Category: Sampled

Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Dub Club

Craig McAllister

Adam over at Bagging Area has long been a champion of things that bang and beat in interesting ways. He’s a particular standard bearer for Andrew Weatherall (and anything that bears his hallmark) and, thrillingly, he’s found himself falling into a role as co-curator of a Weatherall-inspired compilation album, Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1. Born from ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ chat after a DJ slot at Todmorden’s Golden Lion, in a move that apes Weatherall’s own ‘fail we may, sail we must’ manifesto, the record – already sold out on pre-orders alone – is this week’s Compilation Of The Week on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6 Music show. Based on that fact alone, the record must surely be fast-footing its way to a repress; the charts being what they are these days, time it nicely and the possibility of real chart action isn’t unlikely. What a thrill it must be to create something out of nothing, especially one that carries the inference of something further to come.

I’ll ‘Volume 1′ you, m’lad!

Let’s hear it for the instigators, agitators and originators of this fine new release. Virtual fist bumps all round.

This past week, coincidentally, sees four years since Andrew Weatherall’s passing and on the back of Adam and co’s album announcement, I’ve been scouring the forgotten b-sides of my old 12″ singles to eke out any of his remixes. That Petrol Emotion, Flowered Up, James and Sinead O’Connor all leapt up and out at the mere mention of his name, spinning themselves into the wee hours last weekend. All have been bent, buckled and battered out of all recognisable shape by Weatherall, not always for the better, if yr asking me, but they make for interesting and usually long-form listening – ideal in that post-midnight fug.

Weatherall’s own collective, Sabres Of Paradise crept up on me only after time. Other than the ubiquitous twin collossuses Theme and Smokebelch, the albums were lost on me as I gave myself over to the more popular/shallower end of ’90s music. I’d have heard Sabresonic from behind the Our Price counter, but I daresay it would have been shunted aside for the latest Suede release or Steps or something similar. Similarly Haunted Dancehall, with its striking open-razored cover and dark beats on the inside. Classics of course nowadays, but it took me a quarter of a century to appreciate that. Given that I absolutely loved Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman – and hindsight shows us that that record may well be the greatest album of the ’90s – I’m not sure how I never picked up on Sabres Of Paradise at the time, but there y’go. You can’t surf the zeitgeist all of the time. It’ll wear you out, man. Those folk that were into everything – absolutely everything – first? Bollocks they were.

Weatherall’s Sabres’ material, made with Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, is often relentless, head-nodding, dub-infused techno, played at a slow and steady BPM. It can be claustrophobic and anxiety-inducing yet euphoric and rush-and-release magic within the same groove.

Sabres Of Paradise – Wilmot

Wilmot builds itself around a 90-year-old horn sample from a crackly calypso record by the fantastically-named Wilmoth Houdini. Pitch-shifted down a gear or two, the horns allow space for all manner of wizardry to clash and clatter around it; skanking, off-beat guitars, filling-loosening Simonon-ish bass, electronic whooshes, big beats, high in the mix percussion, ech-ech-ech-ech-echoing refrains, trumpets heralding the arrival of the Great God Pan himself. If you’re sitting half-cut on your sofa at an hour way past your normal bedtime, it may just be the record you need to hear. I bet it’d sound great just sitting on the London underground, whizzing below the city with no idea where you are.

As you may already know, Fatboy Slim would later use the same sample on his Mighty Dub Katz Son Of Wilmot release. Given that record’s title, I’d wager that Norman Cook was possibly more familiar with the Sabres Of Paradise track than the ancient original that provided the hook for Weatherall and the other Sabres. But anyway…

Centuras – Crisis

Released on Junior Boys Own, Crisis by Centuras is Weatherall in spirit if not in presence. Another long-form, chopped up dub cut, Crisis is stretched out, messed up reggae. A squeaky keyboard elbows the warped electronics out to the margins, making way f-f-for another f-f-fan-faring horn sample. Similar yet different. Or exactly the same sample as above? Who can tell?  The beat rolls ever forward, propulsive yet glitchy. Figments of spliced vocal lines ghost in and out and a rhythm that brings to mind Primal Scream at their most creative…and Weatherall-affected carries it for 5 or so chin-stroking minutes.

It’s dance music, Jim, but I’d like t’see y’try.

Unexpectedly, I found this 12″ in a charity shop in Saltcoats. The track above is worth alone the 50p I risked on it. Re-sult, as the grate diggers refrain goes.

Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find, Sampled

A Week Of Saturday Nights

Craig McAllister

Lowrell Simon was a Chicago-based soul singer. After being in a succession of hopeful groups, slogging around on the circuit and briefly grazing the lower reaches of the US R&B charts, he was, by the mid ’70s, a staff writer at Curtom (Curtis Mayfield’s label) writing and producing soundtrack material of little consequence. Nothing truly spectacular really materialised from his writer’s pen until the end of the decade. By then, Lowrell was back recording as a solo artist, his experiences with Curtom better equipping him for the making of glossy, groove-driven soul music.

