uncarved.org blog

 Beyond The Implode anarchopunk podcast 5 Nov 2010: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A collaboration between Martin and the good folks of Youarehear. With some help from me.

Classic and obscure tunes with some verbal commentary both refined and rabid.

Unfortunately anarchopunk wasn’t able to overcome the contradictions of capitalism and all the main players seem to be threatening each other with legal action right now.

Martin recently reviewed the recent reissue of Crass’ “Feeding of the 5000″.

See also the uncarved.org Critical Look At Anarchopunk for some good reading.

Oh and if you’re on twitter get on the all new @BTi_Enquiries stream.

Martin is refreshingly balanced about the sad passing of Ari Up.

48 is too young to die and as a lot of people have said in the last few days, her contribution was important and inspiring.

Ari Up at BASH, Plastic People, April 2006 - with Nicolette right, top. More photos from the night here.

But… she was a bit annoying when we saw her at BASH. Charging about and educating us about how things are done in Jamaica in a rather patronising way.

Putting a positive spin on it, she was full of energy and a good counterfoil to the godlike Nicolette. And she certainly kept Kevin Martin on his toes whilst frenziedly demanding the next riddim. Which was quite funny.

I read Zoe Street-Howe’s “Typical Girls: The Story of The Slits” a few months back and would thoroughly recommend it. What I liked best was the uncalculating nature of the group – yes they certainly wanted to wind the right people up, but musically they were fiercely open minded in a way that seems very of its time – very postpunk but not very 2010.

In retrospect we probably could do with more people being annoying like Ari Up.

It’s the 2010 London Anarchist Bookfair this Saturday.

I’ve given it a miss for a few years now (which is fair enough given that I’m not an anarchist!), but might tag along this time to pick up a copy of the new book on Anti-Fascist Action which is being produced in time for the occasion.

In the evening some friends of mine are organising the first in a series of benefit gigs for a variety of causes:

It will be good.

To the ICA last night, for the UK premiere of the Superstonic Sound documentary.

This was billed variously as a film about Don Letts, or perhaps a film about UK bass culture featuring Don Letts and his role in it:

“a documentary, which fuses his life story with that of the history of bass culture in Britain. From Kingston to London, New York to Rio, bass has had a resounding impact on musicians and music lovers alike. It is a meeting point for people from different cultures, backgrounds and races and continues to inspire innovation and change. Following 3 generations of DJ in the Letts family, Superstonic Sound charts the impact of Jamaican bass and how it changed British music and society forever.”

The film is actually an hour long advert for the Letts “brand”. Which is fine if you like Don Letts, I guess. For me the best parts were from Don’s film archive shot in Kingston JA and Brixton in the 1970s. I would have loved to simply watch all that, alongside the footage he apparently has of Prince Far I and others.

Unfortunately last night’s event seemed to suggest that anything involving Don Letts has to end up being about Don Letts more than anything else. Quite a lot of the film is taken up with Don wandering around London with his son reminiscing on his life, or sitting in his studio being interviewed for radio programmes (which seemed a lot more interesting than the film we were watching).

Both Don and his son Jet come across as OK people who have had interesting lives and made worthwhile contributions to culture. The difficulty is that Don is a self-confessed hustler who seems to be perpetually focussed on promoting himself so he can blag the next deal. And fair enough – there are a lot of people like that and it’s not like as a black guy in the seventies he was going to make a good go of being a civil servant or a bank manager.

The problems with this narcissism are twofold.

Firstly it means that the actual ”history of bass culture in Britain” doesn’t get told properly.

The film was all too brief about Don’s father playing his soundsystem in a church basement after the Sunday service in the 1950s. Things then move predictably on to punk and the Roxy (skipping over rudeboys and skinheads dancing to ska in the sixties). The eighties are represented by Big Audio Dynamite and Don going to New York to discover hip hop (“black punk rock”). The nineties don’t get a look in, so no rave or jungle or garage. The story skips directly to dubstep, presumably because Don digs it and his son is a producer and club promoter.

My esteemed colleague Jamrock pressed Don on his opinion of Grime during the Q&A and after the show. Basically he’s not into it and didn’t feel that it fitted into the tradition he was talking about because it’s all bling and designer labels and not about chanting down babylon. I think, for me, the way that grime is produced and distributed and functions as an autonomous expression of urban working class culture is political in itself – regardless of lyrical content.

