"Tis no man - tis a remorseless writing machine" (1-3)
3 minutes ago
Saturday 4 July 2015
Dub Gabriel - 100% 7' Vinyl Roots Reggae Special (1/7/15)
Dub Gabriel recorded live at d/a/c labs 1/7/15 - 100% 7" vinyl set - Over 2 1/2 hours of strictly roots reggae & dub
Horace Andy – Youths Of Today
Junior Byles – Beat Down Babylon
Johnny Clark – Don’t Want To Be No Rude Boy
Trinity – Phsams
Desi Roots – Weed Fields
Johnnt Clarke – King In A Di Arena
Linval Thompson – Jah Jah Is The Conqueror
Kojak – Black Skin
George Boswell – Jah Fire
Phillip Myers – Getho Struggle
Early B – No Funny Tricks
Joy White – Dread Out De
Jah Joe – Dreadlocks Song
Denis Brown & Augustus Pablo – Spirit Of Umoja
Almighty Stones – Penetrate
Martin Campbell & The Hi-Tech Roots Dynamics – Richman
Barry Brown – Politician
Freddie McGregor – Rasta Have Faith
Zig Zag – Rasta Clean
Brent Dowe – Down Here In Babylon
Shaumark and Robinson – Weak Hear Feel It (part 1)
Hugh Mundell – Great Tribulation
Tristan Palmer – Bad Boys
Barry Brown – Release The Chain
Bunny & Ricky – Freedom Fighter
Doc Alimantado – I Shall Fear No Evil
Big Youth – Dreader Than Dread
George Taylor Pace Setter Band – Sweet Talk
Clint Eastwood – Production Plan
Eric Monty Morris – He Is Back
Hopeton James – Get Up Blackman
Asher & Tremble – Humble Yourself
Denis Brown – General
Lee & Junior – Dreader Locks
Big Joe – Bitter Water Rock (Re-Mix)
Prince George – Babylon Kingdom Fall
Jah Brown – Freedom Fighter
The Upsetters – Black Belt Jones
Tayon – Disco Pants
Prince Far I – Frontline Speech
P. Weston – Royal Cord
I-Roy – Caveman Skank
Toyan – Tracks & Socks
Barry Brown – Juks And Watch
Sammy Dread – I Wont Cry
I-Roy – Tribute To Marcus Garvey
Prince Alla – Forty Days And Forty Nights
Prince Mohammed – Come Mek We Rub A Dub
The Immortals – Babylon
Dill And The Pickles – Nine O’Clock
Bob Andy – War In The City
Eric Donaldson – Freedom Street
Download
Friday 3 July 2015
Psychic TV - Unclean / Terminus / Moonchild
As Michael says: Three videos showcasing what might be the pick of the bunch of Psychic TV videos. 1984's 'Unclean' the first video and the first records that was released on Psychic TVs' own Temple Records after the escape / release from Some Bizarre (and of Geff Rushton and Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson) is directed by Cerith Wyn Evans with help from Leigh Bowery. One of the video stars is Nicky Crane, the early 1980's poster boy for the thuggish UK Nazi organisation, the British Movement, and who also marshaled the security for the Nazi band Skrewdriver. How did this peculiar alliance form you ask? No idea I reply. Unless, the story I did hear in the mid 1980's was the truth. At the beginning of the 1980's Nicky Crane had a double life. His extreme hatred for anything he considered non British (or specifically non English) and his deeply hidden homosexuality. Aside from marshaling security for the band Skrewdriver he also had a little moonlighting going on as part of the security team in clubs up the West End of London. Derek Jarman a left field film director (Jubilee / Sebastian / The Tempest / Angelic Converstion) was a semi regular visitor to the openly homosexual club 'Heaven' in Charing Cross and one night met up with Nicky Craine in the club. Nicky Craine ended up in this video for Jarman's old friend Genesis P-Orridge. I have no idea what happened at 'B' in this story from 'A' to 'C'. Derek Jarman and Nicky Craine would know and they are both dead. I truly hope that is the correct story and Jarman or Genesis P-Orridge had no clue of this guys recent past of White Power street fighting, and they only knew of him as a rent boy up west. I prefer that option to the other obvious option. 'Terminus' the second video directed by Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson is from the debut Psychic TV album' 'Force The Hand Of Chance'. 'Terminus' starts with a long 'spaghetti western' type musical introduction with Genesis P-Orridge reciting a story of depression and suicide in an almost dream like fashion. On the video we see Mr Sebastian inking Genesis P-Orridge and a load of wolves separate to the young boy who is central to the story line. At the point of a naked Geff Rushton sitting in and pulling around him a petrol soaked bed sheet and then 'setting himself alight' the 'pleasant' long 'spaghetti western' type musical introduction disappears to a wall of noise of feedback and effects. That music break makes me think of a similar idea in the Velvet Undergrounds 'I Heard Her Call My Name' around two minutes in at the lyric "and then my mind exploded" a split second of silence and the Velvet Underground's wall of noise begins. There has to be a link there somewhere. This wall of noise part of the video has some (but certainly not all) of the more unpleasant parts of the 'Eden' 1 video edited in. The wall of noise diminishes to an Spanish acoustic guitar reprise with Genesis P-Orridge completing his reciting masterpiece.
