Tag Archive: John Peel


ARI UP R.I.P.

Filed under: Atheism, Gender, Music — Leave a comment
October 31, 2010

There is no God and no cure for cancer.  Further proof of these truisms comes with news of the death of Ari Up (Ariane Daniele Forster) aged just 48.  When she began singing with The Slits she was only 13 and this all female band came to epitomise the revolutionary DIY ethic of Punk and helped show that women need not be content to slavishly follow stereotypical roles as passive, pretty adornments.  They were not, nor had any desire to be, typical girls.

Plenty of other bands pretended not to able to play their instruments but The Slits were genuinely inept. They more than made up for this with attitude and an instinctive recognition of how you could incorporate dub rhythms and banal words to create a sound that was both radical and fun.

Unfortunately, I never got to see them live but well remember being entranced by their sessions for John Peel. The current crimson wave of girl bands from the US owe a great  debt to their innovative and fearless example.

This recording from the Peel session of Love Und Romance is nothing less than a classic which includes the following great  lyrics (when Ari could remember them):

Oh oh oh sweet love and romance /  I’m so glad we met by chance
Call you everyday on the telephone /  Break your neck if you ain’t home

 

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KLEPTONE IS GOD

Filed under: Humour, Music — Leave a comment
February 19, 2010

The brand new  monster mash up of Brighton’s  Eric Kleptone is called Uptime/Downtime and was released on the stroke of midnight (Greenwich mean Time) January 1st  to get the new decade off to a flyer. It can be  downloaded free from The Kleptones website along with their back catalogue of  classic bastard pop.

24 Hours released in 2006 remains for me  The Kleptones’ masterpiece – the soundtrack a day in the life of an everyman – but this new work  is also inspired.

One of my favourite tracks, Come Again,  audaciously features the following samples : The Beatles – Come Together/ Dezo – Y’all Know What It Iz/ Lil Wayne – Best Rapper Alive/ Beastie Boys – No Sleep till Brooklyn/Daft Punk – Robot Rock/Rare Earth – I Just Want to Celebrate/Queen & David Bowie – Under Pressure/Cypress Hill – Insane in the Brain/John Lennon – Power to the People/Boston – More Than a Feeling/Freeez – I.O.U./Criminal Element Orchestra – Put The Needle to the Record/Art of Noise – Close (to the Edit)/S’Express – Theme from S’Express. Over 8 minutes all these tracks blend seamlessly mixed with great skill and great respects for the originals.

This plundering is technically illegal of course but,if I were one of the artists, I’d be flattered to be included in the mix.   EC  is not out to satirise or undermine the tunes but, on the contrary, his heightened shuffling actually enhances them.  For its humour of the samples and cut ups,  it reminds me a little of The Cuban Boys, much adored by John Peel in the late 1990s.

It comes across as a labour of love rather than an act of sabotage.  Plans are afoot to release video mash-ups of the tracks on the album. One is already out, aptly titled Welcome Back:

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ROD IS 65

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January 10, 2010

Happy birthday to Rod Stewart who reached pensionable age today. The BBC put up a crappy compilation to mark the day but they only really needed to link to the 1971 performance of him at the top of his game with The Faces on Top Of The Pops. Look out for John Peel pretending to play mandolin and I love the fact that the band make no attempt to look as though they’re really playing live – even kicking a soccer ball around at one point.

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NEW UNDERGROUND MUSIC

Filed under: Music — Leave a comment
December 27, 2009

madridIn the past, particularly in the sixties, underground music was a label given either to cult artists who were difficult to seek out or whose music could in some way be defined as oppositional to the establishment.

As critic Simon Reynolds points out in his excellent article for The Guardian, these former definitions are no longer convincing as a new generation of fans consume and conceive of music in a wholly different ways.

When I was a lad, if I read about some obscure new band in the New Musical Express, the only way to hear what they sounded like was to track down the vinyl or hope that John Peel would play them on his radio show. Nowadays such enlightenment is just a mouse click away. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it reveals to us some amazing ‘hidden’ sounds while on the other hand the sense of mystery is lost. As Reynolds points out,  you can’t keep secrets for very long on the Net – the worldwide web is a free for all community.

Personally,  the accessibility of all this marginal music has opened by ears to a wealth of possibilities and re-ignited my enthusiasm for sounds which can’t be neatly packaged within narrow boundaries. It has confirmed my loathing for the nostalgia peddled by glossy adult orientated mags like Mojo and Word. This pseudo rock academia merely panders to the post 30 something listeners who get a hard on for whatever they got their collective rocks off to when they were 18.

The fact that legal and illegal downloads makes limited edition or deleted titles available to the masses doesn’t make this music for the masses. Whenever there’s a choice between easy and ‘difficult’ listening, the vast majority of consumers opt for the former. The mainstream media may have expanded enormously in the past decade but it is still largely unable to grasp the true value of anything that cannot be readily compartmentalized or easily packaged for a target audience.

This is exemplified by the rise of the so-called ‘weird’ music of  drone, noise, new psychedelia and free folk which has thrived in spite of being largely ignored by the mass media. The smart press have belatedly acknowledged ‘overground’ artists like Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom but have largely ignored the fact that these represent only the tip of massive iceberg.

I agree with Reynolds that the old definitions of ‘underground’ music no longer carry much weight in the same way that to describe artists as ‘alternative’ or ‘indie’ is ultimately meaningless. I take comfort from the knowledge that the best music is still out there in the margins rather than festering in the mainstream.  This may be easier to locate than it was half a century ago but this doesn’t mean that it’s any more palatable to the lumpen masses . To my ears the counter cultural edge has not been entirely blunted. There is still a healthy minority who oppose the disgusting normalness of modern culture and look to music to communicate a truth and vitality that squeaky clean X-Factor wannabes will never satisfy.

The underground is dead – long live the underground!

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LIFE TOO HAS SURFACE NOISE

Filed under: Music — Leave a comment
October 25, 2008

It’s no longer possible to play the sweet eating game  but In memory of the much missed John Peel ,who died 4 years ago today, here is a link to some artists he championed on my  e-music list.

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