and much piety on the question of gardens in these most urbanised of lands, whose soils, although fertile and water washed, require tillage and toil; being loathe to give up their gifts.

There is love of gadgets too.

Our crooked teeth get locked around sweet foods rather more often than is good for them.

And telephone cards (prepaid and slid through the phone-box itself) are quite the norm.

Left side driving and expensive taxis monopolise the late night city transit of sodden passengers at the appointed hour (there are regimented times for debauchery). Not here the slow and steady round the clock consumption of alcohol that is possible in say, Berlin, but instead an evening rush to pubs and bars, that only adumbrates the second rush of the night: the stagger for the last train.

Fads, fashion, and the conspicuous consumption of information (an overflow of disposable ideas disappearing into the vortex of the next day’s intellectual shopping list) dominate as trains run everywhere through swathes of green banked cuttings over shingled sleepers and revetment buildings.

Traditionally eldest sons inherit family holdings, that is the law of primogeniture.

So that the the youngest shall go forth in adventure and rejoice in sad songs as they sup beer....’

One redolent evening, as the night closed off another humid day she came to the realisation that this time she had returned to stay. On the railway station platform near Yoyogi park she hugged me (an unusually demonstrative action for a Japanese woman in a public setting), for no apparent reason, except nostalgia, fear, and the knowledge of the end. As yet she could not see that this too, was a beginning. We sat in the dark, and cried in secret, and as we did so, she handselled her old life onto my shoulders. Slowly her grip on me, the last connection to that existence, slackened. Once I was gone she wrote for a while, told me of her work, her creative ventures, her boyfriend. Soon however, the letters stopped, and she disappeared completely, lost in the ever running engine of Tokyo. I had been a last link to another life, another hope, another place of being. I mourned the loss, as I receded back into New York existence.

The comfort of the Smiths for her was the comfort of me, or rather that which I had represented: another life, beyond the constraints of Japan; wandering in strange lands, playing with the freedom of not belonging, of transience, of procrastinating the final return. For me this comfort began with nostalgia for Tokyo and the moments I had known there. Inevitably though the sound of British working class ennui and the rain sweeping the ‘humdrum towns’ of England, began to engage a more recondite place within me; that which is still adolescent. For a long time I took a guilty, sneaky pleasure in a music that seemed at times snidey, full of sneers and resentment, with an ill-will that evoked the same in my heart. A visit with the Smiths, or Morrissey in his solo incarnation is still a visit with dark corners. There is a curious strength in it though, to identify with a peculiarly British experience that leaves one defiant, bouncy even, able to take on the world, or the street at least, from any angle. It’s a very material force in a way: the same kind of buzz that you get from having new boots and a designer jacket, and just the right weapon to cradle in the pocket.

And then there’s this fascination with those who are ‘physically capable’, the uneasy voice of one born to the street, who sensibly left it behind, who never partook in those values yet has the nagging doubt that perhaps that only thing that ever mattered was this: the ability to handle oneself in a fight.

The thick brown voice of Manchester: those panting nondescript inner-cities, suburbs and council estates, Gateshead, Dulwich, Redland, Bermondsey, all those schools running out of hopes, all hopes long ruined. ...and if there was any point in my going to school, that school. was there anything good there? That I couldn’t have gotten anywhere without that hideous...? Still embedded like an axe in my chest for ever, school, that school, those estates, those children... ...those guitar intervals, dissonant ninths and clustered harmonics, sing of those places, places, places.... ...as surely as that Crystal Palace Football Club shirt (I have hidden in my cupboard) is a reminder of times best forgotten.

The Smiths seem to go well with beer. It’s all that maudlin self pity, if you let it wash up inside. Listen to the accent on the word ‘inside’ in the song ‘Unlovable’ as Morrissey struggles with his place in the world. He’s very good at translating this struggle for the rest of us. So when we go there we recognise it instantly.

B Tribe: Suave (1995)

Thu, 9 Jul 2020 22:45:47 CEST

I awake to the melody of gulls circling the beaches that overlook the Southern sea, swathed in the warm wind that gusts at the olive green and spiked vegetation. The wind is chording, harmonising it’s own tunes, or so I believe for a moment, but then I realise other work is coming through, that of people, their stringed instrument sounds lazily meld with the surf and cricket-loud sand; following a rasgueado strum. Shimmering in the heat the gypsy girl is the first to walk over the dunes, in jewelled sandals picking her way carefully, and she sings as she does so. She passes close, so close that I can see the moisture on her midriff and observe the texture in the embroidery of her blouse, and moved from within I extend my hand, but she passes on, through me, or I through her, I am not sure which it is. As she passes I join the chorus of her song, and it seems as if she hears this, for a frown pauses momentarily on her face, and her voice cracks, with a muttered aside. Then, from my vantage point above the waves I see the the gypsy guitarists; now I understand that rasgueado, sensual they sing too, over slowed beats ‘celli glower, and shakers held in brown hands glisten with wet sand. I would stir to join the throng, sing even, but cannot, logged with feeling I can only be still and watch, listen. At one point the harmony lifts me involuntarily to a sitting position, but even that returns to its point of origin; and I with it, fade to the ground, helpless once more. So it is, the song and the sand, until the dancers come, and at last I too can move, turning at first slow, almost like tableaux vivant, minor to major mode and back again, but then they move off in procession, and I stumble behind, following on their last footprints. I travel, as does everything else under that spell, up through the ancient and parched country to an Arabic citadel, and through the portcullised arch of the city wall to the courtyards within. Sun baked and basking, in this city something of the quiet of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan still resides, although the Ummah has long ago left. Now a male voice rises, claims all griefs to be his own, shouldering the year that has passed, and the girl dances in the dusty streets with him. As the truncated and austere beats continue, the singers fall silent, a dub breakdown in hiatus of another beginning.