'Moon Child' the third video and features Paula P-Orridge and John Gosling filmed at Beck Road in Hackney by Genesis P-Orridge. The audio is a looping pulse accompanied by what sounds like a tattoo gun and a recorder along with some spoken word in a different language (Spanish maybe). All these three videos are genuinely moving, hard to watch in parts, interesting and above all for eighteen year old browsers only!
Thursday 2 July 2015
Space Ace's first amplifier
I bought this for the boy's keyboards and microphone but it's crazy when you get James from The Stooges suggesting I get him a guitar. Might work out some way to get his ukelele thru a fuzzbox tho...
The Pop Group - We Are All Prostitutes / Citizen Zombie / St. Outrageous (VPRO Best Kept Secret Session)
+
She Is Beyond Good & Evil (Live @BBC6 Festival)
We Are All Prostitutes (Live @Rough Trade)
Wednesday 1 July 2015
Tuesday 30 June 2015
Views from Glastonbury
Here's someone who at the moment perhaps for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous
I received no fee for playing Glastonbury, in fact it cost me £500-600 to play. Artists' camping was an afterthought, we found a tiny patch between a swamp and a skip, and no artist showers were provided. Also we weren't fed. But Glastonbury's all about supporting music isn't it?
Average price for any hot food at all was £8. Lots of space for cars provided. Cigar smoking delegates. I'll just pay the bills with artistic acclaim huh? Was 50/50 whether I could afford the petrol back home. But Glastonbury' s so amazing, its all about supporting the artists.
Also they don't facilitate / allow you to sell your own merchandise, so you can't benefit / make a few quid on that either.
Final point, for balance..it remains to be seen if / how the band benefits from playing in front of 1800 fans. Playing Glastonbury wields currency for future opportunities, which is good. We stayed at / saw the Festival for free. I just think that the basic needs / costs of the artists should be covered, given the whole massive venture is based around us, the people who write songs and stuff.
I tapped into a huge audience and having played there will help future things, so it's worth it from that point of view. But not covering basic artists' needs is pretty disgusting
...and here's The Bug letting rip
So against all my better judgement i decided to try and convince my mcs to play two shows for nothing, twist Ninja Tune's arm into frontin tour support as a label debt, paid myself sub-zero, and desperately tried to avoid any pre-conceived thoughts of typical festival traumas....All of which effectively meant, i definitely lost money and sanity to play this year's Glastonbury Festival..
Foolish maybe, but speakin to a journalist a couple of months ago, who said a previous Techno Animal show at Glastonbury had been "absolutely inspirational" for him and the third of the crowd that didnt run for cover when me and Justin played the festival years ago...It was that conversation that spurred me to take a dive into the mud of Somerset in the hope we could alter spine's, dna's and pre-conceptions, and more importantly shake up the conservative middle ground/middle mass neutrality of the festival's line up(Sleaford Mods asides..)..Plus my agent's assistant, and all round badman Ahsan, egged me on to take a crack at a fresh audience.....So this led to me and the Bug crew to climb into the belly of a giant, robotic, mechanical spider, in the early evening sunshine on Saturday night..
