What a week so far. Meltdown Chernobyl style averted, I hope. It’s Wednesday night and I still haven’t posted the weekly Basement playlist. Been ground under marking and commenting upon exegeses and theses. Sorry this blog is so late. I’m telling that to myself.
God, Nick’s electro jazzy opening sounded much more coherent than my first excursion at radio-activity. I thought the listeners were going to hear Huddie Leadbetter AKA Leadbelly just chatting about a record session at the Union City Hotel when he was given some hooch to get in the mood. Not sure if Lomax recorded that one. But I forgot that the conversating is on the next track on my CD burn of the compilation Blacks, Whites and Blues. So instead we heard a full folk blues by the man. The title of the track I don’t have. But it sounded fine all the same, that guitar picking sounding quite furious with the fuzzy resonance of a poor tape dub. The speaking voice is somewhere else on that cassette-to-CD burn. Huddie sounds very jolly, and much more trebly when he’s reminiscing. Quite buzzed. Start the show off with a failure of broadcasting technique. Oh well.
I overlapped with a sixties psychedelic b-movie punk rock trash tune, the kinda thing that the Cramps dream about. It was ‘The Spider and the Fly’ by The Monocles. It has a noxious electric guitar drone, a booming male voicing a scary spider, and a squeaky Minnie Mouse voice of a fly begging ‘help me, help me’. The incredible shrinking fly. Reminds me of another sixties punk classic, Web of Sound, which has a picture of The Seeds caught in a gynormous web. The Monocles are on the third volume of the Pebbles series that mined the suburban garages of the 1960s after the British invasion met the first tabs of rock and roll acid in the USA.
Then cut into a sixties mod favourite called ‘Shoes’ by Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland. I think the northern soulers called this a ‘slider’. Not to be confused with the onionized burger from Whitecastle in the American Midwest, a food that you find leaving you unexpectedly soon, this slider is apparently a tune which you can slip slide away too with your talcum enhanced leather souls. Or so I remember from the back of one of those Kent compilations that were sprayed with northern soul vernac from some diehard committed weekender. Anyway, it’s a great song, very subtle with Bland taking careful steps rather than belting it out. Recorded in the early to mid 1960s with a Brill Building flourish of strings and Latin shuffle. I actually saw the man once in the early 90s in a local dining club in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Mostly black working class women and men in their forties and fifties. All dressed up as if they were ready to let their hair down even more after church. Bobby had rather an unpleasant reddish suit of cabaret sensibility and he’d come out and walk among the ladies at the dining table picking one or two to sing more closely to. His voice was gone by then. He had that horrible hacking croak when he tried to hit a particular note. For some fine writing on Bobby Bland, check out Peter Guralnick. I think there’s a good essay in Lonesome Highway. One of the great Bobby Blue Bland record sleeves is the one for Two Steps to the Blues, which has him standing poised in front of a short staircase into a building. And guess how many steps on that staircase. They might even be the steps to the Duke/Peacock HQ in Houston. Not sure about that, but like to believe it, so don’t care to find out for sure.
Studio One bootleg territory next—a version of Wayne Fontana & the Mindbinders’ Britbeat hit ‘Groovy Kind of Love’ recorded in Brentford Road, Kingston by Hortense Ellis. Wasn’t this song written by someone who would later be in 10cc? Not Godley & Crème, but Graham Gouldman or Goldman, I think. The Jewish guy with the afro. Manchester pop of the 1960s travelled far. Hortense is one of my favourite singers at Studio One. She’s got a voice very much like Maxine Brown, the US soul singer of the same period. I’m a sucker for reggae covers of middle-of-the-road or really overexposed pop hits. You know the kind of stuff I mean—Dennis Brown doing a Perry Como tune. Hortense must be one of the ugliest names around. Thank you, British colonialism. You gave the Caribbean or the ‘West Indies’ the gift of names like Winston and Cedric. Hortense might just as well have been named Ermintrude. There’s a kind of obla-di carnival tint to this song. Must have been around the time that Coxsone and the Sound Dimension studio band were just beginning to find their own sound. Even though it’s a cover, it’s really alien like those Joe Meek productions of the early 60s. The horrible vinyl pressing from which this was burnt also adds to the lo-fidelity charm.