At last, the rasgueado salute, at the start of another journey and the multitude of the town pour from their houses to play to the parched plains and, look! now the fields bear flowers; the gypsy song has rung in the season, as the guitarists circling cast sound to every horizon, like seed....

The light of the soul is the light of life and that light is love....

...so she says, suddenly standing in front of me.

I feel you,

she says.

Me?

I answer,

who so calmly sneak behind?

She is insouciant, and skips ahead ,

and teases,

oh yes,

I feel you,

and laughs, and works, all in one gesture as she sings the land free.

Once the southern sun descends, fire extinguished by the far off horizon she returns to town, her task done for the day. In the window boxes of the street are new flowers from the fecund fields, around the corners and alleyways the gypsies play on, but she is silent now, listening to their ancient melody; she dances away, smiling, and disappears into her house,

Through the ornate grill work on the window frame I can see her, she hums softly to a small child cradled in her arms, but this is for me too, I who perch and rest on a stone bank, who would cry if I could, because here in this village I have seen reason to hope, because here people live for each other it seems, just a little...

as night falls she takes a small bird in her hand, and hears the drummers marching away down the street the gypsies play guitar by a campfire

when they converge the bird

will fly again... she holds her hands up, and the moonlight glistens on her suddenly revealed bracelets as the sleeves fall back and the bird rises, the flutter of wings and the whirl of guitar strum all coursing on the wind beneath the stars

you’ll be back next year, she tells me, and the village recedes away, the moon looms larger and the clouds scud over the bright ocean. I wheel back towards the mountain horizon where I must be as she sings again her blessing, and her spell, and I know I will return....

Jenny Takes Me Down

Fri, 3 Jul 2020 22:43:50 CEST

Jenny takes me down, first the Tube then the streaked and dirty streets, back to her house stopping only to pull in at the all night garage to buy milk, and survey the ragga youth hanging by the boom box, and the cars swirling in and out, the furry-dice bobbing in the windows. The ‘lads’ are buying the petrol and the ‘birds’ are dolling up in the mirror, in a haze of back-seat bass they speed away, down the High street, towards the South Circular, and the road to the rave.

I shudder, I really don’t like being here, in this part of town, not at this time, but she just shrugs it off. ‘Saturday night innit,’ she prompts, and taking my hand leads me up the silent hedge-rowed side streets, skipping in and out of the rain speckled parked cars, picking flowers from one well tended garden, pausing only to pull close as we pass under the railway bridge, to push a sudden and ferocious kiss on my mouth. Walking on, silent and solemn, signing a conspiratorial ‘ssssh’ with one elegant finger, she inserts a key in the lock of her front door and we climb, shoeless, to the back bedroom.

And then, in the solace of her bed, amidst the sounds of her records, I realise that part of me will never leave South London. I too can disappear into this anonymity; the endless roads and terraces, the slew of late buses and canceled trains, and the furtive, slimy, back street public house crime. I am home, because, spinning in her arms, translucent, swapping stories of here and there and everywhere we’ve been and are going, I look up, and brown eyes meet mine and I know she knows, because we’ve thrilled to the same and raged at the same, felt the same slow ivy crawling awareness, that there could be more. Growing in separate beds, in separate genders and colours, we’ve sprouted the same wings. Only now she is comfortable, she says, anywhere and everywhere, whereas I, in my obscure discomfort, am utterly opposite, and consequently, one morning, some morning, she brings me to the airport, and we speak of time passing and phone calls and letters, and hug, and smell on each other the sex of that morning, and then I am gone--another loss? another betrayal?

But when I return --perhaps ready to embrace her-- she tells me that she too has found that to stop is to sink; to sink too deep into the sticky clay of London’s foundation. She too would fly..

How I Got Started

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:26:41 CEST

How I Got Started in (Contemporary) Dance Accompaniment

There I was, a young guitarist wannabe feeling a bit miserable and moribund in South London having tried a few different paths and none fit. I'd heard about dance and movement though and brought me one evening to Goldsmiths Laban Centre and took a class, that turned out to be intermediate Cunningham which of course I could do none of, though I did meet Merce years later and he said my lack of balance would have made me a good dancer always on the edge, though we were being jocular as I escorted him through his studio out of class.

At the side though, in this class, at the grand piano, dark eyes grinning at my dance ineptitude, sat a musician improvising as the class went along….

I could do that!

Somehow, after a phone call, a visit, some boasting I too was sat in that chair, clutching my guitar and crackling treble laden amplifier, and found myself…..

lost…….

listening to counts that I now know were bar measures and phrase lengths in a Graham class, the very scaffold I needed to adorn with music….

that then served only to heighten my tension and invert my flow.

I lasted a while, days, weeks even, but deduced I was not to be asked back. Because of the sound of my instrument mind, quoth they, not what I was playing. Hmmm. Dejected that last day I rode the Southern Region train home again, dragging the offending guitar and amp with me.

During this period I had inherited a piano and had let the information drop that I had done so, and could even play it for the good souls at Laban if ever asked. A lie, or at least huge exaggeration, and a bluff I was sure would never be called.

Weeks, months perhaps, passed, and I laboured on at life, with a great wonderment about the future, not getting very far or prosperous. I was feeling pretty desperate, as I really didn't - don't - cope so well with much 'normal', activity.

At a stretch then, I called the Laban again, to see if they would give me any work. Well, yes, was the retort, but we don't want you to bring that instrument back. We want you to play the piano, as you say you can.

Start in September.

It was July.

I looked at my piano and it sat unresponsive in front of me, like the barely touched book of jazz piano technique sitting on the music stand. There was however, some understanding of how harmony works in my head, such as guitars players have.

How do you get the lead guitarist to turn down? Put a chart in front of him/her!

I set to work to try and transfer some of that vocabulary (from both my head and the jazz piano book) into music on the keyboard.

I decided that I needed some distinctive motifs or chord progressions in various keys, and indeed modes. Surely in ten weeks I could pull enough together.

