Red Pepper » Music

Chumbawamba: One last time

admin — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 10:00:19 +0000

So, the band split up. Big deal. Pop culture is too full of whining pop types anyway. There’s no use sticking around when you’re not being provocative any more, when you’re not shaking things up properly. The bands I loved, the bands that combined great pop with great politics, most of them didn’t last very long. They kicked out the jams and pissed off, fuelling the idea that pop music was at its best when it was transient, when politics in pop depended on change and (yes!) revolution.
The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Slits. Wire, the Raincoats. All my favourite punk idols didn’t last long, and this (as a young lad) didn’t bother me. It seemed natural. I took it for granted that great pop was about people rushing in, saying their piece beautifully, then disappearing.
And then, along with some other people, I started a band, and, and . . . and it stuck around for three decades.
That would have been unforgiveable in the late 70s. Pop/punk/rock music was supposed to capture a time and place, it was meant to be fleeting and ephemeral, throwaway. Wasn’t the beauty of pop culture that it reflected the times in which it belonged? As a young lad in Lancashire I grew up listening to David Bowie, captivated by the haircuts and album covers. Between 1971 and 1977 – Hunky Dory to “Heroes” – this freak endeared himself to my generation of teenagers by scaring our parents and, what’s more, scaring them with tunes and intelligence along with the shock.
Then along came the Pistols, whose two or three years made Bowie look like some Frank Sinatra marathon career. Appearing as if from nowhere, three or four great singles that tore up the cultural landscape, then blam, gone, disappeared. And with politics, too. Not the politics of the politicians, but the politics of ordinary people, spoken (and sung) in our language. Politics to get us reading and learning.
The early 1980s saw the Specials, skanking snappily into and out of their lifespan as a band, inspiring and important and essential. Again, a few short years and they were gone. Crass, revelatory and instructive and unlike any other band I’d ever heard, came and went in much the same space of time.
And so this band, Chumbawamba. We got together and began to make music, then cassettes, then records. We got played on John Peel (a highpoint!). Made albums. Sang about the Falklands war, then the miners’ strike, then Clause 28, then . . . then carried on. There didn’t seem to be any point stopping, because there was always something to write about, to sing about.
Thirty years.
I don’t personally regret a single day of it, but I am surprised that we could sustain our ethos for so long. The ethos, based on all those early years of listening and learning from other bands and from other cultural heroes (from Shelley to Brecht to William Morris to Ena Sharples), was simply to keep shaking things up. There were basic rules that we half-invented along the way. Say the things that need saying, in a way that pricks up people’s ears. Don’t pander to your audience. Don’t take anything for granted. If you get in the same room as a high-ranking Cabinet member: attack him. Simple things.
Having a hit single helped. I don’t mean it helped to justify our longevity – no, it helped take this ad-hoc anarchist roadshow into the heart of pop culture, albeit for a few short months. Singing ‘Free Mumia Abu-Jamal’ (a jailed black political activist) instead of the normal chorus to ‘Tubthumping’ on the David Letterman Show was a delight.
And of course we laughed through the whole thing. Practically from start to finish, we laughed. Our inspiration were the Dadaists, who set up in defiance against the horrors of the first world war, political and cultural troublemakers who dedicated their art to exposing the absurdities of the world.
And this ageing idea that was Chumbawamba, it could have carried on forever. But there was a realisation that, with the commitments of everyone in the band, it couldn’t have carried on being vital, interesting, relevant or challenging. Chumbawamba was never intended to be a band that could just turn up for gigs and play songs that people wanted to hear. And at the back of our minds, whether we knew it or not, was that gnawing realisation that we’d not only outlived the Pistols and Specials but that we were entering territory reserved for the likes of the Stones and the Who. Bands who, frankly, gave up on any sense of rebelliousness or creativity at least three decades ago.
So. Chumbawamba. Thirty years! Compared to the lifespans of the bands I grew up loving, it seems utterly absurd that we lasted this long without falling out, giving up, becoming a parody of ourselves, or running out of ideas. And now that we’ve got there – and been given our passes for the Home For Thirty-Year-Old Rockers – we’re doing the decent thing and stopping. Now. Just like that. Amicably and with a full knowledge of what we’re doing.
Someone told me a joke the other day. What’s the difference between a baby and a pop group? The baby eventually stops whining.

The future

Our main commitments are family, partners and children. It became obvious a long time ago that we were never going to neglect those things for the good of the band. I think some of us (I’m not saying who and to what extent) had grown out of that place where you throw everything of yourself into the band.
What to expect in the future from Chumbawamba people? Assorted things. Creative things, writing, music and possibly appearances at karaoke bars trying to find ‘Tubthumping’ to sing along to, pulling on strangers’ sleeves and saying ‘I was in this band, once, honestly.’ That sort of thing.

Music first

Billy Bragg used to talk about how the music had to come first, politics second and for a while I resented what he said – the ideas and politics were always the starting point for us, for years and years. But over time I came to accept that he was right, and that we were in denial – our tunes and songs and melodies had to come first, because without them no-one would listen to the ideas and the politics.
‘Tubthumping’ was an extension of that idea – a song that was first and foremost universal and uplifting, positive and celebratory. We thought that by having that celebratory chorus matched with a sweetly-sung ‘pissing the night away’ we were subverting the form. I’m still unsure of whether it worked in that way. But it got us onto prime time TV in USA talking about anarchism to Roseanne Barr, and that was sort of the point. Plus, it paid for a lot of good causes. But probably more importantly, as a ‘good tune’, it avoided us being ghettoised.

Towns beginning with ‘B’

Class was and is important to me personally and to the band. I can’t ignore where I’m from, and my ideas and culture spring from that background. We were mainly a working class band, mainly from northern industrial towns, and mainly from places beginning with the letter ‘B’. Seriously. If you weren’t from somewhere beginning with the letter ‘B’, you had no chance!
The John Prescott situation [when band member Danbert Nobacon tipped an ice bucket over the Labour deputy leader at the 1998 Brit awards] was an example of our continuing abhorrence of the way the Labour Party sold out the working class. The Liverpool dock workers’ strike was a cause to champion during the opposition years – then when Blair won, the support from ‘the top’ for the strikers was suddenly dropped. Prescott, a former seaman, fulfilled his role as the working class northern monkey, there to bully the Oxbridge yah-yahs, by siding with Blair and refusing to meet with the dock workers. Both Blair’s personal bouncer and his badge of class credentials.
So yes, we were always a working class band. We had roots and those roots defined our opinions. And still do.

What the milkman whistled

I recently watched a Youtube video of the band King Blues playing in some ridiculously large hall to a packed audience of young people going mad – to the King Blues’ heavily political, opinionated, radical ideas. There’s an audience of young people with a thirst for radical ideas, radical politics in music – but that audience doesn’t need to engage with the popular/national media any more. People know about things through the internet and social media, it’s not Top of the Pops any more.
I do regret that transition. I loved how, when I was learning about music, popular culture was also mainstream culture – when Bowie flirted with sexuality, when the Pistols sang their attack on the queen, these things became front page news. Instantly. So we all knew about it. It affected all of us, London and Burnley alike. It was high culture and low culture combined. It was pan-generational too.
The internet is incredibly divisive in that people find what they want instead of being confronted by things they didn’t know. Kids listening to the latest music will pass it around their peer group but it won’t break out of that world. Pop music used to be characterised by being ‘what the milkman whistled’. The milkman now has headphones, he has his own choice of music that we’re not privy to, and certainly doesn’t whistle!
Now a band as interesting and stimulating and powerful as King Blues can exist without my mum and dad ever knowing about them. That’s sad, I think. Because I want everyone to know about King Blues. I want King Blues, like the Pistols, on mainstream TV and on the front pages of our newspapers.