He struck gold with the very Mayfield-titled and timeless Mellow Mellow Right On.

Lowrell Simon – Mellow Mellow Right On

Anyone who’s heard Massive Attack’s Blue Lines – and that’s everyone here, right? – will recognise instantly its marching heartbeat of a bassline, used to great effect on that album’s Lately; stately, steady and never wavering, driving that track to its soulful and melancholic conclusion.

On the original, things are a bit more upbeat. That flare of unresolved strings at the start, all tension and no release, coupled with the wet slap of funk guitar and precise drum beat promises much and delivers exactly what you hope for. A choir pops up, “Mellow, mellow, right on!” they chant…and then Lowrell himself slopes in, all spoken word and chocolate-wrapped vocals – “Ladies, I’d like to take this time out just to say…”  his easy vocal easing up, out and into Marvin Gaye territory.

Behind him, his disciplined band never drops the beat. They groove and smoove their way through ten metronomic minutes and more of pure discofied funk, the sound of flapping trouser legs, jumbo-winged collars and powder blue suits, of oversized hair and oversized heels. In an era much maligned and swept aside by the snotty arrival of punk, Mellow Mellow Right On glistens like the studio lighting refracting from the mirrored lens of a pair of aviator shades and serves as a reminder that the best disco was just as valid as any other music. Fight me.

You’d get no argument on that front from Edwyn Collins. Scrolling through a Postcard Records group on Facebook recently, that old Mojo article (above) jumped right out at me, and not just because of EC’s unmatching shirt ‘n trousers combination.

Edwyn, forever on the money, whether it comes to guitars or clothes or hair, is once again correct in his assessment of Mellow Mellow Right On. Sung especially for the ladies and wrapped in a bad-ass but glossy production (the wee electronic shooms that fire off now and again, the oil slick thick guitar, the tease and timbre of the strings) – it’d be easy to imagine Dr Dre getting behind the desk to work his G-Funk magic with this as the bedrock.

I bet Edwyn’s still grooving to it now. I know I am.

Get This!, Live!, Sampled

Hidden In The Back Seat Of My Head

Craig McAllister

That triptyich of ’90s solo albums which spawned the rebirth of Paul Weller deserves to be looked at again. 1992’s self-titled debut was the result of the artist being given free reign to reinvent himself, with no great expectations from a record company (Go! Discs) simply keen to offer one of our greatest songwriters the platform on which to start afresh. By 1995’s Stanley Road, Weller had entered his third imperial phase; once again a regular botherer of the charts and the elder statesmen to whom the leading lights of the day looked for validation and support. The record in the middle, 1993’s Wild Wood, is perhaps the most interesting – and best – of those three releases.

Having ‘done’ inner city angry young man and broadminded European mod, Weller looked to the English countryside for inspiration. Still unsure of who his ’90s audience was, the singer decamped to the Manor, a residential studio in the leafy Home Counties and, surrounded by trustworthy people and a handful of his favourite records, holed up to hang out, play, write and record the tracks that would become the Wild Wood album. The inner sleeve photos on the record suggest the perfect scenario for making a classic record; family and kids on the lawn, footballs, a grinning Weller astride a scooter, a home-from-home environment where inspiration flourished.

Much has been made of Weller’s listening habits during the making of the album, and the acoustic influence of Traffic and Nick Drake has oft been quoted as a source of influence, but I’d consider Wild Wood to be Weller’s Neil Young album. Loud in-the-mix acoustics ring throughout the record, attacked by Weller’s uncompromised strumming and finger picking. He might be playing a Martin, but he’s attacking it with all the fervour he normally reserves for his Casino. This is apparent on Foot Of The Mountain, its minor chord balladry giving way to an ebbing and flowing, sprawling and ragged electric outro, the rest of the band riding his coat tails for dear life. The Young influence is there too in Country‘s close-miked pastoral picking and whispered vocal. ‘Where only love can heal your heart,’ he sings, one eyebrow arched in a knowing nod to whiny old Neil as a woozy Mellotron adds a Fabbish, late sixties hue to the mix.

Wild Wood is an album that, augmented by subtle Hammond, delicate woodwind and thunking great gospel piano, showcases the best of Paul Weller. It’s there in the ferocious riffing of Sunflower and The Weaver‘s thrilling hammer-ons, the pastoral campfire soft shoe shuffle and two note dubby bass of the title track (it’s no wonder Portishead highlighted it as something to twist and turn and send into orbit), to the handclapping and roof-raising Can You Heal Us (Holy Man) and the jazz inflections of album closer Moon On Your Pyjamas.

My absolute favourite from the era though isn’t actually on the initial album release.

Paul Weller – Hung Up

As is his forever forward-thinking way, Weller had barely finished the record when he embarked upon another lap of writing. Too late for the album, Hung Up was released as a stand alone single. All the best bands, as you well know, release magnificent stand alone singles and Hung Up is undoubtedly Paul Weller’s addition to that list (even if, at some point, it was clunkily tacked on at the end of the record when Weller’s popularity began to soar.) It’s a fantastic single, Weller self-assured and riding in on a great chord sequence (C – Fm – Am – Fmaj7) before the band joins him on a chugging, descending Beatlesy progression, crisply distorted and fluidly played. The pace, the playing; perfection.

