I had such high hopes for 93 Million Miles album after listening online to the Boiler Room mix of Africa Hitech – it throbs with vocals, rhythms and tropical atmosphere from Steve Spacek and Mark Pritchard.

Africa HiTech - 93 Million Miles

So, to me, the album is a let down. It seems to me that the African feel has been rinsed out of these cool sophisticated tracks where dubstep meets techno-pop. The hypnotic beats make a summery soundtrack but lack the raw pulsating force of the live set.

Still, it is a powerful album that will build their following and become a signature tune for the summer of 2011. Layers of voices on ‘Spirit’ and ‘Light the Way’ reference gospel music, and some of the beats sound like Ghanaian talking drums. ‘Out In The Street’ builds into an infectious anthem with a bit more guts than the other tracks. The title track ’93 Million Miles’ dabbles in a retro Radiophonic Workshop sound – like the Dr Who theme’s kid sister. Some of the vocals sound like Daleks too, but less scary and more sad.

So Africa HiTech’s 93 Million Miles is virtuoso beatmongering, and Mark and Steve show their prowess throughout. If only they’d called it something else – the Africa moniker is just wrong. Hitech – yes. Brilliant – yes. But I can’t hear Africa in any of these tracks.

The Slits

The Slits are on stage and the Tories are in power. We’re rocking back to 1979. Just as David Cameron is a warmer, smoother, sexier version of Margaret Thatcher, the new Slits are now less raw and raucous. They haven’t sold out, though! Johnny “Rotten” Lydon might be doing adverts for butter on TV, but the Slits exist for their music, and they’re still rocking – led by Johnny’s step-daughter Ari Up.

Bad-girl Hollie pops backstage to pee in a cup and then sprays it over the audience. Her dad is Paul Cook from the Clash so she was born a punk-rocker. At least they don’t gob on us! We love the striking women filling the hall with jungle shrieks and that thumping reggae bassline that makes the floor bounce. We might be too young to remember the original line-up, or too old to pogo, but we’re glad the Slits exist again and singing along with ‘Shoplifting’: “Do a runner, do a runner!” we chant.

The late John Peel said after their Session for his radio show that they couldn’t play their instruments and he loved them for that. Patronising git!

Well, now they can play not only their own but also each other’s. Lead signer Ari also does a fine a capella Jamaican patois number, and they storm through a cover of ‘Heard it Through the Grapevine.’ They’ve got a new album out (Trapped Animal) – punk-reggae or reggae-punk if you want to label it. And they’ve also released all their old demos, just to prove that they COULD play all along. This tour takes them across Europe and Scandinavia to Italy and Greece with an independent crew far from the dead hand of Live Nation – a punishing month-long schedule with no rest-days. These are tough cookies and they’re back in the UK for two dates in the first week of June.

Ari Up, who founded the Slits as a fourteen-year-old riot grrl in 1976, is proud to have started the world’s first-ever all-girl punk band. But chatting to her in the dressing room before the gig, it’s clear that punk is a dirty word for her.  “We couldn’t relate to it. It was a label. The media decided that’s punk. But now I use it ‘cos people are desperate for labels.”

She can’t stand it that punk has now become a fashion-statement, and she’s scathing about the so-called godfather of punk Malcolm Mclaren who died recently.

“It doesn’t mean shit to me that Malcolm Maclaren died. He was a rip-off and con artist. I don’t know what’s all this Malcolm- worshipping going on. He’s very exploitative, cashing in on other people’s talent. I’m furious – apparently we were mentioned in the report of his death because he managed us for two weeks and they couldn’t even spell us right! We were on the TV caption as The Splits!”

Tessa, also in the original band, adds “We found we were being written out of the history books so we still have a mission and a lot to say. That’s why we re-formed the band. The roots of it is still there but we’ve kept it fresh.”

New members Anna, Hollie and HoneyChild are a generation younger and they’re bringing the Slits to a new audience with music heavily influeenced by the dreadlocked Ari’s decades of living in Jamaica, Belize, Borneo and New York. Trapped Animal, the new album, sounds like 2010 in its world-music fusion of reggae bassline and punk lyrics

Ari Up believes “We inspired a lot of girls to make their own music. We get them coming up to us saying that they made a band becasue of us.The world hasn’t moved on for girls. It’s totally stagnant. The world’s crumbling. We’ve still got rebellious lyrics against the system, representing freedom for the girls and boys. We’re not segregating girls from boys.”

