Dearly Beloved, We Are Gathered...

Prince videos are few and far between on youtube, but he pretty much owned the 80s with his intros. His biggest, most bombastic album Purple Rain is basically a series of throat-grabbing intros, some of which seemed to have had songs added on later as an afterthought (though to be fair, a good few end rather spectacularly too, especially the epic title track). Love him or loathe him, and despite the various production tricks he used, you knew who it was as soon as you heard the first bar, until his mojo started to slip after the release of the hideous Batman soundtrack. In some ways, he's kind of like Martin Scorcese is to cinema: Even if the song itself is a disappointing dirge, chances are the flamboyant intros will pack a punch at the very least. The calling card of the consummate showman.

Drummage: Road Less Travelled

Obvious economic / convenience reasons apart, I never got why live drumming never quite took off in hiphop. When employed by the likes of the brilliant-but-underrated Stetsasonic, it sounded awesome. They were quite open about trying to capture the 'live' power of War, Mandrill and Earth, Wind and Fire; while also using the talents of production legend Prince Paul. And though the drum machine break from Schoolly D's 'PSK: What Does it Mean?' has been used all over the place (including on Siouxsie's 'Kiss Them For Me'), its the live drumming on Saturday Night: The Album that makes it date a lot less than other hiphop albums from the 80s.

However, the great Aaron Spears has beat a considerable reputation for himself playing for various hiphop / R'n'B acts...

Bring the Beat Back (Drums Along the Potomac)

Despite all the good things that came out of the music of the 1980s, by and large it was a fairly dismal decade. Or at least it was as far as mainstream music went, with a lot of what you'd hear on FM radio or in clubs. Lots of shitty guitar solos, no shortage of triffling go-nowhere trends.

Main beef being with how the beat got simpler. In many instances starkly, minimally -- almost metronomically -- so. I dunno how or when the trend actually started -- it seemed to gradually creep in at some point around 1982 until in gained damn-near complete hegemony. Maybe it had something to do with how the later phase of disco had simplified the beat, and then again with how dance music that came after the post-disco backlash stripped it down even further. Or maybe it was Prince's "When Doves Cry" (known in some quarters as, "Where'd the fucking bass go, homes?") that violently unended the scales, that made it official as the musical trend of the decade. Not sure, but things got pretty stark for a good long stretch after that. Yeah sure, this was all concurrent the hip-hop's gradual steps toward mainstream acceptance. But the mid-school era of mid-digitally sampled of breakbeats and loops was still several years away (mainly due to the affordability of the equipment). Most rhythm tracks for hip-hop cuts either being laid down in the studio by a session drummer laying down a steady beat, or programmed on a drum machine -- most often an 808. The Roland 808 could be a marvelous thing -- capable of complex patterns of the polyrhythmic "Latin" variety, but why put that much effort if you didn't really need to? If there was anything that characterized the sound of "true" hip-hop by the decade's midpoint, it was the punishing jackhammer kick of the 808, pummeling away with inhuman severity.

There were the odd exceptions to much of this, of course -- like Sheila E and her timbales, or the occasionally more-intricate-than-usual rhythm track on some popular "Latin freestyle" number. But as far as what dominated a lot of dancefloors and much of the airwaves -- it was likely a policy of rhythmic austerity had been put in place, or merely decreed the sound of the zeitgeist. Like ridiculous big hair or parachute pants, it was what was in fashion.

Which is why go-go was such an incredible thing when it first began to circulate, was greeting with some sets of welcoming ears, and almost -- but not quite -- became the Next Big Thing.*  Hailing from the city of Washington D.C., Go-go was a locale-specific, homebrew affair. It clearly hadn't kept up with the times, had chosen instead to shoulder its way against the tide of the crowd. It had actually been around for a good many years in gestational form, with some of its key contributors having been veterans of the 1970s funk scene. In fact, the 1970s had seen a couple of proto go-go tracks make it onto the American charts -- Black Heat's "No Time to Burn" in 1974, and then Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers' "Bustin' Loose," the latter of which briefly became a #1 hit on the Soul charts in 1978. The sound of go-go proper wouldn't start to emerge until around the end of the decade, right about the time that disco was being shown the door.