And for sure, whatever the outcome of the set, it was a fantastically surreal memory, that will stay with me for life(even the split second of vertigo when the wind started swingin the gigantic arthropod many metres from the ground was a trip too...lol).. But, i cant lie, when i saw just a handful of people millin around minutes before showtime, the reality set in that we were basically just a small, fairly anonymous number on the bill, and fundamentally a support act to the incredible circus like pyrotechnics of the ARCADIA bug...For us, there was virtually no lighting, fanfares or for that matter, crowd, as i pressed play on the voice of The Spaceape. But again, massive credit to Flowdan, Manga and Miss Red, who immediately put all their energies into the set, whilst i hid behind my wall of noise...They showed again, clearly, they were commited, genuine and fired up...and they seemed to relish clambering around the junkyard beast to magnetise passers by to our racket....As a unit, im happier battlin with these three mic murderers than any previous vocal combo i have worked with live..Their disparate, yet complimentary flows, are a joy to witness and work with, and each mc is respectively a ninja at their chosen flow/lyrical weapon, and even better, they seem as hungry as me to get medieval on the masses..And although, naturally we would of preferred to play to thousands who came out after dark,instead of hundreds, it was still mad vibesy seein more and more people coming to congregate around the droid and brucking out proper at the feet of the insane monster. And having just read this tweet alone, it justified the madness of the decision, day and setting : "Dan Harris @danielharris627 3h3 hours ago
@thebugzoo You were fucking incredible on Arcadia, one of the best sets i've ever seen. "
But if Saturday avoided many of the pitfalls of festivals..(hell we even managed a tiny soundcheck in the spider...haha)...Sunday was a different story...Firstly a small car incapable of seatin all of us had been sent to pick us up from the hotel, so Flowdan/Manga had to be left at the hotel, as me, Miss Red and our soundmaster Goh, drove hastily to the site and WOW tent for set up...
I got to the tent as Four Tet was playin, tryin to set up my shit in pitch black conditions, waiting for bits of gear, concrete and foam to be found, watchin the clock tick closer to showtime....When George Fitzgerald steps up to follow Kieran, the crowd clears considerably, and im side stage in the darkness wonderin why the hell the bookers would put him and us back to back in this tent as his fairly generic house set, amplifies my doubts, and seems planets away from my intentions artistically...
Surrounded by Dan Dirt's sick sound system, and his rig's great crew, i hoped we could sort some decent quality of sound out, despite knowin there would be no soundcheck at all, and the organizers had allocated literally zero time for a changeover(Fine if u show up with a USB stick, but not if u are armed with bags full of hardware toys like mine),that scared me, as did the fact the organizers had not been even able to find a vehicle to go pick up Flowdan/Manga at the hotel until very late in the day, so late in fact, that the organizers informed me "we're not sure we can get your mcs here in time for your set, but we'll try our best."..Zzzzzzz
Bearing in mind we had left them at 6.30, and it was 10, the irony of the slow reaction wasnt lost on me, but my nerves were registerin seismic tremors that didnt allow panic on any one problem, just general stress meltdown on all fronts hahaha...When the roll deep masters literally rolled up 5 minutes before start time, i breathed a hefty sigh of relief, which was soon lost, as the sound guys couldnt manage to set up any monitoring for me.. Havin taken 15 minutes to sort the monitorin, and reposition the stage set ups, i ask the stage manager if were still good for the hour, to which he says "definitely not, you have to finish at 11 as stated in our programme.."...Ho hum, and FUCK, down to 45 minutes and thinkin fast how to re-arrange the set, whilst noticing the tent is now virtually empty...Ah festival stylee...here we go again...
