"The pound is down against the Euro.....
which makes one Euro worth 85 pence..."
"The pound is up against the Euro, which makes one Euro equal 85 pence..."
"The pound has hardly budged today, meaning one Euro is worth roughly 85 pence...."
"The pound has been scraping along the bottom of the barrel of currencies today, it's down against the Euro, so that one Euro is now worth very slightly more than 85 pence..."
"If you're off on your summer holidays, you'll be pleased to hear the pound is up against a basket of currencies. This includes the Euro, which as of today is worth just 85 pence..."
Spinning happily at thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions per minute, not wanting to stop
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Sunday, 21 April 2013
In orbital love
After many weeks dithering, took the new (and slightly bigger) version of the old little train from Wandsworth Road.
A bright Sunday lunchtime. Somehow elated after finding some bargain CDs at the local charity shops (Traffic, Pink Fairies, Bowie, Dylan, etc....) I shift from my default depressed mode to my default manic mode and almost run to the library to borrow something to read on what I expect to be a long train journey. I boorow a Flann O'Brien book and a biography of Man Ray.
The nearest station is now Clapham High Street, so that's where I head. People are up on the platform looking like normal travellers. In the past I remember getting stoned right here on someone else's skunk fumes. These were popular dealing and skinning up spots, in the very recent past.
Not any more. Perhaps. All has changed. Perhaps. It's now smartly branded "Overground" with the orange roundel and orange everything, and the trains are brand new - and quite disconcerting at first as all the seats are placed lengthways along the walls of the carriage, and you can see all the way up and down the train (unless it's going round a very tight corner).
But - it all seemed wonderfully efficient.
Seemed.
Am I beginning to thaw, to actually start loving the modern world, the post-modern, post Olympics, Boris Johnstonian London - the thing I sort of assumed I would hate, I must hate, I had no alternative but to hate?
Maybe. This is the old line but , once past Queen's Road Peckham you realise you're being transported into a shabby version of a brave new world, or at least a shabby old-new London.
Instead of humbly shuffling itself into London Bridge Station (having passed the Milwall football ground and that big waste-burning power station) it shoots off into the docklands, Surrey Quays, Canada Water, the fast-fading shine of that deeply depressing Canary Wharf business area - and then links back into the East London/North London Line.
It plunges into and out of cut-and-cover tunnels, flashes past some of the most fashionable spots in the the city (Hoxton, Dalson Jct etc) and rattles you through so many views of the Shard and the Eye and Hawksmoor, and Brixton market, and and and and St Pauls and so on....you swear the whole thing was a London tourist board commercial.
So I suddenly find myself passing Wapping (christ, wish we'd had this service when I was at TES) and then Whitechapel.
The marathon has been run but the streets are still full of beaming spectators with their souvenir bags, they're crowding up Brick Lane, I just want to find the old bike parts market further up towards Shoreditch.
By the time I get there the stalls are being dismantled, so I make do with 3.2kg of Cyprus potatoes for £1 and a couple of sacks of very ripe tomatoes and trundle on to Canonbury....
Yes, I am falling back in Love with London, and it's not just the weak sunshine that's repsonsible.
A bright Sunday lunchtime. Somehow elated after finding some bargain CDs at the local charity shops (Traffic, Pink Fairies, Bowie, Dylan, etc....) I shift from my default depressed mode to my default manic mode and almost run to the library to borrow something to read on what I expect to be a long train journey. I boorow a Flann O'Brien book and a biography of Man Ray.
The nearest station is now Clapham High Street, so that's where I head. People are up on the platform looking like normal travellers. In the past I remember getting stoned right here on someone else's skunk fumes. These were popular dealing and skinning up spots, in the very recent past.
Not any more. Perhaps. All has changed. Perhaps. It's now smartly branded "Overground" with the orange roundel and orange everything, and the trains are brand new - and quite disconcerting at first as all the seats are placed lengthways along the walls of the carriage, and you can see all the way up and down the train (unless it's going round a very tight corner).
But - it all seemed wonderfully efficient.
Seemed.