Indeed when they perform ‘Typical Girls,’ they make a point of getting a male friend onstage to help out with the backing singers. But he doesn’t stay on for Ari’s sexy solo performance of ‘Take Me Don’t Wake Me’ about how she likes to be woken in the middle of the night by a lover slipping himself inside her.

Maybe that’s not so shocking now as it would have been in ’79 but you’ll be surprised how relevant those old songs sound and the new stuff takes the Slits to a  new level: stronger, more confident and accomplished. Grown-up, but in a good way!

Laura Marling

April 25, 2010

“Miss Laura’s coming and she’s going to knock your socks off” – that’s how Alessi of Alessi’s Ark introduces the headline act. And although the Royal Box at the Palladium is empty, in Laura Marling tonight we truly have a homecoming Queen. She even says herself how good it is to be back in her hometown after touring America and the UK.

She speaks because she can, and that is the title of the album; the song itself makes a blazing finale for her final gig. She whistles, she plays guitar, she tells a funny story about how her mother thought she wrote that Neil Young song, and didn’t know it was all about heroin. She sings, and her voice in song makes us forget the girlie banter and get swept up in the emotions, the stories and the characters she invents.

They sound like folk songs, ‘our’ music, songs familiar to us – but they are all Marling’s own. That’s the clever bit. She’s writing the songs that downtrodden women down the ages yearned to sing but dared not. From the schoolgirl’s sexy daydreams Alas I Cannot Swim to the battered wife’s escape I Speak Because I Can, Laura Marling voices experiences beyond her years.  Her voice itself seems to come from deep inside her self (unlike Alessi’s, which sounds like it’s from deep inside a plastic bucket – no matter).

Between The Unthanks’ authentic tradition, Joanna Newsom’s  daft screechiness and Goldfrapp’s fake folksiness (thankfully now discarded), Laura Marling strides along banging her own drum. This is what holds us spellbound – we old, young and middle-aged musos, folkies, mums and daughters are all cheering but not dancing in the aisles nor even singing along. The lyrics are dark, the beats are tricky; she’s a Londoner playing the Palladium, not a bard of the Celtic twilight. Just to make sure we remember that she is now in the big time, the band overwhelms Laura’s voice sometimes and the lighting is rockstar rather than evocative. Do we really need the bass player from Boy and Bear (the warm-up band) adding to an already overblown sound? Let the girl sing! She is a star.

Peggy Seeger

November 13, 2009

The support act outshines the star here so completely that this is a gig of two halves.

Reclusive Mike Waterson’s rare appearance, in baggy jumper and cloth cap, holds us spellbound with ballads, tales and rhymes of fishing and dockers and lads loving lasses. Martin and Norma (his sister and brother-in-law) chime in with ancient and modern folk. They sing sad songs to remember their dead sister Lal, the troubled singer- songwriter. Norma sings a calypso from Montserrat, where the black slaves rejoice when their sister dies but sing dirges whenever another new baby is born into bondage.

There are traditional Humberside whalers’ anthems (although Martin points out that he does not believe in killing whales, only in keeping traditional music alive. ) Mike adds his own own witty ditties, drawn from life. It all sounds as clear and pure as the wind whistling in off the North Sea, and sets a high standard for La Seeger.

Alas, Peggy Seeger takes the stage like an American Sunday school teacher, bossing us into singing along. She plays the auto-harp quite well, and the banjo rather clumsily.There is a cringe-making song she wrote in her car after hearing a radio report of an abortion doctor being murdered by pro-life campaigners. We are supposed to sing along to this, too, but mostly refuse.

There is one song we all know and love, written for Peggy by her late partner Ewan MacColl at a time when he was still married to his second wife, Kirsty MacColl’s mother Jean Newlove. It’s ‘The first time ever I saw your face’ which won a Record of the Year Award for Roberta Flack.

“He always said he wrote this song as an hors d’oeuvre, but Roberta Flack turned it into an entrée,” Peggy says, to explain the unfamiliar fast pace and jaunty mannerisms of her version. By the time she has finished with it, the song is fit only for the doggie bag.

Only once, in a song dedicated to her brother who died in August 2009, does Peggy Seeger evoke a sense of empathy. It is still light and humourous in its lyrics, but the grief in her voice is obvious as she recalls all the times she might have spent with him but didn’t.  She looks her age, suddenly, and we all remember that she is in her seventies and Ewan has been dead for twenty years and Kirsty for five years, killed in a boating accident. Peggy’s voice is still strong, but an old-lady screechiness creeps in sometimes.

