I’ve been looking for an excuse to include State Of Independence for some time now, I just didn’t expect the excuse to be such a sad one.
Yep, we’re lighting another candle at Skank Blog HQ after the devastating news that Donna Summer succumbed to cancer less than a day after we lost the godfather of go-go, Chuck Brown.
I would have gone straight in with the original of State Of Independence by Jon & Vangelis but it seems appropriate to salute Ms Summer with the big brash hands in the air version taken from her 1983 performance A Hot Summer Night With Donna.
And the sparser, glitchier version by Jon & Vangelis from ’81…
Donna was of course no stranger to the reggae beat, in fact an unlikely transatlantic crossover with our own dutchie passing pickneys Musical Youth cast her as the straight talking teacher, dealing with a class of sallow skinned reprobates before donning some glitzy garb, skipping school with the band and dancing with some traffic wardens, as you do.
And finally, Donna had only a handful of acting jobs, one of them was a recurring role as Aunt Oona in Family Matters. Here she is performing a rousing version of Amazing Grace hidden amongst some dubiously casual commentary on obesity…
Entirely unrelated but as I mentioned him above (and let’s not forget go-go’s association with spiky dons Bad Brains), here’s a clip of Chuck Brown performing a rare bit of go-go crossing over into calypso with Run Joe.
I’ve been on the hunt to license Beastie Revolution for the comp for a while, an electronic journey which led me down a series of dead ends, I hassled the B-Boys management, bombarded Yauch’s film company Oscilloscope, and saddest of all, dropped a line to Day-Z Daze who released the Cooky Puss EP on his Rat Cage label, only to find out that he’d died of cancer himself a few years ago.
But enough with the sad stuff, instead let’s have a flick through the MCA back catalogue…
First up, my favourite Beastie Boys track Something’s Got To Give which encompasses all aspects of the BB’s output featuring the perfect balance of live performance steeped in funk and psychedelia, mixed up with studio trickery, hip hop sensibilities and a healthy dose of dubbing. Heard here live with a smattering of sirens and U-Roy samples…
There now follows a trio of slight obscurities from the interim period between Cooky Puss and License To Ill. The MCA & Burzootie 12″ on Def Jam is probably no revelation but some of you may not be as familiar with his guest spots on a brace of Arthur Baker produced freestyle tracks in the vain of Latin Rascals and their ilk. Everybody say “PUERTO RICO, HOOOOOOO…”
Finally, if you do happen to have another 48 minutes 48 seconds to spare, this is well worth a watch. Behold the Beastie’s throwing away what hadn’t already been lost of their budget for Paul’s Boutique on a launch party atop the Capitol Records HQ in LA featuring a dixieland band, personalised sky writing, and a perplexed David Berman reiterating the statement that the B-Boys are “stupid fresh”. It may come as no surprise that Berman soon quit as company president.
On that note I’d simply like to say that we at Skank Blog Bologna salute Adam Yauch for a flourishing three or so decades of fantastic music, A brave battle with cancer, and most of all, a nice choice of t-shirts…
Has it really been a year since I dug out a copy of Scritti Politti’s Skank Bloc Bologna and set about boring the pants off anyone I could coerce into reading about punky reggae and it’s many offshoots?
It seems like only yesterday I was discussing the ins and outs of a comp on the subject with Bill Brewster. Various labels were approached, and various dead ends were avoided until finally I figured I’d just put it together myself.
So here we are, one year down the line, I have a stack of tracks ready to go off to mastering, Ed Zed and Vivien Goldman are both busy with liner notes and we even have a pulitzer -prize winner supplying a photo for the cover art.
However, I couldn’t commemorate this moment without giving a nod to a track which helped spark this obsession in the first place, Nemo Dub by Return Of The Panthers.
You could say the spiky dread seeds were planted in 1982 when my sister brought home a tape of her boyfriend’s band featuring two tracks, a discophonic punk workout called Crown Of Thorns and the bubbling dub rock of Calling Captain Nemo. Being knee high to a grass hopper I don’t really remember much about it other than liking the tape cover but fast forward to 2004 and I’m in a loft in Wandsworth helping said boyfriend, Steve Miller (no not that Joker) with some painting and decorating.
We got chatting about bands and inevitably The Panthers came up, I was soon furnished with a copy of the original tape and another featuring more demos, plus some tracks by their previous incarnation The Orphans, and curiously a snippet of what sounds like Pig Bag.
Around this time I was playing a weekly Friday night session of no-wave and punk funk with Ed Zed in a fleapit basement in Chinatown, frequented sporadically by freaks, drag queens and on one very special occasion, Billie Piper. Alas I’d left the building by the time Billie hit the dancefloor but Ed assures me she slow danced to It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World by The Residents.
