SATURDAY 12th JUNE 2004: a night of ROOTS REGGAE with SOLUTION SOUND SYSTEM

An upful night of roots reggae with a mixture of the tuffest oldies, crucial new release and unrelease music alongside M.C’s, singers and players live on the sound.

The venue is:

UNITY WORKS
25 WHITE POST LANE
HACKNEY WICK
E9

TRAIN: The venue is next door to Hackney Wick overground station (trains goes via Kentish Town, Camden, Highbury, Dalston, Stratford etc)

BUSES: 276, 308 (get off at Rothbury RD then its a 1 minute walk), S2, 26, 30, (N)236, 388

Entrance is £6
Dance runs from 10pm til 5am

This will be a fundraiser for FIN FEST (free festival in Finsbury Park on Sunday 11th July, where you can catch Solution in action
See you onthe 12th June

Big Respect

Solution Crew

The Pixies, Brixton Academy 2nd June 2004

I’ve never been a massive Pixies fan, but they were a great band and there’s a whole load of nostalgia attached to their songs for me, and my sister, and my better half.

When I worked briefly at the Rough Trade warehouse it seemed like whole days were spent shifting copies of Doolittle along with Yazz’s The Only Way is Up 12″ (*bomp* baybeeeeeeeeeee!!!) and 3 Feet High and Rising. I even managed to blag a 4 track promo for Doolittle with “Wave of Mutilation” on it. Which I then promptly sold to cover my part of the printing costs for T.O.P.Y. London Bulletin 2 (a little A5 zine which we punted about 300 copies of in 6 months! I was stunned.).

I eventually got sacked from Rough Trade for nicking a copy of Nurse With Wound’s Alas The Madonna Does Not Function. I was gutted, but also somewhat amused by the unceremonious termination of the contract-I-was-never-given – people I worked with were parcelling up huge great boxes of LPs every day and sending them to “such and such record store” c/o their home address. You may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, as the saying goes. I imagine da management (although I think it was ostensibly a co-op?) were aware of the major “shrinkage” and I was made an example of. That, or I was just too cack-handed for a life of crime.

Anyway, I digress. It was also a time of my life when I was going out a lot and this even involved going to the occasional indie club where dancing drunkenly to “This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven” was de rigeur. Good times.

Plus obviously the Pixies were the architects of the whole “quiet bit/shouty bit” which is now a staple of every pop punk boy band you care to mention. It’s all about the dynamics, and the controlled mania of the lyrics, folks!

We missed the support cos of putting the daughter to bed on the other side of the river.

The Academy was rammed, huge numbers of people were singing along to every word, it was an impressive atmosphere considering the band just steamed through loads of their best songs without any banter whatsoever. It was, as my beter half pointed out, “a non arse-wiggling gig”. But that’s alright. Once in a while. Anyway it turns out that she likes all the mental thrashy ones and I like the girly Kim Deal ones like “Wave” (which got two outings – version excursion!) and “Heaven”.

It has been a long time since I went to a gig where young men clutch gigantic posters afterwards.

how do you paint “over the top”?

I don’t have the time or desire to plunge into whatever “debates” are currently raging. Suffice to say that ANYONE who rejoices at and/or sneers at and/or tries to excuse (emotionally, intellectually or politically) the destruction of art, be it deliberate by looters in Baghdad or accidental by dodgy gas cylinders in Leyton, should go off now, break bread with Henry VIII, Josef Goebbels, the Ku Klux Klan and the Daily Mail, and stay the fuck out of my life forever.

The case for the opposition, part one: “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge” – Bakunin.

The case for the opposition part two: Gustav Metzger, who is perhaps best remembered for his “auto-destructive art”. Which makes him a bread-breaker with Goebbels, obviously.

Except his parents and older brother were all murdered by the Nazis in concentration camps for being jewish.

DFC

Deptford Fun City by Neil Gordon-Orr

The pamphlet launch was great – Use Your Loaf is a really good space, much more approachable for people not immersed in the counter culture than many occupied social centres I’ve visited.

Nice bunch of local trouble makers, anarchos, young ‘uns in bands and random hangers on like myself and Danny.

Neil did a nice talk on some of the aspects in the booklet and played some tunes. I followed up with a set of reggae tunes loosely connected to New Cross etc – lots of Shaka productions, Mad Professor, Dennis Bovell etc. (Tho Neil pre-empted me by playing Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “New Cras Massakah” 🙂 )

I now have some copies of the pamphlet for sale as well – check this page for details. I’ll even do paypal for those of you an ocean away from Deptford.

set list 15/5/04

It was my mate Chris’ birthday party on Saturday, so I blagged the warm up shift on the decks. Playing to an empty room is harder than you would think – you have a key role in drawing people in, rather than forcing them to go to another pub for some dutch courage. Anyway – I did alright:

Sound Dimension – Drum Song (Coxsone 7”) so the obvious thing to do would be to play an all Studio One set in honour of the man like Coxsone. But it wouldn’t have gone down t0o well and I doubt my collection is up to it. In fact I know it isn’t, but it’s something to aim for…

Hopeton Lewis – Take It Easy (Soul Jazz LP) off 300% Dynamite – not very “pro”, but a corker nonetheless. Anyway – I left the Drum Song seven on the decks for a while in case any purists wanted a ruck about it: Gladdy reckoned it was an original JA press and it certainly has that look about it.

