Swords of the Dance

Yet another old Word piece rehashed for interweb immortality. This originally appeared early Sept 2010, timed to coincide with Ninja Tune's 20th anniversary celebrations.

Perched between a gay pub and a grey council estate on a south London trunk road stands a lone house. Looking out of place, like it’s ducked the sweep of a demolition ball more than once, its anonymous blue façade makes no reference to its contents, save one small sticker below the buzzer: Ninja Tune. One of the longest-serving British dance labels, it was formed as an outlet for renowned producers Coldcut, Matt Black and Jon More, with an initial cash injection of just £500.

They’ve spent a bit more since, but not that much. The higgledy-piggledy three-storey headquarters is crammed with people, records, shelving and computers. An overworked server roars loudly in the corner while the lavatory sink threatens to come away from the wall. Black slinks into the upstairs office, containing hand-me-down and left-behind furniture, and sprawls on an old sofa. Dressed in black (the fact that his birth name is Cohn suggests this may not be a coincidence), with long, straggling hair, his is a more intense presence than the laidback, comparatively dapper More, who’s dressed in the age-appropriate (he’s 53) cap and jacket.

Birthdays and anniversaries are very much in mind. Black turns 50 soon, Ninja Tune celebrates its twentieth this year and they’ve been in this Kennington house they call home for 10 years. But not much longer: the label will move north of the river next year (Black himself is pondering making his partners an offer on the building), bringing one Ninja chapter to a close. Looking around at the walls – a few silver discs (Mr Scruff, Roots Manuva, Coldcut, Cinematic Orchestra) and a lot of posters – I wonder why two of the biggest names in British dance music (and in the late-’80s Coldcut were very big indeed, producing Yazz and Lisa Stansfield and famously remixing Rakim) ever chose to go it alone.

“We’d already had experience of forming a label with Ahead Of Our Time. That was done through Big Life, which was subsequently sold to Arista,” explains More.

Black interjects, “It’s like little fish that get eaten by bigger fish that get eaten by bigger fish. We realised we were little fish and it would be better if we swim for freedom.”

“So we escaped to the best place in the world for fish, which was Japan.”

“Surely the open sea?”

Fish-friendly or not, Japanese films inspired the name and the distinctive logo (designed later by Kev of DJ Food). The ethos – fiercely independent, techno-savvy, web-literate, supremely obstinate – was all their own. While British dance was dominated by house, which went from the underground to high street hegemony, Ninja went the other way, dabbling in anything but. “You can read Ninja Tune as a war with house music, definitely,” says Black. “When the first house records came out we were very excited, but we don’t like conformity, uniformity, monoculture. There are massive pressures pushing monoculture and destroying biological diversity and cultural diversity. You don’t have to be a green-bearded hippy to be aware of that. There’s nothing wrong with people getting off their tits and coming together under one rhythm. But when that rhythm takes over so there isn’t anything else allowed, that’s a problem. So we decided to become the resistance.”

Black, who’s collaborated with Crass before now, has a mile-wide anarcho streak, but that oppositional policy and attachment to life in the margins has made Ninja closer to a dance version of John Peel, a comparison that delights them (“a solitary giant fighting the forces of darkness,” says Black, typically). Just as Peel was always more interested in tomorrow than yesterday, Ninja’s 20^th Anniversary package, XX,  shuns nostalgia, instead bundling up six albums of new music and remixes. In 20 years they’ve never done a ‘best of’. “There’s always something more interesting to do,” says Black. “It’s an exciting time in electronic music right now, it’s swung back again, there’s some pretty wild new sounds and new characters out there.”

                                                                                                           

Ninja’s one brush with real fame came this time last year when the Mercury Prize went to Speech Debelle’s Speech Therapy, released on their Big Dada subsidiary. Its triumph turned to ashes when its failure to sell like Arctic Monkeys was held up as proof of the Mercury’s inverse Midas Touch and the artist herself turned on her label, whom she criticised for not getting stock in the shops. Ill-attended gigs told the truth of the matter: despite being the best record on an unremarkable list it was never going to trouble the scorers. Black shrugs, “It’s full of character, unique, but if you think it’s gonna be Lily Allen you better think again, because it ain’t; it’s something else, it’s an odd record.”

Whether Speech returns or not, Ninja Tune remain vital. Recent releases include The Bug’s excoriating ragga-dubstep, Grasscut’s future folk and Bonobo’s electronic soul, the still breathtaking “audiovisual rhythmic montages” of Hexstatic and the reissue of the Solid Steel series of mix CDs (a format practically reinvented by Coldcut’s 1997 70 Minutes Of Madness). They seem quite happy tootling away, rarely fashionable and largely out of view.

“Our philosophy is to not be distracted by the sound of people jumping on the bandwagon,” says More. Black adds, “We’ve been flavour of the week a couple of times and when you see how the machine works and how it’s set up to flog things when the quality’s not really there, we keep away. We know what we’re doing and we get on with it.” Here’s to another score.

