Martin's top 100
william_kent
Well-known member
77: V/A - CYBERNETIC BROADCASTING SYSTEM TOP 100 (2004)
No. 77 is possibly the greatest thing that ever happened on the internet, and still on my list of fantasy boxsets - I’d cross the Straits of Johor on a space hopper to bag a copy should anyone care to put it together. Streamed live from The Hague on Boxing Day 2004 by I-F’s Cybernetic Broadcasting System radio station…I was there, man. Huddled round the PC (can you ‘huddle’ if it’s just you?) by LED candlelight, having my brain rewired by 10+ hours of robot dystopia.
2005-2008 were my Blackstock Road years, living in a block of council flats originally built for firefighters (all the flats had disconnected, painted-over bells affixed to one of the walls), a few doors up from Jeremy Corbyn’s office. The block was run by a de facto coalition of ageing RCP/SWP types who had a scam going: they’d vet new tenants based on recommendations by their militant pals. Once approved, these new arrivals would then assume the identity of the previous council tenant. Confused? OK: I used to work with a commie called Julian who’d been living in Flat E, and he’d just bought his first house in Arnos Grove. He said I could move into Flat E and pay him £360 a month in cash, to cover the council rent and to help with his mortgage – as long as I was happy pretending to be ‘Julian’ when paying bills, or if the council came knocking. I guess he was impressed I’d heard of Abimael Guzman and Joe Strummer; either way, the block commissars stamped my card. I was in.
The committee was hell-bent on smashing the capitalist filth…but they didn’t want anyone actually on the council waiting list to move in. I guess it’s difficult to enjoy a Gramsci and Malbec with a load of apolitical working-class scum crashing up and down the stairwell. What a swiz! – but fuck it, I wasn’t about to turn a £360-a-month deal down. It was my first place on my own. Every month, Julian would meet me inside The Woodbine and I’d give him the cash in an envelope and tell him about the latest block scandal (usually Flat B being threatened with liquidation for forgetting to put the bins out). I generally kept my nose clean; my only run-in with the committee was when I played the first two LPs by The Saints really loud while painting a door.
These were fun times, overall. OK, there was a pigeon infestation, which led me to hammer on Corbyn’s office door (as 'Julian', of course), demanding action. I saw a figure behind the glass, eating crisps – but, instead of opening the door, he scuttled to the back of the office and hid beneath a desk. But I mainly spent these four years blowing the other £340 I’d have paid if I’d been renting in the private sector on going to gigs and falling out of taxis. I do like a late-night taxi ride across the city: it stirs the romance in my soul and smells far better than the night bus.
Kevin Martin’s BASH nights at Plastic People…Gobsausage and Cobra Killer in Hoxton… Xylitol rocketing across Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Shadwell. The weird thing is, you can now find just about every obscure punk band from Barnstaple who released a cassette in 1981 that sold 3 copies, but there are tonnes of bands, acts and blogs from the mid-2000s that’ve permanently been scrubbed from the internet. You can’t even find pictures or reviews of them anymore, but I swear they were there – now all gone poof, like MySpace itself. I once saw a group called Formula Bone, who had a song called Bob Crow, about a man who tries to top himself by hurling himself onto rail tracks – only to realise the strike’s still on. They also had a song called Humanzee, about infamous apeman ‘Oliver’, which began with the line “I was born of an unspeakable act!” They released a CD-R and got enthusiastic reviews on independent music sites, but good luck finding a trace of any of that now.
There were also grime nights at the Rhythm Factory, goth gigs in basements in Temple, improbable Aphex Twin/Whitehouse clashes under the arches in SE1…or 3AM literary bashes in Soho pubs, where you could take the piss and tell Iain Sinclair you had a book out. Anything from Bishi to Sutcliffe Jugend, London had it.
By day, I’d roll into work hungover, self-medicate with coffee, fags and Nurofen Plus, and sometimes blog about what I’d been up to the night before. I wish I’d chronicled it all a bit better now. With hindsight, it’s kind of ludicrous that I considered London to be ‘on the way out’ around 2006 – but I’ve always suffered from chronic dès vu. Come the night, though, the 2004 CBS Top 100 would take over my brain, like some witch’s spell:
There was a twist: in 2004, you couldn’t just download the show the next day. The instant archival culture wasn't all there yet. So began the arduous process of trying to track down fragments from the Top 100 – mainly through low-VBR, shit-fi SLSK downloads, and, gradually, through the occasional glitchy YouTube vid. Now and then, you’d encounter fellow new recruits also hunting for these tunes, so we’d burn each other CD-Rs of obscure Italo tracks we’d accumulated, including previously elusive entries from the CBS Top 100. It was like Panini football stickers all over again – except the joy of finally obtaining a decent rip of Dancing Therapy far surpassed unwrapping Gary Birtles’ mugshot:
You’d also wince when you encountered EDM snobs who only traded the instrumental mixes. I guess they found the vocals on many of these Italo Disco classics ‘embarrassing’. All I can say is, I found the artwork to compilations like I-Robots beyond embarrassing – probably developed by the same ‘creative’ craphead responsible for those godawful alien-themed Soul Jazz covers.
