Back in 1985 when the world was young the Los Angeles punk band X teamed up with The Blasters' Dave Alvin (as he was then, this was long before he became Americana Elder Statesman Dave Alvin) to make a one-off country album.
The resulting album, "Poor Little Critter On The Road", was released under the name The Knitters and zoomed all the way up to No. 204 in the Billboard album charts.
Fourteen years later the folks at Bloodshot Records decided to drag assorted members of their roster into the studio to put together a track by track remake which they wittily called "Poor Little Knitter On The Road". It would be exaggerating to call it a 'must have' record, but there are some fine moments.
Inevitably my first selection features the golden-voiced Future Mrs Goggins, Kelly Hogan, who on this occasion teamed up with her old band Rock*A*Teens. Also in today's line-up is Kelly's good buddy Nora O'Connor alongside Ground Speed. I have never come across Ground Speed before so cannot tell you whether they were a 'proper' Bloodshot band or if this was a one-off. Noted Bloodshot authority Charity Chic may know.
Roll on another six years to 2005 and The Knitters themselves decided that it was time to get back in the saddle and trot the horse around the yard for a short while, as they have done intermittently ever since. The album they put out then ("The Modern Sounds Of The Knitters") was their last release, but those of you in LA might occasionally spot them live - as these lucky people did in 2011.
While I was typing the forensically detailed text above I remembered that Tapper had featured here before. On checking, I discovered it was exactly two years ago yesterday. Clearly mid-November is when an old man's mind turns to Zukie.
Last time I included a video of Caravan, on account of Mr Zukie sharing his real name with their keyboard player (David Sinclair). I am going to stick with tradition today.
Welcome to the 20th stop on our 55 stop musical tour of Africa. We will be resting here until December, as I have a week long work trip starting the Sunday after next and won't have time to prepare the next run of African posts properly before I go. Don't call it as a delay though. Rather think of it as an opportunity to linger and luxuriate in the magnificent musical legacy of Ethiopia.
Ethiopia is one of my favourite places. I was lucky enough to spend two weeks there in 2012 - plus a 24 hour stopover between flights in Addis Ababa in 2018 - and would I love to go back and explore the parts of the country I haven't yet seen. I won't bore you with my holiday snaps, with one exception, but in the unlikely event you are interested you can find them over on Flickr.
The golden age of Ethiopian popular music was the late 1950s to the early 1970s, when the local brass bands discovered American rock, soul and jazz and mangled them up with the pentatonic scales of traditional Ethiopian music, producing the most magnificently wonky sound. It is like listening to badly warped old Stax 45s. It was this era that Buda Musique captured on their excellent Éthiopiques series of albums from 1998 onwards.
It all came tumbling down after the Derg regime deposed Haile Selassie in 1974 and unleashed the Red Terror on the country. If you are ever in Addis Ababa I would highly recommend a visit to the Red Terror Martyr's Memorial Museum, it is a very moving experience. The damage the Derg did to Ethiopia before they were finally removed in 1991 is incalculable.
On a happier note (no pun intended) its time for the music. Obviously we start with some of the biggest stars of the golden age: Alemayehu Eshete (aka the Abyssinian Elvis and the Ethiopian James Brown), and two men who came up through the ranks of the Imperial Bodyguard Band, Tlahoun Gèssèssè (known as The Voice) and Mahmoud Ahmed, who in my view may be the finest of them all. All feature heavily in the Éthiopiques series.
I was luckily enough to see Messrs Eshete and Ahmed perform as part of an amazing night of Ethiopian music at the Barbican in London way back in 2008. Everything about the show was special, but witnessing the then 67 year old Mahmoud Ahmed bouncing up and down on the spot while at the same time crooning beautifully is something I will never forget.
Missing from the line-up that night was Tlahoun Gèssèssè, who by then was already ill with the diabetes that would take him the following year. On my short visit to Addis Ababa in 2018 I took the opportunity to pay my respects by visiting his understated grave in the grounds of the Holy Trinity Cathedral. You can pay your own tribute by going to Bandcamp and picking up a copy of a great compilation of his 1970s singles.
Also on the bill at the Barbican back in 2008 was Mulatu Astatqé, the arranger and vibes and keyboards player who is credited with creating Ethio-jazz (which fortunately is much funkier than most 'real' jazz, as you can hear in this tribute to a young lady called Netsanet).
Mulatu is still going strong at the age of 80, in fact he was back at the Barbican just last week. The pick of his older recordings are available on an excellent compilation on Strut Records, and he has also made a few records more recently with The Heliocentrics and others.