Kanye's Thriller Night

Kanye West has compared his self-directed 40-minute short film Runaway to the abstract works of Picasso and Matisse. What they would’ve made of this breathtakingly cornball fantasy is anyone’s guess, but I suspect that other giant of 20th-century art whose name kept cropping up at last night’s screening – in the Bafta HQ on Piccadilly, no less – Michael Jackson would’ve felt right at home among the UK urban celebs (Tinie, Chipmunk) and the dozens of St Martin’s art students, reputedly invited at Kanye’s suggestion to “make it look cool”.

“With Michael Jackson’s passing I felt a responsibility to create things for our generation, to be more inspirational and be better parents,” he says. “The lowest common denominator is all you see on TV, we need to use our power in a proper way.”

MTV VMA Performance: Kanye West feat. Pusha T "Runaway" | MeetThaDealer
- Watch more Music Videos at Vodpod.

In Runaway’s case this means rescuing a half-dead phoenix – gorgeous and, happily, wearing as little by way of feathered clothing as daytime telly restrictions allow – coaxing her back to life with a lush garden, a sheep and the power of Kanye’s sampling skills, marrying her, arguing, promising “I’ll never let you burn”, and then watching her rise into the sky while running through the words to his horrible Autotuned take on Bon Iver’s Woods.

This is actually a rare reversion to 808s And Heartbreaks. For the most part the songs represent a return to the form of, if not College Dropout, then at least Graduation. Hard and raw in places, grandiose and orchestral in others, it mostly maintains the form of tracks like Monster and is evidence that Kanye’s new album may overcome its clunky title My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (whither Good-Ass Job?) and drag him back from the precipice he’s been gazing over for the last two years.

He touched on these problems (notably the fall-out from his embarrassing awards-show intervention) in the post-film Q&A. Sounding worryingly earnest in his claims of divine intervention, he seemed like a new, rather boring man, talking about his heroic resistance to record company pressure to do something commercial. He saw this as “the same shit Michael went through”, as if the man who made the most successful album of all time, and regularly phoned CBS boss Walter Yetnikoff at all hours of the day seeking reassurance that its successor would sell even more, was merely a disinterested passenger in his own global super-megastardom.

But beneath the waffle the old arrogant, ever-quotable Kanye was there. “This is gonna sound like the Kanye of three years ago, but do you know how creative I have to be to be me?” he said. And “I wish I had a billionaire to invest in me, ‘cos investing in me is investing in arts through all the three-year-olds I’m gonna inspire.” Then he got lost in a rant against the snobs of the fashion world, blaming Lindsay Lohan for his failure to successfully launch his own range. “Lohan’s collection was like the 9/11 for Arabians (sic) to celebrities [doing their own fashion line].”

And when, reflecting on the extended ballet dance that forms the latter half of the title track, he said “hip hop is like black semen – anything that connects with it becomes that”, it was good to have the old Kanye back. Sorry doesn’t suit him any more than surrealism. But if the film reeks of superstar self-indulgence the new album should make some amends for the horrors of Heartbreaks.

REVERSE CHARGE

For those redirected from Facebook or Twitter, I don't really hate Mark Ronson. I've met him a couple of times and he's intelligent, witty and an engaging interview (though he might reconsider his policy of doing them straight off the red-eye from New York), but it seems like a popular search term and, in all honesty, his new album is a real nurse-the-screens! minger. This is a round-up of retro albums, records designed to both look and sound like something a few decades old. It first appeared in the October 2010 edition of Word Magazine – still on the shelves for a few days and re-posted here just to show you what you're missing.

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ROOTS MANUVA MEETS WRONGTOM
Duppy Writer
BIG DADA

BUDOS BAND
Budos III
DAPTONE

MARK RONSON & THE BUSINESS INTL
Record Collection
ALLIDO/COLOMBIA

ALOE BLACC
Good Things
STONES THROW

Maybe it’s all that dusty-fingered reverence for old vinyl, but when history repeats for hip hop artists it’s not as farce, but pastiche. So Roots Manuva’s latest reggae overhaul appears in a retro-futurist cartoon style by a celebrated ‘80s sleeve designer, while Californian Aloe Blacc slides into regulation Temptations supper-club suit and bowtie, even when the spirit he evokes most closely is that of Bill Withers’ smooth country soul. Like besuited Stones Throw label-mate Mayer Hawthorne, Plan B (another rapper profiting from his singing voice) and the sublime Raphael Saadiq, Aloe’s decided looking the part is as vital as sounding it. Brit-pop may have been born with one eye on the past, but even when they sounded like little more than Bootleg Beatles with their own songwriter, Oasis never quite clambered into the dayglo military jackets.

No one’s benefited from grafting the sound of young, black ’60s America onto modern pop more than Mark Ronson, who soundtracked Amy’s beehived reinvention, as a combination of ’60s soul, killer songs and carcrash infamy pushed her and her hairdo to global celebrity. Repeating the trick with his solo album, he reinvented indie anthems as horn-drenched soul standards, transforming himself from hip hop DJ/producer into genuine solo star (and nemesis to a generation of indie kids, who still haven’t forgiven him for messing with Morrissey and Radiohead).