Then moved into Theo Parrish's epic ‘Dirt Rhodes’ twelve, which has a grunty Fender Rhodes stuttering and moving along like a very slow steam train up a (Wairika) Hill. This 11-minute tune gave Nick and I a chance to talk to the listeners about the Theo gig the night before. I haven’t danced unselfconsciously for so long for ages. I know Calibre in St. Kevin’s Arcade has a kind of semi-legendary status for Auckland dancefloor cleaners, but this was my first time, and I was impressed by the slightly older crowd, the mix of male and female, all creeds and cullahs, very relaxed, stylin’ but creating a largely non-posey vibe. Nice lighting and spaces to escape the noise and sit down if you wanted. Reminded me of one bit of The Garage, a club I went to in Nottingham from around 1984-86. My shoes were OK to get me in this time. Met some people too which hardly ever happens to me in clubs. Some quasi-steroids guy came up to me and said he’d been in my media studies class some years before. This happens fairly regularly at gigs. I don’t mean hitting on me, just recognition. I think people are surprised to see a tubby balding brown academic hanging out at a youth event. Anyway, this guy started to rap on about something he learnt in the course, this or that about the media, and I realised he didn’t have a clue about media studies. Or maybe he had taken away something no one at the front of the lecture theatre had intended. I also got to hang out with one of Nick’s friends Jason who’s a really decent fella and I met Jason’s mate Matt, a gent if there ever was one, for the first time. I think we’ve invented a reality game show for DJ skills. I talked to Kumanan who’s a doctor in town—Sri Lankan Kiwi—there’s more of them around these parts than you’d imagine, boyo. He’s a house fan and disaffected hip hop head who hadn’t been out for a while. He remarked that he hadn’t heard so much jazz in a club in Auckland before. And so to Theo. Never seen Theo before. The promotion promised a 4-hour set. He created little 20 minute arcs of dancefloor movement that cycled around and back upon themselves. It was like one wave of surf enveloping another wave becoming surf and so on and so on, et cetera et cetera. Compelling for most of its oceanic depth, though I wish he’d played some Fela and more Afrobeat. Loads of great disco tracks. Surprising how often he went from something quite downbeat and serene to something with a massive kick very quickly but not jarringly. A real variety of electronic noodlings and jazz solos in so many of the tracks. He likes to treble it up for those female harmonies in choruses and horn blasts. The distorted bass of many of his twelves was not much in evidence. Theo also really gets into the music, moving and grimacing a lot, and he was puffing quite forcefully at the turntables. Anyway, he rocked the proverbial Haus, even though he began with a disclaimer which we couldn’t hear properly in da club. Not time for proper set up or something like that. He even made some mistakes, which as a corner bumping klutz I appreciate as part of DJ aesthetix. Oh yeah, and I caught the second half of Recloose’s set which sounded fantastic. Looking forward to the next album. Shouts out to Cian who also played and whom I missed, though I greeted him as he departed with his heavy bag of hits. And respect to Mark Burgess who’s been playing out Mr Parrish for some time.
A great night. Got home about six in the morning. Thank Christ I was able to nap for a couple of hours before I went out. I wouldn’t have been able to keep standing. But when I got home, I could only intermittently nap, never actually drifting into deep sleep. I was exhausted by the time I arrived at Base HQ. And this! after performing several chores at home and around town. Can you think of anything worse than spending a Saturday morning at St. Pukes. Wasn’t that bad actually. My partner was just about to leave for Toronto and then London where I’ll hook up with her in a week and a half and where my seven nephews and nieces will receive the childish gifts we purchased in toy stores. I got this great plastic wombat for myself with an expression I too readily recognize. Oh, god I’m drifting from my purposeful radio itinerary.
We got into ‘Duggie Dhol’ by Black Star Liner from the Halaal Rocks EP, around 96-ish. Northern British Asian dance music. This has Tjinder from Cornershop parroting like a Panjabi hawker of chai, garam chai. It provided the backdrop for a discussion of Bride & Prejudice, into which I went in great detail. Nick the wag would repeatedly interject, ‘So you didn’t like it?’ And I would point out yet another blemish on Gurinder Chadha’s cartoonish and soulless bid for the US market. It lacks any romantic chemistry. Not a comedy of manners in the Austen or Boston (Henry James) vein. More a comedy of buffoonery, but there’s Panjabi humour for you. Slap and tickle, slaps on the back, huge guffaws, pratfalls, you find them in all the top sitcoms on Indian television. Never have I yearned for Ismail Merchant and Jimmy Ivory to take over the directing helm from someone else. But Merchant just karked it last week. Still there were some things like one or two song-and-dance numbers that were redeemable about B & P—God it sounds like a soap (no not a TV soap but a bathroom soap) or a little thatched cottage in a boring town. Martin Henderson, who’s a Kiwi and Shortland Street alumnus was as wooden as a shopfront Indian in the Wild West. Aishwarya Rai, or Ash the Primadonna of Bollywood was all cheesy dimples, and the acting range of a daytime soap star. Actually not even that good. Must stop slagging it off, though I’m getting that feeling I love when I manage a good putdown in print. Yippee-I-aye. And as I told Nick, there’s a virtue in bad films—they are good for teaching, so I might take bits of it for the Bollywood & Beyond course I teach at uni. I never call that course B & B, promise.
And what was left was another half hour of yours truly trying vainly to bring some generic stability to an unruly bag of vinyl, CDs and an iPod bursting at the seams of its gig capacity.
It just had to be the instrumental version of ‘It Ain’t Hard to tell’ by Nas, with that almost subliminillmatic sample of Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ for the most recent (Black) trial of the century du-dah!. We deserve a keyapella of that, Michael. Why not release it as an extra previously unreleased collector’s version on the next ‘Vindicated’ album? To be honest, I’m a little surprised that it’s gone the way it has. I thought second time around the District Attorney’s office would have got it right, but no, the defence knew the right buttons to press with an ‘unreliable family’. Well, I wonder how long it will take for Michael to return to his ludic ways. Ironic, because just last night Nick and I watched Chris Morris’s temporarily banned Brass Eye special on Pedo-Philia, which was hilarious.