Whilst there are many things I’m not keen on in grime culture, it is undeniable that it’s a lot closer to being “black punk rock” than a lot of the music in the film. It is certainly a lot less palatable than dubstep to many people and has been subject to even more interference from the police than the Sex Pistols and the Clash ever were.

Plus it simply isn’t true that grime is all about bling – it was initially a reaction to the champagne and designer clothes of UK garage.

Furthermore grime reflects the politics of the world it is created in. Which are generally crap. It may be that the economic and social conditions of this decade mean that politics and people’s relationship to it become a bit more interesting, which might mean more interesting subcultures develop. It is a bit wrongheaded to say that dubstep is acceptable in this context, but grime isn’t.

Unfortunately a potentially interesting discussion of these issues was curtailed by the second problem with the cult of Don – that people buy into it. The backwards and forwards between my friend and the star of the show was interrupted by another audience member who wanted to have her say. Which is fair enough, except all she seemed to want to do was big herself up and tell Don how amazing he is.

Many of the other “questions” were of a similar caliber, although there were some interesting tangents where younger audience members raised the issue of generally feeling helpless, having too much information and not having black and white issues to kick out against. Which makes me wonder if the whole event was framed around a nostalgia for the simpler times of the seventies.

Don got his fire back when talking about trying to acquire stock footage of black culture for his documentary films and being charged thousands of pounds for a few seconds of footage of someone like Sun Ra, which Ra’s estate won’t see any of. “Who owns the culture?” is a crucial question to be asking.

But so is “Who decides what’s in the culture and what isn’t?”

There is a film to be made which covers ”the history of bass culture in Britain” which shows that  “From Kingston to London, New York to Rio, bass has had a resounding impact on musicians and music lovers alike. It is a meeting point for people from different cultures, backgrounds and races and continues to inspire innovation and change.”

Unfortunately, enjoyable as it was – and raising as many questions as it did, Superstonic Sound is not that film.

I’ve previously written about my teenage years hanging around with goths in St Albans:

In mid eighties suburban Hertfordshire, goth was pretty good lowest common denominator “alternative” fodder. Black clothes were de rigeur anyway and we tended to huddle together with the other weirdos to avoid violence from people who took exception to our appearance.

Plus, let’s be completely honest, hanging around in a pub for some underage drinking with some impossibly foxy goth girls was a lot more interesting than sitting alone in your bedroom again listening to Foetus and reading William Burroughs.

So I was interested to see Kiran Sande’s 20 Best Goth feature over at FACT Magazine. The inevitable, and planned, reaction to these lists is to get people up in arms about what has been left out – this was as true of Droid’s fantastic 20 Best Ragga feature as of the current one.

But what differentiates goth from other genres is its high level of fuzziness. There are relatively few arguments about what is or isn’t reggae, or who is or is not a reggae fan. But whilst everyone knows what a goth is, very few people in its eighties heydey admitted to being one, least of all the people in the bands. This game of goth accusation and denial even afflicts middle aged men who are succesful dubstep producers.

This adds a certain complexity to the historification process, which is already fraught with issues such as the tension between recording what was popular at the time and what went on to be influential. And of course the personal credibility of the author.

The FACT piece is clear from the outset that it cannot be a history of what was popular with goths (not least because of the author’s youthfulness). Comrade Stagger Lee’s response to the FACT article includes some great personal history, a mix and some good examples of omissions.

That isn’t a bad dialectic right there, which is a fancy way of saying that these two have done most of the work. All that remains is for me to introduce some wildcards and argue the toss!

I carried on hanging around with goths when I moved to London in 1988. Indeed, I lived with someone who had been in a very early incarnation of goth thrashers Creaming Jesus. There were a few clubs a bunch of us went to like KitKat, Friday nights at the Electric Ballroom (was that called “Full Tilt”?), Tuesdays at the Camden Palace (Feet First) and even a Saturday night bash in the club above the Manor House pub, by the tube station of the same name. There was also the Slimelight, but I think that came later when my interest had properly waned.

These nights all had the advantage of being really cheap to get into and filled with attractive goth girls. They were also a right good laugh - something that people with no first hand knowledge of gothdom may not realise.