A few weeks later, as I was beginning to feel that I might have enough to survive one day in the far future playing there, the phone rang again.

“Can you come in earlier?” queried the voice at the other end. We have audition classes and no player. Yes, this week…..

I did not want to risk losing the opportunity and had no idea how to say no at that point.

Good then, you will play piano this week. Studio One, at ten.

Amazingly I had just enough vocabulary to bang out an "improvisation" for each exercise… here my vaguely celtic sounding thing in Mixolydian F, there my C minor bluesy thing, something in E minor maybe a bit Phrygian or Spanish sounding, and so forth. I struggled through, amazed at my survival, perhaps feeling a smidgen of slow growing confidence until the teacher called a Hemiola. There was no way I could convincingly bash out that, and make harmonic sense. She carried on unaware of any of my sweaty disturbance in the corner and counted off. In a panicy moment of inspiration I started slapping my legs. The rhythm I knew. The fingers just could not imagine interpreting it into notes, let alone music.The teacher turned, startled, but then turned back to the students leaping their way across the floor, cajoling as well as counting herself, in tandem with - me.

There was a break. We spoke a little, teacher and I. That was quite good, and novel to use your legs as a drum. That worked!

Do you know if they have any congas here?

Well yes, we do.

Oh good, 'cos I can play them……

So that was how I got started playing piano and percussion for dance. A few years later, in New York, my piano work got a massive boost. The then artistic director of the Graham Company sent round an edict that we accompanists should only play piano. I'd seen him poke his head in a few days earlier, and had accordingly upped the energy and banged a little harder and floridly in an effort to impress. The "kids", had loved it, but clearly I'd ruffled something (it was me, I was the only percussionist there at that time). At first I was miffed, my creative rights being trod down by the man etc, but then I realised. This was another fabulous opportunity to learn to play or at least improve my piano skills and get paid at the same time…..

Hamid

Sat, 20 Jun 2020 00:26:23 CEST

Notes From Africa

Hamid

I first saw Hamid squatting in a doorway near Broadway in New York. I knew from his long frame and bloodshot eyes, and the dust and stoicism that rested on his back, that he was from the Sahara. I caught his eye, and greeted him in Arabic, ’Salaam Alaleikum’. I had a djembe on my back, which was probably why we connected in the first place, but I was on my way to something, and mistrusted his appearance, despite the welcome in his eyes... his shirt stained, his shoes grey and battered. So I didn’t stop to talk. Later he told me that this was the spot to which he came whenever New York was too uncomfortable, the longing for the desert too strong. Surrounded by a mass of people, that swirled like dust, he could be alone and meditate, commune with the images within, and imagine the Harmattan wind tugging at his clothes.

I next spoke with him at the flower-market, where he was selling djembes and wooden amulets. He was with his American wife and small son. He’d not long ago arrived via Air France, to join the white woman he had met when she holidayed in Dakar. I asked him in French if he was Fula, and he smiled and said yes. We looked at each other, and then I confessed my bad French and he his bad English, and then we talked about music. He then told me he’d recently arrived from the Northern desert, following the rains, and that he’d pitched his tent a block over, and I was welcome to join him for tea.

I followed him along one of the East Village’s less well known blocks, and then I saw it, pitched in a battered garden that had originally been the foundation of a tenement building, a Fula herdsmen’s tent. Opposite which was a wooden hut painted with a Puerto Rican flag, surrounded by tall shrubs and a group of Spanish speaking men playing dominoes and drinking weak beer. I could hear hens clucking. There was a child’s tricycle hanging from the back fence, and a selection of toy cars scattered on the dry earth. The men nodded at Hamid as we passed. We sat on rugs under the front flap, that was pinned back to allow air to circulate the rooms within, and Hamid slowly and carefully brewed up over an open flame. I could hear a faraway jeep revving angrily over the dried-out river bed.

It was I who had recognised him first, at the market, he’d almost forgotten me. Hamid does dress in traditional robes sometimes, and this was one of those times, and his mien was very different, but I still knew him--he has a unique presence. When you first meet him he seems to be nothing special, a little slow, obtuse even. Then you realise, this guy is bright, he speaks eight languages for example: Pular, Manding, Wolof, Berber, Bambara, French, English, German (after some time in Paris he crossed the border and lived in Cologne, driving taxis, selling ice-cream). He grew up in the North, but has lived in Dakar, 'like most people' he says, he can play guitar and sing a bit.

He’s got some stuff to say though, philosophical, and spiritual, if you let him. If you want him to say what’s really on his mind that is. For example, at first sight, you don’t think of him as religious, but then you hear the ‘insallahs’ and ‘hamdillahs’ scattered in his speech, and feel the patience... the sad, slow, patience of the desert, of a man who has walked miles in dry, destructive heat, not knowing if there is water in the miles ahead, and with the understanding that if the well is dry then death has been his faithful companion. Because although there used to be an oasis there, around that fold in the sand and stone, times change. Patience and acceptance are intrinsic to Hamid’s nature, but he was restless enough to get on the plane to Paris, and then return again (he took soccer balls and shirts as gifts for everyone), and once again turn and travel, this time to New York. He’s always searching for the means to feed the people left behind, a small group of herding families, who, even as we speak in the brilliant sunlight of Manhattan, are making evening prayer, a thanks for the deliverance of the day’s end, that is the near miracle of God’s love for His people.

However, Hamid decided that given the ever encroaching desert and shrinking rainy season, there was a limit to the number of miracles he could reasonably expect, so he began his journeys. Another nomad loose in the African Diaspora.

