Sampled – Page 9 – Plain Or Pan

Get Filthy with Sarah Cracknell

July 30, 2008July 30, 2008 Craig McAllister

Wouldn’t you love to? The ironic thing is, the track in question doesn’t even feature Sarah Cracknell on vocals, but it is one of the best Saint Etienne tracks you’re ever likely to hear. This is not a media hype…

‘Filthy’ began life in 1991 on the b-side of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ and features the enigmatic (and 15 year old) Q-Tee on vocals. It’s dubby and spacey. There’s a bit of wah-wah which may well have been sampled from an obscure 70s soul record, a looped drum break that could’ve come from the same record, a cracking (sampled? probably) bassline that’s been looped to infinity and even a glockenspiel solo at one point. I used to get quite annoyed that my copy on 12″ sounded like someone was frying bacon on top of it. Years later I got ‘Filthy’ on CD and I realised the vinyl crackles and pops had been added for effect. Actually, maybe they haven’t. They might be crackles from the original vinyl that had been sampled when jigsawing the track together. I hadn’t thought of that until now!

Q-Tee

On top of the fantastic music and the snaps! crackles! and pops! you get Q-Tee’s vocals. Starting out like a sexy version of PIL’s ‘Public Image’, “Hello? Hello? Hahahaha!”, they are husky, half-rapped, half-spoken and half-sung (can you have 3 halves?) and they make the track what it is – a b-side that should’ve been an a-side. I think Saint Etienne themselves recognised Q-Tee’s contribution to the track, because they got her back to rap on ‘Calico‘, when they recorded the ‘So Tough’ LP. They also appear to have realised how good a track ‘Filthy ‘was, because it’s been available in at least 2 other versions since 1991.

In 1995, Saint Etienne teamed up with French chanteuse Etienne Daho, to form St Etienne Daho. They released a 5 track ep, half in French, half in English. (Halves again!) On it you’ll find a re-working of ‘He’s On The Phone’ called ‘Accident (Week-End à Rome)’ that’s pretty good, but the ep is worth getting just for the track ‘Jungle Pulse‘, which is ‘Filthy‘ sung in French. Etienne Daho sounds like MC Solaar rapping on the top. Sarah adds a whispered French thingy in the background and the whole track rolls along nicely. C’est magnifique.

In February this year, Saint Etienne released ‘Boxette‘, which compiles all their hard-to-get and highly collecatble fan club only ep’s and albums. A collector’s wet dream, it has all the Saint Etienne you’ll ever need spread over 4 CDs. It was only available through their fan club and sold for £25. It now goes for around £100 on eBay, so start saving or look below…..The first disc is brilliant. There’s not one bit of filler on it. ‘Filthy‘ makes an appearance, this time under the guise of ‘Studio Kinda Filthy’. A bit less dubby but a bit more echoey and a whole lot more spy film, it’s equally worth having. Extra points too for the old-school sampled BBC announcer at the start.

Do di do di do, do, di, do di do, do di do di do di do di, do di do di do!

Elsewhere on ‘Boxette‘ you’ll find their version of David Bowie’s ‘Absolute Beginners’ (Not very good to be honest. Neither was it when I saw them play it live in 1991). Anyway. I don’t normally post whole albums of stuff that are available and/or new, but as ‘Boxette‘ was limited to 3000 copies and has long since sold out and been deleted, in these credit crunch times save your eBay pennies and click on these links:

CD1 CD2 CDs 3 & 4

Poke about and you’ll find all the artwork you need and you can fashion your own Blue Peter-style Saint Etienne ‘Boxette‘ box set. I did and it looks great!

Sampled

How High’s The Water, Mama?

August 13, 2007September 29, 2007 Craig McAllister

Answer? Three feet high and rising. And so, with these words, Johnny Cash named the greatest hip-hop album ever. From that album, De La Soul released arguably their best-known single, ‘The Magic Number’. Like everything else on the album, it was cut, pasted ‘n’ jigsawed together from a variety of eclectic sources. Soul, funk, country, jazz, rock, spoken word comedy. They’re all in the great melting pot of the single known as The Magic Number.

Syl Johnson ‘Different strokes’ (“Do the shangalang!”)

The Jackson 5 ‘ABC‘

Bob Dorough ‘Three Is The Magic Number’

Led Zeppelin ‘The Crunge’

Eddie Murphy ‘Anybody In The Audience Ever Get Hit By A Car?’

Johnny Cash ‘Five Feet High And Rising’

Double Dee and Steinski ‘Lesson 3 (History of Hip Hop mix)*, which itself samples;

*Schoolhouse Rocks ‘The Magic Number’

*Bill Cosby ‘Got To Have Soul’

*Putney Swope ‘Got To Have Soul’

* ……and many other records that I don’t know. I imagine De La Soul used the Double Dee record as the basis for their track, but I could be wrong.