So music kicks in, hideously distorted at high or low levels in the monitors, zero vocals can be heard in my monitors, and later i find out Manga and Flowdan couldnt hear any of their voice in their monitors either...The dirt crew tried their best to salvage the situation, but soundchecks are as useful for the sound guys as the artists, and virtually impossible at festivals unless yr Pharrell etc...SO the choice was get fucked off, head butt a monitor, walk offstage or grin and bare it, hopin the energy of the tracks still manages to translate over the front of house speakers...Luckily i chose the last option...and with Flowdan in demonic form, the tent filling up fast, and then Manga and Miss Red firing out their verses, the shortened set, adrenalin od and sonic friction led to a mad atmosphere on and offstage as the tent went mentalist...Apologies we couldnt play longer, but MAJOR props to the wicked crowd who helped us ignore the bullshit and concentrate on bringin the fire....We had went from an empty tent to a full one, and again Flowdan, Manga and Miss Red had made me proud to share the stage with em, as they achieved energy god status..So the end result was that which counted....A fucka that the organizers had arranged our pick up 30 minutes after we finished tho, so i had to pack up my gear in record time, and then miss Mumdance/Novelist and Mode Selektor sets....
Ridin in the van back to Bristol, the inevitable post weekend post mortem occurs..The 5 of us, discuss Glastonbury festival proper. ie 1/ Officially £225 a tkt, conservatively 198,000 people on site, plus revenue from food/drink stalls. Who gets the cash ? we knew we didnt..lol ..2/ Lionel Richie drew the biggest crowd of the weekend(Zzzzzzzz), why ? 3/ None of our mates would want to or could afford to buy tickets,who comes to this sort of festival ? 4/ We only had time to see one show(Kanye) over the two days due to setting up/breaking down gear and organizers issuing us with our itinery/timetable etc etc etc.....
BUT more importantly, and satisfyingly we agreed we had come to Glasto as an experiment to see what the unsuspecting would make of our attack, and we had collectively enjoyed giving it our best shot, and seein people reacting with ENERGY.
All in all, playin four festival shows in four days, had proved to us that random festival crowds are def open to our sonic/lyrical avalanche, and the crowds responses at all the festivals had been absolutely fantastic, so therefore fuck the problems !!!...Glastonbury, we got paid in minus figures, got treated like numbers, got fed shit, and had time to see nothing. BUT still VERY glad we did it..The battle continues...
PS Sorry for the book
PPS Still waitin for those BBC cameramen to arrive..LOL
I received no fee for playing Glastonbury, in fact it cost me £500-600 to play. Artists' camping was an afterthought, we found a tiny patch between a swamp and a skip, and no artist showers were provided. Also we weren't fed. But Glastonbury's all about supporting music isn't it?
Average price for any hot food at all was £8. Lots of space for cars provided. Cigar smoking delegates. I'll just pay the bills with artistic acclaim huh? Was 50/50 whether I could afford the petrol back home. But Glastonbury' s so amazing, its all about supporting the artists.
Also they don't facilitate / allow you to sell your own merchandise, so you can't benefit / make a few quid on that either.
Final point, for balance..it remains to be seen if / how the band benefits from playing in front of 1800 fans. Playing Glastonbury wields currency for future opportunities, which is good. We stayed at / saw the Festival for free. I just think that the basic needs / costs of the artists should be covered, given the whole massive venture is based around us, the people who write songs and stuff.
I tapped into a huge audience and having played there will help future things, so it's worth it from that point of view. But not covering basic artists' needs is pretty disgusting
...and here's The Bug letting rip
Foolish maybe, but speakin to a journalist a couple of months ago, who said a previous Techno Animal show at Glastonbury had been "absolutely inspirational" for him and the third of the crowd that didnt run for cover when me and Justin played the festival years ago...It was that conversation that spurred me to take a dive into the mud of Somerset in the hope we could alter spine's, dna's and pre-conceptions, and more importantly shake up the conservative middle ground/middle mass neutrality of the festival's line up(Sleaford Mods asides..)..Plus my agent's assistant, and all round badman Ahsan, egged me on to take a crack at a fresh audience.....So this led to me and the Bug crew to climb into the belly of a giant, robotic, mechanical spider, in the early evening sunshine on Saturday night..