Go-go remained an isolated scene throughout the early years of the 1980s, was limited to the release rosters of small D.C.-based record labels. But in the middle of the 1980s some major labels were taking notice and the music started to gain national attention. Musically, it was clearly a whole 'nother thing entirely -- something distinctly apart from what else was going on. For the marginally-attentive, the music's trademark call-and-response vocals had them thinking it must've been part of the "rap thing." To anyone with memory of the prior decade, it may've sound like mid-period P-Funk, but streamlined and re-tooled and tilted into polyrhythmic overdrive. To others, the extensive percussion section of your average go-go outfit might've brought to mind Afro-Cuban rhythms. To someone else it may have sounded like the music had a strong "Southern" connection, specifically to the sort of drumming often heard on the streets of New Orleans. Whatever the case, it was clear that the music was as live and as loud and as deeply funky as things could get. I was like something lots of people had been missing, had hungered after, without having realized it until it came along and smacked them upside their earholes.

But as far as national exposure went, go-go's popularity turned out to be peripheral and brief. Yes, for a brief while, a number of commercial hip-hop acts (Salt-n-Pepa, Kid 'n Play, et al) would include a token go-go track on their latest album -- maybe as a way of paying tribute to the music, maybe just as a move for hopefully selling a few extra units in D.C. record stores. And of course there was the appearance of the band E.U. in Spike Lee's second feature film, School Daze.

Full-page magazine advert for the Good To Go soundtrack,
which most likely didn't  feature Art Garfunkel (c. 1986)

There was even, at one point, an attempt to do a film about D.C.'s go-go scene. Titled Good To Go, and with Don Letts as one of the production's instigators, it was originally conceived as a movie focusing exclusively on the music. But a short time into production, a number of the film's backers reputedly got cold feet and backed away. In order to salvage the thing, it was quickly transformed into a crime drama set in D.C., with -- get this -- Art Garfunkel playing the lead role. The music portions of the film were quickly benched, or relegated to the sidelines of the movie's story. (The film itself, after release, would come & go without notice, and would for a few years circulate on video under the [re-]titled Short Fuse.)

If anything, go-go commanded attention because it was a groove that asserted authority. The music's brazenly insistent, exhortative horn-yness, its density, the occasional Clavinet cameo in the mix were all signifiers of a funk 'nuum that refused to die, of a party that never ended. Add to this that a fair number of the music's central figures -- Chuck Brown, et al -- were veterans who'd been working the D.C. circuit for years. Even a gaggle of relative newcomers like Trouble Funk exuded seniority -- partly because of the tightness and expertise of their rhythm section, but also because the raspy vocals of bassist Big Tony Fisher projected a wordliness beyond its years.

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* SIDENOTE: True, there was plenty of action and alternatives in the occurring along the margins -- garage, house, techno, etc. But for the most part, many of these developments didn't travel widely, took years to gain broad exposure or acceptance. (Or that was the case with much of the U.S., anyway.) I, for instance, was living in the Deep South at the time, and heard very little of it. What I did hear though, on the radio and elsewhere, was a lot of booty-bass, "quad" type fare. Electro-funk had been big with a certain audience in the South, and once it waned it was kept alive (and refitted with some extra swing) in the South by way of the so-called "Miami Bass" sound -- an indie cottage industry of DJs and trackmakers scattered throughout the region, from the Atlantic side of Dade County all the way over west to Houston. Isht was everywhere providing you went to certain clubs or tuned to certain stations, crowding out most hip-hop that might've filtered down from the East Coast. And it wasn't until about ten years later that I'd learn what a marginal and region-specif phenom the thing was. 

 Relatedly, just uproad from the D.C. of the late 1980s, a set of associates were crafting the beginnings of their own new sound -- starting to kick around the first "doo dew" beats that would eventually morph into the sound of Bmore club" music years later. All of these scattered heterotopias of the groove might be viewed as home-turf DIY remedies for the vagaries that arise from the physical limits of how the entertainment industry operated at the time -- a way of filling the many gaps left by shitty distribution of material product, lazy radio programming and bookings. But more often, however, these localized or regional responses arose from a shared affinity or sense of dissatisfaction, and from a mutual agreement that other motherfuckers just ain't bringin' it, or may have missed the point completely.

Word Up

There can't be many bands who have balanced so delicately on the edge between grandeur and absurdity than Cameo, whose aesthetic came over like the Benny Hill Show soundtracked by Ennio Morricone. They were simultaneously glacially cool and cheekily humorous, making some of the most elegant funk music ever recorded, and then coating it with the pucest lyrics.