Selling out

That whole period where people thought that your politics could be defined by a record label – aaaagh! I hated the DIY thing after a while because it became a religion. I remember spending weeks folding record sleeves and home-printing leaflets and booklets to give away for free – I loved it. But then it became a set of rules, a way of defining yourself. Yuk. People outside our concerts wanting to vent their anger at us for wearing leather shoes. No, really. People putting the politics of DIY above the politics of poverty and class and war and sexuality and inequality etc.
So, selling out – selling who out? Shit, we spent that whole two or three years with EMI giving money away to people who wanted and needed it.
During the miners’ strike we worked closely together with the West Leeds Socialist Workers Party. We became friends with them, and realised that whatever differences we had with their politics, they were our allies in this. We shared a van, shared meetings, shared journeys to picket lines. It made us realise that we didn’t care about ‘selling out’ but about trying to be effective in the world.
Too many people cry ‘sell out!’ without working out first what is being sold, and why.
Additional interview by Steve Platt. Chumbawamba are playing a few final gigs in Leeds, Berlin and Oslo from 31 October to 3 November. See www.chumba.com/finalshows.php for details

Bring on your wrecking ball: the politics of Bruce Springsteen

admin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:00:42 +0000

On a cold, wet day towards the end of June, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band followed their eight pantechnicons into Manchester. They were there for the 39th leg of their North American and European tour, promoting Springsteen’s latest album Wrecking Ball. After monsoon conditions all day, the rain stopped as the band took the stage of the Etihad stadium. This was the beginning of the great Bruce Springsteen show, part concert, part revivalist meeting, filled with theatricality and a fair amount of humour and pathos. The E Street big band sound provided a powerful backing to the lyrics of the 30 songs that filled the next three and a half hours.
At the start of the European tour, Springsteen explained how his deepest motivation ‘comes out of the house that I grew up in and the circumstances that were set up there, which is mirrored around the United States with the level of unemployment we have right now’. In that house in Freehold New Jersey, Springsteen’s father worked intermittently at the Karagheusian Rug Mill (which left him partially deaf), the local bus garage and for a while at the county jail. Unemployment was frequent, however, and it destroyed his confidence and sense of worth, leaving his wife as the organiser of the family home. This tension between bad work and no work has been a perennial theme in Springsteen’s writing, alongside a search for freedom and self-discovery. It also left him with a strong attachment to places and the memories stored up in them.
When the Giants’ stadium in New Jersey was up for demolition, he sang the first version of ‘Wrecking Ball’ at a farewell concert, developing the physical process of destruction into a brilliant metaphor of class violence and the ‘flat destruction of some American ideals and values’. He sings of how ‘all our little victories and glories/ Have turned into parking lots’. And he repeats the invocation: ‘Hold tight to your anger, and don’t fall to your fears.’
In ‘Death of My Home Town’, he sings of the place where he grew up:
The Marauders raided in the dark
And brought death to my home town
They destroyed our families, factories
And they took our homes
They left our bodies in the plains
The vultures picked our bones.
Roots
Springsteen is firmly rooted in the tradition of America’s great popular singer-songwriters. He writes of love, death and loss, loneliness, growing up and work, but also of resistance and rebellion, much of it couched in religious metaphor about the search for the promised land within the American Dream. Narrative songs such as ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘The River’ stand comparison with the very best of popular songs but also cast a nod in the direction of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and John Steinbeck.
He has pursued this lineage as a conscious choice. He has read widely, sung with Pete Seeger, and recorded gospel music and labour and civil rights movement songs. The various themes are deliberately brought together in his new album to ‘contextualise historically that this has happened before’.
This is most notable in ‘We Are Alive’ with its implicit reference to ‘The Ballad of Joe Hill’. Here the spirits of the strikers killed in the 1877 transport strike in Maryland join with civil rights protesters killed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and Mexican migrants currently dying in the southern desert:
We are alive
And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark
Our souls and spirits rise
To carry the fire and light the spark
To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart
We are alive
Patriotism and class
Springsteen sings from the world of the US manual working class. A world with union cards and union meeting halls; a world that has been taken apart over the past 30 years as industries have closed and many have been economic conscripts into imperial wars. In giving voice to this, he calls upon elements of post-revolutionary, post-civil war America with a vision of a genuinely democratic working class republic – something that has been stolen by the marauders, the robber barons and bankers, but which is somehow still lived out in the resilience of its working people.
This patriotism is a central part of his being. He describes it as an ‘angry sort of patriotism’, something that he doesn’t want to cede to ‘the Right side of the street’. This has often led to misunderstanding, as was the case with ‘Born in the USA’. Deeply critical and acerbic about the America that came out of the Vietnam war, it was nevertheless – with its anthemic chorus – admired by Ronald Reagan. Springsteen has become philosophical over such misinterpretations, recognising that no artist has the ‘fascist power’ to control the meaning of their words. It has led him to talk repeatedly of a dialogue with his audience. It is likely that a song on the current record, ‘We Take Care of Our Own’, will spark such a conversation. Again it is rhetorical, holding the American ideal up to the mirror and suggesting that ‘the road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone’.
In the US, where the flag is ever-present and the oath of allegiance spoken daily by children at school, it is easy to see why a fight over what it means to be ‘American’ is a necessary plank of left politics. However, the tensions between the US as revolutionary republic and imperial power are obvious.
If patriotism causes some problems, the class roots of his writings clearly provides him with a universal appeal. In 2010 at Hyde Park he opened with ‘London Calling’, a tribute to Joe Strummer and the Clash, and he has recalled the 1970s and his affinity with punk and how easy it is to ‘forget that class was only tangentially touched upon in popular music… at the time’. It was noticeable that in the first European date of the tour in Seville, he spoke at length and in Spanish about how the workers were being made to pay for the crisis and saluting the indignados. The next day, the Andalucian UGT, the Spanish union federation, had a video of the speech on its website.
Defiance
Springsteen and the band have amassed a huge songbook, and while there is a range of musical styles and themes, the dark side of American life is never far from the surface. He celebrates the freedom of the streets (‘We walk the way we want to walk/We talk the way we want to talk’) but the power of the police and the patrol car is never far away. After New York City police shot dead an unarmed West African immigrant in 1999 he wrote the song ‘American Skin (41 Shots)’ and in defiance of the NYPD played it at Madison Square Garden. In response they refused the normal courtesy escort for the band, called for a boycott of his shows and organised vociferous anti-Springsteen protests.
With the recession, and the death of his close friend Clarence Clemons, this darker side has taken the foreground. Enraged by the destruction of the material world of the working class, whereby ‘the banker man grows fatter, the working man grows thin’, he goads them to
Bring on your wrecking ball
C’mon and take your best shot
Let me see what you’ve got
Bring on your wrecking ball
Because we will survive, and like the ‘Jack of all Trades’,
You use what you’ve got
And you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun I’d find the
bastards and shoot ’em on sight
Music and politics
The contradiction involved in Springsteen, now a multi-millionaire, singing with the voice of the poor and oppressed is obvious. He is not alone here but his resolution of the problem has been unique. His solution was to tour, to play to large stadium audiences, tell the stories and keep the flame alive. He talks about singing with the band as his ‘job of work’, and of the ‘hardcore work thing’ shared by all the band members. On stage he will talk of the ‘foolishness of rock and roll’. In a master class with young musicians he stressed the need to understand their art as being both intrinsically trivial and ‘more important than death itself’.
While cynics would say that he does all this for the money, and he would agree that the money is important, there is more to it than that. This was made clear when Michael Sandel selected a Springsteen concert as one example of What Money Can’t Buy in his new book on the moral limits of markets. Criticising economists in the US, who have argued that the band could net an additional £4 million for every concert with the ‘correct’ pricing policy, Sandel points out that pricing out the people who understand and want to listen to and sing with the songs would change the nature of the concert, making it worthless.
Given his celebrity status, it is difficult to see how Springsteen can keep in touch with life on the streets and retain the voice to sing in the way he does. When asked, he talks of remaining ‘interested and awake’. He is wary of formal politics and though he had clear hopes for the Obama administration – he played at the inauguration (see below) – his disappointment is palpable. He has been energised by the Occupy Wall Street movement and has hopes that this can change the ‘national conversation’, focusing it on inequality for the first time for 30 years. Wrecking Ball is his contribution to this conversation.