I can’t believe the Top 100 broadcast was nearly 20 years ago! Omar Khayyam understated the case, if anything. CBS’ hardcore listeners voted in the songs, including classics by Egyptian Lover, Fast Eddie, Drexciya, Kraftwerk, Sylvester and Patrick Cowley – and that’s just the big names. Even Bourbonese Qualk received enough votes to bag the #90 slot. Mind you, I'm not sure any of those tunes are better than Peter Richard’s Walking In The Neon, Expansives’ Life With You, Charlie’s Spacer Woman or Z-Factor’s I Like To Do It In Fast Cars - the latter basically being everything ‘electroclash’ tried so hard to emulate 18 years later.
The CBS 100 also included a tune by Black Disco Devil Club, from that supposed ‘lost’ 1978 LP that Warp unearthed. I asked Dissensus’ own MMS if this French disco chimera was legit. “Don’t tell anyone,” he laughed, “but it’s all Luke Vibert!” Hate to break it to you if you paid £250 for a ‘first pressing’...
CBS broadcast follow-up Top 100s between 2005-2007. These featured a lot of the same songs but added a few 'new' gems, so all four are worth checking out (they were on Internet Archive last time I looked). The first one was always the best, though. Swap out Voice of Q by Q (sorry Italo purists, never got that one) for Love Spy by Mike Mareen, and the Aphex Twin tune for something by Riccardo Cioni or Baby’s Gang, and this entry would be way higher on the Martin’s Top 100. Which is sort of bollocks, as I’m making this list up as I go along.
The Blackstock Road tankies couldn’t maintain their iron grip of the block and eventually failed to secure Flats C and F from occupation by genuine council tenants. The proles moved in – and the place fell apart! The once strictly monitored bin-day rota hung in tatters. Corbyn never sorted out the pigeon problem, so I withheld my vote from the loafer in 2019. Eventually, the strain of pretending to be Julian and having to pay all the bills in cash took its toll, so come April 2008, I jumped the 240 to Golders Green to rent a nicer one-bed flat overlooking the Finchley Road.
Even though they missed out on CBS Top 100 fame, here’s Baby’s Gang with their eerily pre-cog shuttle crash anthem Challenger. I was also there for that in ’86, when they interrupted ‘Blockbusters’ or whatever with the live news report about the disaster. My brother rang up, demanding to speak to me: "Martin, what does NASA stand for? Need another seven astronauts!”
No. 77 is possibly the greatest thing that ever happened on the internet, and still on my list of fantasy boxsets - I’d cross the Straits of Johor on a space hopper to bag a copy should anyone care to put it together. Streamed live from The Hague on Boxing Day 2004 by I-F’s Cybernetic Broadcasting System radio station…I was there, man. Huddled round the PC (can you ‘huddle’ if it’s just you?) by LED candlelight, having my brain rewired by 10+ hours of robot dystopia.
2005-2008 were my Blackstock Road years, living in a block of council flats originally built for firefighters (all the flats had disconnected, painted-over bells affixed to one of the walls), a few doors up from Jeremy Corbyn’s office. The block was run by a de facto coalition of ageing RCP/SWP types who had a scam going: they’d vet new tenants based on recommendations by their militant pals. Once approved, these new arrivals would then assume the identity of the previous council tenant. Confused? OK: I used to work with a commie called Julian who’d been living in Flat E, and he’d just bought his first house in Arnos Grove. He said I could move into Flat E and pay him £360 a month in cash, to cover the council rent and to help with his mortgage – as long as I was happy pretending to be ‘Julian’ when paying bills, or if the council came knocking. I guess he was impressed I’d heard of Abimael Guzman and Joe Strummer; either way, the block commissars stamped my card. I was in.
The committee was hell-bent on smashing the capitalist filth…but they didn’t want anyone actually on the council waiting list to move in. I guess it’s difficult to enjoy a Gramsci and Malbec with a load of apolitical working-class scum crashing up and down the stairwell. What a swiz! – but fuck it, I wasn’t about to turn a £360-a-month deal down. It was my first place on my own. Every month, Julian would meet me inside The Woodbine and I’d give him the cash in an envelope and tell him about the latest block scandal (usually Flat B being threatened with liquidation for forgetting to put the bins out). I generally kept my nose clean; my only run-in with the committee was when I played the first two LPs by The Saints really loud while painting a door.
These were fun times, overall. OK, there was a pigeon infestation, which led me to hammer on Corbyn’s office door (as 'Julian', of course), demanding action. I saw a figure behind the glass, eating crisps – but, instead of opening the door, he scuttled to the back of the office and hid beneath a desk. But I mainly spent these four years blowing the other £340 I’d have paid if I’d been renting in the private sector on going to gigs and falling out of taxis. I do like a late-night taxi ride across the city: it stirs the romance in my soul and smells far better than the night bus.
Kevin Martin’s BASH nights at Plastic People…Gobsausage and Cobra Killer in Hoxton… Xylitol rocketing across Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Shadwell. The weird thing is, you can now find just about every obscure punk band from Barnstaple who released a cassette in 1981 that sold 3 copies, but there are tonnes of bands, acts and blogs from the mid-2000s that’ve permanently been scrubbed from the internet. You can’t even find pictures or reviews of them anymore, but I swear they were there – now all gone poof, like MySpace itself. I once saw a group called Formula Bone, who had a song called Bob Crow, about a man who tries to top himself by hurling himself onto rail tracks – only to realise the strike’s still on. They also had a song called Humanzee, about infamous apeman ‘Oliver’, which began with the line “I was born of an unspeakable act!” They released a CD-R and got enthusiastic reviews on independent music sites, but good luck finding a trace of any of that now.