Am I beginning to thaw, to actually start loving the modern world, the post-modern, post Olympics, Boris Johnstonian London - the thing I sort of assumed I would hate, I must hate, I had no alternative but to hate?
Maybe. This is the old line but , once past Queen's Road Peckham you realise you're being transported into a shabby version of a brave new world, or at least a shabby old-new London.
Instead of humbly shuffling itself into London Bridge Station (having passed the Milwall football ground and that big waste-burning power station) it shoots off into the docklands, Surrey Quays, Canada Water, the fast-fading shine of that deeply depressing Canary Wharf business area - and then links back into the East London/North London Line.
It plunges into and out of cut-and-cover tunnels, flashes past some of the most fashionable spots in the the city (Hoxton, Dalson Jct etc) and rattles you through so many views of the Shard and the Eye and Hawksmoor, and Brixton market, and and and and St Pauls and so on....you swear the whole thing was a London tourist board commercial.
So I suddenly find myself passing Wapping (christ, wish we'd had this service when I was at TES) and then Whitechapel.
The marathon has been run but the streets are still full of beaming spectators with their souvenir bags, they're crowding up Brick Lane, I just want to find the old bike parts market further up towards Shoreditch.
By the time I get there the stalls are being dismantled, so I make do with 3.2kg of Cyprus potatoes for £1 and a couple of sacks of very ripe tomatoes and trundle on to Canonbury....
Yes, I am falling back in Love with London, and it's not just the weak sunshine that's repsonsible.
Thursday, 11 April 2013
We loved to hate her
Listening to Wah!/Pete Wylie's The Day That Margaret Thatcher Dies (A Party Song) and quite enjoying its mash of Wild Thing and Get Off Of My Cloud. Was this how they imagined it would be? It was a cold evening for those death-day parties in Brixton, Bristol, Glasgow and other places that said lady's policies hit so hard back then.
Then thinking about that claim, that old Maggie would be delighted so many old lefties were doing what she wanted everyone to do at the end of the Falklands war: rejoicing.
As I staggered out of Brixton's 99p Store (around here we can't afford Poundland) I saw "The Bitch is dead" stencilled onto a wastebin and then saw the smashed-in window of the Barnado's charity shop, and I had to stop to think about what I was thinking.
Yes, I hated Thatcher, I lost my first and best job within 6 months of her getting power (yeah I worked for one of the hated quangos, and educational film outfit) because of her policies, I felt only elation as I wandered around the Trafalgar Square area on the night of the Poll Tax riot, I smelt that same heady burning smell as on the morning after the first Brixton riot of 1981 (I was not there, only cycling through Brixton to work the morning after, when the ruins were still smouldering).
Since then, we've seen Thatcher defeated, we've seen her ageing, struck down by dementia, we've seen iron lady become sad old lady. All my instincts were to think, what about forgiveness? And I thought, why? Well, she reminds me strongly of some of my own relatives - aunts of the same sort of age, and of Thatcher's same social background - with the same scrimp and save and stand on your own feet philosophy - and I can't deny part of me feels, let her people have this day, the funeral etc.
But it's a very precarious feeling. Especially when you start to think of "her people". Mark? Carole? Sir Bernard? Jim Davidson? Tebbitt? That bastard who used to edit The Sun?
Next day i cycle to work in Kensington, along streets lined with hideous lumps of metal on fat tyres - things they call Chelsea Tractors, although that is truly an insult both to tractors and even to poor hijacked Chelsea. I see these beautiful old houses being gutted, turned inside-out to create revolting palaces for the beneficiaries of the latest global crises - the hedge-fund-fuckers and their like, the legit money-launderers of city-boy united who are the natural heirs of M T - and think, no, her poison is still very much at work in the body politic.
The absolute polarisation of London - super-rich, desperate poor - is so obvious, so tragic and so dangerous, and so much the legacy of that decade, that you can only wish, not that she should burn in hell, but merely that she should never have existed.
Then thinking about that claim, that old Maggie would be delighted so many old lefties were doing what she wanted everyone to do at the end of the Falklands war: rejoicing.