And for sure, whatever the outcome of the set, it was a fantastically surreal memory, that will stay with me for life(even the split second of vertigo when the wind started swingin the gigantic arthropod many metres from the ground was a trip too...lol).. But, i cant lie, when i saw just a handful of people millin around minutes before showtime, the reality set in that we were basically just a small, fairly anonymous number on the bill, and fundamentally a support act to the incredible circus like pyrotechnics of the ARCADIA bug...For us, there was virtually no lighting, fanfares or for that matter, crowd, as i pressed play on the voice of The Spaceape. But again, massive credit to Flowdan, Manga and Miss Red, who immediately put all their energies into the set, whilst i hid behind my wall of noise...They showed again, clearly, they were commited, genuine and fired up...and they seemed to relish clambering around the junkyard beast to magnetise passers by to our racket....As a unit, im happier battlin with these three mic murderers than any previous vocal combo i have worked with live..Their disparate, yet complimentary flows, are a joy to witness and work with, and each mc is respectively a ninja at their chosen flow/lyrical weapon, and even better, they seem as hungry as me to get medieval on the masses..And although, naturally we would of preferred to play to thousands who came out after dark,instead of hundreds, it was still mad vibesy seein more and more people coming to congregate around the droid and brucking out proper at the feet of the insane monster. And having just read this tweet alone, it justified the madness of the decision, day and setting : "Dan Harris @danielharris627 3h3 hours ago
@thebugzoo You were fucking incredible on Arcadia, one of the best sets i've ever seen. "
But if Saturday avoided many of the pitfalls of festivals..(hell we even managed a tiny soundcheck in the spider...haha)...Sunday was a different story...Firstly a small car incapable of seatin all of us had been sent to pick us up from the hotel, so Flowdan/Manga had to be left at the hotel, as me, Miss Red and our soundmaster Goh, drove hastily to the site and WOW tent for set up...
I got to the tent as Four Tet was playin, tryin to set up my shit in pitch black conditions, waiting for bits of gear, concrete and foam to be found, watchin the clock tick closer to showtime....When George Fitzgerald steps up to follow Kieran, the crowd clears considerably, and im side stage in the darkness wonderin why the hell the bookers would put him and us back to back in this tent as his fairly generic house set, amplifies my doubts, and seems planets away from my intentions artistically...
Surrounded by Dan Dirt's sick sound system, and his rig's great crew, i hoped we could sort some decent quality of sound out, despite knowin there would be no soundcheck at all, and the organizers had allocated literally zero time for a changeover(Fine if u show up with a USB stick, but not if u are armed with bags full of hardware toys like mine),that scared me, as did the fact the organizers had not been even able to find a vehicle to go pick up Flowdan/Manga at the hotel until very late in the day, so late in fact, that the organizers informed me "we're not sure we can get your mcs here in time for your set, but we'll try our best."..Zzzzzzz
Bearing in mind we had left them at 6.30, and it was 10, the irony of the slow reaction wasnt lost on me, but my nerves were registerin seismic tremors that didnt allow panic on any one problem, just general stress meltdown on all fronts hahaha...When the roll deep masters literally rolled up 5 minutes before start time, i breathed a hefty sigh of relief, which was soon lost, as the sound guys couldnt manage to set up any monitoring for me.. Havin taken 15 minutes to sort the monitorin, and reposition the stage set ups, i ask the stage manager if were still good for the hour, to which he says "definitely not, you have to finish at 11 as stated in our programme.."...Ho hum, and FUCK, down to 45 minutes and thinkin fast how to re-arrange the set, whilst noticing the tent is now virtually empty...Ah festival stylee...here we go again...