De La Soul also remixed The Magic Number. ‘The Too Mad Mix’ isn’t essential, but worth a listen. How can you improve the original? You can’t, but here’s Jeff Buckley mucking around somewhere onstage (unknown audience recording bootleg) making a good go of Bob Dorough’s original.

If you haven’t found them already, you can also find the list of records that were used to make ‘Eye Know’ here.

Hope you’ve got your blank CDs ready after all that downloading!

Sampled

Eye Know who does the samples

August 5, 2007September 29, 2007 Craig McAllister

De La Soul’s ‘3 Feet High And Rising’ is my favourite hip hop album of all time. It turned this white, West of Scotland guitar playing, desert boot wearing, walking talking Morrissey haircut into a homeboy (with a quiff). I have been poking about in all the darkest corners of the internet to come up with a definitive list of samples for the record. It was released in the days before sample clearance was the law, so there’s tons of stuff on it that would never be allowed to be sampled nowadays. I’ve found a few websites that list bits and pieces of what was sampled for the album, but nothing definitive. Until next week…..

‘Eye Know’ got to number 14 in October 1989. It’s hard to believe, but the original single/album version was jigsawed together from only 6 records. That’s all. De La Soul played nothing on it. They rapped a bit, but all the music you hear was played by other people. That wouldn’t happen nowadays. Dr Dre finds his sample, sticks it on top of a crazy beat, gets Snoop Dogg to swear a bit over it and voila, another motherfuckin million seller. De La Soul cut’n’ pasted everything, and they sound 10 times funkier than everyone else.

‘Eye Know’ was put together using the following records:

The Mad Lads ‘Make This Young Lady Mine’

Steely Dan ‘Peg‘

Steely Dan ‘FM‘

Patrice Rushen ‘Remind Me’

Otis Redding ‘(Sittin On) The Dock Of The Bay’

Sly And The Family Stone ‘Sing A Simple Song’

Get youself Audacity, give yourself a year, and see if you can recreate this fantastic record in the comfort of your own home. I doubt it…

In the meantime, here’s the ‘Know It All’ and the ‘Daisy Bass’ remixes of Eye Know as a bonus. The start of the ‘Daisy Bass’ remix reminds me of the Happy Mondays ‘Wrote For Luck’ for some reason. Or Lil’ Louis’ French Kiss. Either way, listen and weep homeboys and girls.

Cover Versions, Sampled

Pass It On (part 2)

May 14, 2007September 29, 2007 Craig McAllister

Simple Kid is a one-man band. All battered acoustics, a bit of banjo and a smattering of electronics and new technology. He’s an Irish Beck. I suppose you could call him Feck. Hee hee. Anyway, his first album ‘Simple Kid 1‘ was pretty good. I have had a copy of it since it was released but I recently picked up the genuine article in Tesco for 97p!

More recently I heard him do a song called ‘Lil King Kong’ which sounded like it sampled/borrowed/stole the riff from Led Zeppelin‘s version of Robert Johnson’s ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’ (get it on the BBC Sessions album). Pretty good I thought. And pretty cheeky. Cos it’s not like Led Zeppelin are going to sue him. After all, they’ve made a career out of ripping off the old blues guys and crediting everything to Page, Plant, Bonham and Jones. Even their version of ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’ is credited to Page, Plant and Johnson. But I’ve never been able to hear where they enhanced the original. Unless you count the drums. But then surely the credit should have Bonham added to it somewhere.

Actually, they probably would sue, being the corporate money grabbers that they are/were, but I digress. These 2 tracks are posted in the spirit of the first ‘Pass It On’ post – that the best songs and tunes of the past usually end up being recycled in some way years down the line. Listen and compare, pop pickers.

Led Zeppelin ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’

Simple Kid ‘Lil King Kong’

Hard-to-find, Sampled

Moonlighting with the Noonday Underground

February 25, 2007September 29, 2007 Craig McAllister

Noonday Underground is the nom de plume of Simon Dine. As well as being A&R man at Go! Discs and producer of Paul Weller’s ‘Illumination’ album, he found the time to release a couple of albums. ‘Surface Noise’ is the second of these albums and came to my attention as it featured 2 tracks with vocals by Frank Reader of the Trashcan Sinatras. It is still available, but seems quite hard to get these days, which is why I’m posting 2 tracks from it.

Windmills is based around a sample of some forgotten 60’s film soundtrack. It’s got weird instrumentation, some plucked strings and lazy, almost spoken vocals. It is magic.

Barcelona sounds quite similar to the above and is probably my favourite of the 2 tracks – looped, sampled strings, some plucked acoustics, some vinyl crackles and some weird film noir noises in the background. Complete with a whispered lead vocal track and falsetto backing vocals, it sounds like an eerie music box, and would be great as the background music to a Twin Peaks-style movie.

If you’re a fan of the Trashcan’s and prefer their more introspective stuff like ‘Orange Fell’, these tracks are for you.