RIP Shel Talmy

One of the odd things about the social media era is becoming "friends" with musical legends and cult figures that you've never met. Musicians you've interviewed and interacted with in real life - that's one thing, that makes sense.  But I get a little shiver when I see a name like Annette Peacock, Michael Rother, Peter Perrett and John Perry, or Andy Ellison (of John's Children renown) pop up in my Facebook feed.  

One such Facebook friend that for the life of me I can't work out how I acquired was Shel Talmy, producer of a great number of classic singles of the 1960s, including works that I find impossibly exciting: the obvious anthems by The Kinks and The Who, stuff by The Creation, and above all The Easybeats's "Friday On My Mind".

 I think of the sound Talmy shaped as quintessentially English, even though he was himself an American living in  Britain. (Much the same applies to Joe Boyd).  Most of the groups Talmy produced were British, I believe (or Australian, as with the Easybeats). Somehow Shel was able to tap into, activate, direct, and realise a uniquely English form of musical violence.  

I never actually interacted with Shel, which now seems like a shame. But I did enjoy the detailed accounts of producing particular tracks that he posted on Facebook, always titled "The Blueprint Of...". Over the years I have written about a bunch of things he worked on, but I don't think his name ever got mentioned therein - remiss of me perhaps - but at any rate here they are gathered below: a sort of belated reparations, or salute. 

Talmy is one of the prime architects of this syndrome I broach below (extracted from this longer piece on British Rock Greatness). Again, somewhat ironic given that he was a Yank

... by the early ’60s, a difference had become audible — a contoured clarity to the riff structures hitherto only heard in Eddie Cochran (who produced his own records, and was much bigger in the U.K. than in America). “Shakin’ All Over,” by Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, is the first British rock ’n’ roll record to match America while also sounding different. This stark, almost diagrammatic quality carries on through the Kinks and mod groups like the Eyes, on to Led Zeppelin, Free and the Groundhogs, and beyond them to Wire and Gang of Four. It almost feels like you see the music as much as hear it; compare this lucidity with the organic, live-sounding quality of so much American rock — the marauding murk of the Stooges on Fun House, for instance.  

Perhaps British rock feels less “organic” because we’ve never had an organic relationship with the music or its sources in blues and country. These sounds arrived like invasive visitations, and bear connections to indigenous forms like traditional folk or music hall that are chiefly musicological and twice-removed. It’s as if this inherently distanced perspective on rock gave British artists a unique vantage point, and an advantage. Hearing rock ’n’ roll primarily as recordings first and foremost, rather than as live music, made a difference. As their precursors had with jazz and blues imports, British rock ’n’ roll fans studied the records, playing them over and over and isolating specific bits of performance. (This studious approach no doubt contributed to the remarkable lineage of British guitar heroism.) In the U.K., the record is the primary text, what a live performance is trying to realize and replicate; in America, it’s the other way around. 

Thoughts on "Friday On My Mind" and "the blow out":

With the rave as working class blowout idea, I always come back to this 1966 song by The Easybeats, "Friday On My Mind",  a thrilling anatomy of the working-class weekender life cycle of drudgery, anticipation and explosive release. It's written from a Sixties mod perspective, the 60-hour weekend, but it foreshadows Northern Soul’s speedfreak stylists, to disco’s Saturday-night fever-dreams and jazz-funk’s All Dayers and Soul Weekends, and onto rave and EDM. Every kind of dance culture in which pills are used to intensify leisure time to the utmost, but then it's back to the 9 to 5. 

 This is the key verse --

Do the five day grind once more

I know of nothin' else that bugs me

More than workin' for the rich man

Hey! I'll change that scene one day

Today I might be mad, tomorrow I'll be glad

'Cause I'll have Friday on my mind

And then there's the chorus 

Tonight I'll spend my bread, tonight

I'll lose my head, tonight

I've got to get to night

Monday I'll have Friday on my mind

Musically the verses have this sort of tick-tocking tension, like the treadmill of workaday time, as he waits for the big blowout of the weekend (the euphoric chorus). It's two different kinds of time:  chronos versus kairos

Lyrically the key line is "hey! I'll change that scene one day"  - I find it incredibly poignant - it could just mean "one day I'll get started on my career / start a business and I'll be the rich man / boss" or it could mean "one day me and the rest of the proletariat will organise at the site of the means of production and there'll be a revolutionary transformation in political economy, no more rich men, no more bosses"

But it's clear that he's so caught up in this nightlifestyle that he'll never get around to either the individual or collective escape route

I tend to see the essence of rave (and its precursors) as dissipatory 

But (like a lot of music in different ways) it points towards an unalienated life - one that it can't actually make real  in the outside world, but can only institute in the small areas of space and time it can command

Of course, the troubling thought is that the momentary release of the ecstatic all night dance is actively working against the total and permanent change he and everyone else should be working for (and which would necessarily involve more drudgery and deferment of gratification in favor of the long term goal - duty for the future being the essence of political involvement) 

The here-and-now utopia / TAZ is taking away the possibility of a soon-to-come PAZ (permanent autonomous zone)

Almost sixty years after "Friday On My Mind",  we’re no nearer to overhauling the work/leisure structures of industrial society. Instead, all that rage and frustration is vented through going mental at the weekend (‘Tonight, I’ll spend my bread / Tonight, I’ll lose my head’), helped along by a capsule or three of instant unearned euphoria.

Flowered Up's "Weekender" film is an update of this notion of the  blow out cycle as counter-revolutionary. It's totally mod - indeed directly influenced by Quadrophenia, the mod revival movie of 1979 - indeed there's a sample of the Phil Daniels character's rant about how they can take his office drone job and stick it up their arseholes. In Quadrophrenia, the key scene of disillusionment for the mod protagonist as played by Phil Daniels,  is when he comes across the scene's leading Face - the coolest of the cool  - in his civilian life, where he is a porter in a posh hotel, a flunky ordered around by rich men... 

Another song about the blow out - there's a verse about "going to the disco" in this otherwise gritty funk-blues song about how tough life is economically by the great Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, the king of "proletarian funk"

Got to go to a disco

Throw your troubles away

Dance to the music

That the DJ's play

And then the lights come on

Like you knew they would

Go home and face the music

That don't sound too good

Stuff on The Who and mod from an essay entitled "Buttoned Up" - about buttoned up shirt style, wouldyabelieve? - for this volume

The violence of the Mods as they rampaged against the Rockers was on one level  simply righteous disgust for their abject opposite.  But mod style itself could be seen as having an inherent undercurrent of violence. First, there was the symbolic violence of dressing sharper than your social superiors (“powerful people -- businessmen in suits, take their clothes, retain your identity” as Ian Page of mod revival band Secret Affair put it). But also a kind of imploded violence: the neurotic fastidiousness of dress and grooming was a sort of voluntarily worn strait-jacket, a near-masochistic set of constraints and rules.   

This stringent regime, stoked and sharpened by amphetamines, virtually demanded some kind of release, a breaking free. That could take the form of mayhem (as with the war with the rockers) or through theatricalized disorder. Which is where the Who came in: a band designed by mod philosopher Pete Meaden, the group’s manager in their early days.  Meaden deliberately shaped the Who to appeal to  the existing Mod subculture, which until then had been based not around following bands but dancing to records, imported soul and R&B.

Rock ‘n’ roll had triggered violence before (with the cinema seat slashing done by Teddy Boys driven into a frenzy of excitement by the first rock’n’roll movies to arrive in Britain). But it had never really represented violence musically or enacted it onstage.   The Who’s sound was white R&B so amped-up and amphetamine-uptight it came apart at the seams: Keith Moon’s free-flailing cymbal crashes and tom rolls, Pete Townshend’s slashed and scything powerchords, John Entwhistle’s bass-lunges.  A sound expressive not of sexual desire but of an unrest at once social and existential.  Mod was fundamentally asexual: as Pearce notes, mods “simply were not interested. They were.... too self-absorbed....  Mods were free, clear of emotional ties. They rejected peer pressure to pair off.”  The boys dressed and danced to impress other boys, not to attract girls. Amphetamines  also had something to do with it, suppressing sex drive along with the other needs and appetites of the organism (such as food and sleep). Speed creating a sexless intensity, a plateau state of arrested orgasm that the mods, revealingly, called “blocked”.