He talked to me about music, speaking very seriously in our new found medium of broken French, English and German, plus a few Arabic interjections and expansive gestures. ‘African musical fantasies made in America or Europe just aren’t confident, like the music we play in Africa’, he said at one point, as we swapped names and CD titles. Confident? Musical fantasies? What was he on about? I think it had something to do with how he felt, so many miles from home, so many miles from a way of life that he might never be able to return to, that would probably not be there when he returned. How could he be the confident one? Yet, for example, dub, he reckoned, ‘...feels so sad. It’s great to swim in, but it doesn’t move. It’s like, you’re marooned, in Jamaica or wherever, not traveling. But I love to listen to it.’

He had tapes from the Blood and Fire catalogue of re-releases, typical ‘seventies reggae like Keith Hudson’s, ‘Pick a Dub’, or ‘The Development of Dub in King Tubby’s’. His wife missed hearing the Senegalese stuff that had brought them together in the first place. But he liked Soul music too, because ‘When you listen to old Stevie Wonder or Soul ll Soul, you hear it going somewhere. It’s like it’s sure it belongs where it is, in Britain, in America or France, in the here and now, so it can go somewhere. It’s a modern sound. Like our stuff, it really moves.’

Hamid is really puffed up now, pleased with his point, and I am not sure if it’s confidence or arrogance that drives him. It’s a familiar attitude, this cocksure bearing and didactic tone. I seen it before. In Jamaicans at school, in Salif Keita when he speaks, in Latino Conga drummers, in Jah Wobble’s music. I appreciate it. It’s alright, seems ok, has a place. Sometimes though, it’s not unlike the smug attitude that upper-class Englishmen or Dutch exhibit--‘knowing’ that their cultural values are coveted by the whole world. So I am not sure, with Hamid, where it comes from, or whether I fully believe it, or his words. He is trying to make his way in the world after all, one Senegalese migrant amongst many. He just grins, and drinks tea, suddenly inscrutable.

‘ Thing is my brother, music and dance being associated with sin these days, black people are associated with sin in the white world. You push on us all your sins as well as our own! Not only do you remember the way you discovered we existed, and brought us into your world, which is an endless guilt for you, but now, as well as that, your perception of black music is that it’s nothing but a party party sound. You don’t take us serious. Add to that, too many of you completely lost touch with your own dance and music. So you take our music instead, as a kind of soundtrack to drug and drink to, as you sneak around to get a' (he pauses) 'travesty of dance and music and community up....’

‘Sin?’

Hamid laughs, and slips my question with a statement. ‘With us, we’re so down that we can only go up, economically speaking. So we always have hope.’

After a long pause and a refill of cups he relented.

‘It’s just that when you dance here, in the West it’s for pleasure--and pleasure only. Not that dancing shouldn’t be pleasurable, it is, but in fact it’s so often you who say that pleasure shouldn’t be pleasurable, that pleasure is somehow wrong. So you never dance without feeling illicit in some way. So you turn to something black, something other, to answer that part of yourself, because you lost touch with how to do it yourselves, because you repress it so long. But when we dance, we don’t just do it for pleasure. We dance for life. Because for us all this performance means a lot more. So if you like our pleasure is directly harnessed to the cohesion of our community....’

‘You mean like in Jamaica when news would travel faster via a DJ record than any other method?’ I asked. ‘The disc would be voiced ‘there’s a polio epidemic go and get a vaccine’ or something, and off it would go around the dances all over the island...’

‘That’s a dimension of it, yes. But there’s another level beyond that when we sing and dance. We know we’re alive then. We sing the praises of everything around us, or it sings us.’ he replied, and closed his eyes.

‘But, Hamid, confident?’

‘Yeah, man, identity. We, Africans, we are free about that. We got no problem with identity. We’re not confused. Thing is, because you’re confused you try to take confidence from us as well. So now I have to come here to take something back.’

The First Day at Ailey

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 23:33:46 CEST

What a weird welcome. I'd got the piano into the corner downstage (parallel with the teacher facing upstage but not in her space), my copy of the Face (style magazine bought every month in NYC as a method of staying connected with London's madness while living New York's) spread on the music stand.

Cocky wasn't I, but I'd long argued (rationalised!?) getting my mind out the way was key to good improvising. I'd also eyed up some wonderful women already and, well, things were proceeding as normal. I was playing well, appreciated and glad of that – suddenly the door next to me crashed open and a gruff voice hurled by a swarthy mustachioed man ordered ,

“You're gonna put that piano back after you've used it”.

“Eh?”

“You're gonna put that piano back after you've used it”.

“What? I'm playing man. Leave me alone.”

“You're gonna put it back after you've used it”.

And the door crashed back. I looked towards my colleague but she was busy with her job to have noticed, of course, and bemused I got back to mine.

Next gap though, confusion and curiosity won out and I snuck out and confronted the orderer, sat on a bench across the communal hall between studios with a mate. What was all that?

He repeated himself. Who are you to ask, I demanded. He told me. Another musician I gathered. I dug in, to the effect of you've got no authority then over this or that as far as I'm concerned and the piano stays there after I finish.

His top lip was trembling.

His mate chimed in.

“You're fucking gonna put that piano back after you've used it.”

Who are you? He told me, name, threatening look, saying ,“And I'm telling you....”.

I thought about if for a second, pissed off, riled, nervous, aware I had to get back in the studio and work, and as always, wanting a quiet life.

“You look pretty emotional here.” I said, suddenly inspired, steadying my own voice just enough.

“What are you going to do about this?“

The second guy copped me a look, flexed his biceps.

I pushed on.

“All I can tell you guys is this – I am not moving this fucking piano back after I play it. So... why don't you do whatever it is you want to do about it now, because nothing else is going to change? Come on.”

We all stilled.

“Come on,” I repeated. “Do it!”

Maybe my colleague appeared at that point, or I just sensed the moment with all its greater ramifications – the music, the job now, my body, my future – anyway, I went back in and returned to playing.

At some point she asked what was going on. I explained a little .

“Oh, territorial.” she observed. “They may have wanted your gig themselves.”