Playing for the president

Bruce Springsteen long avoided commenting on White House politics after Ronald Reagan famously misappropriated ‘Born in the USA’ during his re-election campaign. The president ignored the song’s searing critique to claim it contained ‘a message of hope’ that he would make reality if re-elected. At the time Springsteen described it as a ‘manipulation’.
George W Bush and the Iraq War caused him to re-think. In 2004 he backed the Democrat candidate, John Kerry, playing 33 concerts as part of the ‘Vote for Change’ tour. He wrote that ‘for the last 25 years I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. This year, however, for many of us the stakes have risen too high to sit this election out.’
After Bush’s re-election Springsteen became an increasingly outspoken critic. In response to Hurricane Katrina he adapted Blind Alfred Reed’s protest song about the Great Depression, ‘How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?’, transposing the original character of the song’s charlatan doctor onto Bush. He dedicated it to ‘President Bystander’.
Springsteen publicly backed Obama when the future president was still battling Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He enthused: ‘After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project.’ Springsteen played at several election rallies – and the president’s inauguration concert.
To coincide with the inauguration he released the upbeat album Working on a Dream. The title track echoed that of Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father. But the album itself lacked direction. The new cheery Bruce had lost his distinctive voice.
Wrecking Ball has seen Springsteen reclaim old territory. As he acknowledged at a press conference in Paris, ‘You can never go wrong with pissed off and rock ’n’ roll,’ and these songs are angrier than anything he’s penned before. Some of that anger is clearly directed at Obama.
Springsteen was only cautiously critical of the president in Paris: ‘He kept General Motors alive, he got through healthcare – though not the public system I would have wanted . . . But big business still has too much say in government and there have not been as many middle or working class voices in the administration as I expected. I thought Guantanamo would have been closed by now.’ His music, however, offers a far more damning assessment. The single ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ tackles not only Obama’s America but also Springsteen’s involvement in party politics:
I been knocking on the door that holds the throne,
I been stumbling on good hearts turned to stone,
The road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone
Springsteen has said he’ll be staying on the sidelines during the 2012 election, commenting that ‘the artist is supposed to be the canary in the cage’. That hasn’t stopped the Obama campaign putting ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ on the official ‘campaign soundtrack’. It seems that Obama, like Reagan, recognises the power of Springsteen’s critical patriotism, even if he fails to recognise its critique.
Emma Hughes

Shedcasting in Surbiton

admin — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:00:40 +0000

Mark Coles in his garden. Photo: Anna Musial
Surbiton, epitome of the Surrey commuter belt and setting for twee 1970s sitcom The Good Life. Days after the jubilee, the neighbours are clearly in no rush to take down the red, white and blue bunting. It’s the kind of place where you imagine the newsagents take care to stock enough copies of the Daily Mail.
On the face of it there is nothing remarkable about this particular garden. Its trampoline and slide indicate the presence of a young family, and the beds of broad beans and leafy vegetables suggest modest horticultural ambitions. The shed is an ordinary garden shed, used among other things to store tools and kids’ toys. Only the posters of Johnny Cash and Jimi Hendrix suggest that anything more rock ’n’ roll might emanate from within its walls. In fact, it’s the ‘studio’ from which radio broadcaster and DJ Mark Coles produces his internet radio show The Shed.
You might have heard Coles’ dulcet northern tones before. Having spent 13 years as a news reporter for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (for which he still contributes music features, including recent interviews with Wilko Johnson and Peter Hook), he’s thankful for the opportunity to live life at a more sedate pace. It must have come as a shock for someone used to recording light news features for Radio Sussex to be dropped into Mogadishu with US forces as a greenhorn war reporter.
‘It was when I narrowly avoided getting shot in Somalia that I first thought “I’m not altogether sure this is for me”,’ he laughs. ‘You’d be really put through your paces these days. But back then we were pretty much left to wander around with a microphone. It was madness really.’
A passion for Peel
Coles traces back his love of radio, like so many young Brits of his generation, to the experience of listening to John Peel’s legendary show on Radio 1. ‘I was sad as a young teenager and would write out the running order of the show and give each track a mark out of five,’ he confesses. His own mature broadcasting style exhibits a similarly lugubrious character and personal warmth to that of Peel, along with a genuine and unpretentious passion for the music.
I’m clearly not the first to notice the similarity: ‘My colleagues say that when I’m broadcasting from the shed “we can hear it in your voice, you’re so relaxed, your voice has dropped down a couple of tones.’’’ Coles himself wasn’t really aware of it until his then producer warned him before he was due to interview Peel’s widow, Sheila. ‘I listened back to the recording and thought, oh God, I did, I sounded just like him!’
But while Coles clearly owes a debt to Peel, perhaps particularly so in the domestic anecdotes, which recall Peel’s Radio 4 show Home Truths, he is not consciously mimicking him. ‘It is just that in listening to Peel I suppose I learnt unconsciously how you could broadcast naturally, in your own voice, telling stories, saying what you really thought.’
Peel also indirectly helped Coles to one of his biggest breaks as a music broadcaster, when he described the then unknown US rock act The White Stripes as ‘possibly the best live act I’ve seen since punk rock’. Coles figured they must be worth speaking to. With the NME advertising their first UK gigs in 2001, he pushed their lead vocalist Jack White for an interview. The resulting exchange was broadcast on the Today programme the day before they departed back to the US. That evening, on which a last secret gig had been arranged, the media were literally banging on the door to be allowed in.
‘It just exploded,’ Coles recalls. ‘Jack was asking me after the gig, “Man, what have you done?”’ Although Coles modestly rejects the claim to be ‘the man who broke The White Stripes on this side of the Atlantic’, Jack White clearly recalls how important his contribution was. A few weeks ago he recorded an interview that was broadcast in full exclusively on The Shed to promote his new album Blunderbuss.
World of Music
Coles’ interest in music from around the world was stimulated by his stint as host of the BBC World Service show World of Music when the former presenter, the legendary Charlie Gillett, died. ‘It was a wonderful show, I loved it,’ Coles says, ‘and I stepped in to stop them from just axing it from the schedule straight away, which management tended to do once they had lost their iconic presenters – it was the same with John Peel’s show on World Service.’
After just over a year with Coles at the helm, World of Music was finally dropped, but the decision was certainly not driven by audience demand. ‘It was incredible the amount of emails we had trying to keep the show on air,’ Coles says. ‘People were begging, even offering to pay to keep it going.’ But to no avail. The cuts to the funding that the World Service received from the Foreign Office were no doubt at least partly to blame, but it still seems shortsighted to lose a platform that allowed 142 million listeners worldwide to listen to music from all around the globe.
Despite an obvious and infectious enthusiasm for a wide range of musical styles, Coles has little time for the label ‘world music’. ‘It doesn’t really mean anything, and it can be quite excluding. Take Spoek Mathambo, a South African artist from the house scene over there, but drawing on electro, indie rock, samples, all sorts. I first heard of him when someone sent me a YouTube link of a cover he did of [Manchester post-punk outfit] Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control”. I mean, you see “South African house cover of Joy Division” and you’re going to open it, aren’t you! Well, his album deserves to be massive, it’s wonderful, it’ll be in my top five for the year. But you’ll be hard pushed to find it in a record shop. If you do, it’ll probably be in the “world music” section. His [Mathambo’s] career could suffer for it.’
So, too, Coles bemoans the culture of the ‘purist’ expert in other musical cultures, the kind of anthropological interest (for example, in different kora-playing techniques) that is at root a form of neocolonial classification. By contrast, Coles values a more immediate response to the music, something he valued in Charlie Gillett.
That said, Coles suggests that playing music from so many different places has expanded his horizons and got him thinking about what’s going on in the world. ‘If you listen to the Tunisian rapper El Général’s song “Rais Lebled” you can hear the anger and vitriol against the regime even without understanding the lyrics,’ he says.
Gesture of defiance
Social revolution is unlikely to break out in Surbiton anytime soon, but the retreat to the shed has been a gesture of defiance, in a very English sort of way. ‘After World of Music was axed I was just getting exhausted, burnt out, and I wanted to spend a couple of years with the children before they’d be at school,’ Coles says. Although he was offered other presenting work on the World Service, and still does some on a semi-regular basis, he was ready for a break. ‘Why struggle through all the traffic to work in the daily grind of a broadcasting studio on someone else’s terms, when you can go down the bottom of your garden with a battery-laptop and mic and present the programme from there?’ The BBC’s loss was the internet’s gain.
I was expecting at least a small mixing desk and some sound-proofing. But no. The sound of the trains that periodically run behind the shed are muffled by a duvet. That’s about as technical as it gets. ‘It takes me about a day and a half to produce each show,’ Coles says. ‘But most of that is just on getting permissions for all the tracks I play. Apart from that, I do a bit of tinkering to get it the right length and put fade‑outs on the tracks, and upload it to the web. But it really isn’t complicated. Internet radio is back to the old DIY ethic of punk basically. Anyone can do it. You don’t need loads of equipment. It’s like a level playing field.’
The availability of music on demand via the internet means that people with regular web access can listen to pretty much whatever they like – any style, any era. It’s all very different to listening habits before the internet.
‘It used to be that you’d have to take a real chance on a band you hadn’t heard before, or else you’d be trying to borrow things from lending libraries and tape them at home,’ says Coles. ‘But today’s bands are saying things like “we really like the sound of the drummer” on some obscure 1958 recordings. Take a band like Alabama Shakes. They’re all about 23. But listen to their stuff and you can hear they’re drawing on Staxx, Atlantic soul, country, blues and all these different influences but giving it their own twist.’
But not everything about the way the internet makes music available meets Coles’ approval. ‘Take Last.fm. Total nonsense! It tells me all this stuff I’m supposed to like. Well I don’t! And I don’t care for these automatically generated “radio” stations either. Ultimately what I do is use new technologies to do something quite traditional. I still value a DJ talking passionately about what they’ve discovered, telling little stories, relating to the listener in a warm, personal way.’
And so, in a garden shed in what he refers to as the ‘Ditton delta’, Mark Coles does just that. And people are starting to take notice. Already picked up by World Radio Switzerland, a station in Australia and some in the US, Coles is hoping that his show can be syndicated around the world to the sorts of radio stations that previously broadcast World of Music. He’s realistic enough to know that there’s little money in radio these days, and that internet broadcasting alone won’t feed his children. But while The Shed’s audience might not match the numbers he got on the World Service, it’s clear that he loves what he’s doing. And if you listen, you might love it too.
Listen to The Shed: website, Mixcloud, Facebook.

