Lovers and Technology ... On Film #1

Lovers And Technology is a special mixtape of tracks from the archives of the Mad Professor and his Ariwa label, which you can download for free here. There is also a special Lovers And Technology edition of Your Heart Out to download (and print off) free for all here which near the beginning refers to a Channel 4 TV programme Black On Black which featured Ranking Ann and Lorna Gee. I featured this clip during The London Nobody Sings but it is such an inspiring piece of film I have to share it again. There is also an invaluable piece of footage from 1984 of Ranking Ann performing A Slice of English Toast at a live Ariwa showcase in Birmingham.

"This was all fields once ..."

The festive season's musical accompaniment has unexpectedly been provided almost exclusively by The Hardy Tree’s The Fields Lie Sleeping Underneath, a last minute treat for myself . It’s not often I buy a new record on impulse, but I had to have this one after seeing a tip-off by the excellent House of Superflake.
In the words of The Hardy Tree’s Frances Castle, the record was “recorded at home in an attic room over a year ... patched and stitched together a wonky orchestral jigsaw puzzle of sounds that hint at audio memories from lost 70s kids TV program's, ghost orchestras, cinema organs, folk song , and static and crackle.”
That ‘pitch’ was almost enough to put me off. For while the sound assemblage scene of Ghost Box and its extended family has been one of the most appealing areas of activity in recent years, I’ve got to the stage where I’ll scream if I see another reference to gentlemanly ghost stories, sound lab technicians, Arthur Machen or John Wyndham. The Hardy Tree record, thankfully, evokes a whole other set of references. I hasten to add these are just my responses but I am reminded more of Stevie Smith, E.S. Nesbit, and a certain principled, stubborn independence and genteel poverty that characterises a brand of English eccentricity captured perfectly in the blitz memoir Few Eggs and No Oranges: The Diaries of Vere Hodgson 1940-45 which is an essential read published by Persephone.
I instantly felt a sort of emotional engagement with this CD in a way I haven’t with a lot of sound assemblage work. It’s rather like when I first heard Colleen’s Everyone Alive Wants Answers for the first time, and was swept away. The Hardy Tree with its suggestion of junk shop instrumentation, strains of scratched light classical charity shop LPs, and lopsided lullabies is a little in the tradition of the Raincoats and Pram. It also has a strong London theme, conjuring up a lost local London lore I would have loved to include in The London Nobody Sings ... It’s a London whose story is perhaps undocumented in the current vogue for urban psychogeography, but it’s one that fascinates me and is only known now by resilient elderly ladies who’ve always lived in a certain location and remember ‘when it was all fields around here’ and know all about the tea shops in the woods The Hardy Tree so brilliantly evokes.
The Hardy Tree CD comes in an exquisite hand-drawn and hand-printed sleeve with a little booklet inside the packaging. It feels special, and it makes the product something to cherish beyond the actual listening experience. In fact it’s worth buying for the fantastic fox on the cover with its air of “and you are?” Find out more here ...

Festive Cheer

During the festive period over at Anywhere Else But Here Today there are a few Arabic interpretations of Christmas carols which I hope you'll agree are extraordinarily beautiful. It's not my favourite time of year, but momentarily swallowing my humbug I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have supported the various YHO projects. I would particularly like to thank those that have helped in any way with my fumblings and stumblings, especially Per-Christian Hille for his fantastic series of mixtape covers. I'll leave you with an Andalucian carol chosen by Elena from the Occultation Records family, who helped make our Spanish sequence so much fun.

Lovers And Technology

Lovers And Technology is a special mixtape of tracks from the archives of the Mad Professor and his Ariwa label, which you can download for free here. It is a very personal selection, and therefore not necessarily representative. But if, by any chance, you're not an authority of UK reggae from the '80s/'90s then hopefully the tracks here will inspire you to go out and stock up on Ariwa's astonishing achievements. The Your Heart Out projects have covered a lot of ground this year, so it's appropriate we end the year close to home. Many of these tracks will have been recorded in the Mad Professor's studio very close to where my parents were married a long, long time ago. The church and the studio are long gone, but the music is very much alive so let's celebrate it. Naturally, there is a special Lovers And Technology edition of Your Heart Out to download (and print off) free for all here.