There were also grime nights at the Rhythm Factory, goth gigs in basements in Temple, improbable Aphex Twin/Whitehouse clashes under the arches in SE1…or 3AM literary bashes in Soho pubs, where you could take the piss and tell Iain Sinclair you had a book out. Anything from Bishi to Sutcliffe Jugend, London had it.
By day, I’d roll into work hungover, self-medicate with coffee, fags and Nurofen Plus, and sometimes blog about what I’d been up to the night before. I wish I’d chronicled it all a bit better now. With hindsight, it’s kind of ludicrous that I considered London to be ‘on the way out’ around 2006 – but I’ve always suffered from chronic dès vu. Come the night, though, the 2004 CBS Top 100 would take over my brain, like some witch’s spell:
There was a twist: in 2004, you couldn’t just download the show the next day. The instant archival culture wasn't all there yet. So began the arduous process of trying to track down fragments from the Top 100 – mainly through low-VBR, shit-fi SLSK downloads, and, gradually, through the occasional glitchy YouTube vid. Now and then, you’d encounter fellow new recruits also hunting for these tunes, so we’d burn each other CD-Rs of obscure Italo tracks we’d accumulated, including previously elusive entries from the CBS Top 100. It was like Panini football stickers all over again – except the joy of finally obtaining a decent rip of Dancing Therapy far surpassed unwrapping Gary Birtles’ mugshot:
You’d also wince when you encountered EDM snobs who only traded the instrumental mixes. I guess they found the vocals on many of these Italo Disco classics ‘embarrassing’. All I can say is, I found the artwork to compilations like I-Robots beyond embarrassing – probably developed by the same ‘creative’ craphead responsible for those godawful alien-themed Soul Jazz covers.
I can’t believe the Top 100 broadcast was nearly 20 years ago! Omar Khayyam understated the case, if anything. CBS’ hardcore listeners voted in the songs, including classics by Egyptian Lover, Fast Eddie, Drexciya, Kraftwerk, Sylvester and Patrick Cowley – and that’s just the big names. Even Bourbonese Qualk received enough votes to bag the #90 slot. Mind you, I'm not sure any of those tunes are better than Peter Richard’s Walking In The Neon, Expansives’ Life With You, Charlie’s Spacer Woman or Z-Factor’s I Like To Do It In Fast Cars - the latter basically being everything ‘electroclash’ tried so hard to emulate 18 years later.
The CBS 100 also included a tune by Black Disco Devil Club, from that supposed ‘lost’ 1978 LP that Warp unearthed. I asked Dissensus’ own MMS if this French disco chimera was legit. “Don’t tell anyone,” he laughed, “but it’s all Luke Vibert!” Hate to break it to you if you paid £250 for a ‘first pressing’...
CBS broadcast follow-up Top 100s between 2005-2007. These featured a lot of the same songs but added a few 'new' gems, so all four are worth checking out (they were on Internet Archive last time I looked). The first one was always the best, though. Swap out Voice of Q by Q (sorry Italo purists, never got that one) for Love Spy by Mike Mareen, and the Aphex Twin tune for something by Riccardo Cioni or Baby’s Gang, and this entry would be way higher on the Martin’s Top 100. Which is sort of bollocks, as I’m making this list up as I go along.
The Blackstock Road tankies couldn’t maintain their iron grip of the block and eventually failed to secure Flats C and F from occupation by genuine council tenants. The proles moved in – and the place fell apart! The once strictly monitored bin-day rota hung in tatters. Corbyn never sorted out the pigeon problem, so I withheld my vote from the loafer in 2019. Eventually, the strain of pretending to be Julian and having to pay all the bills in cash took its toll, so come April 2008, I jumped the 240 to Golders Green to rent a nicer one-bed flat overlooking the Finchley Road.
Even though they missed out on CBS Top 100 fame, here’s Baby’s Gang with their eerily pre-cog shuttle crash anthem Challenger. I was also there for that in ’86, when they interrupted ‘Blockbusters’ or whatever with the live news report about the disaster. My brother rang up, demanding to speak to me: "Martin, what does NASA stand for? Need another seven astronauts!”
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Fantastic
It's odd and amusing to see the early-mid noughties described in such 'can you believe we had to do this to hear things' terms because I think of the 00s (unlike to 90s) as NOT BEING THAT LONG AGO, REALLY
And if I squint hard and think about it I can remember how relatively primitive the internet was back then, not being able to ID songs for years and years—and nowadays, it seems like you can ID just about anything (aside from all that music you mentioned that's completely vanished)
Also painful to get a sense of how exciting London still was in those days (or was it?)—it definitely wasn't exciting anymore by the time I moved here, in 2015
Typical really
It's odd and amusing to see the early-mid noughties described in such 'can you believe we had to do this to hear things' terms because I think of the 00s (unlike to 90s) as NOT BEING THAT LONG AGO, REALLY
And if I squint hard and think about it I can remember how relatively primitive the internet was back then, not being able to ID songs for years and years—and nowadays, it seems like you can ID just about anything (aside from all that music you mentioned that's completely vanished)
Also painful to get a sense of how exciting London still was in those days (or was it?)—it definitely wasn't exciting anymore by the time I moved here, in 2015
Typical really
william_kent
Well-known member
The 1970s saw one of the most heated subcultural conflicts ever – the civil war between RASTAS and BARBERS.