Fence Records: ‘We’re not trendy, we’re not competing, we just do our thing’

admin — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 15:16:30 +0000

Hailing from the village of Cellardyke, East Fife, the Fence Records co-op of coastal-dwelling musicians has created a unique style of electro-infused folk. While the artists record their own material, they continue the folk tradition of sharing songs among the collective and often collaborate live.
KT Tunstall, a former member of Fence, once complained that they lacked commercial ambition. The collective chose to ignore such criticism and last year’s Mercury nomination for King Creosote and Jon Hopkins’ Diamond Mine proved the musical wisdom in chasing originality not commerciality.
Could you start off by telling us a bit about your music?
I record music as The Pictish Trail and sometimes as Silver Columns with my friend Adem. I started writing songs in about 2001, and released a mini-album on Fence Records in 2002. As soon as I left university, I went full time at Fence – organising gigs for the artist roster at first, and then gradually taking on more label responsibilities. I’m now co-director of Fence Records Ltd… oooh!
How did Fence Records get started?
Well… The label was started up by Kenny Anderson (aka King Creosote) in around 1996. He’d been in a few moderately successful bluegrass bands and had toured all over the UK and Europe throughout the early nineties… but suddenly found himself without a band to play with. He purchased a Fostex digital 8-track machine and one of the first generation CD-R burners, and started recording lo-fi albums, playing all the instruments himself.
Burning copies of these albums, individually one by one, putting them in hand-assembled artwork, and selling them in the CD shop he had a day job with, he started a label.
Kenny released recordings by his brothers (Lone Pigeon and Pip Dylan), attracted the attention of his other musician friends – James Yorkston, Billy Pilgrim, Gummi Bako – and all of a sudden St Andrews had its own music scene. The Fence Collective was born, and 40 albums down the line, King Creosote still releases music through Fence (and also Domino Records).
Cellardyke must be a very musical village! Is the label still run out of there?
Yup, the label is still based in the East Neuk of Fife. Kenny’s based in Crail, and I live in Cellardyke most of the time (but I’m spending increasing amounts of time on the island of Eigg, in the Hebrides). The internet has made it possible for us to operate outside of the city scene – everyone all over the world is only an email away. I think the fact that we’re from somewhere quite remote actually attracts folk to our label – we’re not trendy, we’re not competing, we just do our thing.
Fence is an inspiring alternative to the multinational record company, so it’s useful to hear how such alternatives are practically organised. How is Fence set up?
Fence now operates as a limited company – of which Kenny and myself are directors. We take dividends from the business, and we both have an equal share. As we’re both musicians in our own right we tend to focus on our own careers, and this tends to steer how the business is run. Following a Mercury nomination last year, Kenny’s profile has been raised dramatically, which has meant he’s been a lot busier with King Creosote stuff. This has been great for Fence, as he is the label’s biggest ambassador. I’ve spent most of the past year working on Fence events that can harness this new audience.
It’s not a one man show, though. Kate Canaveral has been helping to run our webshop, which is increasingly becoming a full-time job. David Galletly, a fantastic artist from Glasgow, has done a lot of work for us too, as has our pal Hardsparrow, and Gummi Bako.
You describe Fence as having a do-it-yourself work ethic. How does that inform the day-to-day running of the label?
The label is very much cottage industry – we all work from our respective homes. We used to burn CD-Rs and spraypaint/stamp all the artwork individually, so in that respect we were very DIY. We now have things manufactured by other companies but the day-to-day running of the business is still done from our homes. It’s fine, unless you have to wait in all day for a delivery.
Does Fence enable artists to make a living out of music who might not be able to ‘go professional’ otherwise?
I think we help. We don’t offer our acts any advances or anything like that but we try and give them a platform so that they can make music their life. Not all of our acts want to do music for a living, though. It’s a very competitive, heartless industry at times.
The most important part of any business is ideas. If you don’t have new ones, then you’re fucked. It doesn’t matter how uncommercial or how weird the idea is. As long as you’re consistently trying to innovate the way you communicate with people, you’ll do well.
With the increasing professionalisation of the arts there’s a danger that culture, be it music, literature or art, is left to the ‘professionals’. Fence seems more participative – how do you encourage people to create culture for themselves rather than just consume it?
We’re approachable, I guess. I think the live events that we put on really show how grassroots this all is – and how easy it is to share music with one another by supporting fellow musicians and promoting their music. I know we’ve inspired a bunch of other labels to start because they’ve told me. It’s a great thing.
Some Fence artists have signed to other record labels (King Creosote, James Yorkston) but are still very much involved in the Fence Collective. Does it devalue Fence?
It makes Fence stronger. As a label, we can only do so much. There’s very little infrastructure to Fence. We can only get a certain amount of attention from the press and radio and the public at large. When one of our acts signs to a bigger label that is the greatest advert for us because we’re always keen to keep our association and friendship with the act.
When did Fence start putting on festivals?
Kenny ran all-day events called Sunday socials way back in the early noughties. They were incredible. It’d be in a pub, free entry, they’d start around 2pm, and it’d be live music from Fence Collective folk until the bar shut. Very drunken affairs.
What festivals have you got lined up this year?
Quite a few things, actually but the next two are called ‘Eye O’ the Dug’ and ‘Away Game’. Eye O’ the Dug is happening in St Andrews in April, over the 14th and 15th – tickets available from the Fence Records website. Away Game is happening on the island of Eigg in July – tickets have already sold out. They are both going to be amazing, the line-ups are phenomenal.
The people who live on the Isle of Eigg have an inspirational story – securing community ownership of Eigg after years of insecure tenure…
We love Eigg, and all who live in her. They’re a great community – and big party lovers! The islanders throw their own event in June to celebrate the ‘buy-out’ and it’s a beautiful thing. Away Game isn’t directly related to that but the island is the perfect setting. Great people.