The pent-up pressure had to blow somehow, though, and mod’s latent violence was dramatized by Moon and Townshend in their climactic orgies of instrument-smashing : supposedly inspired by art-school student Townsend’s  encounter with Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art, but really the orgasmic release that mod music, mod psychology, mod neurology urgently required. In the immediate aftermath of “My Generation”, “I Can't Explain", "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere", and the other early Who singles,  young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John’s Children picked up on the band’s loudness and distortion and recorded a  a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors subsequently have come to call “freakbeat”:  mod tipping into a jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy under the influence of speed and LSD.  The strange blend of menace and feyness in songs like The Eyes’s “When The Night Falls” and “My Degeneration”,  John’s Children’s “A Midsummer Night’s Scene”  and “Desdemona” simmered with a spontaneous combustibility that was uniquely English, rooted in the characteristic native psychology of neurotic uptightness and lashing-out rage. 

John Entwistle / The Who, “My Generation” (Brunswick single, 1965)

Rock ‘n’ roll had triggered violence before, but up until The Who it had never really represented violence musically* or enacted it onstage.  Think of words like “mayhem” and “destruction” in connection with that band and the first things that spring to mind are Keith Moon’s free-flailing drums and Pete Townshend’s scything powerchords.  (Not forgetting those climactic orgies of instrument-smashing).  But on “My Generation” John Entwistle supplies more than his fair share of the savagery. Often described as lead bassist to Townshend’s  rhythm guitarist, on this late 1965 single, his is the loudest instrument (with the possible exception of Moon’s cymbals). 

For the first minute “Thunderfingers”, as his bandmates nicknamed him,  churns and grinds as relentlessly and remorselessly as a gigantic tunnel-boring drill. Then, outrageously, he takes the solo and slashes a rent in the song’s fabric with a down-diving flurry of notes at once fluidly elegant and brutishly in-your-face.  This is generally regarded as the first bass solo in recorded rock, and as such, it’s a mixed portent.  Entwistle would immediately attempt to reprise the shock effect on the Who’s debut album with the bass-dominated instrumental “The Ox” and over the years he became an increasingly ostentatious player, peaking with the verging-on-Pastorius floridity of Quadrophenia’s “The Real Me” (much admired in the technical guitar magazines). 

But in the immediate aftermath of “My Generation”, young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John’s Children picked up not on the sophistication (beyond their capabilities, anyway) but the loudness, distortion, and menace.  Amping up the jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy, they recorded a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors today know as “freakbeat”.  Mod, as a musical form as opposed to a subcultural style, represented a uniquely English contribution to rock: the sound of frustration and neurosis, tension and explosive release.  In their own way, for a moment there in the mid-Sixties the Who were as radical as the Velvet Underground. Certainly, as far as Britain is concerned, punk starts here. Entwistle can even be seen as a forefather of postpunk’s  “lead bassists”, or at least the  aggressive hard-rocking sort, such as Jean-Jacques Burnel and Peter Hook. Indeed Hooky actually bought some of the Ox’s bass guitars in the estate sale after his 2002 death.

* Actually I would semi-retract that - Bo Diddley's sound, all rhythm and noise, is joyously violent. 

VARIOUS ARTISTS, Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond

Lenny Kaye's 1972 anthology Nuggets was a rock archivist's masterstroke, a feat of canon rewriting that deposed the post-Sgt Pepper's aristocracy and elevated the forgotten garage punks of the mid-Sixties, from The Seeds to Chocolate Watchband. Rhino's 1998 four-CD update of Nuggets dramatically expanded the original double LP. Now this latest instalment extends the Nuggets premise beyond the USA to encompass the one-hit-wonders and never-wozzers of mid-Sixties Britain: that all-too-brief golden age of amphetamine-cranked R&B and mod-on-LSD that's roughly bookended by "My Generation" and Cream's Disraeli Gears. Just the names of these long-lost groups--Dantalion's Chariot, Wimple Winch, Rupert's People, The Idle Race--induces a contact high, before you even play the discs.

Back then, singles made their point and left. This short'n'sweet succinctness allows the compilers to cram 109--that's one hundred and nine--tracks into four discs. Here's just a handful of gems. Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner", with the saintly-sounding David MacTavish singing a proto-Spacemen 3 love-as-drug/drug-as-God lyric ("fix me up with your sweet dose/now I'm feeling like a ghost"), splashy cymbals, and a billowing solo of controlled feedback. Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything": Van in I'm-A-Man mode, awesomely surly and swaggering. The Sorrows's "Take A Heart": a Brit-Diddley locked groove of tumbling tribal toms and spaced-out-for-intensified-effect guitar-riffs. The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" takes that drastic use of silence and suspense even further: powerchords like Damocles Swords, caveman tub-thumping, tongues-of-flame harmonica, and an insolent you-done-me-wrong/go-my-own-way vocal. Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," a classic misunderstood teen anthem: society gets the blame and the kid surveys Squaresville from a lofty vantage, cries "I laugh at it all!"

One group stands out as a "why?-why?!?-were-they-never-MASSIVE?" mystery. Not The Creation, and not The Action--both had terrific songs but were a little characterless. No, I'm talking about John's Children's. Their two offerings here are astoundingly deranged, the monstrously engorged fuzzbass like staring into a furnace, the drums flailing and scything like Keith Moon at his most smashed-blocked. "Desdemona" features the then shocking chorus "lift up your skirt and fly", daft lines about Toulouse-Lautrec painting "some chick in the rude" plus the stutter-bleat of a young Bolan on backing vox. "A Midnight Summer's Scene" captures mod sulphate-mania on the cusp of mutating into flower power acid-bliss: it's a febrile fantasy of Dionysian mayhem in an after-dark park, maenad hippy-chicks with faces "disfigured by love", strewing "petals and flowers," prancing the rites of Pan.

John's Children's merger of cissy and psychotic highlights the major difference between American garage punk and British "freakbeat" (as reissue label Bam Caruso dubbed it for their illustrious Rubble compilation series). The Limey stuff is way fey compared with the Yanks. You can hear a proto-glam androgyny, a "soft boy" continuum that takes in Barrett and Bolan, obviously, but also the queeny-dandy aristocrat persona of Robert Plant. At the same time, because these bands were schooled in R&B and played live constantly, the music has a rhythmic urgency and aggressive thrust that gradually faded over subsequent decades from the psychedelic tradition (think of Spiritualized's drum-phobic ethereality). This, though, was music for dancing as much as wigging out.

Nuggets II isn't solid gold. There's a slight surfeit of boppy shindig-type rave-ups and sub-Yardbirds blues that just ain't bastardized enough. Personally I crave more tunes with truly over-the-top guitar effects, aberrant bass-heavy mixes, phased cymbals, drastic stereo separation, and other psych-era cliches. The "British Empire" part of the subtitle allows in Australia's The Easybeats (godstars for the duration of "Friday On My Mind") while the "Beyond" pulls in groovy Latin American acid-rockers Os Mutantes. But to be honest, a lot of the Commonwealth-and-beyond stuff just ain't that hot. And inevitably one could compile another 2-CDs out of heinous ommissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.

THE WHO

3O YEARS MAXIMUM R&B

 For a while there, it seemed that The Who had dipped out of rock memory, become a band that virtually no one even thought about. They seemed to have the same relation vis-a-vis the eternally cool and current Beatles & Stones that, say, Deep Purple have to Sabbath & Zep: massive then, monstrously uninfluential thereafter. In recent years, though, The Who have slowly seeped back as a reference point, what with Urge Overkill's "Live At Leeds" sharp-dressed rifferama and the mod iconography of groups at diverse as Flowered Up, These Animal Men, Blur, D-Generation, and Primal Scream (that ad for 'Rocks' featuring Keith Moon). 