I KILLED THE BARBER Dr Alimantado bragged, kicking off a spate of crimper-killings. You’ve got to kill dem dead, before dem spread…KILL THE BARBER DEAD, YAH! Jah Stitch echoed. It was a grim period for Nicky Clarke, alright – but why? What drove these supposedly peaceful men of Jah to take up arms against MR TEASY WEASY?
I think I know the answer. My immigrant parents were so mean, they were always trying to score cheap child haircut deals. For the sake of saving £1, they let me get viciously maimed by a doddery old cunt called Dudley. “I’ll just scalp ‘im then, eh?” Dudley chortled when my mother dragged me into his stinking barber shop, with grim black 'n' white pics of Andre Previn lookalikes glaring from the walls. The bastard wasn’t joking: he took the skin off the back of my neck with his kamikaze snipping. Five minutes later, I looked like a skinned rabbit: it was the same shapeless short back’ n’ sides that the GLC used to give to kids with Down’s Syndrome (to alienate them even further from society). Even my penny-pinching mother couldn’t deny the blood trickling from my scabs and down my nape, so she grudgingly paid a barber who didn’t have the DTs a bit more for my next cut.
That wasn’t my only bad experience. I once went to the hair salon in the basement of Kensington Market, run by gothy, industrial types. Some hot Iberian girl with a bolt through her lip ran my head under the cold tap and got to work with her scissor-fingers. After five minutes, she whipped out a mirror: the fucking bitch had given me a Heinrich Himmler cut. As she popped out the back, I bolted it out the door, back onto the street and onto the nearest bus: no way was I paying £10 for that. KILL THE BARBER DEAD, YAH! I seethed, in tears, scaring some Polish children on the back seat.
And then there was the time Danny the German punk kindly offered to give me a DIY spiky cut and dye it up leopard-style. “It’s not really working, is it?” I suggested three hours later. Don’t think necking an E helped his technique. “Ah…just give me a crop number 1,” I conceded. Just shave the fucking lot off. Great, now I look a BNP baby – again.
So, in the end, I just went to Toni & Guy with a photo of Roger Moore: far less hassle! In retrospect, I should’ve grown out my hair and matted it into dreadlocks. I could’ve added a dab of woad and cashed in on that mid-‘90s ‘Irish people are so cool’ craze. Being mistaken for an RDF guitar tech or Megatripolis juggler would have been embarrassing, but surely preferable to looking like I was on my way to a Death In June gig. Coppershot to Dudley’s head, as I would say.
Still, the barbers occasionally got their revenge: RIP Prince Far-I, gunned down by a HOB Salons junior stylist in September ’83.
76: PRINCE FAR-I - “UNDER HEAVY MANNERS” CD
Even the dog that pisseth on the electric fence of Babylon shall not escape SHOCKS OF MIGHTY. The VOICE OF THUNDER rumbles in the desert…itchy angel fingers hover over the seventh seal. Heavy discipline is coming down fast. Thieves will have their hands broken with iron bars; birds will snap off the tongues of the sarcastic. You won’t like what’s coming! Fire up the black horse of famine. The tower crumples, tossing the wicked into the abyss.
Always found this album more suited to London downpours than Jamaican heat, but maybe that’s ‘cos there was a full-blown thunderstorm (appropriately) the afternoon I bought it for £8 from Daddy Kool in Berwick Street (with store owner Keith Stone bringing his own brand of heavy manners down ‘pon some feckless tourist who’d sparked up a fag inside) ((incidentally, I remember smoking while flipping through the racks at Rough Trade in the ‘90s – lost world, huh)). Far-I’s dread words of warning (with backing toasting by Culture’s Joseph Hill) and Joe Gibbs’ aqueous battletank rhythms are an unfuckable-with combination. I know Far-I went on to record loads more varied stuff with African Head Charge, On-U et al in the early ‘80s, but Under Heavy Manners is such a great snapshot of two forces of nature colliding, you’d be crazy to skip it.
Here’s Far-I admonishing weakheart fake mates and charlatans over a proto-Bomb Squad synth siren squall:
Elsewhere, Big Fight reports on a righteous rasta (150lb) clambering into the boxing ring (and then riding around the canvas on a bicycle) to slug it out with none other than BABYLON (250lb…don’t tell the WBA) for the title of univershal champion. On Young Generation, Far-I informs his 1976 listeners that the new breed of kids (which included me, by the way) won’t fall for the system’s shoddy old tricks. Hmm…bit optimistic in retrospect? Shadow turns the No No No rhythm into militant subsonic paranoia, with military-tap drumming and Far-I questioning who you can really trust.
He also has a soppy moment on the mysterious You I Love And Not Another. I’ve never been able to work out the original version of the song (neither can a few others, judging by YT comments). Who’s the woman singer crooning “Come to me softly, oh darling / While stars shine so buh-uh-uh-uh’(?) into the echo chamber? It’s the sound of Far-I serenading lost media; he might as well be dating a ghost (I guess they both are now). Surely someone knows what/who this is?