But Ronson’s more interested in sound than schtick. Having won proper pop star status, he’s not about to go down with a ship that’s been boarded by the likes of Duffy, not in a world gone Gaga. For third album Record Collection – which I suspect went by the working title of No More Fucking Trumpets – he’s invested in a stack of old analogue synthesisers and brought in the rhythm section of funk revivalists supreme, The Dap-Kings, and a range of guest vocalists, including Boy George, Simon Le Bon and Rose Elinor Dougall of full-time revivalists The Pipettes. It maybe a ’70s/’80s hybrid on paper, but Record Collection couldn’t sound more at home on modern radio if it struck up light banter with a newsreader before delivering a blow-by-blow monologue about the crrrrazy weekend it’s just had.

With electronic riffs filling in where the brass section once stood, his new songs have all the immediacy of a bomb in a firework factory. Bang Bang Bang sounds like a collision between Lena Lovich and a Power Rangers soundtrack; The Bike Song could’ve been conceived in a School Disco nightclub. Chirpy rapper Q-Tip appears on both, but that’s nothing like as shocking as hearing original grimester Wiley jump in halfway through the title track, then dropping off as quickly as he came in to make way for Le Bon (whose voice still sounds like a wet blanket stretched to the size of a cricket pitch) and Ronson himself. It’s a pity two of the three vocalists here are so lousy, because it’s perhaps the most interesting song, with Ronson sending up his own sleb image while expressing his lust for stardom in the language of a love song. For a man who’s previously done little wrong Ronson engenders extraordinary loathing (one webzine recently invited readers to suggest suitable tortures, short of death – the most printable was “coat his bog-roll in cayenne pepper”). But ’80s pop, unlike indie and funk, isn’t protected by a Praetorian guard of the precious and purist. Irritating as it may be, I fear Record Collection will be massive.

If Record Collection sounds like a calculated stab at turning nostalgia into money, Duppy Writer, Good Things and Budos III are acts of indulgence. Duppy Writer is the third Roots Manuva remix album, but the first to place his career span in the hands of one single producer, Wrongtom. Best known for dubbing up Hard-Fi’s roots, he recasts the London rapper’s life work as ’80s dancehall, sticking rhythms from prime digital hits like Antony Red Rose’s timeless Tempo beneath Rodney Smith’s baritone noir. With a sleeve designed by Tony McDermott, the cartoonist who dressed King Tubby protégé Scientist’s albums 30 years ago, Duppy Writer is a timewarped treat.



As, for the most part, is Aloe Blacc’s Good Things. Spearheaded by the astonishing single I Need A Dollar, it’s a recession-era throwback to the days when blue-collar soul heroes serenaded their audience with everyday tales rather than heavily branded fantasies. Set to music crafted by flame-keepers Truth & Soul, it deftly recaptures the paranoia of Nixon’s reign (even a cover of Femme Fatale sounds like it’s there to make a point) and if Blacc can’t quite command a microphone like Curtis or Marvin, his songcraft has no modern peer. If retro funk can be said to have an originator, it’s the Daptone label, purveyors of just-so recreations of the early ’70s sound and look and home to the aforementioned Dap-Kings, from whom sprung Budos Band, the label’s Afro-jazz exponents. This is music that isn’t meant to change: numerical album titles, an all-instrumental brass-led formula repeated throughout, Budos III is for people who wish those blaxploitation soundtracks had never ended. They may be doing it over, but they’re undeniably doing it right.

Barbra Streisand

A genius career turn for our Babs

Duck Sauce "Barbra Streisand" from Mr Goldbar on Vimeo.

Grasscut: One Fell Swoop

First published Word Magazine Aug 2010

At first sight the area separating Bullock and Castle Hills to the east of Brighton doesn’t look like much, another valley nestling between two more points of undulation in this most rippling part of the southern English landscape, the South Downs. Obvious it ain’t, but here be buried treasures, both historical and musical.

The valley was formerly home to the Sussex village of Balsdean – it was abandoned after World War II, during which it was used as artillery training for the British army. The well-trained gunners duly blew it to crap before heading off to the Normandy beaches and now there is almost literally nothing, just one small, apologetic plaque and a couple of dilapidated farm buildings. Beneath the soil lie the ruins of a 12th-century chapel, a mediaeval manor house, two farmhouses and an object that might reclaim the term ‘hidden track’ from irritating doodles that lurk at the end of CDs and clog up your iPod with dead space.



Here the Brighton duo of Grasscut have buried what bassist/keyboardist Marcus O’Dair describes as “a little capsule with as much personality as possible”, including a cassette tape – the only existing physical copy – of a track that will never be released. Clues to its whereabouts can be found in the free download Lost Village and the artwork for their debut album, 1 Inch: ½ Mile, itself the name of an old map scale. The album inlay folds out into a map of the Balsdean area, complete with the suggested route for the walk, a guide to which track to listen to and where, and, for the treasure hunters, a hint about where to look. Though inspired by journeys around the country, from Sussex to North Wales, it has been designed with this specific walk in mind, a 50-minute ramble just north of Rottingdean, once home to Kipling and the final resting place of Fred Perry.