Then it’s back to the cheesy jokes and the finale, which is literally crap – a long-winded ‘satirical’  ballad about pre-mediated farting. Turning the air green, she remarks that is seems ‘kinda ironic’ to accompany this song on a Steinway grand piano. Folk legend? No, she is your embarrassing great-aunt at the family gathering. Time to retire, Peggy!

Flood Tide

This is awesome! The River Thames dictates musical notes to a band in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The vibraphone trills and tinkles, the flute sighs, the clarinet swooshes and the ‘cellos throb like an undercurrent. It is ambient music to sweep you away…

Jazz trumpeter and ‘Flood Tide’ composer John Eacott calls it a ‘sonification’ of the Thames. He explains that the tidal pull of the moon causes the tide to ebb and flow. So his sensors, placed in the river near Greenwich pier, detect the rising height of the water. And they track changes in its speed, temperature and direction of travel. All this data is beamed up to the laptops that sit on the music-stands instead of printed music. Each time a signal is received it corresponds to a set of notes on one of the instruments, so as the cursor washes over the dots on the stave it keeps the rhythm of the water flowing over that particular sensor and that is what we hear coming out of the instruments. Nature and music, science and art come together and the Royal Observatory is hosting the experimental concerts as part of the anniversary celebrations for forty years since man walked on the moon.

To be honest, it doesn’t always sound like water. It’s more like the sensation of being rocked in a boat – sometimes a cradle, sometimes a rollercoaster log-flume. The sound is ever-changing, and also soothingly similar from one hour to the next. John Eacott suggests that people listen for a while then go away and come back to hear how the turning tide has made subtle changes in the sound.

The tide of tourists ebbs and flows, some stopping to listen, others baffled and hurrying back to more familiar sights and sounds. They are missing a unique experience which affects me deeply. I can’t wait for the next performance, on September 12th as part of the Thames Festival. That will be even more impressive, with forty musicians rather than six and a sense of the river’s mighty power.

It’s at the Cottons Centre near HMS Belfast on the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge from 1400 with more details here.

Island 50

Phonica Records, 51 Poland Street, London W1.

How the f*** can you get fifty years of groundbreaking, independent, innovative music into an exhibition in the basement of a tiny record shop in London’s Soho?

Of course you can’t. But then you don’t have to. Island 50 is a year-long fest showcasing the best of the many eclectic artiste on the label, including documentaries on Channel 4, 1-Xtra, Absolute, BBC 4 and Radio 2, a special session at the Montreux Jazz Festival with Grace Jones, Marianne Faithfull and Baaba Maal and your chance to be part of the party by uploading user generated content to http://www.island50.com. Whew!

Still, the Soho basement is a good place to start. Music videos, giant album sleeves and just the right number of words to guide you through the fifty year history make this a fascinating place to spend an hour. You would think that a collection of rebel hearts such as the Slits, King Crimson and Nick Drake would not lend themselves to the museum treatment but the whole place has such a light touch that it works as a showcase. Young ‘uns will see the legends in a new light and oldies like me will enjoy a nostalgia trip. Recommended!

Baaba Maal – Television

The new album from Senegal’s Baaba Maal marks a crossover from specialist world music to music that the whole world can enjoy. No, he hasn’t sold out – the songs are still African. But they have catchy pop tunes with foot-tapping, summery beats and some are sung in English or French as well as his native language. He is still African, but he looks dapper in his black designer shirt and jacket, he is playing Glastonbury without irony …in short, he has arrived.

“I think Television is a new departure. Still with African elements – you can still hear the talking drum, and this is the image of Africa. I’ve been travelling with Western musicians so this is me Baaba Maal and my vision of the future and my vision of the world.”

He’s talking to me in the basement of Phonica Records in Soho, which in a way is his home turf since it houses the exhibition celebrating fifty years of Island Records…charting his successes since he signed to them twenty years ago, along with other legends as diverse as Bob Marley, The Slits, PJ Harvey and Roxy Music.

“Island Records was a road for me. We discovered black music… James Brown, Cuban, reggae from Island Records meant the ears of the listeners became familiar with what we could bring to music.”