The title track’s the legend that The Clash stencilled on their trousers: a call to stop arsing around and grow up a bit, in the face of impending WW3 and Judgement Day. Forty-eight years on, not much has changed…though only Jah knows what the MPLA would’ve made of exploding Motorolas:
As Far-I queries on the opener Rain A Fall, “Is this right stuff?” Yep – too fucking right in my book. The Rasta vs Barber war cooled off in the 1980s (despite Macka B stirring the pot) but the wounds remained raw for a good few years after. Example: bonus track from Far-I’s ’81 follow-up LP, where he advises UK and Irish skins to calm down and behave themselves. I get there was a war inna Dublin ‘cos they couldn’t get no dumpling, but what about the skinheads in Manchester wearing polyester? And now we’ve got microplastics in our balls – thanks a fucking lot, Fred Perry.
I KILLED THE BARBER Dr Alimantado bragged, kicking off a spate of crimper-killings. You’ve got to kill dem dead, before dem spread…KILL THE BARBER DEAD, YAH! Jah Stitch echoed. It was a grim period for Nicky Clarke, alright – but why? What drove these supposedly peaceful men of Jah to take up arms against MR TEASY WEASY?
I think I know the answer. My immigrant parents were so mean, they were always trying to score cheap child haircut deals. For the sake of saving £1, they let me get viciously maimed by a doddery old cunt called Dudley. “I’ll just scalp ‘im then, eh?” Dudley chortled when my mother dragged me into his stinking barber shop, with grim black 'n' white pics of Andre Previn lookalikes glaring from the walls. The bastard wasn’t joking: he took the skin off the back of my neck with his kamikaze snipping. Five minutes later, I looked like a skinned rabbit: it was the same shapeless short back’ n’ sides that the GLC used to give to kids with Down’s Syndrome (to alienate them even further from society). Even my penny-pinching mother couldn’t deny the blood trickling from my scabs and down my nape, so she grudgingly paid a barber who didn’t have the DTs a bit more for my next cut.
That wasn’t my only bad experience. I once went to the hair salon in the basement of Kensington Market, run by gothy, industrial types. Some hot Iberian girl with a bolt through her lip ran my head under the cold tap and got to work with her scissor-fingers. After five minutes, she whipped out a mirror: the fucking bitch had given me a Heinrich Himmler cut. As she popped out the back, I bolted it out the door, back onto the street and onto the nearest bus: no way was I paying £10 for that. KILL THE BARBER DEAD, YAH! I seethed, in tears, scaring some Polish children on the back seat.
And then there was the time Danny the German punk kindly offered to give me a DIY spiky cut and dye it up leopard-style. “It’s not really working, is it?” I suggested three hours later. Don’t think necking an E helped his technique. “Ah…just give me a crop number 1,” I conceded. Just shave the fucking lot off. Great, now I look a BNP baby – again.
So, in the end, I just went to Toni & Guy with a photo of Roger Moore: far less hassle! In retrospect, I should’ve grown out my hair and matted it into dreadlocks. I could’ve added a dab of woad and cashed in on that mid-‘90s ‘Irish people are so cool’ craze. Being mistaken for an RDF guitar tech or Megatripolis juggler would have been embarrassing, but surely preferable to looking like I was on my way to a Death In June gig. Coppershot to Dudley’s head, as I would say.
Still, the barbers occasionally got their revenge: RIP Prince Far-I, gunned down by a HOB Salons junior stylist in September ’83.
76: PRINCE FAR-I - “UNDER HEAVY MANNERS” CD
Even the dog that pisseth on the electric fence of Babylon shall not escape SHOCKS OF MIGHTY. The VOICE OF THUNDER rumbles in the desert…itchy angel fingers hover over the seventh seal. Heavy discipline is coming down fast. Thieves will have their hands broken with iron bars; birds will snap off the tongues of the sarcastic. You won’t like what’s coming! Fire up the black horse of famine. The tower crumples, tossing the wicked into the abyss.
Always found this album more suited to London downpours than Jamaican heat, but maybe that’s ‘cos there was a full-blown thunderstorm (appropriately) the afternoon I bought it for £8 from Daddy Kool in Berwick Street (with store owner Keith Stone bringing his own brand of heavy manners down ‘pon some feckless tourist who’d sparked up a fag inside) ((incidentally, I remember smoking while flipping through the racks at Rough Trade in the ‘90s – lost world, huh)). Far-I’s dread words of warning (with backing toasting by Culture’s Joseph Hill) and Joe Gibbs’ aqueous battletank rhythms are an unfuckable-with combination. I know Far-I went on to record loads more varied stuff with African Head Charge, On-U et al in the early ‘80s, but Under Heavy Manners is such a great snapshot of two forces of nature colliding, you’d be crazy to skip it.