Next up is Netsanet Melesse. I don't think she is the subject of Mulatu's tune - as far as I can tell she only started performing in the 1990s - but both have played with the Wallias Band at various points so who knows. Mind you, everyone else we've mentioned worked with the Wallias Band as well; they were the Booker T & The M.G.s of the Addis scene back in the day. This track comes from Netsanet's 1993 album "Spirit of Sheba".
Aster Aweke arrived on the scene around the same time as Ms Melesse and went on become one of Ethiopia's biggest stars. Her first albums were released while she was living the US, and did very well with the Ethiopian diaspora and in Ethiopia itself. Things really took off after she returned home in 1997, with her albums "Hakere" (1999) and "Fikir" (2006) being particularly popular. Today's track comes from "Hakere".
When I was in Ethiopia in 2012 I managed to catch Teddy Afro in concert in the grounds of the Ghion Hotel in Addis. Teddy had recently released "Tikur Sew", his first album for seven years. One of the reasons for the gap was the three years he spent in jail from 2006 to 2009 having been found guilty of drink driving and a hit and run incident. Some fans believed he was set up, noting that the charges followed suspiciously shortly after the Government banned some of his previous records for being seditious.
Today's Teddy of choice is "Minilik", which is the opening track on "Tikir Sew". There are a couple of decent reggae tracks on the album, but given the close association between reggae and Ethiopia I didn't think it appropriate to fill the MAR slot with dilettante dabbling.
You need a specialist for that. Specifically you need Jah Lude (or Jah Lude the Reggae Dude as I call him). Here he is with a track from his 2012 album "Yachin Neger".
The first two of today's videos have particular memories for me. The first is one I recorded myself while in Lalibela, which is home to many underground churches that were hewn from rock in the 12th and 13th centuries. By chance my visit happened to coincide with the holy day of St. Mercerios, and this is just a short extract from the service in the Bet Mercerios church.
The second was played relentlessly by the likely lads who I had hired to drive me and my bags from Gonder to Bahir Dar later during the same visit. By the end of the four hour drive I was as keen on it as they were.
No stories behind the other videos. I just like them. All come courtesy of the treasure trove that it the Ethiopian Oldies YouTube channel.
I recently acquired for the princely sum of 50p a compilation released last year by the Hamburg based Bureau B label. It rejoices under the very snappy title "Eins und Zwei und Drei und Vier, Vol. 2 - Deutsche Experimentelle Pop-Musik 1978 - 1987", As it is the second volume it should perhaps have been called "Fünf Und Sechs Und Sieben Und Acht" instead.
I was familiar with a few of the names featured on the compilation, such as Cluster and Thomas Dinger, but the majority were previously unknown to me. Walter, on the other hand, probably knows most of them personally.
Here's a couple of tunes from the compilation. If you like them you can find the album and many more German goodies both old and new on the Bureau B Bandcamp page.
Some sweet-voiced folk-rock from the early 1970s to start the week.
Shelagh McDonald is a Scottish singer-songwriter who released a couple of very nice albums before then 'doing a Vashti Bunyan' and disappearing completely for thirty years.
By her own account, Shelagh had a bad LSD trip and moved back up to Scotland, met her late partner and spent many years living in tents and homeless shelters before eventually reconnecting with her old life and resuming recording and gigging in 2013.
Along with many others I first discovered Shelagh's music through the 2005 compilation "Let No Man Steal Your Rhyme", which I believe is still available. After her reemergence she made an album called "Parnassus Revisited", which I have never heard as it was only sold at the handful of gigs she played in 2014 and 2017. If anyone knows how to get hold of a copy please drop me a line.
Since then things seem to have gone quite again. Shelagh has a website but there has been a grand total of one new post in the last nine years. Hopefully she is well wherever she is and whatever she is up to.
Here's a track from each of her first two albums, "Album" (1970) and "Stargazer" (1971).
It's time for another one of my irregular series of searingly insight-free gig reviews. A summary for those of you who can't be bothered to read the whole thing: I saw some bands. I liked them.
Last Friday we were in New Cross to see the mighty Bush Tetras. They have been performing on and off since 1980 when they released the classic "Too Many Creeps" EP. They are currently touring to support their first album in ten years, "They Live In My Head", which came out a few months ago.
The new album is pretty good but sounds positively weedy compared to their live show. They are a great live act and I would strongly encourage you to go and see them if you get the chance.