Instead of sticking him in a studio in London, Island records sent Baaba Maal back to his home village of Podor in the north of Senegal to record with local Fulani musicians. “This company respects my community. Chris Blackwell is someone who did tell me ‘Baaba your voice must have a meaning for your continent, to correct the image of people in the continent’.”

It is an extraordinary voice – all the more so since Baaba Maal does not come from a long line of traditional musicians or ‘griots’ but has studied at university and the Conservatoire in Paris. On stage in Soho, he tells how he travelled to Brazil and brought back some great singers. But, he says, when they got into the studio they were not so great and it took a while before they could work well together. There is a sense that he is still experimenting, always trying new things – even the DVD being launched next week is still a work-in-progress and he watches keenly the audience’s reaction to the preview.

The sweaty crowd of of musos, journos and PR princesses hum and sway and applaud the DVD for the new album. Baaba looks relieved and settles into a short acoustic set including ‘Dakar Moon’. This is a song he’s written and sung in English as he moves into a new way of working, with multilingual lyrics, African music and worldwide appeal.

He is an ambassador for Senegal, and for the whole of Africa. Yet there is no preaching here. It is pop, not propaganda. He explains the title track of the new album, ‘L’homme dans la television’.

”Every one of us is the man in the television. It is a wonderful instrument…if you use it to educate the next generation.”

That’s the neat trick he has accomplished – to save the world, or at least the continent, just simply by being Baaba Maal.

What are your musical influences? That’s the classic question from interviewers. The answer from Mick Jones of The Clash is this exhibition – the contents of a lock-up garage in Acton, West London.

There are toy soldiers, ancient tape recorders, Mick’s drawings from art school, VHS tapes of Only Fools and Horses and On the Buses, old tickets and concert posters. Album covers dangle on strings, dusty boxes of cassettes jostle for space with stacks of hefty non-fiction books and an empty pizza box. It’s not just any pizza box, though – it’s printed with a picture of The Clash.

Fans and art-lovers can rummage through most of the stuff, though the magazines (Creem, Rolling Stone and so on) are kept in plastic covers and displayed on the wall, to preserve them. Mick Jones himself pops in now and then to re-arrange things or to add new stuff from the lock-up. His dream is to have a public library of rock n’ roll, available for everyone. It will not be the sort of library where you have to whisper – his music plays constantly and there are squeaks of delight from the French teenagers and the eight year old Londoner whose fascination with the Clash prove that the spirit of punk is not yet dead. Of course there are sixty-somethings too, muttering and marvelling at those quirky little things that evoke strong memories of bygone gigs.

In the exhibition blurb, director Donald Smith writes “resolutely alternative and defiantly anti-corporate, it is like the dub-side of the O2’s British Music Experience”. It also makes you think about war and propaganda and the bloated self-indulgence of progressive music which punk set out to destroy.

The collection is a creation, in the spirit of Damien Hirst who was once challenged about his pickled  sheep by an interviewer who asked “Is it art?” “If it’s in an art gallery it must be art” was the reply. By collecting  and selecting certain pieces from the torrent of TV, films and music that has washed over him since 1976 Mick Jones has made a sort of life story that is unique to him. There are obvious ways in which his things inspire his songs – for example the toy soldiers doubtless marched their way into the lyrics of ‘Eton Rifles’. But the whole exhibition gives off more subtle messages too. It makes you feel somehow intimate with him and sends you back to your record collection to listen again with different pictures in your mind.

Next time he persuades an art college to host the show don’t miss it and check it out at http://www.chelseaspace.org/

Marianne Faithfull

It’s called Easy Come, Easy Go but this is a difficult album to like. “Like” is too small a word for this perfectionist collection of songs and musicians - all classics and masters in their own right, and all eager to create new masterpieces through their association with Marianne Faithfull. You will not like this album: you will either love it or hate it.

Personally, I love it. More Marmite than Mars Bar, it includes an eclectic mix of soul, blues, country and jazz numbers from writers as diverse as Morrissey and Dolly Parton.

Guest musicians include rocker Keith Richards (renewing the longstanding relationship between Marianne and the Rolling Stones), folk superstars Kate and Anna McGarrigle and Rufus Wainwright, to name but the most famous stars in the constellation. Marianne Faithfull is old-school, and cannot be compared to today’s singer-songwriters such as Amy Winehouse or Laura Marling. She only ever does cover versions - but again, “cover” is too small a word. In the sleeve notes she’s called an “interpreter of songs” and that is exactly what she does. She interprets them as only an older woman can, having loved and lost, been betrayed and jilted, seen enough of the nasty side of human nature. Her deep manly voice carries the full range of emotions, and develops characters in many of the songs which tell stories. She conveys the despair of a jilted woman whose fatherless baby is stillborn, the dark secrets of a paedophile murderer and also the tender hopes of lovers in ‘There’s a Place for Us’ and the high camp of Morrissey’s ‘Dear God Please Help Me’.