Here’s Far-I admonishing weakheart fake mates and charlatans over a proto-Bomb Squad synth siren squall:
Elsewhere, Big Fight reports on a righteous rasta (150lb) clambering into the boxing ring (and then riding around the canvas on a bicycle) to slug it out with none other than BABYLON (250lb…don’t tell the WBA) for the title of univershal champion. On Young Generation, Far-I informs his 1976 listeners that the new breed of kids (which included me, by the way) won’t fall for the system’s shoddy old tricks. Hmm…bit optimistic in retrospect? Shadow turns the No No No rhythm into militant subsonic paranoia, with military-tap drumming and Far-I questioning who you can really trust.
He also has a soppy moment on the mysterious You I Love And Not Another. I’ve never been able to work out the original version of the song (neither can a few others, judging by YT comments). Who’s the woman singer crooning “Come to me softly, oh darling / While stars shine so buh-uh-uh-uh’(?) into the echo chamber? It’s the sound of Far-I serenading lost media; he might as well be dating a ghost (I guess they both are now). Surely someone knows what/who this is?
The title track’s the legend that The Clash stencilled on their trousers: a call to stop arsing around and grow up a bit, in the face of impending WW3 and Judgement Day. Forty-eight years on, not much has changed…though only Jah knows what the MPLA would’ve made of exploding Motorolas:
As Far-I queries on the opener Rain A Fall, “Is this right stuff?” Yep – too fucking right in my book. The Rasta vs Barber war cooled off in the 1980s (despite Macka B stirring the pot) but the wounds remained raw for a good few years after. Example: bonus track from Far-I’s ’81 follow-up LP, where he advises UK and Irish skins to calm down and behave themselves. I get there was a war inna Dublin ‘cos they couldn’t get no dumpling, but what about the skinheads in Manchester wearing polyester? And now we’ve got microplastics in our balls – thanks a fucking lot, Fred Perry.
william_kent
Well-known member
@martin thanks, that made my day.
the tune that the unidentified lady is singing is "Come To Me softly" which was a 1963 Jamaican single by Jimmy James, which in turn was a do over of a 50s tune by The Fleetwoods, Jimmy James is the same guy who did "Red Red Wine" - I suspect that UB40 probably paid for his house rather than The Voice of Thunder
I'm guessing Prince far-I was on a promise and Joe Gibbs was like "I've got this 4 inch tape of failed tune I never pressed up by Sharon from yard, why don't you chat shit over it?"
edit: part of the problem with reggae is that there are so many "one a way" stabs at recording that some vocalist got one shot and that was it
the tune that the unidentified lady is singing is "Come To Me softly" which was a 1963 Jamaican single by Jimmy James, which in turn was a do over of a 50s tune by The Fleetwoods, Jimmy James is the same guy who did "Red Red Wine" - I suspect that UB40 probably paid for his house rather than The Voice of Thunder
I'm guessing Prince far-I was on a promise and Joe Gibbs was like "I've got this 4 inch tape of failed tune I never pressed up by Sharon from yard, why don't you chat shit over it?"
edit: part of the problem with reggae is that there are so many "one a way" stabs at recording that some vocalist got one shot and that was it
william_kent
Well-known member
but barbers - when I moved down south the local lads warned me about the local barbers, "BUTCHER BENNETT" and "SLASHER STRUDWICK", old school down to the "something for the weekend" jar of rubber prophylactics
william_kent
Well-known member
male pattern baldness has deprived a lot of the 70s dreads of their locks so the natty dread / baldhead distinction no longer matters
william_kent
Well-known member
he's being modest I suppose, but this is one of the greatest blogs EVER:
BEYOND THE IMPLODE
I'm still waiting for NEL to publish his pulp novel to end all pulp novels
this a particular favourite post
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I was reading BTI before I even joined dissensus, must have discovered it through woebot.
william_kent
Well-known member
I almost cried the day that "AN OPEN LETTER TO ALL BABIES BORN YESTERDAY" was posted - an end of an era
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I went through an (early) Billy Childish phase and he posted my mix
seagullscreamingkillherkillher.blogspot.com
BILLY CHILDISH MEME KEEPS A ROLLIN'
Bloody hell - you wait six years for a Billy Childish mix, then two come along at once. Benny's knocked out an answer mix to Dubversion's, w...
seagullscreamingkillherkillher.blogspot.com
william_kent
Well-known member
wow, that mediafire link still works!
can't say the same for the sendspace links though
can't say the same for the sendspace links though
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
william_kent
Well-known member
william_kent
Well-known member
75: CLIFTON CHENIER – “LOUISIANA BLUES AND ZYDECO” CD
My first trip to New Orleans nearly never happened: I was detained by the goon squad at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and marched into a holding pen. A dangerous perp with my name had just jumped state lines, so the TSA were taking no chances.
Tell you what – if I was an American felon on the lam, first thing I’d do would be forge a British passport and check into Texas’ most heavily policed airport. About 90 minutes later, as my connecting flight soared away towards Louis Armstrong, I was summonsed to the desk of Officer Angel, a plump J-Lo lookalike (I swear I’m not making this up). One of the TSA creeps smirked at me as he plonked a box of rubber gloves on her table and gave her a knowing nod.
Oh God, it was going to happen…again. I’d already had a so-called ‘doctor’ finger my bunghole in Malta (causing me to shart all over his hand and examination couch)…now I was going to get my ring poked in the US of A too. Thankfully, Ms. Angel didn’t rummage ‘round my anal cavity; she was actually quite affable after I’d enchanted her with my Burnt Oak/Lutonian mash-up twang. Though…in my hornier moments, I sometimes look back on that encounter and wonder…would it have been so bad if she had? Godspeed ye and good luck, American ‘Martin C’ - my elusive frere in crime!! (unless you nonced a minor).