As I staggered out of Brixton's 99p Store (around here we can't afford Poundland) I saw "The Bitch is dead" stencilled onto a wastebin and then saw the smashed-in window of the Barnado's charity shop, and I had to stop to think about what I was thinking.
 |
| Seen in Brixton High Street, the day after Mrs Thatcher died |
Yes, I hated Thatcher, I lost my first and best job within 6 months of her getting power (yeah I worked for one of the hated quangos, and educational film outfit) because of her policies, I felt only elation as I wandered around the Trafalgar Square area on the night of the Poll Tax riot, I smelt that same heady burning smell as on the morning after the first Brixton riot of 1981 (I was not there, only cycling through Brixton to work the morning after, when the ruins were still smouldering).
Since then, we've seen Thatcher defeated, we've seen her ageing, struck down by dementia, we've seen iron lady become sad old lady. All my instincts were to think, what about forgiveness? And I thought, why? Well, she reminds me strongly of some of my own relatives - aunts of the same sort of age, and of Thatcher's same social background - with the same scrimp and save and stand on your own feet philosophy - and I can't deny part of me feels, let her people have this day, the funeral etc.
But it's a very precarious feeling. Especially when you start to think of "her people". Mark? Carole? Sir Bernard? Jim Davidson? Tebbitt? That bastard who used to edit The Sun?
Next day i cycle to work in Kensington, along streets lined with hideous lumps of metal on fat tyres - things they call Chelsea Tractors, although that is truly an insult both to tractors and even to poor hijacked Chelsea. I see these beautiful old houses being gutted, turned inside-out to create revolting palaces for the beneficiaries of the latest global crises - the hedge-fund-fuckers and their like, the legit money-launderers of city-boy united who are the natural heirs of M T - and think, no, her poison is still very much at work in the body politic.
The absolute polarisation of London - super-rich, desperate poor - is so obvious, so tragic and so dangerous, and so much the legacy of that decade, that you can only wish, not that she should burn in hell, but merely that she should never have existed.
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
Spinning yarns at thirty-three and thirds revolutions per minute – Vinyl life, or "There is such a thing as society"
And so to The Social, a very modern bar of sorts in the scary hinterland of BBC, for a strange evening of talking heads and vinyl.
It was really a glorified PR event arranged by Faber, a smart way of giving three of their authors an airing to a group of would-be authors and musos critics and their friends and their friends of friends in this delightful venue - a place that is so much on the cusp that you feel that is nowhere near the cusp, even though you are approx three times the age of their ideal punter. In truth, a pleasant drinking spot.
A certain Prof Simon Reynolds then held forth; he is already famous, and his specs had even thicker black frames than anyone else's, it seemed.
He read from an A4 notebook. I was reminded of a slightly more detached Geoff Dyer, as he described a visit to some US dance music festival; he became almost apologetic when he had to describe the teenage girls wearing only semi-translucent glittering underwear at an EDM festival somewhere in LA. I wish I could remember his excellent metaphors on the inferiority of this new US digital sound, the way it made this hollow massive crashing sound.....and how much better our own rave/ecstacy-fuelled bands using only the crude instruments of 80s techno - 808 state etc - had been.
But....I have forgotten them all. I will have to wait until the release of the updated edition of his 2008 book on the whole rave thing, Energy Flash, but of course by then I will have entirely forgotten the whole evening.
The event was beginning to seem a bit like a flashback to the early 80s, those earnest post-punk polemics, the NME, Scritti Politti etc...until along came the lovely Pogues accordion man with his shiny pate and his lyrical prose. Name of James Fearnley, he's written a memoir of his times with the Pogues in their heyday called (and where did we hear this before?) Here comes everybody, and as soon as he started reading i thought of ....our old punk poet....it was as though he'd signed up for a 10-week course on public reading from John Cooper Clark, but had dropped out after the first lesson... but loved it all.
And of course, Peter Paphides in the flesh!
We had already enjoyed his intro mixtape dj set - a jewel of unimpeachable taste, the perfection of the blend of white and black music, or should I say musics?