It’s the song’s bridge though that elevates the track from merely great to simply outstanding. It’s a real cracker, all loose piano and finger-squeezed guitar couplets – pure Small Faces mod-gospel with the vamping ghost of a PP Arnold-alike oozing in on the second line, her sky-surfing vocal lifting the track into orbit. Then we’re into the guitar solo. No fancy pants pedal boards here, it’s simply vintage guitar into vintage amp and the strangulation of a nimbly-rifled solo that’s halfway between Marriot (Steve) and May (Brian – really). And there’s still time for Steve White – there’s always time for Steve White – Wild Wood‘s secret, unsung hero to rattle seven shades of Gene Krupa from his kit with the mother of all drum fills, before it all ends with the singer and his acoustic guitar once again, wrung out, hung out and Hung Up in under three thrilling minutes.

*Bonus tracks!

Paul Weller – Hung Up (Live at the BBC)

Lovely wee bit of studio chatter on this version.

Paul Weller – Wild Wood (Portishead Remix)

Pistol crack snare, clacking, clipped guitar, murky dub. The drunk wasp guitar riff is a beauty. Weller had some great remixes around this period and this is one of the best. Never ever outstays its welcome.

 

 

 

Get This!, Sampled

And They Catch Him And They Say He’s Mental

Craig McAllister

Spring-Heeled Jack was a Victorian character of folklore; a leaping, springing, impish and devilish figure with gentlemanly characteristics that might tear you in two with his clawed fingers or simply stare you half to death with his fireball-red eyes. He was able to leap high across the sooty rooftops of old London town and vanish quickly into the thick and murderous night. I’m sure he must pop up (and pop off again) in some Sherlock Holmes story or other, but I’m no Conan-Doyle expert. If he doesn’t, then that’s a perfect opportunity wasted, Arthur. It truly is.

Spring-Heeled Jim is a track off of Morrissey‘s last great solo record, Vauxhall And I. Still dressed in decent jeans and with great hair, Morrissey takes the idea of Spring-Heeled Jack and turns the Victorian villain into a post-War East End gangster – pwopah salt of the earf, loves his mother, makes sure old Mrs Jones’ milk and paper is on her doorstep each and every morning…you gotta look after one annuva, aintcha? The sort of a figure that’s part Ronnie and Reggie Kray and part Jack-the-lad, just don’t you dare cross him. I’m sure you get the idea.

Morrissey – Spring-Heeled Jim

The track creeps in on a highly atmospheric guitar track, all stealth and menace and ominous foreboding. It rolls slowly and stately like a pea souper curling from the Thames, a mixture of high in the mix plucked acoustics and a wash of reverb and sustain that would probably be more at home in Kevin Shields’ home studio but in the surroundings of a Morrissey record sounds exotic and perfectly-placed as track two’s wrong-footing mood setter. There’s sampled film dialogue playing in the background and, just as you’re trying to place it (it’s very Morrissey), the chords change and Morrissey makes himself known.

Spring-Heeled Jim winks an eye

He’ll ‘do’… he’ll never be ‘done to’

He’ll take on whoever flew through

It’s the normal thing to do

There’s scene-setting and then there’s Scene-Setting and Spring-Heeled Jim sets out its – his – stall very clearly.

So many women his head should be spinning…Spring-Heeled Jim slurs the words…once always in for the kill, now it’s too cold.

He’s an old soak, is Jim. Happy to sit in his armchair, French brandy by his side, Daily Mirror lying open at the racing pages, ready to share his stories with his many visitors – he still demands respect, after all. He’s a one-time womaniser who’d cut you from ear to ear (from ‘ere to ‘ere) should you as much as look at his female companion, although that’s probably all for show anyway, as Morrissey has pegged him as a mixed-up individual with latent homosexual tendencies that just won’t cut it in the world Jim has chosen for himself. (That’s just my opinion, your honour.)

That film dialogue that runs through the track until the last, “…and they catch ‘im and they say ‘e’s mentuhl” is from We Are The Lambeth Boys, a late ’50s documentary that follows a gang of young south London teddy boys, aiming to disepl the myth that they’re violent and delinquent youths.

When the plummy, clipped accent of the presenter isn’t spoiling things, the Lambeth Boys ride in an open top truck singing “We are the Lambeth Boys!” and shouting “‘allo darlin’” at every female they pass. They sing cockney knees-up ditties. They go to the dancing and eye up the girls (or boys) on the opposite side. They sidle up to prospective partners and with a cool nod of the head, lead them on a quickstepping jitterbug around the floor of the dusty dancehall while Lonnie Donegan’s ‘putting on the agony, putting on the style‘ skiffles its way to its conclusion. They care very much about their hair and their two-piece suits and ties. They also smoke like the London of the industrial revolution. As far as social history documentaries go, it’s a must watch.