So, one week I showed up brandishing a burnt copy of Crown Of Thorns. Hitting play on the temperamental CD deck, it dropped to moderate success (hey, there were probably about 8 people in the club), and I realised there was larger appeal to these tracks than simply a trip down memory lane for the not quite brother in-law of the band’s guitarist.
So onto the band – Return Of The Panthers were a short lived combo forming from the remnants of The Orphans when guitarist Derek Tagg ran off, later joining his brother, and former Cardiac, Peter in The Trudy (pictured right). Steve and singer Alastair Collins recruited bassist Graham K Smith and another (soon to be) Cardiac, Dominic Luckman.
Further Cardiacs associations were garnered when they entered Surbiton’s infamous Crow Studios, run quite fittingly by the brother of Black Panther Bobby Seale’s lawyer, though ROTP actually appropriated their name from The Pop Group’s Forces Of Oppression.
A handful of songs and their accompanying dubs were recorded at Crow until they were kicked out for blowing up a mic whilst recording bubbles for the underwater FX on Nemo, an act which soon spelled the band’s demise before they’d even played a single gig. Fortunately, the recordings are safe on my shelf and the original reel is ready to be remastered and finally put on wax on the forthcoming Spiky Dread comp.
Until then feel free to feast your ears on the echo flooded dub mix, which I pieced together from two slightly warped takes on their tatty old demo tape.
And how about a bit of The Trudy performing The Cardiacs’ Day Is Gone at a benefit gig for Tim Smith?
This one’s entirely unrelated (aside the obvious) but well worth a watch regardless – an interview with The Black Panther’s minister of culture Emory Douglas…
(Wrongtom)
p.s here’s a personalised copy of Emory Douglas’ amazing book – thanks entirely to my sister…
I have a hazy memory of my friend’s dad playing me a tape of what sounded like a rough and ready roots jam, and asking me to guess who was on drums. Given this was about 18 years ago I forget who else he named in the band but aside himself on guitar, I’m pretty sure there was a Studio 1 legend amongst them.
I listed off the obvious folks that sprung to mind; Sly Dunbar, Carlton Barrett etc but each prompted an increasingly cheeky grin until finally he couldn’t hold it in…
Phil Collins.
Yes, perhaps Phil can’t dance or talk but boy could he handle the one drop. Hi hats scattering about on what could have easily been a rehearsal session for Ital Dub era Augustus Pablo.
This bares little relation to the track in question aside the guy with the tape was none other than Mick Wayne or “one-take Mick” as he was known in the business due to his prowess as a session guitarist, though on today’s particular choice he was also present as producer.
You’d be forgiven for not knowing who I’m on about, Mick was far from a household name but the long list of folks he worked with reads like a who’s who of rock and pop’s most infamous. James Taylor, Jimmy Page and Steve Took from T-Rex all benefited from his input, and word has it a brief tenure with agitprop freaks The Pink Fairies came to an end when drummer Russel Hunter objected to him singing about his “big legged woman”.
A love of down-home blues may not have endeared him to some of his more wigged out peers but it was with his own psychedelic outfit Juniors Eyes that Mick made his biggest mark when their manager teamed them up with a struggling ice cream salesman by the name of David Bowie.
Another short lived union which saw their own LP Battersea Power Station sadly fall by the wayside while Bowie rocketed to fame with Space Oddity on which Mick was responsible for the more complex guitar parts, not to mention the iconic take off sequence. Not a bad accolade for a guy who got into performing to fund his way through art school.
By the turn of the 70′s Mick’s “one take” rep was garnering an abundance of guitar session work and song writing, and the logical next step was to get behind the mixing desk, which finally brings us to today’s choice.
A curious concoction of soul and reggae precariously glued together as only an artist steeped in psych and 60′s beat combos could, the tug of war between rock and reggae sensibilities makes this an awkward but pleasant anomaly, ripe for the picking here in Skank Blog’s garden of delights. I’m not going to pretend this record had any influence on punk or even reggae for that matter, in fact until I started writing this post I was under the impression that only the acetate of the single existed but word has it Pye released it on 7″ in ’76.
I’ve no idea who Top Cat was or is, certainly not the King Of The Jungle who’s still rocking the mic today. As ever, if anyone does have any more info, please drop me a line below. I’d ask Mick but sadly he passed away in 1994, not long after the incident with the Phil Collins tape.
I miss the guy a lot but thankfully he lives on in the crackly remnants of a venerable career.
And arguably the finest Mick Wayne moment, from the B-side of Juniors Eyes debut 7″ featuring Mick on lead vocals on the psychedelic blues dancer of Black Snake…
It would be a crime indeed if krautrock went unmentioned during our proto-punk pit-stop, and as I like to think that my lawbreaking days are behind me, I’m not about to take that risk.