They meant it as well. Singer Larry Blackmon genuinely couldn't understand why the media made such a big deal out of wearing a bright red codpiece on Top Of The Pops. From his flat top haircut and handlebar moustache to his spandex pants, he challenged you not to find him cool, knowing that it was impossible not to.

Their music sounds even better now than it did then. Never in a hurry, they always took as much time as they wanted. If only we could return to a time when funk was so ludicrously laid back....

The Junkyard Band

Just to continue the go-go tip, and because it's still as awesome as it was in 1987. I recall it was on the budget-price Def Jam Sampler Vol. 1, which introduced a lot of British kids to hip-hop. Despite sharing space with Public Enemy, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys all in their prime, it was the best track on it. Made by kids aged 8-13 from the Barry Farm Housing Project, Washington DC; with toys, trash and common household items. Considering that and its urgent, hard-hitting lyrics, you can't get more 'punk' than that...

Now That Fits Nice

In close parallel to the 1978-83 post-punk renaissance (as documented in Simon's Rip It Up And Start Again), funk, disco and the poppier side of side of soul was also having a damn good run of it at the same time (covered in Peter Shapiro's equally excellent tome Turn That Beat Around). With a vicious backlash, and fatigue at the cultural hegemony of Saturday Night Fever, the dust of disco settled into all kinds of interesting shapes - from the first stirrings of hiphop to hi-concept New York punky funky disco eccentrics like James Chance, Arthur Russell, the Was Bros. and Kid Creole/August Darnell. Punk, Afrobeat, reggae, fusion, electropop and Latino music were cheerfully appropriated for dancefloor use. Add the ominous dynamics of Reagan's victory and the constituencies he came to destroy, it made for a heady, implicitly political brew. It was perhaps unsurprising that new wavers like Talking Heads and The Clash hitched along for the ride. It was also apt that Bowie would end his run of greatness with Nile Rogers instead of Brian Eno. The integration of the audience was frequently as seamless as its collage of musical styles. It wasn't so much mutant disco, as hybrid; lending it a frequently unpredictable pizazz.

Of course, the arrival of Thriller, its almost totalitarian commercial impact, and the (arguable) backlash it provoked in the form of hiphop, swept this mini-utopia away; leaving dancefloors between a desexualised, deracialised, deradicalised Disneyland and the harsh admonition to 'keep it real' (until rave, itself a different kind of Disneyland, albeit existing largely in the head). Funk was eventually pushed to the margins, but for a while there the influence of George Clinton could be heard all over the place (yaoww!), and not just among his own P-Funk collective. This was before the horrors of AIDS and conservatism, when sexuality was openly celebrated; unlike the paranoid disgust of Jacko and his many imitators, or Material Girls insisting the only thing going on was the rent. Disco was assimilated into the default pop mainstream by the likes of Stock, Aitken and Waterman and Hi-NRG-lite like New Order and the Pet Shop Boys (their one true classic 'West End Girls' - the source of this blog's title - emerged from the New York scene mentioned above, but itself riddled with noirish sexual dread). The only Utopia Madonna pledged allegiance to was her own neoliberal success story. Jellybean Benitez served his instrumental purpose many movers and shakers ago. Despite her (increasingly desperate) bumping and grinding, the actual tracks sounded as sterile as any other by the late 80s. Disco vets like Prince stood out for the idiosyncratic niche he carved, but he was a rarity; reliant on MTV and Hollywood to make his mark. There were still somewhat anomalous exceptions, like Sly and Robbie's awesome 'Boops (Here To Go)'; but rather than prove influential, they ultimately suggested lost possibilities. 