I'd Still Rather Be ... Pt. 6

I love it when great pop music springs from unlikely sources. And I have to admit the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) is a surprising source, but hopefully the series of clips featured as part of the Anywhere But Here Today project will be a revelation, especially if like me your knowledge of Israeli pop music is limited or maybe extends only as far as Esther & Abi Ofarim.
The clips are all from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and are made by army groups formed of young people doing their compulsory national service. The Israeli tradition of military music groups is a long established one, but during this timeframe things got interesting as ‘rock’ elements began to creep into the sound. Well, that’s ‘rock’ in a very loose sense as there will be a lot here to appeal to fans of the Free Design, Swingle Singers, bossa nova, choral, easy listening pop music.
I guess some may feel a slight unease at featuring ‘military’ oriented Israeli music, but it is worth remembering these were young people doing their national service. I know that even in this music there were subversive messages promoting peace. The army groups also were a valuable apprenticeship for many artists who would go on to become successful as the individual replaced the collective approach.
These clips remind me of how in very different times when I was a kid it was quite a cool thing for ‘right on’ young people to travel to Israel and volunteer to work on a kibbutz as part of a socialist/collectivist back-to-the-land ideal. In fact there is something of an overlap between the army groups and the collective settlement idea. The Nahal Band (or Lahakat HaNahal) which is responsible for a number of the stunningly beautiful clips featured comes from the Nahal (which is, I believe, the Hebrew word for stream though in this case it is an acronym – just to confuse Google translations!) military tradition of developing settlements. This helps explain the gorgeous song about the Nahal settlement in Sinai, which is one of my particular favourites and makes me think of Nancy Sinatra’s This Town transported to a kibbutz.
Musically, given the time and the collective approach, the influence of Hair is a perfect fit. But more fascinating is the very pronounced bossa/Brazilian flavour. Several of the clips seem strongly informed by Brazilian music, and there is plenty of evidence that later Israeli pop retained this influence through to the end of the ‘70s as you will see. I absolutely love it when music in one country is seemingly illogically shaped by sounds from another culture. King Sunny Ade’s use of Hawaiian guitars springs to mind. I know the Anywhere Else But Here Today approach gives a weirdly distorted impression of things, but I think these two clips speak volumes ...

