Apols & Obits & Updates.

1. 

I would offer apologies for letting updates to this blog slip so badly this year, but what would be the point, you know the score by now. Suffice to say, if it ends here, I would like to make clear for the record that it is not the lure of social media which has drawn me away from these pages. Now more than ever, “social media” can do one.

No, it is, of course, grown up work and responsibilities which have kept me away. I would dearly have loved to have been able to spend 2021 casually ruminating in (virtual) print on the oddities and virtues of the many, many dusty old LPs I have acquired, and spinning off ill-thought-out treatises from the assorted books on music and pop culture I’ve read whilst sitting on the bog. But guess what? I’m a grown up now, so I don’t have time. Moving thoughts from my head onto an MS Word doc is permanently next thing on the list; the thing which is never reached.

2. 

Damn, we’ve lost some weighty presences this month though, haven’t we? I still feel a pathological need to mark their passing, so let’s do so.

Charlie Watts was so clearly, so obviously, the best Rolling Stone that anyone who has failed to recognise the fact by this point should give up and go home. The least arseholish of their number by a country mile, the near sixty years he spent excelling at a repetitious task for which he never even pretended to show any enthusiasm stands as a shining inspiration to all of us lower echelon wage slaves.

Seriously though - he was great. All of the golden era Stones stuff walks a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and nine times out of ten, I believe, it was Charlie’s measured/dispassionate presence which stopped the others from tumbling headfirst into the abyss of wankerdom. God bless him, and I hope that one day his drawings of hotel beds will be exhibited, assuming they haven’t been already.

And, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Fuck, man. “What a character” scarcely does that old boy justice. His entire life and work is just… off the scale. We’d need to call in the profs and invent a new scale to even get a glimpse of it. 

So many garbled anecdotes could be related pertaining to his nigh-on supernatural shamanic weirdness, but at the end of the day, it’s the records that count, and, though my interest in dub/reggae has never progressed much beyond the dabbler/dilettante stage (given the number of second hand discs in the genre clogging up this corner of the world, I’d need to invest in a reinforced floor should I begin to cultivate a taste for them), at least a few Perry productions remain close to my heart. His perfectly harmonised moo-cows on The Congos’ Children Crying; the disorientating left channel cut-offs on the harrowing, low-down funkery of Woman’s Dub; the fuzzy esoteric pronouncements of Baffling Smoke Signal, which used to fascinate and perplex me when I recorded it off Peel as a youngster; scattered talismans of high level genius. RIP my good man - even this clueless, herb-decrying winehead salutes you.  

 

3. 

Believe it or not, some people still persist in asking me what contemporary music I can recommend, so in the absence of any ‘first/second quarter report’ posts, here’s a one stop, link-based run down on some of 2021’s real goods so far:

Wolfen; Mountain Movers; Heavy Sentence; Brandee Younger (major label alert!); Dope Purple; Potion; The Paradox; Bobby Lee; Smote; Emma-Jean Thackray; this Wicked Lady cover by the otherwise fairly absurd Salem’s Pot; Haig Fras; The Heartwood Institute; Obey Cobra; Ruby Rushton; Birds of Maya; Mienakunaru; Yerba Mansa Trio.

You’re welcome.