Anyway, all the above is just an excuse to post some great tracks from the period. Ironically, the songs below are now most likely to be heard (if at all) in the twattier kind of hipster venue. Places that are far from sexy, integrated, adventurous, politicised or remotely Utopian. Where "fuck you" is the soulful refrain replacing "let's do it!" At least musically, things were a little more open then. Michael Henderson was an in-demand session player with fusion superstars, proving he could funk with the best of them, coiling his mighty bass around a filthy double entendre. Arthur Russell's deeply personal, spacious, spiritual style now has its due recognition. Rick James' Street Songs is the rare album that's excellent from beginning to end, and in a more just world, would have outsold Thriller to much healthier social and commercial effect. The production credits of Sly and Robbie speak for themselves, being in demand as producers with good reason. They eventually settled into the increasingly conservative and enclosed world of Jamaican pop. Frankie Beverly's Maze were relatively 'trad', reflecting the short-lived optimism of an emergent black middle-class; but never quite entered the mainstream with their lack of video glitz and high reputation as a live act. The last track (one of the greatest dance tunes ever, IMHO) is a lovely example of August Darnell's pop genius, and could be a manifesto for the whole milieu I'm lazily attempting to describe. Of course, with the exceptions of mighty Rick and Grace (for obvious reasons - look at 'em), none of these tracks had the pop videos that would be de rigeur by mid-decade. History was indeed made at night, but the Spectacle was closed to its potential; as pop (and nightlife) carried out its slowly gentrified, neutered facelift and eventual irrelevance. But whenever I hear this stuff, it can't help but evoke thoughts of a warmer world.

To Be, Or...

The structural similarity between much advertising and much modern art is not simply copying by the advertisers. It is the result of comparable responses to the contemporary human condition, and the only distinction that matters is between the clarification achieved by some art and the displacement normal in bad art and most advertising. The skilled magicians, the masters of the masses, must be seen as ultimately involved in the general weakness which they not only exploit but are exploited by. If the meanings and values generally operative in the society give no answers to, no means of negotiating, problems of death, loneliness, frustration, the need for identity and respect, then the magical system must come, mixing its charms and expedients with reality in easily available forms, and binding the weakness to the condition which has created it. Advertising is then no longer merely a way of selling goods. It is a true part of the culture of a confused society.

- Raymond Williams, 1980

Wicked wierd

A north Hampshire town in 1984, the usual Saturday traipsing shopping streets behind mum. I was waiting outside one shop when three or four older, harder, cooler, more confident boys surged past – one carrying a huge ghetto blaster blaring out these taut rhythms, icy synth lines and robotic voices. It was a moment, and I had to have that sound (the tune was Man Parrish’s Boogie Down Bronx). This was my first ticket out of the suburban quotidian: electro music had entered and would never leave. I had no real idea of its provenance other than it was American but to an 11-year-old lack of details were no barrier to imagination. Only superficially was it dumb party music bragging about girls, and it laid the groundwork for my perceptions of popular music, and particularly the divide between dance and rock, years before I was ready to process those ideas.

A Damascene moment it may have been but electro was no early stage, esoteric cult. After punk had razed the ground but also made yet more variations on rock ‘n roll palatable to the wider world only as pastiche, a New Pop which the newer, cheaper synth technology facilitated had arrived. With real instrumentation less in favour, the funk quota that most bands still strived for was also more easily achievable through this route. Many a rock outfit had a makeover and descuzzed their sound. Blondie rapped about Flash and Fab Five Freddy. It was also well served on film with the likes of Breakdance Electric Boogaloo and Wild Style. So any near-adolescent wanting to appear a la mode had to have a passing acquaintance with it, just as any with-it band – say The Clash – would pay respect to the culture and dabble in the sound.

My own causal, if very tonally different, link was the beguiling sights and sounds of synth Britons such as the Human League, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode on Top of the Pops in 80-81. Turned out these groups were also enormously influential among black Americans too. Paradoxically getting into it when I did would save me from the worst stylistic excesses of the New Pop which would begin to lose its way; I’d leave the Now tapes to my elder sister and her cronies.

As legacy I would take just the music from this era, but this was a well rounded culture encompassing the four corners of breakdancing, graffiti, MCing and DJing. We were in a ‘crew’ of course, with the hi-top boots, jeans with decorative zips in, the fat laces and the (rarely unfashionable since) two-tone Nike cagoules, although only one of us had any real skills on the lino. For a while all this completely took over – I’d write long graf lists of all the words associated with the genre (smooth/tuff/wicked/etc); tap my pens a lot on school desks in mimicry; adapt Whodini’s Freaks Come out at Night to our tent’s travails on our school camping holiday; spend way too much time with my mate in the hi-fi shops checking out the nice eject actions on blasters we couldn’t afford. I boldly pronounced to my mum that this electro-breaking lark was the future, ‘here for ever’ or something. Well not quite, but while all the elements reduced in relevance most of them have refitted and resurged more popular than ever.