     Personally, I find there's something resolutely unloveable about The Who, although why I'm not sure.  Pete Townshend's mid-life crisis and endless maudlin' musings on lost youth?  Roger Daltrey's voice, face, and fish-farm? Just the FACT (I haven't heard 'em) that John Entwhistle released FIVE solo LP's?  Perhaps the real reason is the boy-ness of The Who cult (and of their legacy, The Jam, Secret Affair etc).  Somehow it's obvious that way fewer women cared about The Who than The Stones, Beatles or even Led Zep. 

     Still, I love the mod-psych bands who never made it--The Eyes, John's Children, The Creation--so I can't logically refute the thrill of "I Can't Explain", "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere", "Substitute". At their 1965/66 height, The Who's white R&B is so amped-up and amphetamine-uptight it's coming apart at the seams.  "My Generation" remains as naffly irresistible as Steppenwolf's equally naive "Born To Be Wild"; Moon's ramshackle surf-drums, exploding everywhichway like Mitch Mitchell of the Experience, Townshend's slash-and-scald rhythm guitar, Entwhistle's bass-lunges and Daltrey's speed-freak stutter, all add up to an immaculately chaotic enactment of mod's "smashed, blocked" aggression, its rage-to-live and hunger for action.

     With the arrival of psychedelia, The Who toyed with the era's fashionable tropes of androgyny ("I'm A Boy"'s Frank Spencer scenario, where mummy won't admit he's not a girl), and regression (the fey "creepy-crawly" terrors of "Boris The Spider").  There were gems here (the effete all-wanked-out vocals of the masturbation ode "Pictures Of Lily"), but mostly The Who's acid-phase is unusually unappetising.  "I Can See For Miles" turns mod misogny into visionary paranoia, and the swooping phased guitars of "Armenia" thrill, but the pallid, fey vocals of this period are pretty pukey.

     Then the bombast begins in earnest.  Daltrey quickly swells into the least likeable white R&B singer this side of Joe Cocker, while Townshend's songs bloat up like houses with too many extensions. The Who's progressive aspirations are all on the level of structure rather than playing or texture (which remained coarse R&B); the result is a horrid fusion of prog-rock and pub rock.  So, apart from "Tommy"'s one genuinely hymnal aria ("See Me Feel Me") and the just-about-takeable epic-ness of their post-counterculture allegory "Won't Get Fooled Again", a long blank void ensues--one whose continuance seemed increasingly mercenary as the Seventies proceed.  Even at their most haggard, The Stones could re- ignite with the lubricious raunch of a "Start Me Up".  The Who's equivalent twilight hit is "You Better You Bet", a song with only one fan in the entire world, Taylor Parkes, and only then for the most perverse, "it's so bad, it's.... really MINDBOGGLINGLY bad" of reasons.

     "30 Years Maximum R & B"? Break that down, and it works out at roughly 4 and a half years of adolescent intensity and two and a half decades of graceless middle-age.     

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Scroll on

A little souvenir of a terrible year...  something I wrote about doomscrolling for Sasha Frere-Jones's end-of-year writer-buddies round-up, looking back over 2023 and looking ahead to 2024, which has been even more "how can this be reality?!?" than I could have imagined.

Hoping for some hopescrolling come Tuesday night....

update: 4 more years of doomscrolling is it then....  at a bare minimum

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It was a year of doomscrolling. Like the year before. And like next year.

Sometimes, when trying to explain affect theory to my students, I use doomscrolling as an example of a uniquely contemporary affect. It didn’t exist - and then it did.

For sure, there’s always been bad news. But it arrived in defined chunks and at punctual intervals - TV news, radio at the top of the hour. Only a massive crisis like 9/11 or Katrina would result in rolling round the clock coverage - and even then, you could walk away from that.

To get the doomscroll effect in the past, you’d have to take a load of newspapers and chop them up and stick on some kind of homemade carousel rigged up out of chicken wire and spindles. And even then it would not approach the inexhaustible, endless-onwardness of the doomscroll,

The chyron, that Times Square tickertape at the bottom of the news channel screen, was a foretaste, an augury of doomscrolling. But it was easier to ignore, and it didn’t have the personalized, algo-attuned quality of doomscroll, the way it learns what detains your gaze and churns up choice items tailor-made to agitate you.

Think about how this timesuck lifefuck invention affects your breathing rhythms, your posture (hunched, clenched), your endocrinal system - and how that builds up as neurological wear and tear, a stress load.

But think also about how those on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum from where you sit  - on any issue, any conflict currently raging - are also being pumped full of this shit nonstop, forcefed fear and tension.  It explains a lot.

For sure, now and then there’ll be a spate of hopescrolling - unexpectedly positive developments, better than expected election results. But mostly the mode is doomscroll - feeding your inexplicable craving for the alarming, the upsetting, the enlargement of feelings of impotence and despair.

Feeding you the illusion of keeping on top of things when actually you’re sinking deeper and deeper.

2023 was the year of doomscrolling. Same as last year. 2024 will be worse - worse beyond the wildest nightmares. 

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Follow up on the blog about Bob Dylan as the Original Doomscroller

RIP Phil Lesh

 Never became a Deadhead, but there's the odd moment on the records, and then there's "Dark Star"

There's also the electro-acoustic side project Seastones, the creation of Ned Lagin, but Lesh's contribution and encouragement clearly crucial.

Below is 

a/ bit on the Grateful Dead from an essay on psychedelia for a Liverpool exhibition

b/ a bit on Grateful Dead and Deadhead culture from Retromania

c/ my interview with John Oswald about his Grayfolded project based on 100s of different live versions of "Dark Star" - a project instigated by Phil Lesh.

Ethan Hein does close analysis of "Dark Star" and recommends some great versions (helpfully collated here by me as a playlist)

Here's a different playlist of  other "Dark Star" renditions I made on Tidal

I rather like this ridiculously non-singular studio version they put out as a single

Second part of Ethan Hein's analysis of "Dark Star", less musicological this time and more about concept + context, surveying academic literature on the song

Earlier Hein post titled "Phil Lesh gets funky"

Call me soft in the head but I've always rather liked this other single - an actual hit, Top 10 Billboard!

Grateful Dead and the SF Sound

Unlike the British psychedelic groups, the SF bands had gone straight from folk to acid-rock without any intervening period playing rock’n’roll or R&B. As a consequence, the feelgood groove that the UK groups retained through all the studio malarkey was absent. Yet despite its lack of grounding in R&B, the SF acid-rock bands uniformly emphasized the importance of dancing. It’s no coincidence that the scene was born in former ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon. This was a particular form of dance--unpaired and asexual, a sacred frenzy of undulant gestures. This freeform dance matched The Grateful Dead’s “search for the form that follows chaos,” as guitarist Jerry Garcia characterized it. 

Capturing the fugitive “magic” of their live jamming in the studio would prove an abiding problem for the Grateful Dead. Shortly before making their first album, Garcia warned, “We’re not a recording band. We’re a dance band.” After a disappointing debut, the Dead veered to the opposite extreme and embraced the sound-sculpting potential of the studio. Painstakingly stitching together live tapes with studio experimentation, 1968’s Anthem of the Sun drew heavily on the avant-classical training of bassist Phil Lesh and pianist Tom Constanten, both of whom had studied under Luciano Berio at Mills College in Oakland, California. “We were making a collage,” recalled Garcia. “It had to do with an approach that’s more like electronic music or concrete  music, where  you are actually assembling bits and pieces towards an enhanced non-realistic representation.”  Compared with the phonographic feats of the Beatles or Hendrix, though, Anthem is a pretty mild experience, with an “organic” quality that mostly feels like a plausible real-time musical event (unlike the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life.” say). The Dead quickly reverted to their original go-with-the-flow improvisational model, as documented on an endless series of live albums.  Jefferson Airplane, likewise, made a couple of gestures at musique concrete--the freak-out track “A Small Package of Value Will Come To You, Shortly,” the electronic foray “Curinga”--but their records generally closely replicated their live sound.  