Venezuela’s hip-hop revolutionaries

admin — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:03:37 +0000

Students perform at a hip hop workshop in a barrio (low income neighbourhood) near Charallave, about one hour south of Caracas. Photo: Global Faction/Alborada Films
The Hip Hop Revolución (HHR) movement was founded in 2003 and brings together like-minded young people from across Venezuela. As well as organising several international revolutionary hip-hop festivals in the country, HHR has created 31 hip-hop schools across the country, which teenagers can attend in conjunction with their normal day-to-day schooling.
While filming in Venezuela for our forthcoming documentary on HHR we were told that normally those attending the hip-hop schools learn hip-hop skills for four days per week and have one day per week of political discussion. However, in some schools those attending had decided they preferred the ratio the other way round. Once participants have ‘graduated’ from the course, they are encouraged to become tutors to the next batch of attendees. Most graduates come from low-income backgrounds, and many go on to establish schools in their local areas.
At a hip-hop school we visited near Charallave, about an hour south of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, one student told us how he had done just that. First, he approached the political leaders in the area, and they agreed that the project was a strong idea. Then he approached the gang leaders in the neighbourhood, and they agreed to make sure the kids got to and from their classes without being hassled. To many of the participants, the hip-hop schools are another element of a new spirit of unity and solidarity in their local communities. In their eyes, hip hop and the political struggle are inextricably linked, and this is their chance to play a tangible part in building the better future they want to grow up in.
HHR took us from the school to a nearby barrio, where music equipment had been set up for a show local HHR members were putting on for the community. As the music started kids came out from their houses; most of them were still dressed in their school uniforms. Entire families came out to their balconies to watch what was going on below.
These hip-hop workshops are a monthly occurrence, so the young people in the area know when to come. Unfortunately, that afternoon it was pouring with rain, which apparently kept many people indoors. Nevertheless, a crowd quickly grew. Many of the kids were very young, and without shoes or a care in the world, they washed their feet in the huge puddles of rainwater. The barrios are at the heart of the HHR movement, and the crowd at the workshop we visited were captivated by the rapping and break-dancing on display.
Our trip to Venezuela also coincided with the inauguration and first ever conference of CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. Thirty-three presidents from all of the countries of the Americas (except the US and Canada) were in Caracas for the event. Photo exhibitions displayed on central avenues of Caracas in the days preceding the conference expressed solidarity with the people of Cuba, Libya and Iraq, the workers movement in Argentina, the Palestinian people and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US among others.
‘CELAC is the most important development in the last 200 years,’ Jamil, a member of HHR, told us. ‘We respect [Venezuelan president Hugo] Chávez because he understands our struggle, but we are always looking to be self-critical in order to keep our revolution moving in the right direction . . .
‘I’m a revolutionary from my heart. Chavez fucks around and flips on us, we’re gonna flip on him. And that’s what I think he expects from us. You know what I mean? That’s why he is so serious with his proposals and with what he does. He has the confidence that he won’t flip on the people. And he understands that capitalism is crumbling. And this is our time, this is our moment, you know, for Latin America, for Venezuela and for us.’
Jody McIntyre and Pablo Navarrete are the directors of a forthcoming film on the Hip Hop Revolución movement. More information: www.alborada.net/alboradafilms

Beyond bling-bling: rap in Cuba

admin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:00:56 +0000

Onstage is Instinto, a female trio extraordinaire. The divas are
wearing shimmering strapless dresses with high heels. As a salsa beat kicks in, they rap in a lyrical prose, spin on their heels, and sing in three part harmony. This is Cuban rap – where the streets meet highbrow classical training from Havana’s best arts schools. It is a US-derived subculture that has flourished on the island despite the United States’ decades-long embargo against Cuba.
This year President Obama has relaxed travel restrictions to Cuba and has begun granting visas for visiting Cuban artists. In August, the Grammy-winning singer Pablo Milanes toured the US for the first time since 1979. Many are celebrating these openings as the beginning of the end of the embargo.
It’s worth remembering, though, that besides the hardships caused by the embargo, there can be benefits to living in a bubble. Islands are hotspots of biodiversity. And Cuban art has developed a particular richness and vitality because of its recent isolation.
Take Cuban rap. Rap was originally an American import. In the early 1990s, young Cubans built antennae from wire coat hangers and dangled their radios out of their windows to listen to American radio. On the airwaves of Miami radio station 99 Jamz FM, they heard US rap acts like 2 Live Crew and Naughty by Nature.
Aspiring Cuban emcees rapping at house parties and in small local venues started out crassly mimicking their American counterparts. ‘Just like you, just like you, nigger, we wanna be a nigger like you,’ Primera Base rapped about their hero Malcolm X. The group was known to sport thick imitation gold chains and fake diamonds – even though ‘bling bling’ was a remote concept given Cuba’s endemic scarcities.
A life of its own
But Cuban rap soon took on a life of its own. Unlike other hip hop fans around the world, young Cubans had little access to the latest trends in American rap. With only two state-run channels on TV, they couldn’t tune in to the globally televised Yo! MTV Raps to see pioneers Public Enemy or NWA. Havana was not on the circuit for touring acts such as De La Soul.
Lacking samplers, mixers, and albums – the key tools for making background beats – because of the embargo, Cuban rappers instead drew on a rich heritage of traditional Cuban music. They recreated the rhythmic pulse of hip hop with instruments such as the melodic Batá drums, typically used in ceremonies of the Afro-Cuban Santería religion. In the heavily Afro-Cuban-influenced eastern provinces, Madera Limpia rapped live with an entire ensemble of Cuban instruments. The group Obsesión used instrumentation to evoke the era of slavery. In their song ‘Mambí’, the gentle strumming of a berimbau musical bow and water sounds produced by the traditional palo de agua give the sense of being near a river as identified with the rural roots of slaves.
In the tradition of artists such as Vocal Sampling – who conjured up full salsa orchestras solely through their voices – Cuban rappers also developed the vocal percussive art of the human beatbox, mimicking not just drum machines but congas, trumpets, and even song samples. The lack of digital technology forced Cubans to innovate and gave the music a decidedly Cuban flavor.
Cuban rap is also special for the calibre of its lyrics. Thanks to the country’s excellent and free schools, Cuban rappers – although predominantly black and from poorer neighborhoods – received a high level of education. Cuba’s most prolific rap producer, Pablo Herrera, was a professor of English at the University of Havana.
Rap lyrics mined Cuba’s literature and history in their portrayals of the tribulations of street life. ‘I have a race that is dark and discriminated/I have a work day that demands and gives nothing,’ rapped Hermanos de Causa in their song ‘Tengo’ (I Have). The song reworked a celebrated 1964 poem that had praised the achievements of the revolution for blacks; a new generation was watching those gains eroding. On one of their tracks, the group Anónimo Consejo pay homage to the mulatto independence fighter, Antonio Maceo, and Pedro Ivonet, who founded the Independent Party of Colour in 1908. The rapper refers to himself as a cimarron desobediente, or rebellious runaway slave, in his criticism of police harassment of young blacks.
Stark contrast
The trajectory of Cuban rap has been in stark contrast to American rap, which was quickly and successfully packaged for commercial distribution. Hip hop originated in the recreational outdoor jams and battles of the Bronx during the 1970s. But when the Sugar Hill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ became a hit in 1979, the genre proved it had a lucrative market. Over the next decade, global entertainment networks promoted influential rap artists such as Run DMC and Salt-n-Pepa.
By the late 1990s, commercial rap had become ascendant within hip hop culture. The earlier diversity of sounds and themes was eschewed in favor of a catchy pop formula with a one‑dimensional focus on consumption.
Cuban rappers avoided this fate for a number of reasons. One was government support. Cubans were initially discouraged from participating in this foreign, ‘racially divisive’ culture by the authorities. In 1999, one journalist brought up the concern that rap was creating ‘ghettoes’ in a country where supposedly none existed. But by the following year, the state realised the need to relate to the rappers because of their growing appeal to black Cuban youth. The yearly hip hop festivals organized by the independent Grupo Uno were attracting some 3,000 youth out in the Alamar housing projects on the periphery of Havana. Hundreds of rap groups were forming across the country.
In July 2001, the newly appointed long-haired minister of culture, a poet, met with rappers to discuss forming a rap agency. As with other musical genres, where artists were full-time employees of the state and paid a monthly salary for performing, composing, and rehearsing, prominent rappers too entered into this arrangement. The Cuban state invited American rappers Common, Dead Prez, Mos Def and Talib Kweli to Cuba for the festivals and to meet local artists. So while kids in other countries were being inundated with commercial rap’s gratuitous criminality and blatant consumerism, Cuban youth were discussing the politics of hip hop culture with some of the most intelligent and incisive American rappers.
Innovation in censorship
The sheltered existence of Cuban rap prevented it from encountering a fate similar to that of American rap. Cuban rap was not immune from commercial pressures and state sponsorship has had an impact on the music too. But censorship, like seclusion, may also foster innovation.
Cuban artists had perfected techniques of metaphor, allusion and ambiguity. Just as filmmakers such as the legendary Tomas Gutiérrez Alea or the black director Sergio Giral defended the racial politics of some of their films by saying that they took place in the era of slavery, so too the rapper Magia of Obsesión defended her song about prostitution by saying that it was about capitalist countries. But Magia had never seen a capitalist country, nor even left Cuba, when she wrote the song. The result is a textured and evocative account of the poor women who work the streets in barrios such as Central Havana, but with no details to identify them as such. The song takes on a universal appeal because of the necessity of the artist to dissemble.
In our oversaturated commons, there is little that can shock or provoke. Conversely, in a place where public discourse is closely monitored, any critical utterance can have strong reverberations. When Cuban rapper Papa Humbertico unfurled a banner reading ‘Social Denunciation’ on the opening night of the 2001 hip hop festival, the act immediately unleashed a series of debates on both sides of the Florida Straits.
This is not an argument in favour of either state censorship or the embargo against Cuba – both of which represent a violation of basic freedoms and rights. Rather it is a recognition that imposed, even self-imposed, isolation can be a crucible for artistic creativity.
In the digital era that we now inhabit – where wire coat hangers have been replaced by Facebook and iTunes – such isolation may be a thing of the past. The underground rap group Los Aldeanos have little airplay on Cuban radio but are a sensation on YouTube.
The recent openings initiated by the Obama administration should be celebrated, especially if they lead to the fall of the embargo, which has deprived Cubans of basic necessities, including food and medicine. But we can also recognise that some things may be lost as Cuba opens to a global market economy, including distinctive subcultures such as that of Cuban rap.
A shorter version of this article appeared in the New York Times. It has been expanded exclusively for Red Pepper