Later that day I passed them of course. I certainly stayed long enough to observe them jamming, the mate on congas, my orderer on piano, piano moved back to the position he favoured. They sounded good. We all got along quite well in the years after.

Stivell

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 17:33:00 CEST

The format here is music review interspersed with fiction and memoir. Also note: Back in the Nineties.

In 1979, shaken and tired, I managed to arrange a weekend away, near Chichester, in the heart of the Wessex of Alfred and Hardy, the inheritance of the chalk uplands of Britain. I stayed with friends, and we walked days, and nights were spent talking around a fire. Here I first heard the shimmering harp and Celtic rock fusion of Alan Stivell. A sound strangely familiar, as if heard long ago in a dream, a beauty that seemed to say. ‘here I am, this is how music should sound’ cascaded around me, soothing and exulting, and utterly right.

London was grey and I felt lost when I returned, so in an effort to preserve the peace I had felt while away, sleeping in the house of my friends and walking out on the chalk downs, I took a cassette player to work, and when I could, listened to Stivell. Instead of hanging out in the yard, I took it upon myself to start clearing out one of the abandoned cottages, saying we needed expanded storage space. Nobody believed me, but in general I was left alone to my task, which meant I could listen to music relatively undisturbed.

The songs circle the empty house where I work, the old toys and posters are mute, but the music loud, beckons, then enters my pores this way and that and dances out again, taking me up and down in time as well as place. My feet are still rooted, but my heart doesn’t know where to go, except where the sound wills it--this song of the past, of the longing ancestors who crowd, ghost-like at the side of Europe’s modern highways, wondering as their descendants speed by. They stare at a sky that looks like yellowed paper on which dirty water has been thrown and left to dry. It too is listening. To songs of the coast. Dark water, wind swept dunes, the moon climbs into the cold cloudless sky. Song of the aching Celtic heart, the tears of trees in lost green lands. Pipers on hilltops in the Mendips look out over forts and dolmen and invisible leylines and play them, and they play the fecund earth back into life, they play crop into fruition, they flush the boar from his forest, and they sing enemies back to the land from whence they came. They sing of the hunt, and warriors, and the Black Dog that walks the far side of the mountain, who shows himself only to those who will join him forever that day.

Lyrical jigs: the soft toned pluck of the small harp, finger and nail against the strings....

I am dizzy with beauty.

Some sun leaks down through the shaft between the house and the works wall, to the cracked and dirty window panes, to glance off a discarded doll, that lies where a child must have dropped it, on her last exit. I imagine the scene: on the last day her parents call from the bottom of the stairs, hurrying her out of the door, the car is waiting. Carelessly she skips out, she has no understanding of ‘for the last time,’ the door is open, her toys left where they will be found as they always have been, on her return. We’ll buy new ones anyway, her parents say, extravagant in the wealth of newness, all homes and hopes to be refreshed. Let’s start again they plead to themselves... .

..and she, she who in the moment felt able to leave her treasures, how does she feel now? Does she look from the window of a shiny new council flat at the grey and communal pathway outside and worry about her loss? Or has she grown too old for all that?

Now this music plays, and I am thinking of her, but also my spirit starts to fly into very distant places, back, to the South Downs of a few weeks ago, and back, into secret recesses in my being. I’m totally into this, and nothing else matters, just spirit and song, dance, feeling, for I too am a member of the ‘no future’ generation, and have no handle on the present, but fearful of the self-destruction in Punk I immerse myself in an evocation of the distant past. I’ll have to switch the machine off before Bob, the foreman, finds me here...

Alan Stivell was born with an old soul, or at least with an understanding of being at the end of a long time line of ancestors--and how to listen with them. He hunches over the mixing console at the end of the session and it’s as if they are all there with him, crowding each other to get a touch, make an adjustment, lower a drum here, raise a flute there.

Stivell plays bad Rock, but good Song. Sometimes it seems as if the players have been selected for their Celtic zeal, rather than their musical ‘feel,’ and sometimes the proceedings get a little contrived, artificial even. This marriage of music from the earliest times in Europe with the hybrid creation of centuries later has its problems, but why carp? It’s an astonishing achievement, this seeking to define and refine a new Celtic vocabulary. This music transcends the toe-tapping rootsiness that infects so much of the (traditional music) scene and instead, like Yeats, formulates a more direct contact with an ancestral mystic tradition. It’s very beautiful to hear. Full of feeling, and texture, the expectation is that we will immerse, (sub)merge, and washed along by eddies and streams, take a journey.

Someday I will take a harp, a tape recorder, my guitars, dub bass, percussion and a rock band, and I will form, meld, and weld a new music, I shall have time, boundless time, extravagant thought, and endless vistas of opportunity to finish. Until then, I remember Stivell.

___

A few thousand years ago by our reckoning, but a couple of day-dreaming days in the life of the planet, a people gathered to ensure a memory. Energies were bent to push the years aside, wills marshalled, and a song was made available to the dreamers of future times. A song of air and spirit, a song of earth, of copses full of sacred trees. The song was placed in the land, and now it choruses through the fields, whispers through the bracken and saline-sanded marsh, cries in the cave mouths and eroded towers of the moor, cools the well-tended gardens of the city public park. For the most part walkers shudder and pass on. The affairs of the day offer enough without asking about those of long ago.

A child walks with a different zest however, and the old people knew that, and this their spirits watched for, as they sought for one to keep their soul alive. When the boy walked in the fields of post-war Europe, it was known that at a certain moment he could walk at one and the same time on the young hills of pre-history, during the fading days of a people. Then they would live again, in all the years between, sung by a bard.

The boy walks alone, grassy-pastures full of standing water, rain trembling down. On the one side people have gathered for the last time. On the other a park slopes away towards a dark city street gutted by the bombs of a few years ago. Life is about to change, and a culture to dissipate. For a moment time is suspended. This gathering is not just about the future. It’s in the middle of the field of history: it will draw on the past to set the future. Sound is the mediator.