So the opening track High Down accompanies the first steps, taking us past the giant phone mast with its gentle classical piano, then swirling up in a giant electric rush as the valley opens up in front of us, home now to nothing more than a flock of sheep (even the burnt-out car referenced in the album map has been removed). Despite the rural setting, the urban is never far away, and High Down’s saunter past the phone mast is accompanied by a swarm of bleeps, the electric fuzz of a thousand flickering phone calls.

“A track like High Down, it’s very easy to make it too stylised. I wanted to make it feel like you really, really were there, rather than just writing a song about being there,” says singer, programmer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Phillips. “Ninety per cent of the music I listen to for fun is on headphones. I get transported by music I love in an environment, it doesn’t matter where it is, I just get into a transcendental state, transported to a demi-world. It makes it a bit more porous.”

It’s a grey and muggy June day (though the fair-skinned among us still come away with a headful of sunburn) as we follow the album’s path, down into the valley to the sound of Meltwater (actually conceived in Snowdonia), the buffeting wind crashing into its grand synthesisers and live drums, courtesy of jazzman Jim Whyte. Although the term folktronica seems little used lately, 1 Inch: ½ Mile is perhaps its perfect embodiment. Not only is it designed to be listened to in an environment that blends the pastoral with the modern, a merger reflected in its instrumentation, it’s peppered with old voices, many recorded from 78s. Album credits include speaking parts for novelist WG Sebald, poets Ezra Pound, Edmund Blunden and Basil Bunting, the Irish tenor Count John McCormack and writer-poet Hilaire Belloc, whose singing of his poem The Winged Horse is sped up to soprano pitch on the closing In Her Pride.

But the most telling voice on 1 Inch: ½ Mile, apart from Phillips’ own, is that of his mother, whose covertly recorded recollections of austerity Britain (“it was grey, very grey”) form the album’s centrepiece, 1946, which soundtracks, at the end of the long winding path downwards, our arrival in the ‘village’ centre. It’s now just one small wall of bricks, marking the foundations of some vanished undetermined building. The plaque marking ‘the site of the altar of the Norman church of Balsdean’ is the only historical footnote, the farm buildings are completely deserted, a hose gently dripping into a water trough the only sign of ongoing interest. The manor house, a mental asylum in the 19th century, is so far gone no one actually knows where it stood. On these fields, Phillips assures me, Henry V’s archers practised for the battle that would take place in Agincourt. Now it’s just grass, trees and wool; lots and lots of wool.

After the short, sharp shock of the climb back out of the valley (soundtrack: The Door In The Wall, by far the poppiest moment saved for an uphill adrenaline shot) Phillips talks of the influences of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, “the idea of the ancient running through the modern” in its contemporary walk through historic places. Phillips, who used to play with 1 Giant Leap and earns his current crust composing music for film and television, is already talking about a track for another disappearing-village project, this one a place drowned to make way for a reservoir.

“I don’t know if we’re gonna become the band of lost places,” O’Dair adds quickly. “The fact there’s now travellers’ vans at the start of the walk and the burnt car has gone just shows the extent to which it’s about change. The record’s meant to be about contemporary England, we’re not interested in nostalgia. That’s why we use old 78s and new Kaoss pads. Neither is idealised or superior, but if you’re in an iPod Shuffle era, then it is all there.”

Indeed it is. You just have to look for it.

Happy Talk

Apparently I'm supposed to write about new stuff and not simply stick up some old rubbish no one even wanted to read at the time. So here's a load of things I rilly rilly like right now. A mate once told me I'm better writing about things I don't like than things I do, so I will do a hate list soon – possibly under the brilliant title Crappy Talk – but not just now cos I'm bored with going about Morrissey. So here's reasons to be cheerful, one, two... ten (which left no room for the great Grinderman and Gold Panda albums).

1/ Kano
His new album shows him to be the only grime kid really moving beyond all that without joining in the charty cheese-up. Neither grime nor grime-pop (or whatever we call that), it's accessible in all the right ways, but still like, well, hard, and is easily the best he's done since his first and possibly better. I went to see him at Bush Hall last week. He was great; it was half empty. What gives?



2/ Patrick Neate - Jerusalem
Rap, reality TV, immigration, Africa, Nu-Lab dog days, AIDS, watching your leg being slowly eaten away by godknowswhat in an African jail cell with only rats for company, all books should be like this. So good I almost feel guilty for just borrowing it from the library.

3/ Joe Hart
An England keeper who doesn't spread through his defence like a bad day on the Stock Exchange. I won't say I told you so Fabio, cos you're not reading (but I did).

4/ Down Terrace
The only English film to successfully bridge the gap between Royle Family and Goodfellas. I'm interviewing the director tonight. Hopefully they were just messing with all that pushing-old-ladies-under-cars stuff.

5/ Syl Johnson - Complete Mythology box set
Take Al Green, batter the perma-grin, twinkly-eyed, just-been-invited-for-a-weekend-round-God's-house look out of him and that broken down lump weeping in the corner, that's Syl. He wound up on the same label as Al, Hi Records, but this massive box collates all the stuff before, including the tune that gave Ali G his catchphrase (not this one).