Paphides. The name, which had buzzed around my brain for oh decades - there he was, exactly as you'd imagine him, the erudite, north London rock music Guardian writer (did he ever work for City Limits? No, surely too young). I was reminded of a precursor, Charles Shaar Murray, who we kept bumping into at IPC chapel meetings in the 1980s....It's that English Lit rock criticism thing, the seven types of ambiguity somehow underpinning the cooler-than-cool writing styles, the smart-arseries and the self-effacement that didn't quite efface the self.
In fact the best comments of all came from the vinyl man, the man who used to work for Rough Trade and now does the record shop thing. His name was Spencer Hickman and he had the only really acceptable argument for the infinite superiority of vinyl over any other audio format. It was better, he said, because, well, it was just obviously better.
I agree.
Oh lord, will you forgive me ever?
It was really a glorified PR event arranged by Faber, a smart way of giving three of their authors an airing to a group of would-be authors and musos critics and their friends and their friends of friends in this delightful venue - a place that is so much on the cusp that you feel that is nowhere near the cusp, even though you are approx three times the age of their ideal punter. In truth, a pleasant drinking spot.
Apart from good beer, there were good words and good things to learn. For example, I never knew that the 33rpm/45 rpm, LP to single divide was the result of an early audio format war - CBS vs RCA - which was resolved to everyone's benefit by simply accepting both formats. Nor did I know that Lonnie Donegan's "Rock Island Line" was originally just a last-minute filler for a Chris Barber LP because Chris had not realised how much music you could get on one of these new-fangled vinyl things.
This came from an erudite and quite nervous young writer called Travis Elborough, who illustrated his rather beautiful lecture with examples of rare LPs he had brought with him in an old record case - each time, fumbling to pull out the cover he needed. It went well, though. He won a lot of hearts, I think, in that young and brainy audience. All those nuggets of vinyl history. If I was a Faber PR I would be pleased in the certain knowledge that at least half a dozen of the audience will buy his new book, The Long-player Goodbye.
This came from an erudite and quite nervous young writer called Travis Elborough, who illustrated his rather beautiful lecture with examples of rare LPs he had brought with him in an old record case - each time, fumbling to pull out the cover he needed. It went well, though. He won a lot of hearts, I think, in that young and brainy audience. All those nuggets of vinyl history. If I was a Faber PR I would be pleased in the certain knowledge that at least half a dozen of the audience will buy his new book, The Long-player Goodbye.
A certain Prof Simon Reynolds then held forth; he is already famous, and his specs had even thicker black frames than anyone else's, it seemed.
He read from an A4 notebook. I was reminded of a slightly more detached Geoff Dyer, as he described a visit to some US dance music festival; he became almost apologetic when he had to describe the teenage girls wearing only semi-translucent glittering underwear at an EDM festival somewhere in LA. I wish I could remember his excellent metaphors on the inferiority of this new US digital sound, the way it made this hollow massive crashing sound.....and how much better our own rave/ecstacy-fuelled bands using only the crude instruments of 80s techno - 808 state etc - had been.
But....I have forgotten them all. I will have to wait until the release of the updated edition of his 2008 book on the whole rave thing, Energy Flash, but of course by then I will have entirely forgotten the whole evening.
The event was beginning to seem a bit like a flashback to the early 80s, those earnest post-punk polemics, the NME, Scritti Politti etc...until along came the lovely Pogues accordion man with his shiny pate and his lyrical prose. Name of James Fearnley, he's written a memoir of his times with the Pogues in their heyday called (and where did we hear this before?) Here comes everybody, and as soon as he started reading i thought of ....our old punk poet....it was as though he'd signed up for a 10-week course on public reading from John Cooper Clark, but had dropped out after the first lesson... but loved it all.
And of course, Peter Paphides in the flesh!
We had already enjoyed his intro mixtape dj set - a jewel of unimpeachable taste, the perfection of the blend of white and black music, or should I say musics?
Paphides. The name, which had buzzed around my brain for oh decades - there he was, exactly as you'd imagine him, the erudite, north London rock music Guardian writer (did he ever work for City Limits? No, surely too young). I was reminded of a precursor, Charles Shaar Murray, who we kept bumping into at IPC chapel meetings in the 1980s....It's that English Lit rock criticism thing, the seven types of ambiguity somehow underpinning the cooler-than-cool writing styles, the smart-arseries and the self-effacement that didn't quite efface the self.