.... Paralleling the Deadhead subculture that surrounded the Grateful Dead all through the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, the rave scene created a sense of ecstatic tribalistic community. Like Dead shows, each rave constructed a “temporary autonomous zone” in which drugs could be experienced in the most audio-visually conducive environment imaginable. The acid house played at the raves couldn’t have sounded further from the Dead’s meandering country-rock, but it had exactly the same function. As journalist Burton H. Wolfe put it in the 1960s, this was music designed “to blow the mind and provide action sound for dancing.” 

DEADHEADS

THE LIVING DEAD

On the face of it, it's difficult to think of anything more distant from Mod and Northern Soul than the Deadheads, that tie dye tribe who followed the Grateful Dead on their arena tours all through the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties.   The turn to psychedelia in the mid-Sixties was precisely what turned off many mods and led to Northern Soul.  It's easy to imagine a Northern Soul or Secret Affair fan's disgust at the Deadhead's sense of "style": the long straggly hair and face-fuzz, the cut-off-shorts and loose flowing garments with their unappetizing mix of garish colors and Whole Earth-y shades of brown.  The Dead's music--all meandering guitar solos, rootsy grooves, weak whitebread harmonies--could hardly have been more offensive to the mod sensibility.  

 Still, there are a surprising number of parallels between Northern Soul and the Deadhead scene. Both are style tribes whose members travelled on pilgrimages to particular clubs or one-off events, "temples of sound" where they congregated to create an ecstatic ritual space.  At the Dead's long arena shows and the Northern Soul all-nighters loud music and drugs meshed to overwhelm listeners and transport them to a collective high. Dead shows were famous for the ripples that traversed the crowd-body in response to certain shifts in the music.  As journalist Burton H. Wolfe observed, the Dead's music was "action sound for dancing" just as much as it was head music designed to "blow the mind". A different kind of dancing, for sure, to the fastidious steps and acrobatic twirls on display at Northern nights. Freeform and fluid, Deadhead dancing was the continuation of the "freaking-out" style that emerged in 1960s San Francisco at former ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon as well as at the Be-Ins and similar triptastic happenings.   Orgiastic yet asexual, this sacred frenzy of undulant gestures matched The Grateful Dead’s “search for the form that follows chaos,” as guitarist Jerry Garcia characterized it. But like Northern Soul, the Dead's concert audience was mostly on its feet, moving and grooving.  

The main thing that the Deadheads and Northern Soul have in common is their fixation on a particular moment in the Sixties, keeping it alive in defiance of the passage of pop historical time.  Neither scene was really retro, but rather an example of subcultural persistence.  "Keeping the faith" is the central principle in both fan cultures. So too is an emphasis on community--a sense of togetherness defined against the mainstream, that unlucky majority who aren't in the know.  As the Dead's Tom Constanten put it, "Back in the sixties, there was a great sense of community, and I think a lot of the energy and the steam, the wind in the sails of the Grateful Dead phenomenon is from that community."  There are even parallels between Northern Soul and the Deadheads in terms of the way a rhetoric of anti-commercialism was combined with a bustling entrepreneurial activity, as with the markets for handcrafted goods (hemp bracelets, jewelry, tie-dyed clothes) and Dead memorabilia  that sprang up in the parking lots outside the arenas where the Dead  played, which aren't that far removed from the record dealers selling and swapping rare soul singles at the Northern Soul all-nighters. In both scenes there was also a bustling illegal trade going on rather less openly:  amphetamines and barbituarates with Northern, and at Deadhead shows, marijuana, "doses" ( LSD), and other psychedelics like peyote, mushrooms and MDMA. 

All this parking lot activity was as much part of the total experience of a Dead show as the band's performance.  These outdoor bazaars,  teeming with  backpack-lugging peddlers and gaudily daubed, Merry Prankster-style micro-buses and vans, offered a kind of nomadic surrogate for Haight-Ashbury circa 1967-69. And they had the same upsides and downsides. Familiar faces that you'd see at every show, people passing around the pipe and sharing stuff with strangers, an atmosphere of trust and tranquility…. But also rip-off deals, scam artists, hardcore drug casualties, kids flipping out on bad trips.   

Deborah J.  Baiano-Berman, who's both an academic and a Deadhead,  characterizes the band's following  as a "moral community" and argues that Dead's concerts allow their fans "to live out their interpretation of a hippie-like communal value system, based primarily on freedom, experimentation, solidarity, peace, and spontaneity."  Inside the auditorium, the crowd created the atmosphere as much as the band or the lighting crew.  The emphasis on tie-dye and clashing colours, the painted faces and beads, turned the whole shimmying, swaying audience into a paisley ocean, a spin-art kaleidoscope.  Baiano-Berman points out that almost nobody sits at their assigned seats in the concert hall: they move out into the aisles and dance, drift around the auditorium, settling in different places, creating an effect of "incessant movement and circulation". To an audience sensitized on drugs like LSD, which intensifies peripheral vision, to be in the midst of this flickering multitude is entrancing and magical.

Another aspect of Deadhead culture that's about communality and circulation is tape trading. From very early on Deadheads started recording shows, a practice that was first tolerated by the band and then encouraged, with the Grateful Dead making provisions for a special area at each of their shows for tapers.  There was a huge demand for cassette recordings of the band's shows, in part because the Grateful Dead's official studio albums were airless affairs that failed to capture the electricity of the band in full improvisational flow.   Deadhead culture's communal ethos meant that if anyone requested a tape, the taper had to make them a copy. Tapers also got into trading recordings with other tapers in different parts of the country.  All that resulting excessive documentation and redundancy anticipated aspects of today's retro culture, like the multiple clips of the same gig videoed on cellphones and uploaded to YouTube. 

The taping phenomenon has a paradoxical aspect.  The angle on the Dead has always been that you really had to see them live to "get it": you needed to experience the flow of the moment, the pure quicksilver magic of Garcia's soloing as it rippled out into the cosmos.  Taping the shows attempts to capture that evanescent beauty but in the process goes against the "be here now" spirit of psychedelia.   Indeed the tapers became obsessed with recording quality. Instead of dancing and getting lost in music, they would spend the show crouched beside their tape recording equipment, constantly adjusting the recording levels (sometimes listening to the show through headphones plugged into the machine) or repositioning the microphones.  They'd admonish dancing Deadheads for bumping into the equipment or chatting too loudly on the periphery of the taper's sections.  Like the dad with a videocamera welded into his eye socket at his kid's birthday party, the tapers were not fully present; they missed, partially at any rate,  the very event  they were attempting to save for eternity.  

The fact that obsessively stockpiling audio documentation of the live Dead is so central to the Deadhead subculture seems to resonate with its deepest impulse: to freeze-frame History and artificially keep alive an entire era, the late Sixties.  The Deadhead scene is a preservation society.  Or perhaps it was actually a reservation, a zone of cultural territory set aside for an outcast tribe.  The gentle frenzy of the Deadheads is a ghost dance: an endangered, out-of-time people willing a lost world back into existence.

JOHN OSWALD 

The Wire, 1995

 by Simon Reynolds

     There are two different schools of sampling. For some (A Guy Called Gerald, The Young Gods, Techno-Animal), there's a fierce conviction (50 percent aesthetic, 50 percent legal anxiety) that all samples must be masked, all sources rendered unrecognisable.  This is the modernist school of sampladelia: digital technology as a crucible for sonic alchemy, musique concrete made easy as pie.  I have a lot of sympathy for this ethos, but there's a sense in which this approach reduces the sampler to a synthesiser, and thereby misses what is truly idiomatic to the machine: taking the known and making it strange, yet still retaining an uncanny, half-recognisable trace of the original's aura.