On the other side, the boy is arrested by a sudden feeling, prescience, a shiver in his inner ear. A moment when his soul is open to the will of the world, and a path is shown.

When the song comes to him, through him, he shudders but does not quicken pace. Instead he stops to listen, courageous, but also self serving, as with the sound comes the knowledge that this is his path to being, that anything else will be dreams Seeing the moment of arrest, the men and women on the hill of long ago, smiled at each other, and slaughtered animals. Vats were broken open, fires raised. Children of the past ran out to the field where the child of the future was, they ran over and through him, but he didn’t flinch, Instead he smiled and trembled a little, silly laughter on his face, lost in sound and feeling. His embrace slipped around them, and they danced a circle to the sounds of bag-pipes and gut strung harps, melismatic voices throbbing as dusk came. Still he knelt and felt, even as the children faltered and returned to their fires and parents, the evening meal and sleep.

The evening darkened as he waited, under a grey cliff laced with moss and small ferns, blackberry thorns at the bottom. He ate a little of the fruit, and waited for the dew.

The sun sank behind the mountains and the thorns and bracken became a tram-stop, and the cliff wall, sooted apartment-buildings, socketed with a hundred electric-lamp lit windows. The sounds of cooking and homecomings rang out, over the hiss of tires on wet road surfaces, and the clang of tram bells. He stirred himself to board a number 96, and began the journey home along the sinuous alleys of the city. Draped over him was the glow of song, the feeling of song, and he resolved to discover that sound again.

Allan Stivell was born during the watershed years that followed the second-world war, the same time period that spawned American rock and roll. European son, his early work was a spill of emotion through re-hewn Celtic tradition, full of a furious beauty at one and the same time both lyrical and strident. After a decade of this however, the sound softened into abstracted, introspective and meandering journeys, albums like Celtic Symphony and Legend. These releases are often found the New Age bin, as well as the Folk, International, or World categories.

Then in the nineties came a new and robust maturity that syncretes diverse sensibilities together, passionate, lyrical and energetic:

The Mists of Avalon (1991): Via interwoven hand-drums of indeterminate metre and pulse, I rediscover the Celtic tales of the Welsh Mabinogion. This wash of voice, these gently meandering textures of harp that flow under bridges of note bending whistles constitute a music steeped in the traditions of years, and the experience of the player and composer. There is a pure, almost naive, intensity that reminds me of my childhood discovery of myth. My experience of this music is steeped in the memory and the meaning of memory, my first experience of these stories...

When I was very young, say, seven years, I was very interested in myth, particularly the stories of the Northern countries, and history too. Already at that time I was conscious that what I wanted to ‘ be’ was a ‘bard’, that is a musician and a poet: in some senses a documenter of humanity, past and present. I was taken with the quest of the Holy Grail, in the Arthur legend, and in particular with the Percival character. Now this Percival, (or Peredur as he is known in The Mabinogion) when he is an adolescent has a kind of ‘vision‘ experience of what his future should be, which I equate with my feelings at six or seven about becoming a bard.

Later, as I entered puberty I discovered pop music, as a ‘magic’, that thrilled me, but felt it far removed from anything I could aspire to. I could not imagine myself as a performer. I drifted on until, having learnt bass at school, I taught myself the basics of guitar. Something of a second epiphany, as it were, because at this point I took on board the idea that I didn’t always need a teacher for this, for music, as music was in fact an inner teacher. Or that music should be an expression of that inner self, the truth within. A truth I wished to pursue, whether for profit or loss in a material sense, until the end of my days. I happily, in fact avidly, studied painting and stained glass, literature, history and geography but music I felt, belonged to me.

In the legend Percival has to endure many trials and much suffering before he can return to this interior place, this vision. His innocence and ingenue like character gets him into a lot of trouble, but also delivers him from evil. Late in life, Percival achieves his goals, and is at peace. I too, hope to remain on good terms with the realities (exigencies?) of life, and yet maintain the creative flow that is music.

Brian Boru (1995): these songs (for the most part old Celtic standards) flow, and speak for themselves, they need no performance pyrotechnics, just a mature reading by a mature singer. There are reasons why these tunes have been sung for years, have become the repository of a culture: they are solid, well-constructed artifacts. And, the message here in this recording is, if you can visit with yourself deep enough, and drag it all up into the light then you visit with everyone, all cultures.

A dancer friend choreographed to the track ‘Mairie's Wedding’. This traditional reel from the Scottish Hebrides is a supplication from a fishing/farming community for which the vagaries of weather and nature have real impact, as well as a celebration of the nuptials of one couple. The prayer, couched in joyful sound, is for an abundant supply of basic vittles (peat, herring, meal) for both, the newly weds and the community as a whole.

She lounges opposite me in the back garden of a New York cafe, and her hair, artificially red, glistens in the spring sunshine. As she speaks, her eyes, with a dusting of glitter on the lids, articulate the whirlwind of moods and images that possessed her when she danced. For a moment, this city-girl, carefully dressed and adorned for city-life at the millennium’s end, is at one with her exploration of the force in her ancestral roots. I am sorry to have missed the gig itself, but hearing her talk now, I realise I could be catching one of the best moments.

Away in the far North

the mist has kissed the dew on the moor

where the fleeting days of summer are lived

to the full before the winds blow from the storm-crowed ocean dance people, dance...

Butterflies flutter through the watery sun.

Even at this time of year there is a tinge of damp that creeps up as far as the slate damp-course in the stone wall of a crofter’s cottage. The air refracts the light that shines from the ocean, and the stark hill-sides.

At night, stars elope behind speeding Atlantic clouds. Sex ignites the village.