In fact the best comments of all came from the vinyl man, the man who used to work for Rough Trade and now does the record shop thing. His name was Spencer Hickman and he had the only really acceptable argument for the infinite superiority of vinyl over any other audio format. It was better, he said, because, well, it was just obviously better.
I agree.
Oh lord, will you forgive me ever?
Monday, 14 January 2013
The Shard? Maybe it's too good for London.
Today, the Shard was showering silver light across Southwark and into my borough, Lambeth. I liked it a lot.
The debate about Renzo Piano's strange addition to London skyline has been quite good fun, if predictable. Many have complained that it's too big or damages views of St Paul's or whatever. As if London actually had a skyline worth preserving, before this rather beautiful reverse icicle appeared, shaming all the shabby 60s and 70s and - ugh - 80s and - yee-uch - 90s stumps it looks down on.
That great Canaletto skyline of St Pauls lording it over all the other Wren churches and warehouses was finally trashed in the 1950s and 60s. I'd argue that the so-called Shard (spike? stalagmite? stretched tee-pee?) acts as a sort of peg for all the new rubbish. It gives them a wonky sort of focus, hints at what might have been had London had a proper cluster of aerial architecture. It suggests this most strongly only from directly due north and due south viewpoints. From Brixton Hill, or from suicide bridge in Highgate, say.From others - as from the little south London train that clatters between Clapham High Street and Peckham Rye - you see all of London's new, tall buildings in a washing-line parade, or as a receding gum stabbed with an absurdly variegated assortment of rotting and disintegrating teeth.
Like the Gherkin, but unlike most others, the Shard works well as a standalone. Nothing else built in this muddy riverside settlement over the past three decades has quite so cleverly exploited our fast-changing estuarine skies and cloudscapes. I am very biased, I love real skyscrapers. By real, I mean something that soars away and makes you gasp. In the 70s, Centre Point and Barbican and the NatWest tower tried and failed. I have always despaired at London's pussyfooting approach, and I hate the dreary cluster of sub-Dallas identikit bricks downriver.
But even sceptics are beginning to enjoy the Shard. I love the way it pinpoints London Bridge for anyone anywhere within a 20 mile radius. How, as you follow the Thames, it approaches, and recedes, and approaches again, and teaches you just how extreme are the river's bends.
I love how it rises, so un-phallic, above the city as you cycle down any of the seven south London hills towards the centre, and get that reverse-Whittington view of the golden cow of the city. I love how, quite often, I think I am looking at yet another view of the Shard and then realise it's just another Victorian church spire a few hundred yards away.
From Hampstead Heath, it complements St Pauls, standing back, offering the great cathedral some reflected light, and in no way competing with it.
I love how it seeems to bulge at the base and embrace poor ugly old Guys Hospital next door. At times, it's almost a mother-and-child portrait - you wish the shard could wrap some of its glittering glass skirts around the malformed granny, hide her brutal planes. But then again, Guys has a mad beauty about it. It is really the dwarish grand-parent of this ludicrously elongated sapling.
I love how it shines with almost biblical auras at dawn on clear winter mornings. And how on dull grey afternoons it takes on much of the grey-green muddiness of the thames water it rises out of.
Monday, 31 December 2012
The hands and the knees
My career as a life model never really happened, did it?
The failure to become a naked corpse on a mortuary slab, my failure to audition for RAM, my failure to respond to the invitations of artists in Barnes and Vauxhall, all point to one - that I do not have the bottle.
True, you did strip for Belarus, on one of the coldest January days of 2012. But who, who would really want to look at and draw a naked, skeletal 60-year-old stringbean for hours on end? It would be too distressing, too odd. I think they prefer a nice cheerful middle aged chap with a bit of a beer gut and a head of curly hair.
My one paid job does not in fact require nudity. Quite the reverse, in fact, for I am being the hands and knees double for an eminent academic whose portrait is to be painted for a national collection.