The chaotic scratching, blunt industrial beats and MC reportage would offer fitting representation of the Bronx and other districts being torn down. What passed for the banner of ‘Electro’ was a much wider genre encompassing the escapist post-Soulsonic forces stuff, Run DMC’s stripped back bluntness or the even more basic drum machine minimalism of Roxanne/UTFO. In ’85, as this DJ Revlution comp would attest, synthesised riffs were losing out as virtually everyone was rocking hard bass kicks and snares backed up with electronic handclaps, scratching and riffs broken down and exploited for pure rhythmic import – when much of the subject matter being spat was still quite prurient such force could seem a little bewildering. And though there were gritty tales as made most obvious by the likes of Grandmaster Flash’s The Message I was pretty much out of there when the stuff started going gangsta for reasons I’ll explain later. Yes there was also shit like the Fat Boys giving it a bad name, and all manner of prurient eccentricity before that became uncanny and hip. There were a few popular long-running themes such as the welter of battle rhymes/answer records between Roxanne with UTFO and Roxanne with Roxanne Shante; apparently there was a version with swear words on it which had to be tracked down. For my own part, I was also on a quest to find the most perfect scratch sound, and I located it in NYC Cutter’s DJ Cuttin’s licks contorting the sounds of brakes being slammed on.

This was a shortlived spell like the most intense obsessions; I was on the sound probably from late ’84-late ’86. Enthusiasm for playing and watching football dropped as my interest in hanging round crappy precincts listening to music and talking about breakdancing – but never having actually any burns – increased. Crucially, this would be an early sign that in any such scene the music would be my over-riding concern. That did not mean I would slip into fanboy obscurantism – to have the prime cuts from each act would be enough.

Handily, for at that time I had neither financial or logistical resources to deepen my knowledge, this was a music well contained by Mike Allen’s shows on Capital Radio and the ‘Electro’ compilations, straight outta West Acton and regular enough to be fairly definitive (although looking back they did seem to flip back and forth between older and newer stuff). Mates would tape compilations complete with photocopied and badly coloured in covers. Some stuff got into the UK charts giving us a chance of direct ownership (Mantronix, Doug E Fresh, DMC). Generally outré acts like Chris ‘the Glove’ Taylor with his Itchiban Scratch stayed as eccentric one-offs in my mind, enhancing their weirdness. This was a street music before the tiresome ‘reality principle’ was enforced on music either as willed expression or theatrical gesture, so it was tuff but often dead weird at the same time.

What stays with me from this scene today? Almost embarrassingly so, much of it is note-perfect thanks to regular trips back to the sound (a friend ripped me a CD-rom’s worth of all of the Electros), but the ones I offer up as examples are:


Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde were a double act in at the start of the scene, and therefore not totally transformed by the takeover of drum machines and Bambaata type electro. ‘Fast Life’ is a Kurtis Blow production with live bass and synth sweeps offset by the electronic handclap machine on random, a fine background for Andre Harrell and Alonzo Brown to divert from the usual rock the party rhymes to deliver a cautionary tale about a kid who ‘grew up much too quick’. Harrell went on to form Uptown records where the duo’s corporate livery was more suited to its New Jack Swing.



Marley Marl is deservedly cited as a leading light. With his cousin MC Shan here, we have ultra tight beats, big ups to self, not a chord or melody in sight. As head of the Juice Crew, Marlon Williams’ style was an arrogant and assured anti-music. He also led the late 80s evolution of hip-hip with his work for Eric B and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, Kool G Rap & Polo, Masta Ace and others. That DJ Cuttin record is his too. And you must check his harsh brutalism on MC Craig G’s Transformer – a late appearance on Electro 10 but a bleak and ugly slab of shifting sledgehammer beats, shock instrumental stabs and the shapeshifting daemon himself coming through the vocoder.

Then there was there more straight-up electro bounce LA sound – the pre-NWA explorations of Dre in the World Class Wreckin Crew and Professor X as the Arabian Prince, as well as the Unknown DJ. And the guy who stands out with his consistent Pharonic concept was Egyptian Lover. These days those pitch-bent riffs, queasy voices and druggy beats are the meat and veg of the fidgety pop world; back then I used to find Greg Broussard’s material dangerously exciting and disturbing as I’d listen to a tinpot tape-player or radio under my sheets.