I'd Still Rather Be ... Pt. 5

Osibisa. Hamilton Bohannon. Odyssey. Talking Heads. PiL. Slits. Ze Records. Burundi Beat. Rough Trade’s Soweto compilation. John Peel gleefully playing the glorious sounds of Bhundu Boys, Four Brothers, Kanda Bongo Man, and so on. These were all factors in waking me up to the music of Africa. One other major milestone was a special report on “Juju, Afrobeat and Highlife” in the April 1981 edition of The Face where I first came across the names of Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade if not their music, thus sowing some important seeds. My curiosity was aroused. And the feature, by Peter Murphy, is an excellent one.
Oddly that edition of The Face is one of the few I managed to keep hold of down the years. It has Adam Ant on the cover, and also mentioned on the front page are The Beat, Polecats, Gang of Four, Selecter, Delta 5, Bush Tetras, Lounge Lizards, and Aswad. Impressive! So, yeah it’s a relief that it’s not just rosy-eyed romanticism that makes me remember The Face of that era very fondly.
The interesting thing about this edition, in the context of ‘80s revisionism, is that it was issued just as we were entering the glossy optimism of the so-called ‘new pop’ era. And yet there is little sign of all that in this issue of The Face. Indeed its tone is rather grumpy. Delta 5 are struggling to make ends meet, The Beat are weary, Aswad are bitter, The Selecter are disillusioned, the Gang of Four critical. It’s a time of transition. Jon ‘Britpop’ Savage is scathing about the ‘Blitz kids’. Robert Elms on the other hand enthuses about Defunkt and the Lounge Lizards. Neil Norman raves about Cassavetes’ Gloria. Ray Lowry pokes fun at Julian Cope. And a future leading Labour politician complains at length on the letters page about an unfair Elvis Costello review by Geoff Deane. There is even a nice mention for Manicured Noise and an ad for The Ultimate Action.
The star of the show though is Julie Burchill, and my how the world has revolved in some strange ways since those days. I know what became of her. But she really was on top of her game back then, and her monthly ‘pop’ column was an essential read. In this one she has a go at the world, with a few exceptions like Girlschool/Motorhead, Dept. S, and Talking Heads. She suggests: “Hear Stalin Wasn’t Stalling by Robert Wyatt – Ilya Ehrenburg makes contact with the fantasy Phil Spector in Red Square. Read some of A.J.P. Taylor’s writing on the Second World War. Support Shakin’ Stevens, a fellow traveller. Find out about Kim Philby and the Spanish Civil War – you’ll be thrilled in a way you’ve never been thrilled before, I swear. Buy all John Lydon’s records – don’t do the dirty on him and desert him, because he’s the one who gave this country’s spirit the kiss of life and helped you be as smart as you are. Read the Old Testament and vote Labour.” It was all quite exciting in 1981.
In another of her columns from that time Julie would come out strongly in support of The Beat, and if my memory serves me well she suggests they are almost as perfect a pop group as the Pistols had been. The Beat win her backing for performing on Top Of The Pops in Russian Army outfits, using African highlife guitar melodies, and having a toaster on prime time TV as though it was the most natural thing in the world. That’s fair enough. But I would add introducing us to The Congos’ Heart Of The Congos via their own label, and having Cedric Myton singing with them on Doors Of My Heart, their finest moment. Though I’m with Julie about this ...

I'd Still Rather Be ... Pt. 4

I have to confess that when I started the Anywhere Else But Here project I made a conscious decision to steer clear of African posts. This was because at the time we seemed to be drowning in African sounds. The market was alive with highly desirable compilations of old salvaged sounds from Ethiopia and Nigeria. There were suddenly all sorts of collections to choose from: afro funk, afro beat, afro rock, afro disco. And the world of blogging was awash with wonderful, lost African LPs and mixes of rare 45s. It was almost too good to be true, and in the true spirit of a kid let loose in a sweet shop I over-indulged.
Bizarrely it was a bit of controversy about an Ariel Pink track that accidentally led me back to the Ethiopian sounds. But before that I fell totally in love with Algerian music, which is of course just as much about Africa as, say, Nigeria. And as I renewed an affection for rai sounds it was also during the Algerian sequence that I came to realise that I liked a lot of the more traditional pop as much as the more directly western influenced shall we say funkier music.
And yet the funky stuff has an eternal appeal. Certainly there is an incredible amount of fantastic funky African music out there to discover, regardless of how many compilations and blogs there are. In fact I am still in awe of all the people out there who know so much more about all this wonderful music than I do.
I, for example, knew absolutely nothing about Ernesto Djédjé and his music before I stumbled across a series of clips of him performing on YouTube. I can’t say I know a lot more about his work now apart than the fact that he was the king of ziglibithy, a musical form he pioneered back home in the Ivory Coast before his untimely death in 1983. I hope that the handful of clips that are included over at Anywhere Else But Here Today seize your imagination in the same way they have mine. And if you come across a copy of his best known LP Le Roi du Ziglibithy from 1977 then do not hesitate to investigate. It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Looking a little further into the story of Ernesto and ziglibithy almost inevitably took me to one of my favourite Afrosoundscentric sites, Likembe, which is run by one of the saints and scholars that have made the past few years a brighter and better place than they otherwise might have been. I have said it before, and I will keep on saying it: I am continually inspired by “all those who take the time and trouble to share their enthusiasms and obsessions, for whatever reason, for little return, yet in so doing enlighten and illuminate, making the world a better place, leading us to sounds and people we never dared dream exist.”