I finally rolled into NOLA after midnight – the airport shuttle bus dropped me outside the St James Hotel on Magazine. The street was totally deserted. A fat rat crossed my path as I stood there in the dark, gripping my bag and fumbling for my last fag. It was the most cinematic moment of my life.
The next evening, I went out exploring and strolled into a crowded bar, where a band was blasting out tunes like this:
Maybe it’s the Mick in me, but I could never resist a squeezebox. I still don’t truly know where Cajun ends and Zydeco begins but, after an evening of this stuff (and a skinful of Abita), I realised I never wanted to listen to any band or MC who didn’t know how to set an alligator trap* ever again.
Clifton Chenier is revered as the ‘King of Zydeco’. To prove it, he used to wear a massive fuck-off crown of such splendour, it drop-kicked King Tubby’s puny Christmas Cracker-grade headgear into the Mighty Mississippi:
As you no doubt all know, New Orleans is voodoo central. I was in a shop checking out gris-gris bags (green magic’s my thing: cash is king) and chatting to the girl behind the counter. “Well,” she said, furrowing her brow, “voodoo’s real…as long as you don’t use it for negative things like…trying to make your boss ill.” What the living fuck? Where’s the fun in that?!?
It’s no surprise, then, that voodoo references crop up in Chenier’s work. Pepper In My Shoe is about a particularly nasty ‘hot foot powder’ spell where an assailant sprinkles chilli powder and black pepper (sometimes mixed with graveyard dirt and ground-up wasps’ nest) into the victim’s shoe, causing him (or her) to wander around aimlessly in a perpetual mental fug (let’s get real: it’s her doing it to him). A girl did this to me once, so I know what I’m yapping about. I spent a whole week spinning round on the Circle Line, reading and re-reading the first three pages of JG Ballard’s Vermilion Sands in a zombie stupor, mouthing each syllable while jabbing the page with my finger. A London Underground employee asked me if I was OK and where I was going, and all I could stutter back was “Shin…Shin…Shinjuku Washington, です”.
Thank Mopsus of Thrace, this torment finally ended: some pisshead clutching a McDonalds meal staggered onto my carriage at Farringdon and upended his vanilla milkshake all over my left Converse. I yanked the sneaker off, and whaddya know – the vile goofer dust scattered out all over the carriage floor! Finally…my mental faculties were restored! Every curse you put on me / will return to you, times three, I promised my ex, alighting at King’s Cross, and hobbling on one socked foot, for a late-night nosh-up at Crystal Kebab. And guess what – she wound up married to a social worker! Don’t mess with my mojo (on a reggae tip, Denzil Laing warned rasta youth about this hideous abuse of voodoo on the Lee Perry-produced Beware Of The Pepper).
I always hated Christmas dinner – fancy eating a bird so dry you need four different sauces to force it down! – so when I came back from NOLA the first time, I swore I’d always celebrate Christ’s birthday with a slow-cooked chili instead. It’s difficult trying to persuade a family that never got over bread sauce and cheesy parsnips to go with my swampcore flow…but my ideal Xmas Day is a chili simmering in the pot on a low heat from 10am-4pm; a steady stream of Black Velvets and Woodford Reserve in between; and Cajun/Zydeco thumping away on the stereo – occasionally punctuated by the wails of yet another carol singer caught in the outdoors beartrap. This next number isn’t on the CD I picked above, but I’ve been playing it religiously every Xmas since 2011:
By the way, let’s not forget NOLA’s ‘white magic’. While I was over there, I became interested in the history of the Krewes and their arcane Mardi Gras rituals (imagine The Rotary Club on acid: many a textile plant heir goosed the NOPD superintendent’s daughter at a Mardi Gras Krewe bash). There’s a lot about the history of (and controversies surrounding) the Krewes online, if you care to search (too long and complex to go into here), focusing on OG outfits like Krewe of Proteus, Knights of Momus and Mistick Krewe of Comus. These Krewes also inspired more fun mobs like the Mystic Krewe of Barkus (an all-dog parade) and the gay Mystic Krewe of Satyricon. Here’s some wacked-out local TV footage from '83:
Clifton Chenier, I salute you, and hope everyone down in that neck of the woods escapes the worst of Milton tonight. Anyway, I guess this has post has devolved into a bunch of random tunes rather than an album or definitive song, but when did that stop me before? Hope you enjoy this freakout:
(* Toss a chicken breast into a wheely bin, tip it on its side, prop the lid open with a broom handle and wait ‘til the ‘gator slithers inside, shutting the lid behind it)
My first trip to New Orleans nearly never happened: I was detained by the goon squad at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and marched into a holding pen. A dangerous perp with my name had just jumped state lines, so the TSA were taking no chances.
Tell you what – if I was an American felon on the lam, first thing I’d do would be forge a British passport and check into Texas’ most heavily policed airport. About 90 minutes later, as my connecting flight soared away towards Louis Armstrong, I was summonsed to the desk of Officer Angel, a plump J-Lo lookalike (I swear I’m not making this up). One of the TSA creeps smirked at me as he plonked a box of rubber gloves on her table and gave her a knowing nod.