For this work - I cannot reveal the subject or artists' name yet - I have to dress up rather than undress, wearing a selection of lovely tweedy suits and ties - and for one, later rejected pose, a beautiful corduroy overcoat.
It's not terribly exciting and surprisingly difficult to model someone else's hands - even though they look the same, my knuckle-joints are not as flexible as his. The amount of time spent arranging my extremities, trying to hold them still, changing the light, moving the toes an inch back, tucking in the shirtcuffs, is an eye-opener. He endlessly photographs, and then seems to do it all over again, and then again.
But the artist is a charmer, young but steeped in the traditions of portraiture. His studio easy to reach and the pay very fair. How can I complain?
The failure to become a naked corpse on a mortuary slab, my failure to audition for RAM, my failure to respond to the invitations of artists in Barnes and Vauxhall, all point to one - that I do not have the bottle.
True, you did strip for Belarus, on one of the coldest January days of 2012. But who, who would really want to look at and draw a naked, skeletal 60-year-old stringbean for hours on end? It would be too distressing, too odd. I think they prefer a nice cheerful middle aged chap with a bit of a beer gut and a head of curly hair.
My one paid job does not in fact require nudity. Quite the reverse, in fact, for I am being the hands and knees double for an eminent academic whose portrait is to be painted for a national collection.
For this work - I cannot reveal the subject or artists' name yet - I have to dress up rather than undress, wearing a selection of lovely tweedy suits and ties - and for one, later rejected pose, a beautiful corduroy overcoat.
It's not terribly exciting and surprisingly difficult to model someone else's hands - even though they look the same, my knuckle-joints are not as flexible as his. The amount of time spent arranging my extremities, trying to hold them still, changing the light, moving the toes an inch back, tucking in the shirtcuffs, is an eye-opener. He endlessly photographs, and then seems to do it all over again, and then again.
But the artist is a charmer, young but steeped in the traditions of portraiture. His studio easy to reach and the pay very fair. How can I complain?
Wednesday, 14 November 2012
Fela Kuti musical at NT in November
Ages ago I wrote this stuff about Fela the musical:
"In two minds about the news that the Broadway musical hit, Fela!, is coming to London this autumn.
"In two minds about the news that the Broadway musical hit, Fela!, is coming to London this autumn.
I've loved Fela Kuti's music through four decades (first heard him in the early 70s, when UK rock gods started falling over each other to get a bit of authenticity by visiting Lagos).
Now he's going to be up there on the same billboards with the likes of Freddy Mercury, Abba, and Andrew Lloyd Weber - a curious fate for this tempestous musician and political activist.
Am I just being a snob? I mean, the fear that it won't live up to the reality of his music and stage presence is ridiculous isn't it? I don't like music biopics much (apart from those old Ken Russell BBC films on the likes of Delius) - but I do like the idea of Fela being brought to new audiences."
Since then I've seen the show. It was at Sadlers Wells, and it was astonishing. I never did see the real Fela, I never went to Lagos to visit the Shrine, the Kalakuta republic, I just have been deeply attracted to his music since - when?
I first heard Fela when a friend made me listen to the Ginger Baker/Fela Ransome Kuti recordings back in the early 70s. It was exciting stuff, but then so was Osibisa, and then along came Bob Marley and I was totally absorbed in Jamaican music for the next 10 years or so. Apart from a wee bit of Ian Dury, and a lot of jazz, and the Clash, PiL, Robert Wyatt and Jah Wobble.
Partly thanks to John Peel, but even more thanks to another radio man, Charlie Gillett, I started again listening to wider ranges of stuff. Gillett's show on BBC Radio London was a beautiful thing. He was so mild, modest, and engagingly knowledgable, he out-Peeled Peel for me.
Thanks to him, African, specifically South African, music, re-entered my airspace in the early 80s, and then thanks also to repeated visits to a Kentish Town pub where the great (and now late) Dudu Pukwana's band – Zila – had a regular slot. This music was just so crazily, beautifully, infectiously hot and full of human charm, and this coming form a band of exiles who'd been forced out of their own country by hatred and death-threats.