I also retain big love for Aleem – twins Taharqa Aleem and Tunde Ra Aleem with 70s soul-disco man Leroy Burgess who peddled emotionally charged electro soul that through its energy sat better with the Electro compilations than the slicker, high-tech soul of its Street Sounds cousin (one of which actually I got in error after I instructed mum, obviously shopping alone in Aldershot that Saturday, to come home with any Electro she saw in Our Price). They also produced for acts such as Captain Rock.

More well known than all of these with his highly distinctive electrofunk, it’s hard to avoid Mantronix as a considerable auteur. Kurtis el Khaleel epitomised the rise of the singular producer who like Marley Marl would release under different guises/styles and work with a range of rappers and vocalists. I choose Ladies, standard girl-talk for sure but with a weird atmosphere catalysed by slower than usual polyrhythmic drum patterns with real percussion, minor keys and echoed MC Tee rhymes.

If 82-84 saw the emergence of this futurist thrust, then 1985 was the year of take-over, certainly that DJ Revolution comp would suggest it was a big year. That meant consolidation was round the corner; by ’86 the purer electro sound was getting overexploited (Paul Hardcastle’s 19, anyone?), while the industry had seemed only to raise the profile of the dumber stuff (Fat Boys, LL Cool J – anything past Rock the Bells is cack), get behind acts past their sell-by date (Roxanne, Kurtis Blow) or usher others into more soulful, rockier or mainstream material such as Run DMC or Mantronix, in stark contravention to where the culture was actually going. With New York repurposed as a city of service and finance capital, those industrial slabs of rhythm, wreckin shop scratching and block rockin lyrics that purveyed a tumultuous city with considerable heterogeneous cultural force were out of place – it was now the job of rappers to talk about the crack zones left behind. For that true ‘hip-hop’ itself was coming to the fore. Boogie Down Productions was one of the first of the new school – and as with so many KRS-1 would soon have his own tale for summary inspiration after Scott La Rock’s death. The braggadocio of the frontman gripping his johnson had been replaced by an in-your-face bad boy with deadly intent. Either as preacher man, griot or grisly celebrator of the life, rappers (no longer just plain old MCs) had stories to tell beyond girls about using guns and selling drugs and for this his ‘cadence’ was all-important and the return to musicality served that – sampling took over and the real funk of the 70s was plundered – I’m tempted to think because you needed a fun counterpoint to all the lyrical brutality.

By its twelfth edition it was ‘Hip-Hop Electro’ 12, and by 17 it had lost any mention of electro at all – while nominally the term did not fit everything in this wide range of emerging sounds it had been accurate enough; by now it was outdated. The modern shapes and blocks of colour were also slowly edged out, and with this loss of consistent corporate identity the game was over. Or rather it had changed. The strictly entertaining party elements took a back seat until consumer capitalism was ready to re-embrace them. I corresponded by having a period out of the game – a spiritual penance if you like away from other people’s hyper-reality (the music I chose for this interlude was mostly U2, the Minds and Jean Michel Jarre! Oh what scars in my collection!) before Public Enemy and others such as Eric B bought me back in time for hip-hop’s golden era to follow. But that’s the music of another decade.


25-30 years on electro music’s legacy is strong. The reliance was still on the ever fertile production line from America but for Britain’s multi-culti teenagers always so achingly keen to be on-trend, this was the first visible subculture to explicitly refute live music and be all about DJs, producers, labels, the latest up-to-the-minute beat (a more visible cousin to the necessary occlusive soundsystem-based dub reggae culture). The notion of the b-boy still has a very strong hold on how up and coming British producers present themselves. You can view it as pre-nuum in this respect, possibly with even more direct linkage than the more naively utopian, therefore less streetwise, rave.

Personally, electro/hip-hop goes far beyond being my first window on the black American world and a companion in my adolescent stirrings – ‘Electro is aural sex’ they used to print on the inlay of the tape covers. I still exercise an over-reliance on the compilation method of accumulation Electro introduced me to – picking the best artists with no particular need to discover the full blown artist album where your loyalty is frequently let down by lack of quality/overindulgence. And while Rubin and co were introducing elements of rawk as it collided with the MTV generation, these few years precluded any liking for metal/rock/indie and coloured my perceptions of those genres for years afterwards. Hearing this blunt but emphatic anti-music as my source material would make my inherently distrust the vaunted ‘emotion’ of the troubled rock artist, or the value of all the ever diminishing repetitions of musicality the bands behind him present. Since I have realised the pointlessness of relativity in relation to disparate musics I have opened up my ears, but in many respects it’s still all about the beat. And yeah sad to say I still annoy a lot of people by beatboxing too often.