Brian Boru is an authentic Stivell identity, but it’s also the performance of a cohesive band, in that it’s full of great musicians playing tunes together. Moreover, there’s a consistency of production value throughout, which is what lifts the CD as a consistent whole above The Mists of Avalon. The bottom end is smooth, the drums crisp, the vocal sits in the middle just right, the ambient sounds are pertinent. The producer is Martin Meissonier, who also worked on King Sunny Ade’s Ju Ju Music, a major release of 1982. Perhaps this relationship with someone who had an influence on the profile of African music in the West helped Allan Stivell towards his next, and very different project, although one is left to speculate as to why Meissionier was not involved for a second time.

1 douare/one earth,(1998) is a melange of culture, with sounds from the Maghreb, the Sahel, Amorica/Brittany, Ireland, London, all putting in appearances. Here, in New York, on a first listen it seemed as if the whole effect was dissipated by the slew of producers, players and guest stars but now I listen in happy abandonment. Stivell pulls off an almost complete and coherent World music. His presence is strong enough to come through the ‘little bit of this little bit of that’ approach. Over a funky beat. From flutter to sonorous incantation to explosion, pipes implore, voices declaim, there’s a solemn serious joy emanating from this project that’s full of power, and two fisted. You are hooked by the age-old sensibility of the harp and voice with the one hand, then stung by the articulate electronica of the other.

...and here comes Jim Kerr revelling in his Scottish identity, and the passing of his teen-throb days, him so beloved of so many in 1981. Well I remember his album covers and photos scattered next to Bryan Ferry’s in the bedroom of Scottish Sara, back in Laban days.

She was born in the Scottish Hebrides, where her retired British army colonel father owned a fish-farm, and when she had come to South London it was with an apparent lightness that I found stunning. I was happy to gain the use of her bed as a crash-pad when I didn’t feel like struggling home, snuggling next to her warm body and exchanging a kiss or two, before drifting into chaste slumber. While we were both at Laban I had dedicated some music to her, an ambient piece recorded with Finn. It placed a fantasy Sara firmly in a soundscape of an even more fantasy North African sea port city, replete with cooing doves, Morrocan bongos and reverb drenched trilling guitars. This was an effort to polarise the predominance of Bryan Ferry and the aforesaid Simple Minds records in her collection.

Although the both of you, the boy-star on the album jacket and the languorous girl in the bed, have long ago evolved onwards and upwards, away from all that, the old image (girl gazing at adored and fetishised poster boy icon), still resonates. Simply put: Jim, you were an idol. ‘Oh, the voice of that guy in Simple Minds, now there’s a singer,’ she exclaimed over breakfast in the noisy brown lounge by the refectory one afternoon, and I concurred, and hid my jealousy, as I knew she liked to play the game of invoking her bedroom heroes to haunt the four tracked efforts I could display.

Conversely, Jenny, who had no time for the abstraction of far away idols, but a lot of enthusiasm for the struggles of those around her, would steer me by the arm towards the bank of tape recorders in the University ‘audio-visual’ room. ‘Come on, give us a listen’, she’d grin, and then, tethered by the headphone cord to the whining motor, jiggle and moan as the sound coursed through her. “This one got a bit reggae innit,’ she’d laugh, with a shudder in her hips, then kiss me, and scamper back to the stream of students in the corridors, leaving me alone to rewind and stow the mute record of hours of passion. But I am past all that now, and so is Jim it seems, as this strange little glimmer of almost atonal dissonance and martial misty eyed chant, called ‘Scots are right’, unfolds...

‘Kenavo Glenmor,’ is a ‘praise song’ for a Celtic Bard, similar in mood to something like “Seydou’ or ‘Folon’ (from Salif Keita’s album Folon). It has the same combination of elegy and ecstasy, that feeling of happiness and sadness in one. Like life.

Aet On (into the universes breath) has a string part that remind me of a long plangent melody that uncurls through syncopated pizzicato over seductive ostinato in a song released sometime during the early eighties in Paris by the Algerian/Parisian/Berber sisters, DjurDjura. It was played incessantly by John Schaeffer on his ‘New Sounds’ radio program in New York, and finally collected in the Voice Of Silence Afropea compilation on the Luaka Bop label. I remember listening, in the top room: the roof tops opposite bathed in moon light, looking down on open skylight windows, watching people play and work, me with the radio on, my incessant exploration of sound.

But the most complex and matchless composition is perhaps the Celtic Symphony. On which also DjurDjura perform.

1982

Sun, 7 Jun 2020 01:19:28 CEST

1982

In the spring I was up on the King's Road, to meet with Sam Alder at EG records, who was in my life as a kind of avuncular figure, proffering advice and guidance. He believed that I had talent worth nurturing, I of course believed that he should have signed me yesterday, and was resentful that he hadn’t. I had abandoned major-seven jazz-chord inflected styling and was instead exploring the world of ‘art’ material. This meant recording with a battery of borrowed percussion, my bass and guitar, and a tiny Casio keyboard. The ‘studio’ such as it was, consisted of two Revox half-track recorders on which I would ‘ping-pong’ material backwards and forwards, through a small stage mixer. I had found myself increasingly interested in non-vocal music, and the recordings reflected that, confining themselves primarily to groove and texture. Sam suggested that I needed to work on a ‘concept’ or ‘rationale’ for an album’s worth of material. The thing to remember, he said, was that you could put ‘anything over a funky beat’. He talked of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp and how they were ‘really serious’ about music, as a ‘spiritual path’ even, certainly as a vehicle for work on the self, as well as an earner of ‘daily bread’. In fact, to allude to a statement of the philosopher John Godolphin Bennett, the origin of the phrase ‘daily bread’ in The Lords Prayer was rooted in the idea of ‘spiritual sustenance’; and had nothing to do with the provision of food. He advised that if one was truly ‘natural’ for ‘this kind of music’ then it wasn’t worth compromising; it was an inner state of being that shouldn’t be messed with. Confusingly though, he then talked of reality in the music business, giving the example of Jon Hassell as someone who when forced to ‘compromise’, by accepting Brian Eno as equal partner and collaborator, had found this a bitter but beneficial pill to swallow. He suggested that my sound should go to New York, to the ‘Downtown Loft scene’. Sam was in the habit of taking the Concorde at regular intervals to New York for business meetings at that point, unfortunately I, who had never even flown, found the idea of that city distant and untenable. I left his office buoyant though,and strode off down the Kings Road, visions of future successes rolling through my eyes. Just before I left, he gave me an album.