Gil Scott-Heron: Speakin’ for a whole generation

admin — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 21:08:42 +0000

If Gil Scott-Heron, who died in New York on 27 May, rejected the media portrayal of him as the ‘godfather of rap’, it’s perhaps easy to see why. Scott-Heron is best known for his groundbreaking spoken word piece The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a three-minute call to action for the disenfranchised black youth of 1970s America. Saturated with contemporary political and pop cultural references and shot through with an acerbic wit, it sets out to wrench its audience from the cultural opiates of mass media news, sitcoms and, above all, advertising:
‘You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.’
So when the rapper KRS One re-wrote the lyrics for a 1995 Nike commercial – transposing the titular lyric to ‘The revolution will not refrain from chest bumping … The revolution is about basketball, and basketball is the truth’ – Scott-Heron must have felt things had come full circle. What started out as an anthem of Vietnam-era free-thinking had, in the hands of one of his supposed musical ‘godchildren’, become a vehicle for marketing ‘made in Vietnam’ trainers to black youth.
Yet for all the bling excess of much contemporary hip-hop and rap, musically and poetically it’s easy to see why Gil Scott-Heron had such an extraordinary influence on the genres. Most of his first album, A New Black Poet – which includes an overtly homophobic track, ‘The Subject Was Faggots’ – is spoken word, almost as close to traditional poetry as to the soul and funk music with which he became associated later. When Scott-Heron introduces one of the rare melodic tracks, ‘Enough’, by saying ‘A lot of people think it’s a poem, and after they hear me sing it, they’re sure it’s a poem,’ the message is clear: you listen to this for the lyrics.
Scott-Heron developed this blend of soulful funk and poetically personal and political lyrical writing in follow-up albums Pieces of Man and Winter in America. In Winter in America he binds together familiar subject matter – politics, urban deprivation, alcohol and drug abuse – with wider themes of pan‑Africanism, afrocentricity and black power.
It was during this period that Scott-Heron began to take a more active stance on key contemporary global justice issues. His 1975 single Johannesburg, with its chorus ‘Tell me brother, have you heard/From Johannesburg?’ was among the first pieces of American popular culture to deal with apartheid. With typical wit, Scott-Heron draws parallels between race relations in the US and South Africa.
He featured on the 1985 anti‑apartheid protest song ‘Sun City’; and when, in May 2010, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel put to him that ‘Your performance in Israel would be the equivalent to having performed in Sun City during South Africa’s apartheid era,’ he pulled the gig. In 1979 he also took an anti-nuclear stance, appearing at the No Nukes concert in Madison Square Garden where he sang ‘We Almost Lost Detroit’, written about the partial meltdown of Fermi 1 reactor in 1966.
The 1980s was a relatively fallow period for Scott-Heron. He released several albums, but none were especially well-received, and his record label Arista dropped him in 1985. He battled drug and alcohol dependency for much of this and the later period of his life and served two prison sentences for cocaine possession. It was shortly after completing the latter of these in 2007 that Scott-Heron recorded his first studio album for 16 years, and the one that was to be his last, I’m New Here.
Scott-Heron is perhaps the most esoteric of that tiny group of musicians who can claim to have changed not only the musical but the political landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Like Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye, his music reached out to generations of disenfranchised youth through its combination of soulfulness, beats, raw emotional power and intelligent and thoughtful political message.
Scott-Heron’s poetry, his spoken word rather than his music, may be what comes to define his influence. His 1993 track ‘Message to the Messengers’, an outspoken address to the rap artists of the 1990s who were claiming lyrical descendance from him, perhaps sums this up best:
‘And I ain’t comin’ at you with no disrespect
All I’m sayin’ is that you damn well got to be correct
Because if you’re gonna be speakin’ for a whole generation
And you know enough to try and handle their education
Make sure you know the real deal about past situations’
‘Pop music doesn’t necessarily have to be shit,’ Scott-Heron said of the success of his single ‘The Bottle’. And if there is one thing that defines Scott-Heron’s legacy, this is surely it: pop music with the power to inspire a generation. n
Steve Pretty is a musician, writer and performer. He co-runs the Hackney Colliery Band and his one-man show Steve Pretty’s Perfect Mixtape is at the Edinburgh Festival. www.stevepretty.com

