Bad Brains - Melody Maker - March 16 1991

 

BAD BRAINS / BAMBI SLAM / THE STUPIDS

Clarendon, Hammersmith, London

Melody Maker, May 16th 1987

by Simon Reynolds 

Live the Stupids are never quite as monstrous as on record. Tonight, hampered by the nonappearance of guitarist Marty Tuff, their frantic thrashing stirred up a strangely immobile cloud of noise that loomed in the distance rather than sweeping over to engulf us. Hard core should drown.

Bambi Slam songs are Pebbles tantrums. Sixties punk with tweaks of feedback and a beat like a little brat stamping its feet on the spot, or the Glitter Band at 78rpm. Interesting, but unfortunately made to seem puny and flat-footed by the noise and majesty of what followed.

Bad Brains double-stun with a tidal wave of their sound and the shock of their incongruity — imagine Burning Spear playing Anthrax. But the link-up of Rasta and speed core is totally appropriate; both sub-cultures have a total vision of the world, as unremitting tribulation and slavery, both imagine liberation in the form of apocalypse. Bad Brains' music similarly seems to consist in absolutes — of gravity, velocity, heat, cold. Blacks invented rock 'n' roll in the first place, so it's fitting that they're here at its outer limits, presiding over its ultimate super-nova, its whitest white-out. Their singer slashes out the beat with an outstretched arm, and it's like he's conducting the orbit of planets.

The shows are slick, as tautly rehearsed, as the Temptations or Zapp, right down to glib inter-song chat. An intensely glamorous bunch — the singer lashes the air with his dreadlocks, the guitarist wears a permanent gape of joy at his own brilliance, the bassist's bug eyes and Clinton eyebrows say "I can't believe we're doing this!" In a way, there's nothing of themselves in the music, it's anti-authentic: Bad Brains take the form of hardcore and perfect (exaggerate) it to the point where it's abstract art.

Such a fastidious assault, so exact, so exacting. Bad Brains are about astounding musicianship crammed within rigid parameters and so blazing all the more brightly. (The singer brings an almost scat feel to the straight-ahead melodies, throws in all manner of swerves and dips.) Similarly the emotional intensity of Bad Brains, of hard core in general, comes from when energy is caged, ricochets off the walls.

Bad Brains were like a visitation, a bolt from the heavens, and the vast sexless apocalypse of their music left even the grubbiest, most lumpen members of their congregation cleansed, elevated, re-born.

Cover versioning - Skip James versus John Martyn

 for The Wire cover versions mega-feature issue, November 2005

“Devil Got My Woman” (Skip James, rec. 1931)

Blues might be the most worn-out (through over-use and abuse), hard-to-hear-fresh music on the planet, but James’ original “Devil” --just his piteous keening voice and acoustic guitar--still cuts right through to chill your marrow. The lyric surpasses “Love Like Anthrax” with its anti-romantic imagery of love as toxic affliction, a  dis-ease of the spirit (James tries to rest, to switch off his lovesick thoughts for a while,  but “my mind starts a-rambling like a wild geese from the west”). Most singers would flinch from taking on this unheimlich tune. But John Martyn, reworking (and renaming) it as “I’d Rather Be The Devil” on Solid Air (Island, 1973) not only equals the original’s intensity but enriches and expands the song, stretching its form to the limit. It starts as a sickening plunge, a dive into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the band’s surging aquafunk rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or P-Funk; Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come into focus now and then--“so much evil”, “stole her from my best friend… know he’ll get lucky, steal her back”--but mostly Martyn’s murky rasp fills your head like this black gas of amorphous malevolence. Then suddenly the bitches-brew  turbulence dissipates; ocean-as-killing-floor transforms into a barrier reef-cocooned idyll. Danny Thompson’s bass injects pure intravenous calm, keyboards flicker and undulate like anemones, Martyn’s needlepoint fingerpicking spirals in Echoplexed loops of rising rapture. Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the young James toiled to Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, “I’d Rather Be The Devil” captures the ambivalence of “blue”: the colour of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb bliss. The two halves of Martyn’s drastic remake also correspond to a battle in the singer’s soul--between monster and water baby, danger and grace.