Both FACT and Lee’s lists miss out these three tunes. All of which were surefire goth dancefloor fillers. You could also probably expect to hear a blast of PIL’s “Rise” and Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb were also de rigeur, soon to be joined by virtually anything off the first Nine Inch Nails album. And late period Siouxise and the Banshees (“Wheels on Fire”, “Peekaboo” etc). And yes, “Cat House” and “Big Hollow Man” by the legend which is Danielle Dax.

What I like about the tunes listed above is that people avoid them like the plague now – they can’t be cited as influential or hip. But they were huge tracks which people danced to week after week in the late eighties and early nineties. I suspect they still get played at goth clubs now, somewhere.

Perhaps I remembered them as being better than they actually are in the cold light of day in 2010. In fact, a good few of them sound a bit leaden and overproduced in that eighties way. But they do catapult me back to dark clubs, ripped to the gills at the age of 19/20. Which I think makes them important, and valuable – to me at least.

I suppose what I’m saying is that writing about classic music is well and good, but writing about the history of subcultures can’t be done by just selecting the best bits – any more than a “greatest hits” compilation can truly represent an artist.

Martin has also contributed to the discussion with an excellent post over at Beyond the Implode. His piece combines some great anecdotes with some good musical selection and is much funnier (intentionally!) than me wittering on like an old fart here.

Loki brings things up to date with a look at Zola Jesus over at An Idiot’s Guide to Dreaming. I first heard them on Boomkat’s psyche-dub “14 tracks” compilation. Their collab with LA Vampires was a standout track for me and whilst the own efforts are much less dubby, they are significantly more goth – a definitely worth investigating.

ZJ are also flagged up in the FACT feature as being a current incarnation of goth. It’s easy to argue for a goth continuum:

• Siouxsie
• Bauhaus
• Sisters of Mercy
• Sisters clones like the youtube vids above
• Nine Inch Nails
• Placebo
• Marilyn Manson
• emo?!
• The Horrors etc
• Lady Gaga
• Zola Jesus

That’s just off the top of my head – to pursue the idea we would need to demonstrate connections between each stage and fill the gaps. I’m not really interested in doing that. Possibly the list is total bollocks anyway, but you see what I’m getting at.

What I am interested in is whether the resurgence of goth now has parallels with the economic and cultural conditions in the early eighties.

Is it a miserablist escapism – a way of internalising uncertainty about the future? Or simply an amplification or adolescent emotional intensity? Or both?

Do people turn back to artiness in times of austerity because they have lots of time on their hands, or because they are seeking something greater than trying to make ends meet?

It’s not time for me to get the pointy boots out again, but I’ll be keeping an eye on things with some interest.

Out of all the great MCs from Saxon sound in the eighties, none became household names as much as Smiley Culture.

Indeed, as I pointed out in my Agit Disco piece, seeing Smiley on Top of the Pops was my first experience of UK MC culture.

But whilst the rest of the posse are fairly easy to track down, as they are still involved with music or community work, figuring out what Smiley Culture was  up to was shrouded in mystery. Did he own a pub, an advertising agency? The rumours seemed to change year by year.

I wanted to know so I could satisfy my curiousity, and also because I wanted to track the guy down and interview him about his life.

Then this week, a double whammy of answers.

The Guardian was first, revealing that Smiley owned a diamond mine – oh and that the Queen used to play his tunes in Buckingham Palace!

Then, a rather less jolly tale. In an eerie echo of Buju Banton’s recent troubles, The Evening Standard revealed that David Emmanuel (aka Smiley Culture) had been charged with conspiracy to supply cocaine.

The case continues, so I guess it’s not prudent to write more at this stage.

Who Makes The Nazis is a new blog which is “Keeping an eye on the neo-fascists currently burrowing their way into a subculture near you…” off to a good start with yet more on Tony Wakeford, but also some more general ruminations on the neofolk scene which are very well argued. I especially liked the comments in this entry about artists who harp on about exploring extreme material, but seem unable to come to any conclusions or opinions about their favourite subject matter, even after a quarter of a century.

I was also thrilled to see Martin rev up the Beyond The Implode war machine with a piece entitled “10 youthful musical rituals I (sometimes) miss“.

Datacide magazine have started digitising the archival pieces from their predecessor, Alien Underground, which was a great zine covering techno, noise and politics in the mid 1990s. Pieces so far on the Criminal Justice Act, Digital Hardcore Recordings, Sakho, and a lot more. Even the record reviews from back then are a nice reminder times gone by…

Datacide contributor Flint Michigan has a great interview with Arthur McDonald of early Factory Records act The Royal Family And The Poor over at Mute Magazine.