6/ Ed Balls
Or (Big) Ben if you're more familiar with The Thick Of It than real politicians. He was brilliant on yesterday's debate, being the only Labour leadership candidate to talk in policy rather than catchphrases and currently seems to be doing two shadow jobs (his own – education – and chancellor, where he's regularly picking apart Osbourne's axe-happy ways). He'd be a rubbish leader, but I may vote for him anyway since I know he can't win.
This just in: apparently BoJo says "I agree with Ed" on the economy. Is this a good or bad thing?

7/ Sian Anderson's blog
If it's half as entertaining as her tweets – all the joys of having a house full of teenagers with none of the grief – http://siananderson.blogspot.com/ is gonna be essential reading.

8/ Doug Stanhope
First time I saw Doug Stanhope I was disappointed his show was a little more reined-in than his DVD. No such trouble last week. Despite the drinking and stuttering he's now slicker than the sea round Deepwater and so near the knuckle you can hear them scraping along the ground. He didn't do this, though. Absolutely definitely NSFW. Probably not safe for home, or anywhere anyone else might hear.



9/ Breaking Bad Series 3
First series was all about Walt, second put some proper flesh on the other characters, this third is shaping up to be weird as fuck. Mexican dealers crawling to some shrine, the eyeball that follows him everywhere, the shyster I-can't-believe-he's-a-lawyer screwing Jesse's parents. Two eps in and already loving it. And Walt now has a natty little beard in place of that foul 70s 'tache he was rocking for series 1 and 2.

10/ Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner
Oh, there was room for this after all. It's like Fuck Buttons, Bibio and Caribou and all that other lovely stuff . That's enough YouTubeing for one post, so just google him yourself.

Sly Stone: Stone Crazy After All These Years

This appeared in slightly shorter form in Word Magazine in Sept 2007. This, is the full unedited, unexpurgated version (or, if you work for a record company catalogue department, the Deluxe Edition) written with no regard for word count or reader's attention span.

So far as I know this was only Sly's second interview in 20 years, the other being Vanity Fair earlier that year - but don't shoot me if I'm wrong on this, it's not like he has a press officer to check these things with.

The interview took place in the small hours of July 30 and if my questions seem a bit rubbish I plead tiredness, being a bit pissed and pathetically starstruck.


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“We’re in here, Daddy. The door’s open, come on in.”

There’s a slight delay, a distant rumble. And there he is – for only the second time in some 20-odd years, Sly Stone is showing up to be interviewed. The last occasion was earlier this year, near his Napa Valley home, north of San Francisco: this time the location is his daughter’s hotel room in Sandbanks, a stretch of coastline a few miles from Bournemouth boasting, our driver tells us, the “third most expensive real estate in the world”.

Sly enters head bowed, dressed in a checked, hooded orange suit, somewhere between surgical overalls and pyjamas, offers a firm handshake, a smile and a hello. He doesn’t sit in the armchair so much as try to lie on it, adjusting himself to the injury (the result, it's said, of falling from a cliff near his home) that has necessitated a neck brace for the series of concerts that have been this summer’s least expected comeback. He peers upwards, almost tortoise-like, and asks in that deep baritone that has long since dropped to a croak, "Can I smoke?" Despite assent the cigarette in his hand stays unlit.

Notwithstanding the obvious physical decline, Sly is far from the broken man assumed by legend. The eyes still shine, the voice, though initially halting, soon finds its flow and the mind is plainly active. There are a thousand questions to ask the man whose disappearance from music, pursued by stories of cocaine arrests and total seclusion, has made him a mainstay in rock’s hall of casualties. So I start with the most obvious: why now?

"I’d been writing songs and felt like I’d written enough," he replies. "Again, I’ve got offspring who are pretty talented, so I thought I better get with them and get busy before they deny me."

Those offspring are both present: Novena – a classically trained pianist who mixes rock, soul and R&B and who, with her bright eyes and angular face, looks exactly how you’d imagine Sly Stone’s 25-year-old daughter would – and Rawsil Phunne (pron. fun), product of his relationship with Family Stone trumpeter Cynthia Robinson (the only original band member on this tour), and a rapper-producer (she briefly took the stage during tonight’s shambolic performance at Bournemouth Opera House). Rawsil has inherited her father’s brashness and sense of mischief. She screams in mock outrage at her dad’s controversial pronouncements and entertains herself by throwing grapes at me (‘family initiation’ she calls it), erupting in laughter when I try to catch one in my mouth.

This is not what I expected.



The call to attempt an interview came through two days earlier. Although there was no press officer for this tour, contact had been made with the Opera House’s Events Manager, the fabulously helpful James, who assured us he’d get me backstage and try to grab some precious moments with the artist formerly known as Sly ‘no show’ Stone. Since these have been virtually non-existent to all but intimates for so long (Vanity Fair’s April encounter was the culmination of a fifteen-year pursuit), the odds ranked somewhere between face time with Lord Lucan and a sing-song with Elvis. Instructions are to get whatever possible, even if it’s just a hasty autograph on a few old albums, and if worse comes to worst…well, at least I’ve had a free Saturday night out in Bournemouth.