Give yourself 50 minutes and watch the full thing here. You’d love it.

It’s an obvious Morrissey go-to, We Are The Lambeth Boys. There’s the us-against-them gang mentality that he instilled in The Smiths and every other group he’s formed around him since. There’s the rock ‘n roll reference points. The haircuts. The clothes. The attitudes. The good-looking male protagonists. Any still from the film could have been a piece of Smiths cover art.I can’t emphasise just how essential a watch it is!

For being fiercely Mancunian, Morrissey seemed to form a special bond with London in the early ’90s. That train heaved on to Euston and before you knew it he was referencing Battersea and Bethnal Green, Arsenal and West Ham, East End boxing clubs, Piccadilly and Dagenham and Ronnie and Reggie and having his picture taken outside the Grave Maurice pub, a favourite watering hole of those same Krays. Creating characters that were so clearly unfluenced by and based upon the unsavoury players of old London was the natural conclusion to this, and Spring-Heeled Jim endures as one of Morrissey’s best tracks on one of his greatest albums.

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Music, Make The People, Come Together

Craig McAllister

There’s a constant digging around here, an archaeological scraping and raiding of tombs, done purely for the purpose of highlighting the marginalised and forgotten, the nearly weres and never would bes that the decades have been less than kind to. Not for nothing is the tagline above ‘Outdated Music For Outdated People‘. You’ll be well aware of that if you’re a regular.

Sometimes, an old track comes flying back into the conscience, usually, although, as in this case, not always, on the back of radio play or an old film and you think, why continue to unearth the underheard when bangers – yes, bangers! – such as this exist.

Such is the case with Yarbrough & Peoples’ Don’t Stop The Music.

Yarbrough & Peoples – Don’t Stop The Music (12″ mix)

My ex-hospital radio station copy

From straight outta nowhere this afternoon, the track’s programmed electro bassline body popped its way into my head, slinky and sinuous, the half cousin of – sorry for this – Level 42’s Lessons In Love, but ten times as funky and a hundred times more listenable, despite the lack of human touch. It’s 43 years old and lost none of its mid-paced, head-nodding grooveability. Keyboards sizzle and fizz, hi hats hiss and clavinets play a top line that Stevie Wonder himself might’ve considered being on the verge of dangerously funky. Has Fatboy Slim sampled it yet? I can only assume he has – those keyboards have a total S.O.S. Band feel to them, and he’s sampled them, as well you know, although a quick Google proves inconclusive.

I can sing the refrain if y’like; monotoned white man doo-wop, flat and out of tune but entirely soulful and heartfelt. Dawn’t yew stap it, dawn’t yew stap, stap tha moozic. Even to rhythmically-challenged Ayrshiremen of a certain age, the track has an unputdownable swagger.

Formed in Dallas from the same musical sphere that birthed the Gap Band – the Fatboy sampled them too, Calvin Yarbrough and Alisa Peoples found ubiquity with the track, its comically sped-up backing vocals and gospelish refrain sending it to number one on the Billboard R&B chart for over a month. Remember when there were multiple charts? Remember charts at all? The duo’s story is one of church choirs and pick-up bands until one night in 1977 when Peoples joined Yarbrough’s band on stage for a number and the stars aligned to cast their magic.

Yarbrough & Peoples would continue as a duo for far longer than they were welcome, with ever-decreasing returns and increasingly shallow chart positions, but that’s almost irrelevant considering how timeless, how great their big hit single was. If you’re not still playing the track a week after you’ve read this, questions will be asked.

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Travellin’…

Craig McAllister

…at the speed of love.

That’s the stall-setting opening gambit on Fallin’, the unlikely yet inspired collaboration between De La Soul and Teenage Fanclub, a marriage made in heaven that was strictly at odds with the hell of the rap/rock crossover that soundtracked 1993’s Judgement Night movie. Amidst a hotchpotch of hideousness – Helmet & House Of Pain, Biohazard & Onyx, Slayer & Ice T – and the odd briefly inspired moment – Dinosaur Jnr & Del The Funky Homosapien’s choppy and groovy Missing Link, Sonic Youth & Cypress Hill’s dark and, er, dope hymn to smoking (I Love You Mary Jane), De La Soul’s daisy age hip hop beats melded with TFC’s Bellshill beat and created the album’s best track that, 30 years later (!!!) sounds fresher than ever.

With De La Soul being in the news this week on the back of the death of Dave Jolicoeur (Trugoy the Dove), I’ve taken to playing many of the group’s early sample-savvy singles and debut album at a decent volume. The track I keep returning to though is Fallin’. It’s been played at every available opportunity; in the car, doing the dishes, sorting the washing, brushing my teeth, boiling the kettle, texting my pals… it’s a real beauty of a track. Stick a microphone in front of me and I reckon I could bust out a pretty faithful recreation of the opening verse’s rap. But don’t. I’m a white guy from the west of Scotland and we’re not known for our flowability skills on the mic.