So music kicks in, hideously distorted at high or low levels in the monitors, zero vocals can be heard in my monitors, and later i find out Manga and Flowdan couldnt hear any of their voice in their monitors either...The dirt crew tried their best to salvage the situation, but soundchecks are as useful for the sound guys as the artists, and virtually impossible at festivals unless yr Pharrell etc...SO the choice was get fucked off, head butt a monitor, walk offstage or grin and bare it, hopin the energy of the tracks still manages to translate over the front of house speakers...Luckily i chose the last option...and with Flowdan in demonic form, the tent filling up fast, and then Manga and Miss Red firing out their verses, the shortened set, adrenalin od and sonic friction led to a mad atmosphere on and offstage as the tent went mentalist...Apologies we couldnt play longer, but MAJOR props to the wicked crowd who helped us ignore the bullshit and concentrate on bringin the fire....We had went from an empty tent to a full one, and again Flowdan, Manga and Miss Red had made me proud to share the stage with em, as they achieved energy god status..So the end result was that which counted....A fucka that the organizers had arranged our pick up 30 minutes after we finished tho, so i had to pack up my gear in record time, and then miss Mumdance/Novelist and Mode Selektor sets....
Ridin in the van back to Bristol, the inevitable post weekend post mortem occurs..The 5 of us, discuss Glastonbury festival proper. ie 1/ Officially £225 a tkt, conservatively 198,000 people on site, plus revenue from food/drink stalls. Who gets the cash ? we knew we didnt..lol ..2/ Lionel Richie drew the biggest crowd of the weekend(Zzzzzzzz), why ? 3/ None of our mates would want to or could afford to buy tickets,who comes to this sort of festival ? 4/ We only had time to see one show(Kanye) over the two days due to setting up/breaking down gear and organizers issuing us with our itinery/timetable etc etc etc.....
BUT more importantly, and satisfyingly we agreed we had come to Glasto as an experiment to see what the unsuspecting would make of our attack, and we had collectively enjoyed giving it our best shot, and seein people reacting with ENERGY.
All in all, playin four festival shows in four days, had proved to us that random festival crowds are def open to our sonic/lyrical avalanche, and the crowds responses at all the festivals had been absolutely fantastic, so therefore fuck the problems !!!...Glastonbury, we got paid in minus figures, got treated like numbers, got fed shit, and had time to see nothing. BUT still VERY glad we did it..The battle continues...
PS Sorry for the book
PPS Still waitin for those BBC cameramen to arrive..LOL
Bill Bruford on Chris Squire's passing
He had an approach that contrasted sharply with the somewhat monotonic, immobile bass parts of today. His lines were important; counter-melodic structural components that you were as likely to go away humming as the top line melody; little stand-alone works of art in themselves. Whenever I think of him, which is not infrequently, I think of the over-driven fuzz of the sinewy staccato hits in Close to the Edge (6’04” and on) or a couple of minutes later where he sounds like a tuba (8’.00”). While he may have taken a while to arrive at the finished article, it was always worth waiting for. And then he would sing a different part on top.
An individualist in an age when it was possible to establish individuality, Chris fearlessly staked out a whole protectorate of bass playing in which he was lord and master. I suspect he knew not only that he gave millions of people pleasure with his music, but also that he was fortunate to be able to do so. I offer sincere condolences to his family.
Adios, partner. Bill
Via
The photo is 1971, somewhere in Italy. L-R Steve Howe, Jon Anderson, Bill, Chris
Sunday 28 June 2015
Tuesday 23 June 2015
Guilty (of a flashback to May 1977 in Glasgow)
At the local university on the Saturday night The Ramones were playing supported by Talking Heads and then the following night Television and Blondie played at The Apollo.
The only band that had set foot in Britain previous to this was The Ramones and this was also the first night of the Television tour.
I was needless to say completely gobsmacked that the following issue of MM had numerous words that apparently had come out of my mouth. I speak here as someone who can talk a load of crap at the best of time but after indulging in powders I can even amaze myself with the shite I utter.
So I read Allan's article out to them as I relive that glorious weekend in my head once more and after finishing it I say to them that it is amazing, as I feel that 'I haven't changed in one bit in all these years' to which my kids reply, almost in unison that 'that is bloody tragic dad.'
I had to laugh!
Tee
WTF with Marc Maron: President Obama
'Racism, we are not cured of it. And it's not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That's not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don't, overnight, completely, erase everything that happened two to 300 years prior.'
Monday 22 June 2015
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