There is, literally, no one else I’d do this for.

But Sly is special; has been ever since my teenage self was shaken from TV slumber by his supercharged performance at the Woodstock hippie-folk drearathon, enrapt by the sight of this lean black man clad in white Indian tassels leading his vice-tight black/white, male/female band and the assembled hordes through a ten-minute I Want To Take You Higher, daring them to risk their ‘approval’ by throwing up peace signs. Shortly after, a friend taped me 1971’s There’s A Riot Going On and the Greatest Hits rush-released by CBS to fill 1970’s deathly silence. They’ve been my two favourite albums ever since.

The transition from those affirmative onomatopoeic hits (Life, Fun, Stand), part Lichtenstein, part carnival, to the prickly heat of the claustrophobic Riot is as extraordinary as any of the era. But it’s what came out the other end that has defined Sly, if not the Family Stone, ever since. The 2006 Grammys sighting, a hunched Sly wondering offstage after barely a minute, appeared to confirm that his retirement should be permanent. Yet some 1500 punters in Bournemouth have staked £35 on this man and the band initially put together as a tribute act by his sister Vet (soul singer Little Sister) doing a show worth seeing.

The signs aren’t great. I was told to arrive at the venue by 6.00, when Sly was scheduled to appear for the soundcheck. But they’re not even in town yet, having only just landed at Heathrow. At 9.00 the harassed Events Manager informs me cars have been despatched to fetch them from respective hotels and they’ll have to test their equipment after support act Unklejam have played. We are officially on Sly time.

They commence just after 11.00 and the problems are immediate. Several mics aren’t working, the electric piano drowns all but the brass section. Cynthia Robinson still blows the trumpet like a one-woman war on Jericho, but during Dance To The Music’s band introductions Vet looks round anxiously as if expecting bits of scenery to collapse. After 20 minutes of this (and still no Sly) they hold an emergency soundcheck. Dale, a Scotsman doing a 700-mile round-trip to see him, screams “Get on stage you fucking cunt”. Later, after they’ve re-started with a painfully subdued Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey (once a line in the sand, here sand in the face), Dale’s ejected for continuing his protest, though the sympathetic bouncers re-admit him shortly afterwards.

By now Sly is on, performing If You Want Me To Stay (sweet irony!), prowling the stage for Sing A Simple Song, his diminished voice further obscured by ongoing mic problems. A strange stooped figure in his black baseball cap and grey-and-white bandana, he nevertheless defies expectations by leaping into the photographer’s pit during the recital of ...Higher that follows a fragile Stand. I move backstage during the encore, which Sly surprises everyone by participating in, scotching my plan to collar him while the band played on. The gig ends to as many boos as cheers (James later tells Word he’s had hundreds of refund requests), and after a half hour’s wait I’m told Sly will talk back at his hotel. I’m doubtful, but accept a lift with Scott, the tour manager, and Cynthia Robinson, who rates the show one of the tour’s best, blaming the venue for the sound’s failings (I decide against jeopardising my place in the car by querying the wisdom of a show-time soundcheck).

Arriving back at Sly’s hotel, Scott leaves to pack for the flight. "You’ve spoken to the girls, right?" he asks. I tell him I haven’t. His mouth says "Good night", his expression says "Good luck with that", and I’m alone in the hotel foyer wondering just how to broach the daughters-gatekeepers of the most reclusive man in showbiz. Incredibly, it’s a doozy. Rawsil is hospitality itself, checking that Dad’s game and inviting me into her huge room, where she and Novena play their works-in-progress on the wall-mounted CD player. Separated in age by at least a decade, they tell similar stories. They were raised by their respective mothers but Dad was about. "There was always contact," says Novena. "Nothing was a mystery. It’s funny when you’re on the inside and know what’s going on, but nobody else does. What’s the big deal? He’s chilling. Just ‘cause you don’t see him at the grocery store or he doesn’t have an album out, doesn’t mean he has disappeared."

Now that he has resurfaced, one thing about Sly is immediately apparent. The man who withdrew all those years ago isn’t about to let the world back in. His first recourse is the joke, the glib remark that answers the question but swats away analysis. His past drug problems are well known, but he is no born again, 12 Steps, Just Say No-er: “If I could do it all over again/ I’d be in the same skin I’m in,” maybe as true now as it was on 1973’s Fresh. After promising to release some of this mountain of new music via the internet and reciting some new verses that demonstrate the man behind lines like “You’ve been sitting much too long/There’s a permanent crease in your right and wrong,” still has a way with a lateral lyric, he addresses the twenty-year question.

So Sly, what have you been doing?
"Writing songs and riding my motorcycle. Maybe now and then a horse, but not too much horse. But mostly I write songs, I’ve been playing music since everybody saw me last."