Teenage Fanclub & De La Soul – Fallin’

Teenage Fanclub are, as you are well aware, four white guys from the west of Scotland too and, while they wisely left the rapping to the masters of the art, they do contribute some soulful ‘doo-doo-do-do‘ adlibs in the background – possibly aping, or just plain stolen from Biz Markie or the Steve Miller Band, as you might spot later.

The track is built around a sample of Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’, a widescreen open road of a record, as American as truckstops and Telecasters, with references to Elvis, Jesus, Ventura Boulevard, Mulholland Drive and endless freeways, sung in Fanclubesque multi-harmony atop a bed of rich acoustic and clean chimin’ electric guitars. There’s a rumour, unsubstantiated, that it plays at maximum volume whenever white American men of a certain age cash in their one-way ticket for that final trip along life’s highway and park the Cadillac outside the pearly gates. I guess I’ll never know.

It’s something of a surprise, then, to find out that the idea for building the track came, not from the four guitar-crazy Scottish musos who may well have played along to a Tom Petty record or two in their time, but from the magpie mind of De La Soul’s Posdnuos. More of that in a bit though. Firstly, how on earth did this heaven-sent collaboration come to be?

Gerry Love, bass player with Teenage Fanclub at the time, alongside Brendan O’Hare, former TFC drummer and inspired catchphrase merchant very kindly offered to cast their surprisingly clear minds back three decades and reminisce exclusively for Plain Or Pan.

Gerry: De La Soul came over to Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire – we were mixing Thirteen at Revolution Studios in the town. Originally we were approached via our American label DGC (Geffen) to ask if we fancied collaborating with PM Dawn. As we were weighing up the offer we were updated with the news than PM Dawn couldn’t make it after all and would we like to work with De La Soul? It took us less than a second to say yes. Like most people of our generation we were big fans of their work. Three Feet High and Rising was a massively important record.

Brendan: De La Soul (and their weed…and their preconceived ideas of us) came over to the studio. I think they thought we were Tom Petty, which we weren’t. They were hilarious once they realised we were equally hilarious.

Speaking to LA Weekly in 2009, De La Soul’s Posdnuos explained further.

Posdnuos: They (the Judgement Night people) started pairing up different artists. We could’ve been paired up with familiar names, but we didn’t know who Teenage Fanclub were at the time, so we picked them.

Brendan: The track sorta happened when they muscled a drumbeat out of our Alesis SR16.

Gerry: I remember the session started with a drum beat programmed by Maseo. I put down a bass line, Raymond put down a guitar line and then Posdnous and Trugoy started working on the lyric while at the same time going through a box of records they had brought looking for something to sample. It was really impressive to see how they worked. In a matter of hours they had recorded the vocal. We all put down some harmony vocals.

Posdnuos: We were taking a break from brainstorming ideas. We happened to be sitting in a little reception area outside the studio, and Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ video came on. I’ve always been the person in the group, who when he hears certain words, I take them and apply them to a certain thing. It started as a joke – ‘Hey, let’s make a song based off a Tom Petty video!’ Then Dave (Trugoy The Dove) said, ‘let’s spin it about us falling off as a rappers.’ So we went to the store, bought the Tom Petty CD, and based it around the song.

Then we got a bassline from (Biz Markie’s) Nobody Beats The Biz, the Steve Miller sample (listen carefully and you might spot a morsel of more ‘doo-doo-do-dos’ from Fly Like An Eagle), and a snippet of Petty’s voice and it came together pretty fast.”

Gerry: I saw that Posdnous say that they got the bass from a sample. That’s complete nonsense! For the record: it’s my part, I came up with it. The bass line doesn’t feature anywhere on that Biz Markie track.

They did add the Tom Petty sample at the end though, and then that was it – all done and dusted in a few days.

Spot the samples…

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – Free Fallin’

Biz Markie – Nobody Beats The Biz

Steve Miller Band – Fly Like An Eagle

What began as something of a throwaway track to fill space on a compilation album ended up a fully fledged De La Soul track, so much so that Tommy Boy, De La Soul’s label, wanted to include it on Buhloone Mindstate. The band nixed that idea though, and so the group’s third album’s loss was most definitely Judgement Night‘s gain.

Gerry; A few months later we flew out to Chicago to make a promo video with them.

Brendan: The recording of the video is one of my favourite memories.

The video is great, both groups coming together to goof around in an American high school classroom. De La Soul are the academics, TFC the class goons. Gerry spends his time sleeping in the back row alongside a bored Brendan, with an equally bored-looking Norman in front of him. Swotty goody two shoes Raymond sits up straight at the front with Maseo and Posdnuos the ‘teacher’.

When the video cuts to a school drama production, we see the two acts sharing the stage, De La Soul rapping in triplicate as a clearly tickled Teenage Fanclub play out the tune, a collection of acting kids weaving in and out of the happy stew.

Gerry: De La Soul were just really friendly guys. The whole thing was one of the most unexpected things that ever happened in my time in Teenage Fanclub and one of the most rewarding. As a track, I think it still sounds pretty good.