     Canadian musician/producer John Oswald falls into the second, postmodern camp. Sampling, or as he prefers to term it, "electroquoting", is a highly self-conscious practice that allows him to interrogate notions of originality, copyright, signature and 'the death of the author'.  Long before the sampler became available, he was using more cumbersome, time-consuming techniques of tape cut'n'splice to create his famous if seldom heard Mystery Lab cassettes.  But he really made a name for himself in 1989 with the Plunderphonics CD, which caused a major ruckus, sonically and institutionally, with its digital vivisections of songs by The Beatles, Elvis, Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, Glenn Gould etc.  Despite the fact that 'Plunderphonics' was distributed on a non-commercial, non-profit basis, the Canadian Recording Industry Association, acting on behalf of its clients CBS and Michael Jackson, threatened Oswald with litigation.  He was forced to destroy the master-tapes and all remaining CD's.  700 remain in circulation, while the intrigued can get bootleg copies from a number of Copyright Violation Squads (see end-note).

     Since then Oswald has mostly confined his plunderphonic escapades to cases where his reworkings have been solicited, like his de- and re-constructions of songs by The Doors and Metallica, amongst others, for a limited release CD celebrating the 25th Annivesary of Elektra Records. An exception was "Plexure" (released on John Zorn's Avant label), where Oswald cannibalised the entire audiorama of contemporary pop'n'rock in one fell swoop. The result--5000 songs 'composited' into a 20 minute frenzy of crescendos, choruses, screams, powerchords, etc--is a bit like Napalm Death with samplers.

     Last year, at the invitation of the Grateful Dead, Oswald plunderphonized that band's most famous and far-out song "Dark Star", producing the double-CD "Grayfolded".  The first disc, "Transitive Axis" came out last year; now the second half, "Mirror Ashes" has been added, and the whole 'Grayfolded' package is being made widely available, following the unexpectedly warm reception 'Transitive' received from the Deadhead community (50,000 copies sold!). 

     Entering the Dead's legendary vaults, where recordings of virtually every performance they ever made are stacked, Oswald spent 21 days listening to 100 versions of 'Dark Star', and extracted 40 hours of improvisatory material.  The original plan was to create just one disc, but Oswald soon realised he had enough good stuff for two.  'Transitive' and 'Mirror' each took three months of painstaking digital labour to construct. The results are astonishing. Whereas the iconoclasm (literally idol-smashing) of 'Plunderphonics' was patently audible, 'Grayfolded' is true to the spirit of the Dead:  the nine tracks of 'Transitive', in particular, form one seamless, fluent monster-jam, and sounds almost like a plausible real-time event with the Dead in unusually kosmik form.  Although Oswald's techniques allow Garcia, Weir, Lesh et al to jam  with their own doppelgangers across a 25 years timespan, the digital methodology doesn't really draw attention to itself on the first disc (it gets a bit more outre on "Mirror Ashes", though).

     One of the ironies of "Grayfolded" is that Oswald wasn't exactly a Deadhead when he embarked on the project. "I enjoyed 1969's 'Live/Dead', especially 'Dark Star', and might have heard the odd C&W song or 'Truckin'', but I basically didn't listen to them for twenty five years," he admits over the phone from his Toronto office. "But I found what I expected in the vaults--all kinds of great things were happening in concert.  I also went to two Dead shows.  The first was in Oakland, their home town, and I thought 'well, this is not great improvising', but it was fascinating sociologically, in so far as there's this relationship between an extremely active, fertile audience and a very untheatrical musical experience onstage.  A year later I went to another show in New York, and found that musically it was quite satisfying, almost like a completely different band. So I started to respect the idea that an audience would follow this band looking for these good concerts. I had got one out of two, a good ratio."

     In the lysergic daze of late '60s acid-rock, the Dead did weird studio-as-instrument stuff on early albums like 'Anthem of the Sun' and 'Aoxomoa', But today one associates the Dead with a keep-it-live, jam-a-long mess-thetic, possibly because their legacy is godawful American neo- tie-dye bands like Blues Traveller, Phish, etc. Was there a sense in which Oswald was making a case for digital music as the new psychedelia, and making up for the Dead's abandonment of the studio's possibilities?

     Actually, no. "The technique of this record--using computers, digital transfers and stuff--is really incidental to the illusion I'm trying to present.  People would tell me to stop listening to the tapes and go to a concert, 'cos live it's a totally different thing.  And I thought what constitutes this other 'thing'? It's obviously not in the band itself, cos there's no theatricality. Maybe it's 'cos there's so much drugs in the air! What I found at the concerts is there's a give and take between the audience and band, there are audience surges triggered by certain things the band do, or by the lighting, which is very subtle and directs the visual attention back onto the audience every so often. I thought 'well, we're not going to soak the CD cover in acid, so how can I achieve what I think everybody desires--a record that captures this feeling that Dead concerts are magic?'  So I did things that are unnatural, like have a young Jerry Garcia sing with an old Jerry, or have an orchestra of multiple Dead musicians, all in order to pump up the sonic experience so that at certain points you think: 'What's happening? Have the drugs kicked in?'".

     These paradoxical sensations--a real-time, flow-motion band suddenly transfigured and  transcendentalized--were created via an array of intensely artificial and finickety techniques. Like 'folding', whereby Oswald took similar material from different concerts and layered them up, achieving a density similar to the effect Phil Spector got from having several pianos playing the same chords. "For instance, on "Transitive Axis" I took a really nice 12 minute duet between Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia, trimmed out redundant ideas and folded it down to three minutes. Yet it still feels like a duet. Using a computer, it's easy to take something from later in a musical sequence and slide it in earlier, superimposing it on a different track of the mix. I used to do that in my earlier analog days but it was much harder to do it accurately. With computers, I can move things by a millisecond 'til they fit exactly in the rhythmic pocket, so you still have the 'feel' of a band. 

     "After the first disc, Lesh said he would have liked to hear even more folding, and in response I took the entirety of 'Transitive Axis' and folded it 14 times. This created 16, 384 layers and squeezed 60 minutes into 2 seconds! It sounds like a feedback rush or a jet engine, and I slipped it into "Cease Tone Beam" on the second disc. It's a bit like that JG Ballard idea that in the future people will listen to  Wagner operas that have been compressed from four hours to a few seconds, but still have the flavour, like a whiff of perfume."

     "Cease Tone Beam" itself is Oswald's plunderphonia at its most extreme. From the ' drumspace' sections of Dead shows, which often segue into 'Dark Star', Oswald took a minute and a half fragment of ultralow-end percussion timbre, generated on Mickey Hart's custom-made aluminum beam. Oswald slowed it down 16 times into a protracted sub-aural seism, over which he layered progressively shorter, less-slowed down swatches of percussion that went up in ratios (2, 4, 8) that generated a simple  armonic relationship.  The result, at once ethereal and chthonic, other- and under-wordly, is the missing link between avant-grunge unit The Melvins and Eno's "On Land".

     Oswald doesn't really know how the Grateful Dead feel about "Grayfolded". Ex-keyboard player Tom Constanten did send him a thank-you note, but the death of Jerry Garcia left the rest of the guys "pretty preoccupied".  Diehard Deadheads responded extremely well to "Transitive Axis", but the more anti-naturalistic "Mirror Ashes" has stirred the first charges of 'heresy!'.  Oswald's favourite reaction is "from a guy on the Internet who wrote that Grayfolded makes him cry, because it encapsulates 25 years of Garcia, and it's unreal in a way that gave him a very visceral sensation of it being a ghost."

                                                                                                    Ghosts of Phil

Garcia's death does shine a peculiar light on the whole project, in so far as it suggests that a kind of involuntary immortality for artists may soon become widespread. Oswald has shown that a sympathetic ear can 'play' another artist's aesthetic like an instrument. (Of course Luddites like Lenny Kravitz and  Oasis have effectively already done the same thing, vis-a-vis Hendrix and Lennon/McCartney, by writing new songs in another's old style).  But what's to stop an unsympathetic, money-motivated ear doing the same thing?  In the future, will artists copyright their 'soul-signature' and then sell it to the highest bidder to be exploited after their demise? Fond of visual and filmic analogies, Oswald mentions that the movie business has been trying to devise ways of taking dead stars and creating simulations of them to play new parts. The mind boggles....