They have recruited a top quality rhythm section for the current tour (and possibly beyond) - Steve Shelley (ex Sonic Youth) on drums and a surprisingly funky Cait O'Riordan (ex Pogues) on bass. As good as they were the stars of the show were the two mainstays of the band, singer Cynthia Sley and especially Pat Place on guitar. She's phenomenal.
On Monday we headed up to the Moth Club in Hackney for a change of scene and sound, where we sampled the funky samba-scented stylings of Ana Frango Elétrico (Ana the Electric Chicken as Portuguese-speaking readers will know).
She was also promoting a new album, "Me Chama De Gato Que Eu Sou Sua", which came out three weeks ago. According to one of the more pretentious reviews I read it is "an interior offering, full of diaristic observations and raw, personal truths, unfurling the layers to Ana’s ever-evolving identity". Not just that, but it also "invokes the core conventions of Brazilian boogie music, filtering it through a prism of a retro-futurist, wide-ranging pop".
I don't know about all that, but she makes a fine sound and delighted the enthusiastic sell-out crowd at what she said was her first London gig. We didn't have the best of views so can't really comment on her stagecraft, but I enjoyed the music a great deal and will go again if she comes back this way.
Here is an oldie but goodie from each of them, followed by some newies but goodies in the videos (and as a bonus Bush Tetras and a special guest performing 'the hit' last Friday)..
I'm running a bit behind on the blog this week - I had people staying over who seemed to think I needed to spend time with them instead of writing posts - so instead of the usual preparatory fluff we're heading straight to Africa. Eswatini to be precise.
It is a country I have visited a few times, although not for ages. For a few years in the mid 1970s my family lived in the north of the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa about 100 miles from the border with Swaziland (as it was then called), and we had a couple of enjoyable family holidays there. I also visited in the 1990s when my sister was working as a doctor in a small rural hospital 30 miles from the border, way up in the Lubombo mountains.
If you have tuned in expecting the usual perfectly curated blend of sounds then you are in for a bit of a disappointment. This episode is a real mish-mash. And it starts with a bit of cheating.
Zacks Nkosi is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of Southern African jazz for his work with the Jazz Maniacs, the African Swingsters and others in the 1940s and 1950s. While he was an ethnic Swazi he was actually born in KwaZula-Natal in 1918, not very far from where we used to live. It is estimated that roughly half the Swazi people are born and live in South Africa.
I decided to include Bra Zacks today because frankly we were a bit short of contenders for Eswatini, and because there is so much competition for places in the South African post that - as great as he was - he wasn't likely to make the shortlist. If you like what you hear below, you can find a reasonably priced compilation of his solo work on Bandcamp.
From smooth jazz we move to more traditional Swazi sounds featuring the makhoyan and umtshingosi, which as you know are the Swazi bow and bark flute respectively. They are showcased on the 2014 album "Akuna'nkomo" by Gogo Mphila & Phayinaphu Mncini (also available on Bandcamp as are all today's featured albums). I hope this will satisfy George's recent demands for more flute.
I don't know what the opposite of 'seamless' is - seamful? - but whatever the word is it can be used to describe this next transition. From Gogo & Phayinaphu we go to Dusty & Stones, three times winners of Eswatini's prestigious Best Country Music Artists of the Year award and now the subjects of a much acclaimed documentary which came out last year.
Off the back of the documentary Dusty & Stones made their debut at the Grand Ol' Opry a month ago - which must be a dream come true for any country musician - and have reissued their 2009 album "Mooihoek Country Fever", from which today's selection comes.
For a long time those three were all I had. The only other music from Eswatini I could find was lots of house and amapiano which did nothing for me. I could have included some but I am incapable of judging what is good and what is bad when it comes to that sort of thing.
Fortunately I was saved by the Lubombo Community Radio station when it was in the process of saving itself. Back in 2013 the station enlisted the help of nine local acts and released an album to raise some funds to enable them to buy much needed equipment.
I could have chosen to include pretty much any of the acts on the album as the overall standard is very good, but I opted for the Happy Sisters because we have not included any female artists yet and Plateau Roots for the Mandatory African Reggae. Enjoy!
Dusty & Stones are doing well, but they are not the shiniest Swazi star on the scene right now. That honour going to Uncle Waffles. She (no typo) is a DJ and record producer whose single "Tanzania" topped the South African charts last year and has since toured globally, in the process becoming the first amapiano artist to play Coachella.
We kick off the video section with her smash hit. It isn't my cup of tea really, but it is good to know she is out there smashing the avuncularchy one waffle at a time.
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