Music for scaffolders: 808 State on Top Of The Pops

I've been watching old Top Of The Pops clips. It's how us cool people spend our leisure time. Back in the 1950s, our hobbies would have been weekends in Margate or afternoons down the bingo getting razzed on prawn cocktails. Not for us modern kids.

I actually want to talk about 808 State, which won't be a surprise for regular readers of this blog. They appeared on Top Of The Pops for three of their singles. They performed their breakout hit Pacific State in November 1989 when Simon Mayo was the presenter. When Cubik hit the charts a year later, they were compered on by Anthea Turner. And Manchester DJ Gary Davies was MC when they played In Your Face in the summer of 1991. That latter programme also featured Chris Isaak, Nomad featuring MC Mikee Freedom, and Julee Cruise doing her dreamy Twin Peaks theme. 

808 State were deliciously experimental. They still are: 2019's Transmission Suite is a cold-war cooling tower of steaming creativity: chills and thrills all the way. But considering how relatively undeveloped dance music was in the late-80s, Bob State were wild. Take, for example, their 1989 album 90. It starts with the floaty hypnosis of Magical Dream, ends with the liminal industrialism of The Fat Shadow, via the acidic chatter of 808080808. Expand the discography, and we quickly reach the squelchy acid of Flow Coma, the lift music of Lift, the gospel of 10x10, and that psychedelic guitar-mageddon of Cubik. 

808's Graham Massey appeared at the Louder Than Words festival last November. He was speaking at the launch of Matthew Collin's Dream Machines, which I've written about here. At this event, he recalled playing Cubik to a record company exec from Warner Brothers. The suit didn't seem too fussed about the track, but thankfully producer Trevor Horn took the bait. Horn signed 808 State to his ZTT label, which had previously achieved hits with Art Of Noise and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. 

"We were surprised because we didn’t sound like the pop music of the time," said Graham on the interest from ZTT Records. "Trevor Horn was a great champion of what we were doing, and such a great pioneer of sonic stuff, so we felt like he really had our back."

Horn encouraged the band to edit their tracks for a radio-friendly audience. And, of course, it worked. Graham added: "I remember the thrill of hearing [our songs] on builders’ radios, those paint-splattered radios that scaffolders had, and we were like: yeah, pop music!"

Graham described the band as four individuals with colliding record collections. "It’s opulent," he said. "It’s a lot of ideas crushed and spat out into very colourful ways. We were exploring ideas. With studio time being so rare and expensive, and the equipment being so exciting, it seemed like you shouldn’t keep doing the same thing."

And he described their 90 album in particular as an exploration of ideas and a celebration of the sampler. "The sampler was such a fresh and exciting tool that we were still learning to use. Plus I was learning to be an engineer. I was trying to ape Prince records with the tiny little delays that make psychoacoustic spaces. It wasn’t just notes and musical melodies."

Thank the lucky stars and the miraculous moons that Top Of The Pops was there to promote such zany music to the masses. The programme stopped its regular broadcast nearly two decades ago, and we are poorer as a result. However, we shouldn't be too downhearted.

A few years ago, I was at a Dreadzone gig. You might remember them for bucolic protest rave tunes such as Fight The Power and Little Britain. The gig was full of crusty old folks like me. But I found myself on the front rail next to two young women: early twenties at a push, all glammed up and ready to party

"How on earth did you find out about Dreadzone?" I asked.

"The internet," they said. They had discovered the band online, at it had become their "thing". And they didn't even need Anthea Turner to help make that happen.

Further Fats: Oh, puppies, why do you live? (2006)

Further Fats: 808 State's number tracks in number order (2013)

Zombie'ites! Going underground with Transglobal and Banco De Gaia

I'm off to see Transglobal Underground at Band on the Wall tonight. Their 1993 album 'Dream Of 100 Nations' has always been a favourite: full of forthright pan-Afrasian techno, and a great introduction into the world of Nation Records, Natasha Atlas, Loop Guru and Dreadzone. Fusion techno that's as agitated as it is celebratory.

Below, I've plopped down some YouTube embeds for you to listen to, all taken from that album.

Banco De Gaia is DJing too: his 'Last Train To Lhasa' album is a modern ambient masterpiece that, thanks to dreamy samples, changed the way I heard choo-choo trains forever. The same way The Orb made fluffy clouds magical for evermore.

Put aside your chores - grouting the cat can wait. Listen to Banco De Gaia's Kincajou below.

So much of my blogging seems to look back to the 1990s, and this post is no different: but I'm proper looking forward to seeing this lot right now in 2017. The world needs their trippy madness more than ever before.

I have just burned down my local NHS hospital while listening to Phil Collins on my walkman

Forgive me, dear blog whisperer, as I bring the dirty subject of politics onto the clean pages of the Fat Roland blog.