     In addition to plunderphonic activity, Oswald works as a producer, where he deploys unique  ecording techniques like his Orbital Microphone Navigational Imaging Via Echotronic Radio Stereo Eccentricity, aka OMNIVERSE (a mic' with the aural equivalent of a zoom lens, enabling it to do a 'tracking shot' down the entire length of a piano string).  He also writes pieces for orchestra, and, as we speak, is putting the finishing touches to a stage production involving 22 choreographers "none of whom know what the others are doing". Finally, and strictly as a hobby, he plays sax in a quintet confusingly called The Double Wind Cello Trio.  On the plunderphonic front, Oswald has a backlog of classical music related stuff to release, and he's about to embark on a massive opus that will somehow "encapsulate this first century of music recording history that is about to come to an end".

19th Century DIY versus 20th Century DIY: cylinder home recordings, pirate radio tapes + adverts

Luke Owen of Death Is Not The End just recently put out a really interesting release: Making Records: Home Recordings c. 1890​-​1920 -  a collection of DIY home recordings, transferred from blank and repurposed brown and black wax cylinders, dating back to the early years of widespread phonographic technology, from the late 1890s and first couple of decades of 20th Century. In the words of David Giovannoni, whose collection is the source of this material: "For the first time in human history we could take sonic selfies, audio snapshots with friends, and aural portraits of loved ones. Our phonographs captured the sounds of everyday life, both silly and serious: the baby’s squalling, Johnny’s naughty joke, Grandma’s favorite hymn as only she could sing it, our letters to loved ones in foreign lands...."

In honor of yet another fascinating Death Is Not The End release, here's my piece on an earlier archival triumph - Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993 Vol. 1  .... followed by my liner note for Pause for the Cause, aka Vol. 2 of the Pirate Radio Adverts compilation series....  followed by my interview with Luke about the project as previously Q-and-A'd at Blissblog.... followed by a bonus piece about my cherished pirate radio tapes originally done for The Wire.   

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 Save and Rave! How A Compilation of Pirate Radio Adverts Captures a Lost Britain

director's cut, The Guardian, Feb 16 2021

“Have you got that record that goes ah-woo-ooo-ooh-yeah-yeah?”  It’s a scene familiar to anyone who spent time in a hardcore rave record shop in the 1990s – a punter asking for a tune they’ve heard on pirate radio or at a rave but they don’t know the title, so they mimic the riff or sample-hook hoping that someone behind the counter can recognise it.  A relic of pre-Shazam life,  the ritual is preserved in an advert for Music Power Records aired on the pirate station Pulse FM in 1992. Nick Power, owner of the Harringay, North London shop, recalls that no matter how mangled the customer’s rendition, “nearly always, you’d be able to identify the exact record they were looking for.”

In the advert, Power himself plays the roles of both sales assistant and punter (pinching his nose to alter his voice). Now, almost 40 years later, the comic skit commercial has been resurrected on London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993 Vol. 1, the first of a pair of compilations pulled together by audio archivist Luke Owen. 

Released via his label Death Is Not The End, Vol. 1 is available digitally at a name-your-price rate and for £7.50 as a limited-edition cassette tape – a cute echo of the format on which pirate listeners captured transmissions of hardcore and jungle.  Back then,  most fans pressed ‘pause’ when the ad break started, which means that surviving documents of the form are relatively scarce. But what once seemed ephemeral and irritating have subsequently acquired period charm and – for some - collectability.

Owen started Death Is Not The End in 2014 as a label and NTS radio show that trawled much further back in the 20^th Century to scoop up early gospel and obscure blues. But early last year, he put out Bristol Pirates, tapping his own teenage memories of that city’s 1990s radioscape. The adverts loomed in his nostalgic reveries with particular vividness: “they were infectious and endearingly DIY…  some of them memorable to the point of fever loops. I can still remember one or two word for word”.  Owen sees “pirate radio broadcasts” in general as  “archival folk music” that fits perfectly logically alongside the field recordings and Jamaican doowop he’d earlier reissued. “They are raw, impromptu and communal musical experiences.” 

Pirate MCs and DJs often described an upcoming ad break as “a pause for the cause” – an annoying but necessary interruption, because the revenue funded the station’s operation. But the ads were useful to listeners, alerting them to raves and club nights. Promoters likewise depended on the pirates as the primary means of reaching their market, along with flyers left in record shops. 

Listening today, the ads offer fascinating snapshots of a living culture, at once entertaining and historically valuable as deposits of sociocultural data. Most of them are for raves and clubs, record stores or record releases. But some are for businesses unrelated to music: Vol. 1 features ads for a Croydon shop fittings company called Trade Equip and for Right Fit, a Dalston women’s wear store. If the uproarious tones of the commercials for imminent raves convey the hustling energy of rave as a micro-economy,  these more mundane non-music ads show how the scene was embedded in the larger economy. There’s poignancy too: from Fidel’s Menswear to the music equipment store Brixton Exchange to Music Power Records itself, these businesses have mostly shuttered or moved premises owing to changing demographics and rising rents.  So a slice of local urban history is captured here too.

Author of London’s Pirate Pioneers, Stephen Hebditch says that pirate radio – once a middle-class hobby – had by the late Eighties become “urban enterprise for the people most excluded from the legitimate media system… London reggae labels in particular put a lot of money into the pirates. Then when acid house came along promoters were splashing out a fortune on the stations linked to the rave scene”. Some of this revenue covered the costs of replacing radio equipment seized by the authorities. But larger pirate operations could “make back the cost of losing a transmitter in just a few hours of broadcasting”. 

Although demonized by the government and news media as gangsters of the airwaves,  the pirates were genuine community stations, playing music marginalized by mainstream broadcasters. The pirates represented minority populations – most obviously Black British, but other ethnicities too,  like Greek-Cypriot Londoners.  That’s Nick Power’s background, so he was tickled to hear a Greek-language ad for a Willesden Green beauty salon on London Pirate Radio Adverts Vol. 1.   On Vol.2,  out in early February, a similar one for a Harrow Road kebab house sits alongside ads for the Peckham jungle club Innersense at the Lazerdrome and for Chillin’ FM’s ravers dating service.

Death Is Not The End’s  compilations could be seen as a haunted audio cartography of a disappearing London. But that sounds a bit ghostly and elegiac: more crucially, these pirate adverts are joyous mementos of enterprising fun, young people grabbing good times at the outer edge of the law.

Sleevenote for Pause for the Cause: London Rave Adverts 1991​​​-​​​1996, Vol. 2

2022

Back in the early ‘90s, whenever the pirate radio MC announced “a pause for the cause”, I usually pressed pause on my cassette recorder. That’s something I would regret years later, when ad breaks had become cherished mementos of the hardcore rave era. Luckily, back in the day I often left the tape running while I went off to do something else. So a fair number of ad breaks got captured accidentally for my later delectation. Not nearly enough, though. So in recent years I started combing through the immense number of pirate radio sets archived on the internet. Sometimes the tracklists would note “ad break” or “ads”, helping to narrow the search. But often I’d just stumble on a bunch in the middle of a pirate show preserved on YouTube or an oldskool blog. A few of my original unintended “saves” and latterday “finds” are included in this wonderful collection by audio archaeologist Luke Owen. It’s the latest in his series of compilations of UK pirate radio advertisements, with this volume focusing on the audio equivalent of the rave flyer: MCs breathlessly hyping a club night or upcoming rave, listing the lineup of deejays and MCs, boasting about hi-tech attractions like lasers and projections, mentioning prices and nearest landmarks to the venue, and occasionally promising “clean toilets” and “tight but polite security” (“sensible security” is another variation). Some of these ads are etched into my brain as lividly as the classic hardcore and jungle tunes of that time. (Most rave ads incorporate snippets of current music, of course – big anthems and obscure “mystery tracks” alike). Names of deejays ring out like mythological figures: who were Shaggy & Breeze, Kieran the Herbalist, Tinrib, Food Junkie? Putting on my serious hat for a moment, I think these ads are valuable deposits of sociocultural data, capturing the hustling energy of an underground micro-economy in which promoters, deejays and MCs competed for a larger slice of the dancing audience. But mostly, they are hard hits of pure nostalgic pleasure, amusing and thrilling through their blend of period charm, endearing amateurism, and contagiously manic excitement about rave music’s forward-surge into an unknown future. The best of these ads give me a memory-rush to rival the top tunes and MC routines of the era.