Brendan: It was sad news about Trugoy. He was lovely and keen on yoghurt.

 

 

 

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

It’s Funk, Jah, But Not As We Know It

Craig McAllister

This record will be 50 years old this year…half a century young and still sounding like nothing that’s been before or since. Well, to a point…

Lee Perry‘s Jungle Lion is vintage Perry, from the stoned, lion roaring madman-isms at the beginning to the sun-baked skank as the record’s groove kicks in, to the echoing brass refrain that lifts the recording up and out to the moon and back, the hook that keeps the whole acid-fried masterpiece from falling apart.

Lee Perry – Jungle Lion (7″ mix)

The production on Jungle Lion is insane. The band is locked in and tight, bass and drums laying the groundwork, that wet slap of chicka-chicka guitar adding the scratchy colour like a toddler with a crayon dragged across a piece of paper; messy, unique and creative. Perry toasts over the top in his own freeform fashion, the needles of the mixing desk accelerating far to the right and stuck in the red as he ‘Ughs’ and ‘Aows’ and ‘ch-ch-chs’ his way across the top. ‘Dan-dee-layon! Jung-gal layon! Fay-ah!‘ It’s funk, Jah, but not as we know it.

That brass refrain. The hook. You’ll definitely have heard that elsewhere. The keener scholars around these parts will point to Al Green‘s Love And Happiness and take the bonus round for 15 points, please, Jeremy.

Al Green – Love And Happiness

Now, I don’t know quite what wizardry The Upsetter was capable of manifesting inside Black Ark, but it seems to me – and I may be well off the mark here – that Perry sampled, yet didn’t sample, the horn refrain from Al Green. What I mean is, the refrain on Perry’s track is the same music, not merely a version played by Perry’s horn section, but sampling wasn’t a thing in 1973…or was it? Exactly what technology was available to maverick studio heads with no boundaries and serious creativity overload?

My thinking is that Perry simply played Al Green’s track and, using a studio microphone set up next to the speaker where Love And Happiness blasted forth, recorded what came out. Remember how, back in the days before ghetto blasters with in-built radios, you used to tape the charts? Yeah, exactly like that.

So Perry takes Green’s track – the delicious guitar riff in the intro as well as the horn refrain – and builds his own warped and inventive take on a soul classic. Nothing new in this of course – most reggae tracks began life as sun-baked covers of the soul music that crackled and crept across the US services airwaves and onto the Caribbean – but Lee Perry’s masterstroke is in the direct lifting rather than the direct copying that his peers would do.

Al Green’s original is such a great track. Stately yet understated, quietly assured and coasting on a slow fever bed of warm hammond and honeyed brass, the perfect foil for the Reverend’s measured, restrained vocal.

He always surrounded himself with great musicians, did Al, from the Rhodes sisters on backing vocals, to the slow ‘n steady Al Jackson Jnr on drums and Leroy Hodges on bass, to his guitar player and sometime-co-writer (and brother of Leroy) Teenie Hodges. I’ve written about Teenie before, a relative unknown in the guitar world but, for me, a guitarist whio appeals to me far more than some of the usual names who appear on those ‘Best Guitarists Ever’ lists. He’s such a fluid player, Hodges, clean and clear, with the most delicate of touches. Those fingers can hover an inch above the frets and his guitar will sing, clean and chiming, bluesy and soulful. No wonder Lee Perry was keen to employ him in whichever manner he could get away with.

One great horn refrain, two outstanding records.

 

Cover Versions, Hard-to-find, Sampled

Cavernous

Craig McAllister

Housed in a sleeve that suggests free movement, fluidity and motion; the gentle, undulating swirls, the band name written on two contrasting axes, Liquid Liquid‘s Optimo EP is a product of New York’s imperial post-punk phase, a fertile, ‘anything goes’ period that encouraged – demanded, even – individualism and originality. For extra homework, you might want to check out ESG, The Contortions or Bush Tetras. For now though, find your feet with Liquid Liquid.

With its pots ‘n pans poly tempo, the lead track Optimo borrows the feel of its window-rattling rhythm from Booker T’s Soul Limbo, before firing off in brave new directions; jittery, staccato lead vocals, bass-as-lead-instument, the piston pattern of steaming hi-hats, the sum of its mish-mash of musical styles old and yet to come making something that’s altogether inherently brand new. It’s no coincidence that the multi-genre embracing ’90s club night at Glasgow’s Sub Club was named after the track.

Liquid Liquid – Optimo

The EP is most interesting and celebrated, perhaps, for the track Cavern. It’s the bass line, obviously, that pricks the ears. It leaps, flying off the record to skelp you round the chops with a ‘wherehaveyouheardmebefore,eh?‘ smack of familiarity. A chrome-covered aerodynamic pulse, its cave-like sound, moving-ever forward and flowing was, for all I know, an influence on both the band’s name and their best-known track. It was certainly an influence on hip-hop, that bassline, although more of that later.