Oh God, it was going to happen…again. I’d already had a so-called ‘doctor’ finger my bunghole in Malta (causing me to shart all over his hand and examination couch)…now I was going to get my ring poked in the US of A too. Thankfully, Ms. Angel didn’t rummage ‘round my anal cavity; she was actually quite affable after I’d enchanted her with my Burnt Oak/Lutonian mash-up twang. Though…in my hornier moments, I sometimes look back on that encounter and wonder…would it have been so bad if she had? Godspeed ye and good luck, American ‘Martin C’ - my elusive frere in crime!! (unless you nonced a minor).
I finally rolled into NOLA after midnight – the airport shuttle bus dropped me outside the St James Hotel on Magazine. The street was totally deserted. A fat rat crossed my path as I stood there in the dark, gripping my bag and fumbling for my last fag. It was the most cinematic moment of my life.
The next evening, I went out exploring and strolled into a crowded bar, where a band was blasting out tunes like this:
Maybe it’s the Mick in me, but I could never resist a squeezebox. I still don’t truly know where Cajun ends and Zydeco begins but, after an evening of this stuff (and a skinful of Abita), I realised I never wanted to listen to any band or MC who didn’t know how to set an alligator trap* ever again.
Clifton Chenier is revered as the ‘King of Zydeco’. To prove it, he used to wear a massive fuck-off crown of such splendour, it drop-kicked King Tubby’s puny Christmas Cracker-grade headgear into the Mighty Mississippi:
As you no doubt all know, New Orleans is voodoo central. I was in a shop checking out gris-gris bags (green magic’s my thing: cash is king) and chatting to the girl behind the counter. “Well,” she said, furrowing her brow, “voodoo’s real…as long as you don’t use it for negative things like…trying to make your boss ill.” What the living fuck? Where’s the fun in that?!?
It’s no surprise, then, that voodoo references crop up in Chenier’s work. Pepper In My Shoe is about a particularly nasty ‘hot foot powder’ spell where an assailant sprinkles chilli powder and black pepper (sometimes mixed with graveyard dirt and ground-up wasps’ nest) into the victim’s shoe, causing him (or her) to wander around aimlessly in a perpetual mental fug (let’s get real: it’s her doing it to him). A girl did this to me once, so I know what I’m yapping about. I spent a whole week spinning round on the Circle Line, reading and re-reading the first three pages of JG Ballard’s Vermilion Sands in a zombie stupor, mouthing each syllable while jabbing the page with my finger. A London Underground employee asked me if I was OK and where I was going, and all I could stutter back was “Shin…Shin…Shinjuku Washington, です”.
Thank Mopsus of Thrace, this torment finally ended: some pisshead clutching a McDonalds meal staggered onto my carriage at Farringdon and upended his vanilla milkshake all over my left Converse. I yanked the sneaker off, and whaddya know – the vile goofer dust scattered out all over the carriage floor! Finally…my mental faculties were restored! Every curse you put on me / will return to you, times three, I promised my ex, alighting at King’s Cross, and hobbling on one socked foot, for a late-night nosh-up at Crystal Kebab. And guess what – she wound up married to a social worker! Don’t mess with my mojo (on a reggae tip, Denzil Laing warned rasta youth about this hideous abuse of voodoo on the Lee Perry-produced Beware Of The Pepper).
I always hated Christmas dinner – fancy eating a bird so dry you need four different sauces to force it down! – so when I came back from NOLA the first time, I swore I’d always celebrate Christ’s birthday with a slow-cooked chili instead. It’s difficult trying to persuade a family that never got over bread sauce and cheesy parsnips to go with my swampcore flow…but my ideal Xmas Day is a chili simmering in the pot on a low heat from 10am-4pm; a steady stream of Black Velvets and Woodford Reserve in between; and Cajun/Zydeco thumping away on the stereo – occasionally punctuated by the wails of yet another carol singer caught in the outdoors beartrap. This next number isn’t on the CD I picked above, but I’ve been playing it religiously every Xmas since 2011:
By the way, let’s not forget NOLA’s ‘white magic’. While I was over there, I became interested in the history of the Krewes and their arcane Mardi Gras rituals (imagine The Rotary Club on acid: many a textile plant heir goosed the NOPD superintendent’s daughter at a Mardi Gras Krewe bash). There’s a lot about the history of (and controversies surrounding) the Krewes online, if you care to search (too long and complex to go into here), focusing on OG outfits like Krewe of Proteus, Knights of Momus and Mistick Krewe of Comus. These Krewes also inspired more fun mobs like the Mystic Krewe of Barkus (an all-dog parade) and the gay Mystic Krewe of Satyricon. Here’s some wacked-out local TV footage from '83:
Clifton Chenier, I salute you, and hope everyone down in that neck of the woods escapes the worst of Milton tonight. Anyway, I guess this has post has devolved into a bunch of random tunes rather than an album or definitive song, but when did that stop me before? Hope you enjoy this freakout:
(* Toss a chicken breast into a wheely bin, tip it on its side, prop the lid open with a broom handle and wait ‘til the ‘gator slithers inside, shutting the lid behind it)