— Simon Reynolds, author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. 

Chat with audio archivist Luke Owen about the Pirate Radio Adverts project:

 How did you get interested in pirate radio in general and in pirate radio adverts in particular?

I began tuning in to pirate radio from my early teens in Bristol in the late 90s - there was a lot of action on the dial back then and I was sucked in. It was a portal into the drum and bass/Full Cycle stuff happening in the city when I was too young for the clubs, and it also nurtured my love of reggae, dub and Bollywood soundtracks at a relatively young age. The ads were often infectious and endearingly DIY, and some were memorable to the point of fever loops, I can still remember one or two word for word. 

I came upon the Pirate Radio Archive website a couple of years back, and there I found a trove of recordings from across the 80s and 90s through which I could transport myself back in time to some of those broadcasts I had been brought up on. I had been running Death Is Not The End since 2014 as a record label and NTS radio show focused mostly on "deep digs" into early gospel/blues/folk, field recordings and various archival finds. Coming across these recordings I was immediately stuck by the desire to do something with them, and put together a mixtape for the Blowing Up The Workshop mixblog and subsequently released it on DINTE as a cassette. It was a bit of a left-turn for the label perhaps, but being both archival and field recordings I thought it fit. I'm interested in "folk music" having a broader contemporary remit, and what it can mean in context. To me, recordings like these pirate radio broadcasts can represent archival folk music of sorts - they are raw, impromptu and communal musical experiences. 

For me, the appeal of them is multi-leveled – there’s nostalgia, there’s period charm, there’s the amateur nature of them, some of the comedy ones are genuinely funny…   But I also think they provide a valuable and historically important archive of subculture and British ‘lifeworlds’, especially minority populations (e.g. you have the Greek salon ad on Vol 1 ).

Yes, a lot are hilarious and some to the point of being genuinely a bit unhinged in places... A big part of the uniqueness of pirate radio is in the ads I think - it reflects the alternative culture through the lens of local business and events in a way that often contrasts with the staleness of "commercial" radio as much as the music itself. The whole thing often just seems to thrive on amping up the madness a bit, because they can. The London Pirate Radio Adverts collection was also intriguing from a local history perspective. I've always been interested in the changing landscape of areas, the previous lives of buildings, music venues, long gone record shops etc. By chance a lot of the adverts I collected for this happen to be for clubs and bars in places in South East London and East London that I've come to know quite well since moving here in the mid-noughties so that's another facet of it for me. Also, Immigrant communities making use of pirate radio as a means to supply an essential community service is an inherent element to pirate radio as a whole I think.

I like also the range. You have the slick-aspiring ads (with a tiny bit of Smashy + Nicey about the patter,  quite common with pirate deejays before ’92 when it got a lot more ruffneck and hooligan in vibe -  or they’ll hire that voiceover guy that also appeared in cinema adverts, the one with the incredibly deep voice,  he pops up a few times on your tapes). And then the much more amateurish efforts.  

Redd Pepper? I'm never quite sure whether it's him or an imitator... He sure must have gotten a lot of work around this time regardless. There's another guy who seems to have been the voiceover guy for a large portion of reggae & dancehall/soundclash events in the past couple decades (this is him @ 5.40 on Side A) and is still going strong. I'm going to do my best to track him down, I think I might have a friend of a friend who hired him for an ad once.

I think there's sometimes a conscious effort to get someone with a posh accent (or affecting one) for some of the dances that are billing themselves as classy & exclusive affairs. Then you've got some hilariously oddball voices, and a really bad Scouse impression that I have no idea what it's trying to achieve! I think pirate radio in general is prone to jokes and reference points that only the small group of listeners (or more likely mates of the station and the DJs) are "in" on, and this can bleed through to the ads as much as the chatter.

They often seem to like putting FX on the voice.

Yes, the use of delay on pirate radio station voiceover and adverts seems to be a point of reference that's bled in from sound system culture. I think it also helps the adverts "pop" and the feedback has the handy effect of papering over cracks where they may often sound too muddy and amateurish otherwise. I've also added tape delay here and there to aid with the transitions from one track to the next - the idea was initially for this to have the flow of a mixtape as much as possible.

Most of the ads on pirates were for raves, clubs, records shops, occasionally a compilation or a 12 inch release … But  it’s interesting that quite a few of them are for non-music-related businesses -  there’s one I came across for a bakers, you’ll get ones for hairdressers or a restaurant.  Or on Vol. 1 the shop fittings ad for Trade Equip  and the one for Fidel’s Menswear.

In a way I find the non-music related ads as some of the most intriguing and charming. It shows that the stations were often genuinely part of a thriving localised economy, and not just for soundheads. It seems a bit mad to think of a small high-street business advertising on the radio these days, and I suppose with the advent of social media marketing we're probably seeing the last of small businesses in print advertising to a large degree - it's just not attractive as you don't get to monitor the traffic it's generating and target your audience down to the minutiae, but it leaves a document of that business that can be preserved from a local history perspective (whereas when a business folds their online presence will likely disappear with it).

Even on the music history level alone, though, they are  valuable – there’s a sort of established history of rave where certain legendary clubs get mentioned  over and over (Rage, Labrynth, Innersense) and the same applies to the raves, labels, record shops. But these ads capture just how many clubs, raves etc there were, in all different parts of London or UK… many that have been forgotten or only ran for a short while. And there are addresses, times, prices mentioned.

Yes, the provision of full addresses, and often bus routes and the general specifics for the clubs and venues always gives me a pang of nerdy excitement. The addition of local landmarks, "under this flyover", "next to Tescos" etc. gives me extra info with which I can go sleuthing on Streetview and look at the ghost of the club mentioned in the advert (and for extra nerdery I can swipe backward in time on street view to see it's former guises too).

The raver’s dateline courtesy Chillin FM advert is very interesting and surprising!

Yes I was surprised to come across so many ravers datelines! I wonder if this is something you had come across before? Hooking up and meeting potential partners never struck me as a priority to pilled-up ravers but I must be mistaken... It was relatively before my time, and I suppose it's easy to be swayed by the dominant narrative of early rave being a drug-fuelled oasis away from meat-market bars & clubs, but there was clearly a market for it! I can't help being reminded of Father Ted's priest chatback line whenever I hear it, also.

I think you mentioned in that Crack interview how most people paused the tape when the ads came on…   so there’s a limited number of ad breaks that have survived intact.

Yeah I guess it makes sense that the music is what the majority of the listeners are there for, and the ads can do one - or indeed be edited out later. The sources I had were pretty much all online, so I suppose you could say that a portion of those who have ripped/digitized their tapes didn't stop their recordings when the ads came on, and rather they have cropped them out in the process. But in general it's the same principle as to when you would record a TV show on VHS - a waste of valuable magnetic tape space. 

What number did you accumulate before you started winnowing them down?

Maybe 100 total? It's been a bit of a blur to be honest. At some point I think I was losing it a bit.

It’s good that you have ads that aren’t just rave / hardcore / jungle, but others kind of music that were big then – like mellow house and progressive house etc.