The influence of krautrock (though I’ve always disliked the term) on punk and post-punk is of course profound – be it via the minimalist droning of Neu, the creeping edginess of Can or the pioneering electronica of Kraftwerk, the Germans have found their way into the hearts, minds and music of everyone from John Lydon to Thurston Moore.
Faust established themselves as part of this Teutonic troupe with their first two releases, the avant-psych monoliths Faust and So Far, but on their subsequent 1973 LP, Faust IV, they began to flirt with some more ‘conventional’ styles (for them, anyway) and, splendidly enough, reggae was on the cards.
Possibly the spikiest dread in the pre-punk milieu, The SadSkinhead is remarkable in its foreshadowing of the era to come. Tinny, trebly guitars grind out a serrated skanking rhythm while a slightly expressionless vocal recounts a tale of directionless delinquency (‘Going places, smashing faces, what else could we do?’), and in fact a peppering of vibraphone may be the only thing to suggest the track was recorded prior to 1977.
To my knowledge, Faust’s erratic but highly acclaimed career hasn’t yielded any other such skanky outings, though I’m pleased to say The Sad Skinhead does still feature in their live set to this day. Presumably just not when they’re playing their guitars with chainsaws…
(Dread Zed)
Some rare documentary footage from 1971:
…and a latter day Faust recording an album in what looks like someone’s living room:
There’s very little I can tell you about this record aside:
a) It came out in 1974 on EMI’s reggae imprint Rhino Records.
b) The line up featured various lesser known names from the UK prog and pub rock scene scene such as Mike Hodgkinson from Sammy, and Keith “Smoke” Abingdon from Breakthru.
c) Frank’ N’ Stein was in fact a struggling group called Gnasher who fed a series of novelty singles through publishing impresarios Nick & Tim Heath (children of big band legend Ted Heath), whilst trying to sell their more serious output to Purple Records, home of Deep Purple among others.
d) Though the Heath brothers are credited as producers, they were only responsible for the studio session which let loose the A side Monster Reggae. EMI frowned on the homemade Tutankhamun, recorded on a Univox reel to reel in the basement of the band’s house at 67 Cromwell Road N6 (fittingly not too far-flung from the Highgate Vampire), fortunately they saw fit to release it as a b-side.
e) 67 Cromwell Road was a hive of musicians and artists, run by an aspiring writer who paid host to various bands including glam rockers Silverhead featuring a pre-Blondie Nigel Harrison.
f) Tutankhamun, in all it’s bone rattling rock-reggae glory, is a real treasure from the tombs.
And of course the fun but inferior A side – Monster Reggae.
Gnasher eventually signed to Purple, releasing one 7″ – Medina Road. Also of note, though admittedly quite tenuous, Purple also released a single by Yvonne Elliman, last seen on these pages bopping along to the blip-skank of The Beepers Video Fever, and heard here performing a slick rendition The Who’s Can’t Explain…
And finally, Yoev Harel’s short documentary on psychic investigator David Farrant and The Highgate Vampire.
Sunday afternoon in what should now be known as London’s square mile; the once tumbleweed strewn streets of Shoreditch and Brick Lane are now teeming with tourists and orange skinned Essex girls. Every corner stinks of the collective piss of a thousand city boys, every road now hosts at least one high street brand, and word has it you’re never more than 6 feet from a Klaxon whilst you swan around this poxy excuse for a modern day Sodom & Gomorrah.
Yet, it was whilst strolling down the now aptly named Commercial Street that I heard someone wailing along to Led Zeppelin’s D’Yer Mak’er from their car, and it dawned on me that it was high time for some spiky dread pre-history, as every good sub-genre should have one.
Way back before The Roxy rocked out to King Tubby Meets The Rockers, and before Patti Smith’s skanky sojourn to Redondo Beach, Led Zep were marrying rock with reggae to come up with a single which would delight and appall their fans in equal measures.
Easily dismissed as cod reggae, in most part due to it’s unfortunate and self aware title, D’yer Mak’er isn’t really a bad song at all. Page’s picking and John Paul Jones’ Bass-work offer some strains of an authentic reggae rhythm, soon offset by the usual sonic assault of Bonham’s big and bashy drums.
Robert Plant finally whiteys the whole thing up with some silly but downright infectious Oh Oh Oh’s, borrowed shamelessly from doowop, and the result is a rock-reggae monster which can brighten up even the greyest, wettest day in what may as well be London’s new west end.
And here’s Lady Gaga brutally murdering it live at another aptly named location, The Bitter End in Greenwich Village…
I’ve been looking for an excuse to include State Of Independence for some time now, I just didn’t expect the excuse to be such a sad one.