Do you socialise outside of your immediate family circle.
"Not too much, no. I hang with my daughters and then there are the twins I’ve known a long time, about 11 years, there’s one of them over there, Shay (he gestures to the woman who entered the room with him, who appears to be his companion). Things are working out just fine. I have no doubt we will have hit records, because we think people wanna hear it. A lot of people wanna say what we’re gonna say, but they don’t wanna be the ones to say it yet."

Do you pay much attention to people who’ve come along since, drawing heavily on what you’ve done. People like Prince, OutKast?
"Yeah, and I respect them and I’m happy for them. I’m glad if there’s anything that I’ve done to encourage them, to feel more confident in their own career, then that’s flattering. And the ones that sample me, I’m thankful, because I’m gonna have fun sampling them as well."

When you put the group together it was a completely different look: multiracial, men and women. Was that a natural evolution or a deliberate statement?
"Most things are pretty much spiritually intentional… And then there are things that I do intentionally. If we have everyone together we can do things together and it may have a lot to do with how people look at life and even in different countries, between countries. Regardless of how much we disagree and we go on fighting the terrorists and the da da da da and the whoo whoo whoo whoo, we’ve still got to live together. Kill off half the country because you feel like it? You can’t do that. So we still got to live together, so the next group may have terrorists in it. You see where my head’s at? Keep your enemies up close. If the terrorist is your enemy then a good place for him to be would be right there in the group."

The outlook of the band was initially very positive, very up.
"Yeah, something good is always gonna happen, especially when something bad’s going on. Damn near anything can happen. Some people just gotta look for the bad, and when it’s bad then you know it’s gonna get good. Garbage gets recycled at least. I guess that makes sense (laughs)."

…Riot is a very dark, very bleak album. Is that how you felt when you were making it?
"It was pretty dark. That studio in Bel Air on the top floor had a secret passage to it. You’d go in there and there was a jacuzzi and a sauna and there was a riot going on in there, everybody was rioting. The manager’s going, 'I want to get this one, I want that much money, I’ll take that, you can’t stop playing, you’ve gotta get up by yourself,' whoo whoo whoo whoo. Sounds like a riot to me."

You recorded a lot of it in a Winnebago.
"It’s fun to be able to move around, to open your eyes, to wake up somewhere else. Sometimes it has a lot to do with your outlook, your perspective. I’m sure if you wake up in a flood you wouldn’t think about dry land. When you move around you think different, if you think you lost any kind of a beat you just straight go to the ghetto. Take it back to the ghetto, that’s where it’s at. And don’t ask me about the rap by the way, ‘cause I love rap. Ask me who’s my favourite rapper."

So Sly, who’s your favourite rapper.
"They say he’s dead."

Mister Tupac?
"Then there’s another name of Rawsil. You haven’t heard of her yet. You have? She’s cool huh? DNA."

Talking about …Riot, is it true you banned timepieces in the studio?
"You just lock it up, so you couldn’t tell if it was day or night, if it’s this week or that week, you just play when you play and keep on playing. That worked out better for me than anybody else it seems."

Bobby Womack said he would play for five or six days straight.
"That’s what he thought. He was up for five or six days straight, he was hallucinating, I’d be going to bed every night. Sometimes I’d stay up if there was something inspiring."

But the vibe of the record was also down and dark.
"Well yeah, there was a group called the Ku Klux Klan, don’t forget that. And another group called the Black Panthers, and the Aryan Brothers, different groups and their beliefs. Everybody had their own way of telling everybody how to live, so it sounded like a riot to me."

Legend has it things took a turn for the worse when you moved from Frisco to LA. Is that fair?
"Yeah, that’s fair to say. But I’ve never really had it bad, I can’t complain. Even when I had drugs I had all of the drugs. Can’t complain about that."

How and when did you come off them?
"When I ran out. Just woke up and there was no more. People were into doing other things, that’s cool, I’ll get high on that. I had chances in life, I took a lot of acid. Guess you can tell huh?"

When was that, the ‘60s?
"‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000. I did acid not too long ago. Nah, not a lot of acid, just maybe onnnnnnnce…a day (laughs). Maybe once a month, twice, three four times a month. But I don’t even do that anymore, I’m looking for a new drug. I hope they come up with something because this coffee is getting my heartbeat a little fast. It’s getting very boring."

They need a drug for old people.
"Old people?"

And then he’s turning the tables, asking me questions. Are there any black people in England? Where do they live? Do they have alcohol problems? What drugs do they do? Do people still line up in Piccadilly Circus to get a fix? More pressingly, he wants to know how he can reclaim the Bouvier dog he bought in Belgium, now confiscated by UK customs. Before he leaves I ask him about the prospects of a full Family Stone reunion.

"Good chance, very, very good chance. I’m sure it will probably occur as soon as a couple of members start getting jealous that things are occurring anyway."

You’re all still on speaking terms?
"Oh yeah, things are cool. There’s one arsehole, but I wouldn’t even tell you his name is Larry. He’s alright, he’s just a little different. Came to the Grammys, he was gonna play and somehow he done some backstab bullshit with Prince, took my music and gave it to Prince. Then he got scared to come on stage because he thought I was gonna rough him up, but I wasn’t going to rough him up. I might now though. No, he’s a good guy, goes to church a lot."