Liquid Liquid – Cavern *

The drums, shuffling, sparse and fat-free, showed that the most powerful music doesn’t always need an earthquake of percussion to propel it forwards. There’s some lovely shaker action all the way through, keeping it less rock and just on the right side of funky. I’d imagine Reni of the Stone Roses would enjoy playing along to this. The vocals, sparse and infrequent, almost an afterthought to the groove, throw up little melodic phrases and half-lines that, funny this!, were also an influence on the hip-hop community. Indeed, if you can’t hear the recognisable melodies and key words (and musical interludes and tempo and general vibe) that form the vocal for Grandmaster Flash‘s White Lines, where have you been all this time?

Yes, not content with copying – not sampling – the bassline, Flash took a liberal dose of the vocal’s style and phrasing and – ooh-whu-ite – created a version of Crystal that was far more reaching than anyone could ever have anticipated.

Initially, Liquid Liquid were flattered. Hearing White Lines adopt their bassline (and vocal inflections…and melodic interludes…) and have it boom from the subway-shocking soundsytems in Manhattan’s clubs – higher baby! – hearing their vocals aped and added to – higher baby!! – hearing their track get an epoch-defining makeover, replete with a boxfresh rap and more hooks than an Ali 15-rounder – higher baby!!! – was quite the thrill, until – don’t ever come down! – the thorny issue of copyright and plagiarism reared its dollar-happy head. Slip in and out of phenomena, indeed.

Grandmaster Flash – White Lines

There’s only ever one winner in this type of fight, and it tends not to be the creators who benefit, Both Liquid Liquid and Sugarhill Records, the label who’d issued White Lines, were ordered to pay legal costs that ultimately led to both parties winding down, citing lack of funds as the reason.

Full Time from the City of New York:

Finance 2 – 0 Culture

 

* there are two versions of Cavern on this one sound file. I’ve no idea how I did this or how to fix it. So enjoy Cavern Cavern by Liquid Liquid Liquid Liquid.

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Knuckles Rapped

Craig McAllister

There was a terrible version of You’ve Got The Love a few years ago, a windswept and earnest cover that was drama school in delivery and hive-inducing in reception. Florence & The Machine had chosen to close their festival slots with it and there were enough enthralled and taste-free people giving thumbs up around the band that their record company rush-released a version. It was all over the radio like a rash in need of antihistamine, its Asda-priced Kate Bushisms making me almost crash the car more than once. Sting. King.

The source (aye!) of Florence’s version was the deep throb of The Source‘s track, recorded with finger clickin’ soul survivor Candi Staton on vocals.

The Source feat. Candi Staton – You’ve Got The Love

Taking her vocal line from the motivating commentary on a keep fit video – ‘sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air…sometimes it feels the going is just too rough…I know I can count on you‘ – Staton’s delivery ensured something of classic cut status for the track.

Many people wouldn’t have realised the record was essentially a cover. Indeed, for most chart music-buying folks, the record’s 5-note bassline and viralish, ear-worming keyboard motif would be their first unknown introduction to Frankie Knuckles.

Waaaay back in the years when house music was first thumping and throbbing its way from the sweaty basements of Chicago to the switched-on fringes of the mainstream, New Yorker Knuckles teamed up with Chicago soul singer Jamie Principle and hotwired his original soulful vocal to a tune that was at once progressive, deep, emotional and zeitgeist-riding.

In an era when (Stateside especially) hair metal was the mainstream’s thing, when The Smiths were putting out The Queen Is Dead and every other guitar band in the country was hanging on to their jangling coat tails, Knuckles was busy programming sequencers and drum machines – MC80s, 303s, 707s and 808s – to create a record that still resonates today. If How Soon Is Now is, as was said, the indie Stairway To Heaven, Frankie Knuckles’ Your Love is dance music’s She Loves You.

Frankie Knuckles – Your Love

The record kicked doors down. It gatecrashed the notion of what ‘dance music’ was, and what it was not. It wasn’t a hundred mile an hour electro pogo. It wasn’t base and derivative. It wasn’t (always) an anonymous guy hiding behind a rack of technology while a lip-synching beauty mimed her way atop the caterwaulings of a session singer. This particular brand of dance music was forward-thinking, cerebral and deeply soulful. As it turned out, it was pretty much timeless too.

Your Love‘s rattling, reverberating snare must’ve sounded wonderful clattering off the walls of the Hacienda, even on a half-empty Wednesday night in February. Me? I wouldn’t know. I was too busy twisting my fingers into Smiths riffs and worrying about the length of the sleeves on my cardigan. I caught up in time though.

The sequenced keyboard line that formed the melodic hook of The Source’s cover is, at source (ha, again) hypnotising and trance-inducing, the Jungle Book’s Kaa and his spiralling snake eyes set to music. Its bassline is massive; instantly recognisable and capable of inducing Proustian rushes in even the most pasty-faced of guitar band-lovers when heard unexpectedly. It builds beautifully, from sparse electro through keyboard swells and man/woman gospelish harmonising to deep-breathing backing vocals, tasteful foreplay to the wham-bam of Lil’ Louis’ French Kiss, if you will.