There are examples of almost all music genres in this collection - soul, folk, country, jazz. This might be a sampler, proving the versatility and musical accomplishment of a woman who has the perfect diction of Petula Clark and the vocal power of Dusty Springfield as well as the pulling-power to persuade the very best session musicians to join her comeback.

Each song is beautifully orchestrated, with a big, full sound different every time yet somehow locking together to make a coherent album. You might want to download just your favourite track (mine is the Morrissey number - track 4 on disc 2. It sounds deceptively short and simple but the melodramatic orchestration lends a touch of dark humour and the sexy lyrics gain in spiciness when you realise that Marianne is old enough to be your gran!)

If you listen to the whole album a few times it will grow on you as an album, a statement by a woman who was famous as a muse, a girlfriend and a singer of other people’s songs. The statement says “I’m still here ” and “I’ve still got it”. In that sense you might think, if you wanted to poke fun, that it is not the Mars bar but the Cadbury’s Caramel that symbolises this new Marianne (look at the advert with the fancy female hare batting her eyelashes at the tortoise). However I have no wish to poke fun. This is a serious musical achievement. It is not music for girls who’ve been dumped by their boyfriends (try Dido). These songs sound sad but yet provide sustenance for your soul.

 

Brighton

Brighton rocks for music fans, with intimate venue Komedia, Fatboy Slim’s beach party and massive regular collectors’ fairs at the Conference Centre hosted by www.vinylmanenterprises.com.

There’s even a rock hotel, the Pellirocco. From the outside it looks like another staid Georgian guest house on Regency Square. Step through the front door and you’re in a fantasy of rock-themed bedrooms. Sink into the white shag-pile of the Ocean Room, luxuriate on a red heart-shaped bed or re-live the glory days of punk. Office parties, hen nights and romantic trysts keep the Pellirocco busy so book in advance.

The Ocean Rooms are a nightclub –one of many in this party town. The hotel’s released its own CD and in the bright pink bar the cocktails have a musical flavour. Try the Poor Man’s Supernova, (Babycham not proper bubbly) or Love Potion Number 5 (vodka, cointreau, cranberry and lime). The owner’s also opened a sex shop called She Said. It’s not on the premises but tucked away in a nearby back alley. This all sounds a bit gay, but hotel spokeswoman Jane Slater assures me they welcome all sorts – including most touring bands playing Brighton…

The gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender scene is huge in Brighton, yet friendly and welcoming to straight couples, singles and students from the two universities. Check out the vintage clothes and large-size high-heeled shoes in Oxfam. Or if you want to spend real money try the quirky little shops in the Lanes. Here you’ll find the UK’s only independent perfumery, Pecksniff’s, a jewellery quarter including the affordable and hip Au, an old-fashioned sweet shop with gobstoppers, Montezuma chocolate and a treasure trove of gift shops. The Friends Meeting House hosts Fair Trade Markets selling everything from sea-glass necklaces to Palestinian olive oil. Find more treats in North Laine at Pokeno Pies (authentic pie, mash and liquor), the Wicked sex shop and Borderline Records, whose regular customers include crate-diggers from as far away as Wimbledon.

So, is there more to Brighton than sex, shops and rock ‘n’ roll? You bet! The town is also a family-friendly seaside resort with pebble beaches, fish ‘n’ chips and a funfair on Palace Pier (the burnt-out West Pier burnt is now just a rusty skeleton).$ Beach volleyball, cycling and skating are big sports and the town has a football club, Brighton and Hove Albion, known as the Seagulls. In the Sea Life Centre you can stroke a stingray and eyeball a shark.

Visit the Pavilion stately home, a glorious Russian-style onion-domed palace. There’s a festival every May and a year-round welcome from the place that is built on fun and individuality – so much so that each of its buses has its own name (Dusty Springfield is my favourite) and they run all through the night so you can always get home safe. London is fifty minutes away by train and its attractions make Brighton equally good for a day trip, a night out or a dirty weekend.