It's easy to imagine pirate radio as exclusively a place for jungle, hardcore, reggae and dancehall etc. but yes it's refreshing. I particularly am interested in the popularity of rare groove and how that fits into the mix. The Under 18s Disco advert strikes me for it's mix up of styles - 'ragga, house, rap & swing'.

What is your favorite ad out of all the ones on the two cassettes?  Or top 2 or 3.

I think probably the Videobox rental shop is up there, it's the faux dialogue that just makes me smile. The Rolls Royce & A Big House in 89 is just fantastic for the list of celebrities who have "been invited", and that you simply need to go into your local hairdresser for £1 tickets.

PIRATES OF THE AIRWAVES

The Wire, 2008

By Simon Reynolds

 Easily the most precious sonic artifacts in my possession are the tapes I made of London pirate radio shows in the early Nineties. Everything else is replaceable,  albeit in some cases at considerable effort and expense.  But these ardkore rave and early jungle tapes are almost certainly irrecoverable: given the large number of stations active then,  the sheer tonnage of 24 hours/Friday-Saturday-Sunday broadcasting, and the drug-messy  non-professionalism of the DJ-and-MC crews of those days, it's highly likely my recording is the only documentation extant of any given show.

In which case, if only I'd used higher quality cassettes!  Before I got wise, I'd tape over unwanted advance tapes from record labels: since the radio signal could often be poor, buying chrome blanks seemed a waste .  Plus, in those early days, I wasn't doing it out of some archival preservationist impulse.  Like a lot of ravers I was just taping to get hold of the music, something hard to do otherwise because deejays rarely  identified tunes. Later I'd discover that many were dubplates that wouldn't be in the shops for months anyway; in some cases, they were test pressing experiments that never got released at all.  I was taping simply to have the music to play through the week when the pirates mostly dropped off the airwaves, and in 1993, when I spent large chunks of the year in New York, I took the tapes with me to keep the rave flame burning during my exile.

These relics of UK rave's heyday are editions-of-one because they're mutilated by my spontaneous  editing decisions: switching between stations repeatedly when a pirate show's energy dimmed, or the DJ dropped  a run of tracks I'd taped several times already; cutting off arbitrarily when I couldn't stay awake any longer, or dwindling into lameness because I'd left the tape running and went off to do something else.  In the early days I often  pressed  'pause' when the commercial breaks came on, something I now regret because those that survived  are among my absolute favourite bits. With their   goofy, made-on-the-fly quality,  the ads for the big raves and the pirate station jingles contribute heavily to the dense layering of socio-cultural data and period vibes that make these tapes so valuable.

The crucial added element to these tapes,  something you don't get from the original vinyl 12 inches  played in isolation or even from the official DJ mix-tapes and mix-CDs of the era, is life.   In two senses:  the autobiographical imprint of my personal  early Nineties, someone hurled disoriented into the vortex of the UK rave scene and still figuring it out, but also the live-and-direct messiness of deejays mixing on the fly and using whatever new tunes were in the shops that week, of MCs  randomizing further with their gritty and witty patter.  The tapes are capsules of a living culture.  Something about the mode of transmission itself seems to intensify the music,  with radio's compression effect exaggerating hardcore's already imbalanced frequency spectrum of  treble-sparkly high end and sub-bass rumblizm. Pirate deejays, typically mid-level jocks or amateurs, also took more risks than big-name DJs crowd-pleasing at the mega-raves. Playing to a home-listening or car-driving audience, the DJs mixed with an edge-of-chaos looseness and squeezed  in some of the scene's odder output rather than just sticking to floor-filling anthems.

Oh, they're not all pure gold, these tapes. Many shows stayed stuck at "decent" or slumped outright into "tepid". But the ones that ignited…  ooh gosh!  The vital alchemical catalyst was invariably the MC. On some sessions, it's like a flash-of-the- spirit has possessed  the rapper,  as electrifying to the ears as a first-class Pentecostal preacher or  demagogue;  you sense the  MC and the decktician spurring each other to higher heights.  It tends to be the lesser knowns that thrill me most: not  the famous big-rave jungle  toasters like Moose or Five-O but forgotten figures like OC and Ryme Tyme, who forged unique styles that  melded  the commanding cadences and gruff rootsiness of U-Roy-style deejay talkover with the chirpy hyperkinesis of  nutty rave, or collided  barrow boy argy-bargy with  B-boy human beatboxing. Some of these tapes I know so well that the tracks are inseparable from the chants and the chatter entwined around the drops and melody-riffs; years later when I finally worked out what the mystery tunes were and bought them, they sounded flat without that extra layer of rhythmatized speech thickening the breakbeat broth. 

1992 to 1994, ardkore to darkcore to jungle, is the prime period for me. I seldom revisit the drum and bass years, when things got serious; things pick up again with the poptastic re-efflorescence of UK garage and 2step, when the number of London pirates resurged to its highest level. Grime is an odd one:  I've got masses of tapes, and there's masses more to be found archived on the web, but the emergence of the MC as a capital A artist strikes me as a mixed blessing. With one eye on their career prospects (an album deal) the MCs increasingly came in with pre-written verses, reams of carefully crafted verbiage dropped with little regard to how it fit the groove.  Pirate MCs always had an arsenal of signature catchphrases and mouth-music gimmicks, but with grime a vital element of ad-libbing improvisation got severely diminished.  So excepting some  2002 tapes from grime's protozoan dawn,  I've not got the same attachment or affection as I do for the classic rave sets.

Oddly, I've rarely found people who shared my obsession to anything like the same degree: a  handful of collector-traders, and a guy called DJ Wrongspeed, whose fantastic  Pirate Flava CD collaged the best bits from his now defunct Resonance FM series based around re-presenting pirate radio broadcasts. Often I've come across people who'll talk enthusiastically about recording  the pirates "back in the day," only to reveal they'd long since taped over the cassettes,  left them in the car to curdle in the heat, or just lost them. Aaaaargh!

But as a quick web search reveals, pirate tape fiends are out there lurking, and not just ones obsessed with the London-centric hardcore continuum:  there's online archives and merchants for the original pirate radio of the 1960s (stations anchored in international waters or occupying abandoned offshore military forts) and sites dedicated to the land-based pirates of the Seventies and Eighties and to the Eighties hip hop mix-shows broadcast by London's pre-rave pirates.  In terms of my particular addiction, you can find ardkore, jungle and UK garage sets archived at old skool sites, or offered for trade or sale; on various  rave, drum'n'bass and dubstep message boards you'll come across individuals sharing huge caches of  vintage transmissions.  The pirate penchant seems to be a minority taste within the larger niche market for DJ mix-tapes of the sort recorded through the sound board at the big commercial raves  and then sold commercially through specialist record stores. People have been selling or swapping dupes of these sets for a dozen years at least (nostalgia for 1990-92 set in as early as 1996!). Today, an original Top Buzz mix-tape circa 1992, say, might fetch sixty pounds on Ebay.  Strangely, from my point of view anyway, old skool fanatics generally prefer the slickly-mixed official releases to the vibe-rich but erratic pirate tapes; a lot of people just don't like MCs, it seems.  But if, like me, you dig the brink-of-bedlam atmosphere of the pirate set, or are just curious to cop an in-the-raw feel of what it was like in those crazed days, seek out these online deposits of delirium: 

http://www.hardscore.com/radiosets.htm

A sizeable cache of 1989-97 shows, mostly from the London area.

http://www.londonpirates.co.uk/TouchdownAudio.htm   http://www.londonpirates.co.uk/DonAudio.htm 

Sets from two of my favourite stations of the 1992-93 "golden age"

http://www.yorkshirejunkies.co.uk/music-pirate-radio-recordings.php

Massive archive of  broadcasts from Sheffield, Leeds,  Bradford, York, Huddersfield, Hull and other North of England stations, 1992 - 2006

http://www.tapesgalore.co.uk/prtapes.htm 

Huge selection of pirate tapes, albeit for sale rather than download.