I’m very happy to be taking part in Stefan Szczelkun’s Agit Disco project. My installment is now available here.

It covers UK reggae and dancehall from the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on the politics (with a small “p” and a big “p”).

There is no audio on the Agit Disco site, so I will be circulating my mix myself initially. But I haven’t quite decided how yet.

Previous Agit Disco selectors have included Neil Transpontine, Stewart Home, Howard Slater, Tom Vague and Stefan himself. All the contributions are worth your attention.

Or: Pseudo Gay Rastas part one

Sex Boots Dread – Tickle Tune (Rinka, 1980)

A nice bit of traditional toasting over the Pick Up The Pieces riddim:

Me think about the lion as him rest upon the sand
Me tink about the help that me have from white man
And me want to crying
Becah me listen to the lying
Me know when me talk that me [real break something - not sure?]

Me know that me mix up with real good friend
Good [earth or 'erb ration - not sure?]
It not absurd situation
Because me black and me proud and me Rastafari
Me and yah people we nah see eye to eye

Which then deviates jarringly, and hilariously, from the norm:

There’s a difference in me lifestyle
There’s a difference in me dance style
What a difference in me case file
Because me black and me proud and me Rastafari
And me homosexual
Homosexual
Homosexual

The lyrics then move on to some explicit and jaw-droppingly funny descriptions of gay sex, before concluding with some more philosophical musings:

And me mind goes asunder with the wonder of life
‘Ow people give you pressure for to pick up a wife
And me know it not a sensible
Brrrrr! me know it not a sensible.

Because me like all me brother and me like all me sister
Me like everybody and me not a resister
Me open up me mind guy
Me open up me mind guy

And me love, me love, me know about love
me also think of sex and me know it from above
and me like a man cocky style

East west north and south
I take it up the arse and I take it in me mouth
North south west and east
I play the beauty and me boyfriend play the beast

North south east and west
Sexual freedom – always the best!

Sex Boots Dread – Pentel (Rinka, 1980)

Pentel (aka Pentil) is in a similar vein, covering Mr Boots Dread’s relationship with an a young Indian bloke – their love life taking place in his parent’s cornershop with an increasingly bizarre variety of the merchandise used as props.

I like these tracks – they are very well done with an obvious affection for reggae and a who give a fuck attitude to the prevailing sexual codes of conduct. And they are very funny.

I first heard of Sex Boots Dread on Woebot’s blog. These tunes came out on a 12″ and were rumoured to have been given a great review in the NME because of their pro-gay lyrics – something unheard of then and now for what seemed to be a Jamaican artist.

But there are a few clues, just from listening, that suggest everything is not what it seems. For example “think” is pronounced think and the more patois tink in the first two lines. And the sexually explicit content is very different from the usual “slackness” of the genre.

Sex Boots Dread is rumoured to be the work of comedian and personality Keith Allen.

The actual evidence for this is a bit sketchy, especially as I haven’t read Allen’s autobiography, “Grow Up” (Ebury Press 2007). But I’m more interested in writing about the context the record might have been made in, than who actually made it. So there.

West Side

Sex Boots Dread also appears on an album entitled The Roughler Presents The Warwick Sessions Volume 1, which came out in 1987.

The album also features Keith Allen, and is a product of the eighties Ladbroke Grove scene in West London. The Roughler was a fanzine which was set up to cover news of the Rough Trade cricket team (a concept nearly as incongruous as occult order the Ordo Templi Orientis having a baseball team, but apparently this is also true – I’ve never had much of a grip on sport) which operated out of The Warwick pub.

As fanzine veteran and West London historian Tom Vague puts it:

“Of all the local mags, the Roughler most definitively represents Notting Hill and the area’s contrasting psychogeography. Originally the scoresheet and fixture list programme of the Rough Trade cricket team, the Old Roughians, the satirical mag/fanzine/website etc was founded in the early 80s by the local pub legend Welsh Ray Roughler-Jones.

The Roughler covered the scene at the Rough Trade pub, the Warwick Castle at 225 Portobello Road, and the activities of Keith Allen, the Comic Strip actor who was in the local groups, the Atoms and Tesco Bombers, and arrested in the ’76 Carnival riot. In the mid 80s Allen achieved further local notoriety with his ‘first gay Rasta’ spoof record, Boots Sex Dread’s ‘Tickle Tune’.”