The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, District Six, Hugh Masekela, Paul simon's stuff - and the way UK musicians like the Specials, Robert Wyatt etc, signed up to anti-Apartheid with the whole of their musical as well as political souls - that music was powerful, joyful and even quite dangerous, in the best sense.
And then we had the Bundhu Boys, etc etc....I needed to get back to the Nigerian sounds but there was just too much else of beauty around. Rare groove revivals, James Brown. Funk, punk, Rip Rig and Panic. All that Cuban and Brazilian stuff too, and the rise of Soca. Those were good times to love music in London, or anywhere else I am sure.
Fela was there all along BUT stupidly I only really got back into him in 1983 or so, when, on the last evening of that year's Notting Hill Carnival, as the southern quarter of the crowd of revellers surged back up Portobello towards the tube and the buses, as we surged past pyramids of empty Red Stripe tins and coconut shells, there was one last sound system - not really a sound system, just an indoors hi-fi set up on a trestle table outdoors, two small but good speakers and a deck and a big amp, and a girl dj/citizen swaying around, selling her last few tins of lager, with Shuffering and Smiling playing off vinyl at maximum volume, and that stream of going-home pople were stopping their going and starting again to dance, and Fela sort of led it all, a big last street dance at the 1983 Notting Hill carnival.
Anyone else who witnessed this please remind me. Maybe I was just too tired and stoned and runk and dreaming to have any accurate memories.
Since then I've seen the show. It was at Sadlers Wells, and it was astonishing. I never did see the real Fela, I never went to Lagos to visit the Shrine, the Kalakuta republic, I just have been deeply attracted to his music since - when?
I first heard Fela when a friend made me listen to the Ginger Baker/Fela Ransome Kuti recordings back in the early 70s. It was exciting stuff, but then so was Osibisa, and then along came Bob Marley and I was totally absorbed in Jamaican music for the next 10 years or so. Apart from a wee bit of Ian Dury, and a lot of jazz, and the Clash, PiL, Robert Wyatt and Jah Wobble.
Partly thanks to John Peel, but even more thanks to another radio man, Charlie Gillett, I started again listening to wider ranges of stuff. Gillett's show on BBC Radio London was a beautiful thing. He was so mild, modest, and engagingly knowledgable, he out-Peeled Peel for me.
Thanks to him, African, specifically South African, music, re-entered my airspace in the early 80s, and then thanks also to repeated visits to a Kentish Town pub where the great (and now late) Dudu Pukwana's band – Zila – had a regular slot. This music was just so crazily, beautifully, infectiously hot and full of human charm, and this coming form a band of exiles who'd been forced out of their own country by hatred and death-threats.
The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, District Six, Hugh Masekela, Paul simon's stuff - and the way UK musicians like the Specials, Robert Wyatt etc, signed up to anti-Apartheid with the whole of their musical as well as political souls - that music was powerful, joyful and even quite dangerous, in the best sense.
And then we had the Bundhu Boys, etc etc....I needed to get back to the Nigerian sounds but there was just too much else of beauty around. Rare groove revivals, James Brown. Funk, punk, Rip Rig and Panic. All that Cuban and Brazilian stuff too, and the rise of Soca. Those were good times to love music in London, or anywhere else I am sure.
Fela was there all along BUT stupidly I only really got back into him in 1983 or so, when, on the last evening of that year's Notting Hill Carnival, as the southern quarter of the crowd of revellers surged back up Portobello towards the tube and the buses, as we surged past pyramids of empty Red Stripe tins and coconut shells, there was one last sound system - not really a sound system, just an indoors hi-fi set up on a trestle table outdoors, two small but good speakers and a deck and a big amp, and a girl dj/citizen swaying around, selling her last few tins of lager, with Shuffering and Smiling playing off vinyl at maximum volume, and that stream of going-home pople were stopping their going and starting again to dance, and Fela sort of led it all, a big last street dance at the 1983 Notting Hill carnival.
Anyone else who witnessed this please remind me. Maybe I was just too tired and stoned and runk and dreaming to have any accurate memories.
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