Another button pressed at the wrong time, and the first bit of ‘Mad Izm’ by Channel Live on twelve inch vinyl supported by KRS One. I just love this beat, never get tired of it, and the rhyming is as supple as a nipple.
I played a ‘Planet Rock’ era electro track produced by Arthur Baker with the help of John Robie. This was Planet Patrol’s ‘Play at your own risk’. Wonderful in places but you realize that many of these funky pioneer producers, while they were headed into James Brown-meets-Kraftwerk territory, were also fond of those classical flourishes on the keyboards that were to be found in bad prog rock, Rick Wakeman, Queen and Vangelis records. But thankfully, at 33 and a third, ‘Play at your own risk’ sounds more like Frankie Knuckles than Man Parrish or the backing track for the next Cher hit. This was the backdrop for a review of Yasmin a film written by the guy who scripted The Full Monty and directed by a Scottish geezer whose name I still haven’t checked up on. The film is set in dreary working class northern England—Corro land, basically, except the neighbourhood’s predominantly brown and white girls are giving the teenage Asian boys blow jobs for hash. Yasmin’s a feisty young British Muslim woman played by Archie Panjabi. She wears a burqa as she drives off to work but once out of the neighbourhood, on the moors, she stops her Ford Focus, removes the black for the slightly tarty colours of boob tubes and lip gloss. She fancies this white bloke at work who doesn’t know anything about her life in the hood. So it’s The Double Life of Veronique without anything mysterious in it. Belle du Jour without any sex. Yasmin’s dad is played by the worst British Asian actor to ever appear on screen (don’t know his name), but he looks like a shrivelled conker (that’s horse chestnut to you non-Brits) and is one of those stereotypes going on about keeping tradishun and not shaming the family. She’s still agreed to marry a family friend from back ’ome in Kashmir. This oik in a shalwar kameez doesn’t speak any English. With rights to his conjugal rights, and he wants to nob his wife Yasmin. But to her it’s strictly an arrangement until he gets his British residency, so he’s not coming anywhere near her bed. He and his goatee get desperate so he happens upon a goat to satiate his desires. It only gets better. September the eleventh happens and then everyone starts chucking Osama gags the way of Yasmin. And then her family home is invaded by the police, who are after the goat-friendly husband who is suspected of belonging to a terror organization. Yasmin suddenly (oh, oh, oh so suddenly) goes from being like practically a mouthy diva in waiting to that fantastic Asian woman in Footballer’s Wives to the piety of the full-time burqa and a life as a demure dame. She heads off to the mosque, expecting her now barely interested white bloke to hop along to the local (masjid, not pub) for a prayer or five. The transition to the faith is so plastic and unconvincing. Meanwhile, Yasmin’s teenage bro and part time pusher almost as suddenly gives up blow jobs from white girls for blowing up those who threaten his fellow Muslims several thousand miles away. We’re off to see the Mullah, the wonderful Mullah of Oz! OK, I’ve just done what Manaia Toa accused me of when he came into the studio a few minutes later: ‘You’ve told them too much of the plot’. Whoops. Will be more restrained next time. Nick said, ‘So you didn’t like it?’
No lust in the British Muslim community apparently, well not in the women, so I played Laura Lee’s ‘I need it just as bad as you’ which is all about women getting the horn. It’s a feminist funk joint recorded with Holland-Dozier-Holland a few years after they left Motown (loved the T-shirt, Theo!). Great keyboard sound in this one. Then Fantasy 3’s instrumental version of old skool hip hop number ‘It’s your rock’ produced by veteran of Latin hip hop, Aldo Marin. In a dub style, the voice cuts out suddenly a number of times right in the middle of a phrase, rather like our show when I press a wrong button in the Base studio. Another reason to love it.
Then can’t for the lie of me (that’s not a typo—I shouldn’t have to tell you) remember why I was inspired to play 4 Hero’s hardcore nascent drumnnnbass classic ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’. The voices sound cheesy now, as bubblegum as the Archies sounded almost forty years ago, but the track still packs a punch. Then closed out the show with a song by The Jesus and Mary Chain from their second album Darklands. ‘About You’ is one of their romantic ballads with loads of reverb on guitars. This is the moment when the Reid brothers were probably deepest into the old heroin which is like the Guinness of Glasgow and Edinburgh. It’s a luverly tune predicting in its rockist way the merging of hip hop culture with stately beats to create that trip-hop tempo.
Manaia Toa called me ‘Dad’ a couple of times to take the piss. I took it calmly.
And so that was the end of that. It’s now after 1:20 on Thursday morning so I’d better try and hit the hay. God, I haven’t got long… We’ll be on to discuss the Film Festival next week. And Scrubs keeps getting better.