[link to whole publication - Entrance to Hipp: An historical and psychogeographical report on Notting Hill compiled by Tom Vague for HISTORYtalk Vague 44]

Tom also states that Keith was involved with legendary reggae pirate radio station Dread Broadcasting Corporation.

I’ve not found any corroborating evidence for that, but here he is interviewing Lepke of DBC for Channel 4 in 1982:

It seems like Keith had a project called “Breakfast Pirate Radio” which was either a station or released on cassette or both. Either way, that also featured Sex Boot Dread tracks:

 Breakfast Pirate Radio [94:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(relevant section commences 56:30)

The show also includes Gerry Arkwright, the “northern industrial gay” character and a very camp presenter. Allen clearly felt homosexuality was great source material, and it is certainly worth remembering how transgressive this must have felt at the time. There are also a fair few pops at politicians and middle class people which suggest an anarchist influence.

Ian Bone and an early incarnation of Class War used to knock about in Ladbroke Grove too. According to Bone’s autobiography “Bash The Rich”, Keith once played drums in his band “The Living Legends” and filmed several hours’ worth of footage of Class War’s “Bash The Rich” excursion to the 1985 Henley Regatta. Although it’s fair to say Mr Bone was less than impressed with one of Mr Allen’s latest ventures.

Dogging

A piece in the News of the World reveals the source of the record label name:

“Keith becomes uncharacteristically coy when he records a night of lust with one of the biggest stars in British drama. He refuses to name her but teasingly reveals she was later honoured with the title Dame.

He won her over with the bizarre story of how he came by his tattoo of a dog’s head and the word Rinka.

Keith had it done in a fit of anger over Seventies Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe being found not guilty of plotting to murder male model Norman Scott, his alleged gay lover.

In the drama leading up to the case Scott’s dog Rinka had been shot through the head. It was an odd chat-up line to a top actress but Keith reveals: “An hour later we were in her bedroom snorting amyl nitrate—her with a pair of headphones on, listening to opera, and me with my tongue all over her. And no, it wasn’t Judi Dench!”

Rinka Records also released a seven inch by The Atoms in 1979, featuring Keith Allen on vocals and piano. That record has a catalogue number or R23, but it may explain the Rinka2 imprint on the Sex Boots Dread label.

Sex Boots Dread: The Movie

“Tickle Tune” appears in the 2001 Larry Clark movie “Bully”, which I haven’t seen – but apparently it’s playing in a nightclub.

The track credited as follows, but does not appear on the official soundtrack CD:

“Boots Sex Dread”
Performed by Rinka
Written by Rinka and J. Cafritz
Published by Just Send the Money to Us Music (BMI)

“J. Cafritz”?! Well that turns out to be Julia Cafritz, former guitarist of Pussy Galore and now of Free Kitten infamy.

Kim Gordon and Julia Cafritz

Julia confirmed her awesomeness by dropping me an email and asking about the track when she found me discussing it over at the Chatty Mouth reggae board. I was happy to bung her an mp3, and took the opportunity to ask her what the crack was:

“it was a mythical track, in my mind some total concoction of Thurston [Moore, Sonic Youth] and Byron’s [Coley, music critic best known for his writing in Forced Exposure, now writes for The Wire amongst others]…since they had a hand in it getting on the soundtrack.”

That’s the only reason for me to be falsely given writing credit. ‘Just send ALL the money directly to us’ was Free Kitten’s publishing company…they even got that wrong.

The track must be a total joke. Having spent my entire childhood traveling to Jamaica every year, there were definitely some gay rastas on the down low…but none with such a keen sense of humor in such a homophobic culture.”

Sure enough Byron Coley bigs up the record in this piece for Vice Magazine:

“Sex Boots Dread” – Rinka – worth $1,000
I have the only copy of this 12” you’re ever going to see outside of Jamaica. It’s from the early 80s and it’s about Rinka coming out of the closet and and getting into heavy toasting about the pleasures of anal sex. Larry Clark used it for a club scene in the movie Bully.

So there you have it, a cracking record with quite a story behind it. I guess all of this might explain why Lily Allen, Keith’s daughter, has so much of a reggae influence in her work…