I feel privileged to have witnessed the events of the past week. It's like we've all watched a unicorn give birth to a kraken: we have a sense of pride to have been part of something fascinating whilst trying to ignore that niggling sense of horror.

It has brought me my own dilemma. My political views were formed growing up in a Labour household in Manchester, sharpened by the poll tax riots and set in stone when the music world rose up against the Criminal Justice Bill.

That spirit of protest crystalised around bands like Dreadzone, Orbital and the Levellers, more of which I have waffled about here.

Which brings me to the Liberal Democrats. I have written the following comment on the Lib Dem Voice website:

"I hope some good can come from the coalition, I really do. The move to roll back Labour's civil liberties abuses is welcome. However, I am a left-leaning Lib Dem supporter who feels sold down the proverbial river by the pact with the Tories.

"I understand the reasons why, in many ways, the coalition had to happen - but the mantra 'vote Lib Dem get Tory' is too hard a pill to swallow. For now, and with massive regret, my support of the Liberal Democrats is suspended."

You see, my head understands the hobson's choice Nick Clegg faced: side with the reds and bring down the country into a burning heap, or side with the blues and bring down his own party for the sake of Blighty.

He underestimated the endless well of ire bubbling against the Tories. I agreed with Nick when he described the "gulf in values" between him and Cameron, so maybe I didn't take seriously the possibility of him using my vote to bring back Maggie's mates.

I loved spending the night at the Manchester count at the behest of some wonderful Lib Dem people, Northenden councillors Martin Eakins and a newly elected Mary Di Mauro. And nothing will ever take away the sense of pride when I voted for John Leech in 2005 and again in 2009 (and also in elections since 1997).

And so it's with a heavy heart that I suddenly find myself as a floating voter for the first time in my life. I cannot vote Tory. I feel betrayed by the Lib Dems. Labour have been shockingly right wing (see this piece by George Monbiot). And I don't feel that connection with the Greens yet.

I hope I'm wrong, and that I return to the Lib Dems like a prodigal son. But.... Tories? Seriously?

Maybe I need to rediscover my leftist roots. Or just keep joking about the whole thing, as I did on my Twitter feed the day the coalition formed after jibes from work colleagues about being a 'massive Tory' - because if I don't be silly about it, I may start a poll tax riot all on my own:

- Because I voted Lib Dem, I'm going to spend this afternoon being a MASSIVE TORY. Do join me.

- I am being a MASSIVE TORY. I have just smashed in the face of a poor person. I don't think they minded.

- I am a MASSIVE TORY: I have just burned down my local NHS hospital while listening to Phil Collins on my walkman.

- As a MASSIVE TORY, I've just pissed on a disabled person in a council flat. I am enjoying being a MASSIVE TORY.

- I've sent the single mums back to where they came from whilst shoving a miner down a pit. I'm a MASSIVE TORY.

- My final act as MASSIVE TORY is to seek social justice and sanctuary for the alienated and afraid. Oh, hold on....

Blowin' in the wings: why protest songs should return to centre stage

A member of the BNP lives near me.

I know because on the sign outside the flats where this person lives, someone has scrawled a flat number next to the letters "BNP".  And yes, the address was on that leaked list of members last November.

I do wonder if the person concerned wears the graffiti as a badge of pride. Or whether they're vulnerable and fearful in a society that ought to respect people's freedom of speech, even if their views are hurtful and repulsive.

Do you recall the years after Thatcher (you remember Thatcher: she's the mother of the BBC's least favourite celebrity since Jonathan Ross, Jeremy Clarkson and, um, the DEC)?  In the early 1990s, for a generation of young people politicised by the poll tax riots, it was especially cool to bash racism with music.

Some artists waved the flag higher than others. Reggae trance soundsystem Dreadzone (pictured) woke the zion youth and encouraged them to Fight The Power. Credit To The Nation sampled Nirvana with protest single Call It What You Want, and we all learned that (a) racism was wrong and (b) sampling had gone too far.

And Phil Collins threatened to leave the country if the left-wingers gained power. (They never did, because Collins and his ilk secretly infiltrated the Labour party with a drumming gorilla, or something.)

I still have Anti-Nazi League stickers on old notebooks somewhere.  The notebooks are full of appalling song lyrics that will never again see the light of day.

Since then, we've forgotten how to be political through music. Yes, protest songs live on, and plenty of musicians rouse the Citizen Smith within us. But Bono made the whole thing a little maudlin, while Morrissey's revived spat with the NME left both parties looking more than a little pathetic.

Politics seems to be hiding in the wings when it should be centre stage.  There is plenty to be political about.  The BNP keep winning seats for their disgusting cause, the red-top dailies prey on people's fears, and the pay gap continues to drive a chasm betwixt all different sorts of people. 

It's pretty disingenuous of me to turn a piece about racism into an exercise in nostalgia.  But I wish we could regain that spark.  Make Chumbawamba cool again. Well... okay... maybe I've taken it too far...