Illegal Art: Recreating records

admin — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 22:53:19 +0000

Philo T Farnsworth isn’t his real name but an appropriated one, taken from the man who invented television. Philo isn’t giving his actual name. If I was to ask, I wouldn’t get an address either, and there are many who have asked – most of them record company lawyers.
The American record label Illegal Art was founded by Philo (or, as has been suggested, a collective of ‘Philos’) in 1998. They release an eclectic mix of mashup records and audio documentaries; artists include the critically acclaimed Girl Talk, the Bran Flakes and the surreal Corporeal Blossom. There are no rules as to what they can and can’t put out, but Philo is clear that the label is there to support artists that the market won’t: ‘We support work that we feel is artistic and that otherwise might not see the light of day.’
The label was launched to infamy after it released Deconstructing Beck. This compilation album was built entirely out of samples taken, without authorisation or payment, from the musician Beck. The samples were manipulated electronically, producing a sound that is both abrasive, bizarre and, for the most part, entirely unrecognisable as the original artist’s.
Beck’s own music is also largely made up of samples, the difference being that he is signed to a large record company – the UMG-owned Geffen. It is this company that pays for the copyright clearance on his samples; it is also this company that owns the records he makes. Illegal Art is well aware that this means the money paid for samples moves from record company to record company; little goes to the original artists.
Freedom to create by appropriation should not be denied to those who can’t afford the royalty fees, according to Philo: ‘Copyright makes it so that most artists are afraid to appropriate. Appropriation, though, often leads to new forms of artistic expression and thus it seems the evolution of art is hindered.’
Illegal Art is savvy enough to ensure copyright doesn’t hinder its ability to reappropriate. When it released Deconstructing Beck, the label made sure to notify Beck’s record company, publicist, and attorney. Beck’s attorney threatened to sue and the tiny label suddenly found itself in the spotlight but Philo admits that the label knew what it was doing: ‘Violating the rules of the market has played in our favour. It’s a great marketing tool!’
In the end Beck’s attorney didn’t pursue the case, a pattern that has repeated itself with every other legal threat made against the label. No record company has proved willing to contest the legal case made by Illegal Art, which argues ‘fair use’ under US copyright law. This applies to reviews, news, criticism and parody, but ‘music is often perceived differently,’ says Philo. ‘The public perception remains that copyright is stricter on music than on gallery art. The whole purpose of limited copyright was to encourage the creation of new work. The application of copyright’s fair use provisions to transformative works such as ours is all about doing just that.’
Philo concedes that in a capitalist system some copyright laws are necessary. ‘There is a need for protecting artists’ work, definitely. The laws just go too far and make it difficult for other artists to build on past works. We certainly wouldn’t want to eliminate copyright as then large corporations would exploit everything and small artists would rarely be paid.’
For Illegal Art the key is to keep business out of art. ‘Companies’ refusal to distinguish between whole and unmitigated theft for profit and the fragmentary re-use of our common cultural artefacts in the creation of new work is the best reason we know of to keep lawyers out of art,’ Philo argues.
Artists on Illegal Art render the distinction between high art and popular culture obsolete. They joyfully mix a cacophony of material, often to humorous effect. For instance, the New York artist Corporal Blossom recently released A Mutated Christmas, in which classic Christmas songs were reassembled from hundreds of original recordings.
Illegal Art’s most successful artist is the pop collage mastermind Girl Talk, aka Gregg Gillis. While some mash-up DJs may have slipped into the banal and predictable, Girl Talk has continued to innovate. With increased success, though, comes increased risk of a lawsuit. One reason Illegal Art artists may have avoided this so far is that all their records can be downloaded for free. The label long pre-dated Radiohead in asking for donations for its records rather than setting a price.
Illegal Art is engaged in a struggle to open up our increasingly centralised and monopolistic cultural institutions to commentary, criticism and, most importantly, recreation. It is playfulness that defines its output, Philo enthuses: ‘I love play. We have a bias towards playfulness, to messing around in the margins.’
www.illegal-art.net

Craft work

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:55:15 +0000

Electronic pioneer Matthew Herbert conducts the nightclub audience as though we are his human orchestra. Dressed entirely in black with a decibel counter under his watchful eyes, he is master of ceremonies at the avant-garde Robert Johnson club in Offenbach, Germany.

The producer and conceptual artist is orchestrating a strange focus group to sample sounds for his latest musical project, One Club. The album is an attempt at democratising electronic music, to give his most avid fans the chance to participate in the creation of each bleep and beat. We have been warned that microphones are all around us – on the ceiling, in the toilets and on the lapels of a fellow clubber.

The audience is asked to kiss the person next to them, to jangle their keys, to stamp their feet, to dance, to laugh: to club. We are told to rattle the change in our pockets once for each EUR10,000 in our pay packet, to whistle in different ways to denote our sexual orientation, to shout out the name of the political party we voted for. The album was played for the first time at the Robert Johnson on 8 July. Herbert will also perform in Britain at the Big Chill and Green Man festivals in August.

‘One Club is designed to be both a functioning body of dance music in its own right, but at the same time a celebration of the temporary communities that come together weekly around the world in clubs. Since the record is made entirely from sounds recorded in one night at a German night club, the audience is implicated directly in the outcome of the music and hopefully stronger links are made between the DJ, the music itself and the act of dancing,’ Herbert says.

‘For a long time now, clubs have accepted a corporate version of reality, with excessive branding and sponsorship, yet reluctant to acknowledge the potential political or social power implicit in large numbers of young people gathering in public places. The One Club project is intended to offer an alternative version of that relationship between the audience, the building, the locality, the political, the performer and the music.’

Speaking after the two hour recording, Herbert tells me: ‘I was surprised how much pleasure they got from being told what to do. It transformed the space. It was really hard work keeping the momentum going and getting the sounds in a clear enough state to use them. Also, I wanted to record what is really there, not to manipulate what’s there. It’s not a laboratory, it’s a night club. With a music studio, significant amounts of money are spent on shutting the real world out. Soundproofing suggests we’re frightened of the outside world where it is inconsistent – but you would record atmosphere.’

Herbert first performed live as Wishmountain in 1995, using only a pepper pot as an instrument. Since then his music has always been conceptually driven – he has driven a tank over a cooking dish and shot it to get a sample. His dance record Bodily Functions was a global success.

His label, Accidental, has also been lauded for its individuality. The Invisible, 2009 Mercury Prize nominees, chose it to release their eponymous album. Paul Morley, writing in the Guardian, has described Herbert as a ‘restless militant outsider musical progressive in a culture increasingly cuddling up to conformity’.

One Club is a ten-track dance record that marks a return to Herbert’s most well known and commercial sound. But it is so much more. The second of a trilogy of ‘One’ projects, it continues with a departure from his previous grand, extravagant and awe-inspiring Matthew Herbert Big Band project because each record is constructed around a single concept: One One, his most intensely personal record to date; One Club; and One Pig, in which he documents an animal’s life and death.

Each contains the DNA of the Herbert manifesto: high concept and hand crafted, catchy and compelling. To understand this trilogy – as with all of Matthew’s work – we are invited to examine the handiwork. Like an antique chest of drawers, to know if it is genuine you have to remove the drawers, turn them over, look at the quality of the joins, the hinges, the varnish.

Deaf ears

I met Herbert for the first time in a antiquated hotel in central London. He wanted to talk about an audacious international political stunt he had performed but that had gone unnoticed by his intended audience. Herbert had been invited to contribute to the ‘idents’ for the Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow in 2009. When he came to producing the musical introduction for Israel, he decided to include samples of gunfire aimed at innocent Palestinians, grinding tanks and the seemingly euphoric sound of water drops. His intelligent, high risk, moral statement fell almost entirely on deaf ears.

And so Herbert is consciously a political performer. The website for Accidental counts the number of estimated dead in Iraq. His ‘One Life’ from the album There Is Me and There is You produces one beat for every 1,000 killed following the invasion, while ‘Battery’ is an ode to British resident Bisher Amin Khalil-al Rawi, tortured in Iraq after being arrested with a battery charger.

The musician avoids tendentious agitprop, however, and argues that being a member of a party or group is ‘the antithesis’ of the Herbert manifesto. He is also conscious of the limitations of his own ability to preach to a club audience: ‘I do sometimes think I am battling against a lot of ingrained ideas about what music is and what it can do. People out on a Saturday night do not necessarily want to be challenged about the world.’

‘There is definitely a sense in the dance music world that I am a party pooper because I don’t just want to have a good time and take drugs, or whatever,’ Herbert continues. ‘There is a valuable place for that kind of sense of transcending the mundane contained in electronic – but it should not only be that.

‘People do not think of music being political unless it is left wing. But 50 Cent is talking about using violence against your enemy, oppressing women and making money – they are the same messages as the government. Within the new music there are no overtly political songs – it is all there but it’s much less obvious. For me it is as honest as I can be.’

To understand the political message of Herbert, you need to look beyond bold public statements and lyrics. You need to know that the beats that represent the dead in Iraq are sampled from the bleep of the life support machine of his first child, born prematurely and lucky to be alive. As he says: ‘It is very easy to say the war is shit, or to catalogue the number of people who died. But what is harder is to represent the personal, which is why the beats in that song are from when my son was in intensive care.’ The message of Herbert’s manifesto lies in the mode of production.

Toilet mics

When I arrive at Herbert’s home studio, down an idyllic

side street in the newly fashionable Kent seaside town of Whitstable, I immediately stumble over a microphone angled into the basin of the toilet and another into the sink. The mics are recording the sound of water swilling down the plughole to add the finishing touches to Rowdy Superstar’s first album.

This is vintage Matthew Herbert. There is a manic, almost compulsive drive to record the world around him. This is explained in part by the fact that his father worked as a BBC sound engineer. However, the enigma of Herbert is to be unlocked further back in his family tree.