In terms of the music itself, well from Dizzee’s bite of the Roxanne/UTFO beat on Fix Up, the Chemical Brothers’ use of the Roof is on Fire or any number of wholescale lifts from those Brighton Go! Team merchants who wear the influences very visibly on their chests – very little of it that was any good hasn’t been appropriated. On one hand the pulse beat seemed to served the rather dull breaks genre, on the other austere and enlightening Detroit electro from Aux 88, Mike Banks’ various guises, Drexicya and the broadening out from electroclash artists like Peaches. Bear in mind what was called electro-house very rarely had that pulse-beat but still traded off the genre’s schlock value. The breaking, popping, graffiti and so on are so thoroughly re-entrenched in a now officially sanctioned Street Culture that for originals like me to call its bluff and claim it’s nostalgic would be nonsense. A kid (or more likely, a student wearing a rucksack into the scene) can immerse themselves in this life more completely than we ever could and, with ever more distance from the original Bronx explosion of the late ’70s, questions of cultural theft seem much less relevant.

With any retrospective of a once vital culture we have to be careful not to lurch into nostalgic soft focus or use it as a validator of once vibrant lives, like the way pissed Dads attempt the moonwalk, the body pop or, no! please don’t!, the crazy legs at a wedding. Or the way Vernon Kay endlessly evokes the spirit of rave as if he’s a Haciendia veteran. But if you deghettoise the sound – not necessarily think of it as childish electro but straight-up dance music – then much of it competes with all the myriad disco/funk/early house stuff of the Dance Decade. Generally, all the genre’s trademark sounds have been back in vogue for a good 10 years so the more pertinent question is when will it stop being so influential.

An Electro 10
MC Craig G – Transformer
Imperial Brothers – We Come to Rock
Aleem – Release Yourself
Captain Rock – Cosmic Blast
Cybotron – Clear
Egyptian Lover – My House on the Nile
Marley Marl ft MC Shan – Marley Marl Scratch
Man Parrish – Boogie Down Bronx
Dr Jeckyll & Mr Hyde – Fast Life
Roxanne Shante ft Biz Markie – Def Fresh Crew

Golden Years

Some of the best music of the early '80's, and also some of the most forgotten, is the bright funky pop that came from a number of eccentric British soul bands. I suppose much of the reason it has fallen down the memory hole is that this stuff has never been genre-ised, which seems to be the ars memoria by which music critics fill their elephantine memories.

So I hereby invent the genre of "British Pop-Funk". I suppose the grand-daddies of this genre were the mighty Hot Chocolate, one of many 1970's hit machines whose reputation has gone from kitsch to genuine appreciation. Among their successors were Linx, whose big hit "Intuition" brightened up a miserable 1981. The personable frontman was David Grant, who is nowadays employed, along with his wife Carrie, as a hard-nosed bastard who tells people that they can't sing.



Imagination were fronted by the impish satyr Leee John, one of the early '80's great pop characters, and surely one of the inspirations for Red Dwarf's The Cat. Their hits, such as "Body Talk" and "Just An Illusion" were seductive epics that seemed to lie at the midpoint between the American soul greats and the weirdness of the New Romantics. It was this kind of crafted oddity that made these bands identifiably British, and not just carbon-copies of their American peers. Like Adam Ant and Kevin Rowland, Leee John would keep up the act in tabloid interviews, telling journalists that if he didn't make love five times a day he was in danger of exploding etc.



Loose Ends were genuinely highly rated at the time, and talked about in the kind of reverential tones that augured future greatness. They were one of the few British bands to make an impact on the U.S. R&B chart, and in 1985 it appeared that the world was their oyster. Alas it wasn't to be, and they appeared to vanish as quickly as they appeared. Doesn't mean we shouldn't recall them now though.



The only band who went on to build any kind of career out of this sound were the excellent (though terminally unfashionable) Level 42, who deserve their own post. This is a shame as the rest of the pop-funk bands of this era were chronically under-appreciated, not least in the UK itself, which always considered its own R&B music as ontologically inferior to that produced in the U.S., despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Ah, we can only look back on what might have been....