Jon Hassell: Dream Theory in Malaya (1981), Possible Musics (1980): The white noise loaded breath was obtuse, but strangely attractive. Perspective fiddled with and distorted. This wasn’t the first time that I had heard ‘experimental’ music. In the years preceding Punk, John Peel would often play such sounds (Faust, Amon Dül 3, The Third Ear Band, The Soft Machine), but this had a single minded focus I hadn’t come across before. A very particular vision of sound, and of course the Northern Indian song inflected trumpet is otherworldly; wherever that is allowed to run free, good things follow. I was surprised at the lack of a funky beat.

The combination of baby-like moans and shakes placed directly in the ear, balanced with far off sounds with names like ‘Burundi cloud’ and ‘Distant Drum’, makes for disconcerting and hallucinatory experience.

caressed sound caressing the ear the voice human and utterly alien, caressed alien and utterly human voice circular and vibrating shimmers underlay all that water

Possible Worlds(1980): ‘Chemistry’: harmonics bounce and pop, watery drums lurch, slow unfolding layers, a bass ‘solo’... ‘Delta Rain Dream’ floods full band-width energetic trance inducing curling sound, over walls, and bending around this a dark breathy trumpet voice. Immersion. ‘Ba-Benzele’: a herald calls the coming good? That first call, then the answer from beyond the city walls, then the second, then the second response, until finally the rain is called and the people can raise parched tongues to the sky. As I listen to those thunder sounds, the temperature tangibly drops. ‘Rising Thermal 14’ 16’’ N; 32’ 28’’ E’: In the Sudan, birds are borne high, they survey the land below, waiting to swoop low again. The pilgrim, alone, stops to watch. ‘Charm (over Burundi Cloud)’: In the Sudan, in the middle of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, East of the White Nile, the full moon, light lacerating the stone hard pathways of the heights that rise above the camp. Hooded followers of the faith sit and pour tea, talking in soft voices. Ululating song pours from the throat of a man who sits cradling an oud. Above the heights, a mirage: a celestial city, busy with flyovers and trestle bridges, cars hurtling, businesses open and restaurants doing a brisk trade. Parallel fourths are winding and wending across hills, as in a recording studio the musicians sit and imbibe everything, playing both the desert and the town onto the tape....

Possible Worlds

Tynemouth 1981

Sat, 6 Jun 2020 00:07:18 CEST

1981 I went up to Newcastle, driving a battered Ford Transit van through the heaviest snow in decades, the heater inoperable, busting to piss every fifty miles, because of the amount of coffee consumed in the effort to stay warm and awake. Steve at the wheel, Gareth, a Geordie Tabla player tapping out intricate mixed metre rhythms on the dashboard next to me. The journey took twelve hours instead of the more normal five. The next day I walked the snow-crusted streets for the first time. I stood out on the bridge approach staring down at the rooftops and quay side market, the faded but elegant old-town spread underneath. Looking behind, the cathedral spires and shopping centres of Newcastle beckoned; pie shops caressing the air with steam. Ahead was Gateshead, brooding in dowdy satellite oblivion, cars streaming towards the motorway, the moors, the South. The Tyne was green and muddy, no boat stirred her to life save a solitary Navy schooner at berth on the South side. I photographed silent and surreptitious. The swing bridge island midstream was kissed with snow. The cottages on the South side glowed pink and soft in the Northern sunlight. Light careened and skidded around the snow covered rooftops and hillside, scrambled down to the lower banks and reentered Newcastle proper via the lower bridges that gaze at the Goliath towers of the higher crossway. Riots have come and gone in the rest of the country, but in Newcastle I’m told, with a smile, ‘no nothing happened here mate, just the usual Saturday night’. Newcastle still acts out the raids of a thousand years ago every weekend. In the small hours I tumble down the stairwell of the metro station into a crazy and comedic scene of fighting and verbal sparring. Boys on the down escalator call to the girls on the up: ‘show us yer tits!’. The girls reply ‘show us yer pricks,’ and this being Newcastle the boys oblige, laying their flaccid members out on the rubber bannister. Down on the platforms a cheerfully violent brawl breaks out, and spills onto the railway tracks, bodies running this way and that in a chaotic melee. Sunday morning I take the metro out to the coast, where waves pound the orange sand at Tynemouth Priory, and imagine the prows of long-ships breaking the head waters at the river mouth. I look across to the other bank, towards the mining communities of Durham, and the root of my paternal Grandparents’ emigration. They had ‘walked out,’ as ‘dating’ was called in the vernacular of the region, since the age of twelve. After marriage they traveled south to renew a lease on life that had ran out in the North during the depression of the ‘twenties. On the metro, traveling back into the centre of the town a sullen skinhead sits and cleans his boots with an old rag, which he then discards on the floor. At this point my mind first opens to the possibility of leaving England. This survey of the long road from the North down which my grandparents came has opened in me a remorseless desire, an onus even, to continue on, to search out further possibilities.

Back in the Nineties...

Thu, 4 Jun 2020 21:26:43 CEST

Back in the nineties I created a lot of essays all loosely joined by A being about music B memoir related and C pertaining to how place affects creating music and how one listens. A mixed memoir called "Music Matters". Much of it I would heartily disown now , but not all - and who am I to judge now that the work is done, anyway? So I am resolved to dripping out the essays over the next few months, often without comment, sometimes with.