One Club is a fascination with the production process, as is everything Herbert has created to date. Not just in terms of sound engineering, but in the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the smells and tastes, sights and sounds that aggregate into human experience. This informs Herbert’s interest in ethical consumerism, his opposition to war, his meticulous research for One Pig.

Of his early childhood, he says: ‘I grew up without a TV; we never had one in the family home. My days were filled with playing different instruments, making stuff, drawing. I started piano from the age of four – and played all the way to university.’

Later in the conversation, he adds: ‘Nobody crafts anything any more. We do not have a table made by a person; we do not know how to recognise a good table or a bad table. My great-grandfather was a master coach-builder and I brought him a table I made at school and the first thing he did was turn it upside down and say it was crap – but he was right. I had not even varnished the bottom.’

The Herbert experience of the world is alienation and Herbert’s music is his resistance. Like Sartre, he is conscious in every moment he lives of the way people no longer love or own what they produce. They no longer ‘make things’. The commodities that are produced appear alien and hostile. The companies that produce are inhuman and destructive. Herbert’s is not a reactionary, agrarian romanticisation of handicraft. He clearly has no moral difficulty with embracing the new. Instead, the music has the ring of authenticity, of human creativity: it is a call to arms for quality.

Capitalist mass production, capitalist alienation, has destroyed the craft of music, he suggests: ‘All musicians are using the same samples and techniques – it’s a bit like a giant Lego club where everyone’s given the same blocks and same wheels and everyone is told to build different cars out of the back of it.

‘You are distanced from risk, from the humanity of it, by which I mean life is a pain in the arse.

‘People today are interested in the product, not the process. We do not see where our food comes from. I recorded at a landfill site and it is one of the most depressing things. Around 90 metres by 90 metres of landfill and they dig it 30 metres down. They fill it hundreds of metres above ground level – and that’s just one year’s rubbish from Canterbury. In Whitstable, Hatchards was 150 years old and they replaced it with Costa. Capitalism is the replacement of the historical with the ahistorical, with the asocial. And we have no idea where the coffee comes from.’

So with One Pig Herbert will archive through sound the process of a pig being born, slaughtered, butchered and scattered through the capitalist mode of production: drum skin, bone flutes and toothbrush bristles will produce the sounds for the recording. Informed by Christien Meindertsma’s book PIG 05049, Herbert expects to follow the pig’s body into paint, heat valves and 185 other products – including bullets. The allegory, as with George Orwell’s Animal Farm, is resonant.

Rhyme and reason

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:53:23 +0000

We’re now at a stage where anything that contradicts too strongly with the main line, or the way they want young people to perceive the world, and the things they want young people to find important, it’s not deemed worthy of exploitation. In the UK they very much keep their eyes on America, what American hip hop is saying, and if you look at American hip hop the moral of story is: get money, because that is the only thing that defines you and that defines every single aspect of your worth and that defines how you view yourself. Therefore in this country, people are not thinking in terms of what can I say to change the world, or what opinion do I even have about the world – it’s what is the best way I can get signed. In reality it’s what is the best way I can be exploited.’

On a crisp April evening in west London, Kareem Dennis, better known as rapper Lowkey, is a young man with plenty to say about why other British rappers are not, unlike him, addressing the political issues of the day in their lyrics. At just 23, Lowkey is taking his fierce denunciations of the state of the world to a rapidly growing audience, increasingly puncturing the confines of the hip hop community to include those on the left, both in Britain and beyond, who wouldn’t necessarily call themselves rap fans.

Born in London to an Iraqi mother and an English father, it was through his family that Lowkey first encountered rap. ‘I just got into rap when I was young, from my brother’s record collection. My parents had a Public Enemy vinyl but I didn’t really find them to be very entertaining at that age to be honest, it just sounded like shouting to me.’ It was through artists such as Gil Scott-Heron that Lowkey’s attraction to rap intensified and at 17 he started taking it seriously and rapping in public regularly. Since then he’s been part of various rap crews, even venturing outside his genre in 2008 when he joined forces with indie/rock musicians from the Arctic Monkeys, Reverend and the Makers, and Babyshambles to form Mongrel, a band playing a hybrid of indie, rock and rap.

Long live Palestine

A watershed in exposing sections of the British left to Lowkey’s uncompromising prose occurred in January 2009 when Lowkey took to the stage and addressed a Stop The War Coalition rally in London against the Israeli military’s devastating assault on Gaza, dubbed Operation Cast Lead. In a poem entitled ‘Long Live Palestine’, released earlier this year as a charity single to raise funds for Gaza’s victims, Lowkey offered a performance charged with both anger and humanity. In one section he rhymed:

Talking about revolution, sitting in Starbucks,

The fact is that’s the type of thinking I can’t trust,

Let alone even start to respect,

Before you talk learn the meaning of that scarf on your neck,

Forget Nestle,

Obama promised Israel 30 billion over the next decade,

They’re trigger happy and they’re crazy,

Think about that when you’re putting Huggies nappies on your baby,

Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza,

This is for the child that is searching for an answer,

I wish I could take your tears and replace them with laughter,

Long live Palestine, Long live Gaza.

Lowkey is nearly always seen performing with a Palestinian keffiyeh on his shoulder, and it’s clear that it’s an issue he holds very dear to his heart. I ask about the roots of this commitment.

‘I can’t lie and pretend it has nothing to do with my Arab heritage,’ he says. ‘But that’s [Palestine] something I always grew up feeling was so misunderstood… In my opinion the actions of Israel point to an attempt to eradicate not just the existence of the Palestinian people but the existence of the word Palestine. They [the Israelis] don’t even refer to them as Palestinians, they refer to them as Arabs. They’re ethnically cleansing Jerusalem as we speak.’

There is an urgency and intensity to Lowkey’s words. Recalling his performance at the London rally he chuckles at the memory that ‘Convincing people to let me speak at that event wasn’t easy… After that the reaction was surprising and that kind of pushed me forward and I’ve moved on from there.’ He’s since travelled and performed in the West Bank, Gaza, and most recently Lebanon.

Soon after meeting me Lowkey is set to fly to the US, where he’s been invited to join Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein on a speaking tour. Unlike many high-profile US rappers, who have been heavyweight champions of Barack Obama, Lowkey is deeply unimpressed with the first black resident at the White House.

These sentiments have been most recently collected in a song entitled ‘Obama Nation’, where Lowkey offers a scathing attack on the policies of the US president. In the first month of the song’s music video being posted on YouTube it was viewed over 80,000 times; Lowkey has also collected an impressive following on the social network site Facebook, with nearly 11,000 ‘fans’. Lowkey’s songs are clearly stridently confronting the global political talking points of the day and reaching an impressive and growing number of people around the world. But, with a general election looming at the time of the interview, how does he feel about domestic UK politics?

Apathy in the UK

‘Here only about 45 per cent of the population voted at the last election,’ says Lowkey, speaking before the 2010 election. ‘This shows the extent to which people do not believe the politicians, do not believe in the politicians, and do not relate to the politicians.’

‘And look at our relationship to Britain’s political history,’ he adds. ‘Words like Balfour Declaration don’t mean anything to the average person here … There’s a gap between the elites and the people.’

Lowkey sees signs for hope beyond our borders. ‘On the Palestinian issue, things are changing, perhaps too slowly and perhaps it’s too late, but they are changing. I’m looking on CNN and I’m seeing [US] General Petreaus saying Israel is hurting the US’s interests in the Middle East. So you do have these changes happening.’

This doesn’t lead him to make unrealistic predictions about the possibilities for change. ‘I’d rather be a pessimistic guy who’s proved wrong than an optimistic guy who’s proved right,’ he says.

Even so, Lowkey carries a certainty about his future that is uncommon in uncertain times. ‘I won’t be dictated to about what I can and can’t say. Under no circumstances,’ he declares. Young though he may be, in Lowkey Britain has found a new forceful and influential voice of rebellion.

Lowkey’s new album Soundtrack to the Struggle will be released later this year. More info: www.lowkeyuk.net. To read a longer version of this interview: www.levelground.info