Suck Out My Insides

A Certain Ratio were perhaps the most overtly occultish of all the punk-funk groups. Although they made pictorial play of their interest in flight, with their sleeve pictures of old aeroplanes and aviators, their real interest was in the dark, draining, winged spirits of nightmare - incubi, succubi, vampires and demon angels. Just as they drained the mana, or life-force, from African-American funk music, so their own mana was drained by their record company, and their subordinate position to its priority band Joy Division. In their dealings with demons however, the two bands could not have been more different. If Joy Division were an external dramatisation of the internal battle of the shaman to conquer and re-shape chthonic spirits, A Certain Ratio invited them in through the window to drink their bodies dry.

Their obsession with spirit-possession and blood-loss first overtly manifested itself on the early single "Do The Du", a bleakly sado-masochistic depiction of a claustrophobic relationship in which flesh is flayed and blood is drawn. Their most celebrated single "Flight" is creepier still, a Blakean hive of blind, incorporeal spirits spiraling upward to the light of Revelation, the soundscape whistling with their ectoplasmic trails. The sleeve art openly contrasts images of human aviation with parasitic spirits. Were our efforts to construct flying machines inspired by birds, or by malign angels?



Their first album proper, 1981’s "To Each….." immersed itself deeper in the theme, with tracks such as "Felch" and "My Spirit" chronicling the loss of vital fluids. For ACR, the decline of the industrial north was itself a kind of voodoo that manifested itself in a physically palpable despondency. You could feel the general decay leeching mana from your own body. Their new singer, Martha Tilson added her bloodless vocals to "Back To The Start", a call to the night-spirits that is reminiscent of the open-window scene in "Salem’s Lot".



Their masterpiece, "Sextet" was released in 1982, and featured a lush, exotic sound that brought to mind J.G. Ballard’s "Crystal World". The deep, aquatic bass shone refractive waves on the other instruments like ripples on the walls of a nocturnal swimming pool. The opening track "Lucinda" was the clearest expression yet of their aesthetic, a pulsating account of obsession and possession, sexual desire provoking the winged spirits of decay to leave their gremlin-work on the factories and attack the body-personal. "Knife Slits Water" with its sub-aquatic bass rumbles and murderous, disembodied vocals recalls Roeg’s "Don’t Look Now", with its grotesque demon stalking the canals of Venice.



Their last great album, "I’d Like To See You Again" was a kind of ambient-funk that featured a shimmering rain-washed penumbra that anticipated The Blue Nile. Like most post-punkers, they then spent the remainder of the decade gradually losing touch with the dark impulses that originally propelled them, engaging in that strangely universal phenomenon in which every attempt to make themselves more "accessible" only increased the level of indifference with which they were regarded. At their best though, there was no-one who could match their ability to invoke the vampire spirits that were feeding on the national psyche.

The Boss

One aspect of the 1980's that seems to have faded from memory is just how famous Diana Ross used to be. At the beginning of the 1980's she was considered to be at least as important as Michael Jackson, and before her defection to RCA in 1982, she was very much Motown's musical ambassador, an artist who connected the golden age of the Motown Sixties with a continuing ability to produce crisp up-to-the-minute pop music.

1980's "Upside Down" was particularly fabulous, a wonderfully compulsive piece of Chic-ery, that, like the best funk, seemed to have a certain crunchy quality - that indefinable rightness when every instument comes down on the beat.



The follow-up "I'm Coming Out" was every bit as good; just as compulsively funky, and with an even more explicit subtext. It's a reminder that Ross was once both an icon and someone very aware of her own iconic status. Fittingly, her records were always bigger hits in the US than in the UK; this was always the unacknowledged proof of a real star - she was big where it really mattered.



"Muscles" and "Work That Body" were her last adventurously funky UK hits, both cashing in on the early-80's exercise craze, before the effective finale of 1985's "Chain Reaction", a nod to her past that was pretty much an act of surrender before the terminator-ambition of Madonna. Despite her long-standing reputation for ruthless ambition, it's noteworthy that she appeared a fairly mild figure in comparison to the hit machines that were progressively destined to replace her.

Perhaps the air of forgetfulness that seems to have enveloped her has a certain cautionary quality. Maybe artists aren't really remembered for the modernist excellence of their output, but rather for their human ability to elicit empathy or sympathy. Perhaps the post-modern robo-divas of today, recipients of torrential Ballardian/Baudrillardian effusion, will disappear into the memory-hole even more precipitately than the genuine artistry of Ross, which, while being relentlessly inventive and modernist, was rarely at the time acknowledged as such.