Barry Brown – Every Knee Shall Bow (Attack 7”) “The good you do, it will follow you…” includes what sounds like a false start on one of the choruses… ruff and ready!

Aggrovators – Dub on My Pillow (Attack LP) “Johnny in the Echo Chamber” – Mr Clarke jumps in and out of “Tears on My Pillow” whilst Mr Tubby and Mr Lee mash the place up.

Willie Williams – Armagideon Time discomix (s/t Studio 1 LP) Cos everyone knows it from The Clash or from Ghost Dog or… they just know it.

Scientist/Jammy – Flash Gordon Meets Luke Skywalker (Trojan LP) This track kicks ass – a massive anticipation-builder as it has virtually no beats in it. Stripped down minimalism that is all the more powerful for it – you know what SHOULD be happening, but just get teased. When the entire tune kicks in just before the end it feels like you’ve just come.

Gregory Isaacs – Thief A Man (African Museum 7”) “You’re Just A Part of Babylon’s Plan”

Dennis Brown – Wolf & Leopard (Trojan LP) classic niceness.

Observers – No Conscience (Trojan LP) the dub

The Mighty Diamonds – Stand Up To Your Judgement (Hitbound 7”) pure soul, blogged about this one before I think.

Abyssinians – Declaration of Rights (Studio One 7”) OK, so I did end up playing quite a bit of Brentford Road output 🙂

Bunny Lee – Version (Jackpot 7”) the dub of Johnny Clarke’s version of “Declaration” – again, not very “pro”, but it means you can mix it all together rather than buy two copies of the same tune, or do a Shaka-esque ‘turn the record over with big pause’. (This is when people started arriving en masse, so time to move up a gear)

Joy White – Idlers on the Street (Grounation 7”) dunno if I actually played this, but it’s great – she has an almost too squeaky voice, but it works: “a girl can’t walk in peace because of the idlers on the street”.

Ward 21 – Ganja Smoke (John John 7”) never fails

Nelly Furtado – Turn Off The Light (FiWi 7”) ditto

McKay – Take Me Over (Go Beat 12”) From last year on “Double Barrel”)

Barrington Levy – Murderer (Jah Life 7”) Nice bit of swirly dancehall anthemia. Not the right time to follow this up with the more shouty Levy/Beenie Man collaboration as usual.

Pad Anthony & Tonto Irie – Champion Bubbler (Greensleeves 12”) If I had my choice I’d play stuff like this all night but it doesn’t really work when you kick off at 8:00pm. “Yellowman him yellow/him yellow like cheese/Bob Marley died of cancer disease…”

Frankie Paul – Pass The Tu Sheng Peng (Greensleeves 12”) never fails because of the “darker shade of black”/”Norwegian Wood” riddim, coupled with it being about smoking. Plus you can tweak away at the Radics extended instrumental at the end. But I didn’t do too much of that because time was running out and I had to play:

Jah Screechy – Walk & Skank (Blacker Dread 12”) Or “where SL2’s ‘On a Ragga Tip’ came from” as it is most commonly known to people who ask me about it: “a hand in your pocket and one by your side”.

Nerious Joseph – Sensi Crisis (Fashion 12”) pull uuuuuuuuuuuup!

I had a ton of other stuff to play, but forgot to pack a load of it because it was hectic times dropping off the daughter with my Mum and Dad. So if you’ve seen me DJ over the last year, you will have heard quite a lot of this. Needless to say, I was already on my 2nd pint by the time I’d finished and was therefore slightly the worse for wear when the late licence came to an end at some ungodly hour of Sunday morning.

The rest of the DJs done good, especially Danny Chin who finished off with a propah party hip-hop set.

Two Books

Paul Morley – Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City (Bloomsbury 2003)

Joe Jacobs – Out of the Ghetto: My Youth in the East End Communism and Facism, 1913-1939 (J Simon 1977 – later republished by Phoenix Press 1991)

Danny always reckoned you should have at least two books on the go – one highbrow, one lowbrow. I assumed the Morley book, about Pop Music, with Kylie in it, would be lowbrow, but I was wrong.

It’s been blogged to death elsewhere, but I really didn’t get on with it – too many lists, too much micro-repetition. A lot of reminded me of a particularly bad bout of ‘flu a few years back when I ended up in bed for two weeks. For (what seemed like) hours, I ended up having the same dream, again and again and again.

“Words and Music” is a bit like that, but fortunately I was able to skip great chunks of it and not feel bad about it, cos it was out of the library. Having said that, I really liked the bits about John Cage and Fad Gadget.

I assumed “Out of the Ghetto” would be high-brow, but I was wrong about that as well. Joe Jacobs, a working class Jewish bloke, grew up in the East End of London. This book captures his experiences really well. His story weaves together a number of themes – London history, the rise of the British Union of Fascists, Joe’s involvement and gradual disillusionment with the Communist Party of Great Britain and just the experience of a particular person reflecting on a particular time in their lives.

It’s completely unpretentious and down to earth, with Joe refusing to overdo his contribution to the number of events he clearly played a major part in (for example the resistance to Moseley, Cable Street, etc). I found the material on the debates in the CPGB on workplace/union vs community/ant-fascist activity to be very relevant today. Joe’s style is very conversational – he doesn’t over-theorise and the every day stuff sits naturally alongside the political activity.

My only regret is that the book doesn’t go into his involvement in later life with groups like Solidarity and Echanges. Joe died in 1977.