‘I can’t let go’, sings Principle, as the song builds to its steamy-windowed climax, a notion that I wholeheartedly subscribe to. Your Love is a great record, propulsive and soulful house in the vein of Promised Land, both Joe Smooth’s original and the Style Council’s faithful reworking. I can’t let go indeed.

demo, Get This!, Live!, Sampled

Twin Reverb

Craig McAllister

Check…check…check!

A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo!

(Pause)

Trrrr-rat-at-a-tat a-tee-tee

Trrrr-rat-at-a-tat a-tee-tee

Bass. How low can you go? Actually, not that low for now. A tight ‘n taut bass guitar plays high up the frets, its woody thunk foreshadowing what will follow:

dur der-der-duh-der

dur der-der-duh-der

Nagging, inistent. Immediately earwormish. It moves through the gears a semitone and the drummer falls in with a loping, skipping, skittering beat that’s been rescued after falling from the back of a lorry last seen leaving Manchester in 1989.

A brief dropout from the bass brings another burst of rat-a-tat percussion, immediately followed by two short and teasing electric guitar riffs – bendy, wobbly, hypnotic – and then, on a surge of nagging, asthmatic guitar, the band is here. The second guitar player makes themselves known by triggering their distortion pedal and a viral squiggle of feedback bleeds from the speakers for a bar or two before plectrum meets nickle. It’s a cheap, punky trick and you love it. 

Spitting in a wishing well. Blown to hell. Crash. I’m the last splash.

As far as song intros go, Cannonball by The Breeders is so familiar, so engrained that even 29 years later, Pavlovian rushes make their way to the soles of the Doc Martens without you realising.

The Breeders – Cannonball

It might be the riff that moves the feet – a nagging, twanging, guitar player’s sore finger of a lick jigsawed to a monster, see-sawing tidal wave of fuzzed-out barre chords, but it’s the vocal that moves the mind.

Kim Deal, moonlighting from a by then fragmented Pixies, has the unequalled ability of sounding as if she’s constantly grinning as she sings. Not in a Marti Pellow, I-can’t-believe-I’m-getting-away-with-this dimple buster of a grin, but a proper mile-wide smile as expansive and welcoming as the Ohio of her birthplace. In the golden age of Hollywood, Kim and her cheekbones would’ve been filmed swinging carefreely around lamposts. “I’m in love…I’m in love with singing, and I want the wurld t’know!” Check the video below for proof.

Freed from the pressures of Pixies, Kim takes centrestage and ropes in her twin sister Kelley (replacing Tanya Donnelly who’d by now left and formed Belly) alongside English bass player Josephine Wiggs and Slint’s Britt Walford on drums; an alternative rock supergroup of sorts that occasionally – especially on Cannonball – surpasses much of what made them so revered in their respective day jobs.

Kim and Kelley mesh and meld and harmonise across the verses, an electrified Mamas and Papas (or should that be Mamas and Mamas?), surfing the wave where two voices become one yet sound like three. Clever stuff, you’d need to agree. A metallic clatter of muted six-strings amplified to dangerously exciting levels heralds the noisy bit and suddenly you can see why The Breeders were one of Nirvana’s tour supports of choice. Melody and mayhem – always key ingredients in a proper guitar band’s arsenal.

Cannonball rocks. From the static bursts of fuzz mic, to the spontaneous “Heys!” that appear with satisfying regularity, to the underlying breathy a-woo-oos that you’ll spot if you scratch below the surface, it’s a real beauty of a guitar track, punky yet, eh, funky too. Do they really sing, ‘I’ll be your whatever you want…the bong in this reggae song‘? Yes. Yes, they do.

*Bonus Tracks!

Here’s the demo of Cannonball, working title Grunggae. Very much a work in progress, you can hear the seeds being sown; that shuffling beat, the twin vocals, the a-woo-oos, the metallic k.o. and rattling clatter before the noisy bit. The DNA is all in place, even if the arrangement isn’t.

The Breeders  – Cannonball (demo)

Fantastically lo-fi live version here:

The Breeders  – Cannonball (Live in Stockholm, 1994)

Magpie DJs Radio Soulwax have oft incorporated Cannonball into their sets, mashed up occasionally (as was the parlance of the time) with Skee-Lo’s I Wish, intelligent rap and indie rock cross-pollinating into something wholly different.

Radio Soulwax part 0

 

Listen from 3 min 20, or download the whole thing and marvel at the psychedelic jigsawing of it all; Beastie Boys, Maceo & The Macks, EMF, God Only Knows, Elastica, Jack And Diane, Eye of the Tiger, Mr Oizo, Erik B & Rakim, What Have You Done For Me Lately?, Basement Jaxx, Funky Cold Medina, No Diggity…..all fed into the Radio Soulwax super-blender and served up as something brand new…. even 20+ years later. The soundtrack to every one of my barbecues for the past two decades, I can never get enough of 2 Many DJs mixes.

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