Some of us would’ve been pleased with a few signatures, but got nearly half an hour of his time (and still got the autographs anyway). Returning to the foyer, I call a cab back to Bournemouth and am told five minutes, but half an hour later there’s still no sign. "I’m terribly sorry,” says the dispatcher, "the driver’s fallen asleep. It’ll be another ten minutes." No problem. I’m on Sly time.

Put That On Your Motherfucking Playlist

I love Cee-Lo and I really love wholly gratuitous pottymouthing in a record, so I can think of no better way to mark my first new post than with a Cee-Lo swearathon. Remember Eamon? You can forget him now.

The God Delusion

First post, old article (first published in The Word Nov 2009), let's see how this works.



RAKIM


The Seventh Seal


(RA/SMC)

Time was when no one had to ask who the best rapper was. People had their individual favourites, those they loved for their unhinged charisma (KRS-One) or insurrectionary geist (Chuck D); but it was a truth universally acknowledged that for the full poetic possibilities, for a voice that moved like liquid and rhymes that fell from the ether, there was only one contender. And he went by the name of Rakim Allah, or God to his fans.

The skinny 18-year-old who grappled with the mic so dextrously on his first single (“it’s biting me, fighting me, inviting me to rhyme”) reinvented the street corner art. Others were more lyrically profound, but no one else made the act of rhyming in rhythm seem such an effortless, instinctive joy. The sense that rap had found its chosen one persisted well beyond his heyday (the four-album 1986-92 lifespan of his partnership with his DJ, Eric B). A first solo album, arriving in 1997 after a five-year silence but cannily including a bonus disc of past classics, sold well. But its successor, 1999’s The Master, flopped disastrously, underlining the fact that in rap, unlike rock, immortality is the preserve of the deceased.

Or Dr Dre. Hip hop’s production Midas signed its rap God to his Aftermath label - one of those dream teams that sounds so perfect it can only fail. Rakim wasn’t the first to discover that, fresh from Eminem’s runaway triumph, Dre’s eyes had grown bigger than his belly. But the extent of the fall out was telling. He left the label three years later with mooted, modestly titled album Oh My God still incomplete, citing creative differences. Rakim didn’t appreciate Dre’s attempt to remake him as a “dark side rapper” (as he phrased it in a recent interview), as if he was nothing more than a forerunner for 50 Cent. If the mumbling bullet-magnet - who’d taken the name of an infamous stick-up kid who allegedly once robbed Rakim himself - from Rakim’s old Queens streets was the new benchmark, where did that leave the old vanity signing?

Out on his own, which is where he’s remained ever since, turning up every few months since 2006 to promise his next album, now titled The Seventh Seal, would be here soon. Released a decade to the month since The Master, the album is notable for Rakim’s lack of pulling power. The Dre tracks are long-since junked. Nas, one of many ‘90s rappers who cast themselves in his image, never turned up for the promised collaboration, and even contributions from hardy perennials Akon and Busta Rhymes have disappeared somewhere between the August press playback and November promo copies. The only ‘guest’ of note is Gwen Stefani, who appears via a Don’t Speak sample on the closing track, maternal tribute Dedicated. It shouldn’t happen to a deity.

Commercially crippling though it is, the star-stripped nature of the album isn’t entirely for the worst. Tracey Horton - formerly a mid-‘90s rapper more notable for being called Pudgee Tha Fat Bastard than for his records – steps in where a plump-budgeted album might have boasted Akon or T-Pain, and delivers three choruses without once crying “locked up” or reaching for the Autotune. In fact, Man Above, where he threatens to break into Tainted Love, but freeze-frames on the “ohhhhh!”, is one of the album’s red-letter moments. Likewise Walk These Streets, which would’ve been a cue for clichéd gunplay in lesser hands, but emerges as a soul-charged statement of self-purpose.

But The Seventh Seal is held back by beats which wouldn’t have sounded far-sighted had they succeeded The Master by months rather than years. Neither in tune with the times, nor riding the wonky idiosyncrasy of a visionary like Dilla, this is the sound of a man unwilling to be dragged out of his comfort zone. The best moments (the lovely Put It All To Music or thumping How To Emcee) have a gnarly old charm, the worst (the wretched Psychic Love and prosaic Satisfaction Guaranteed) are simply stolid.

The exception is Holy Are You, which utilises a well-worn Electric Prunes sample, but covers it in a quiet storm of electronic fuzz. Rakim, never one to leave the lily ungilded, responds by playing up his messianic image while delivering a pantheistic lesson in all the major religions served with a side-order of mythology, ancient and modern (“A pharaoh in ghetto apparel, stay blinged-up/ Fort Knox display, a modern day King Tut”). Rakim was draped in gold for the cover of Paid In Full 22 years ago, but has long since been overtaken by a generation of platinum stars, many with a fraction of his talent. The Seventh Seal won’t register with a younger generation of rap fans who barely know his name, nor will it outrage the handful of purists and ageing admirers who await his every outing like the second coming. But both he and they deserve a little better.