looking back at 1994 - Xmas issue commentaries - Melody Maker - December 24-31 1994

 

Freaky cover isn't it? 

The whole issue readable at Nothing Else On

Jungle ! (January 22, 1994)

 

Not the first thing I did on jungle in Melody Maker - there was this Singles Club column from three months earlier focusing on releases from Moving Shadow and Reinforced.

And much earlier in April '93, I did a Letter from SW2 column about "Junglist" music 

But this 

was the first proper feature, as in piece that includes interview material with an actual living-breathing junglist (Goldie, my go-to motormouth for much of ,the earlier championing). 

But although this was the first proper feature to appear, it was actually the second to be written - for in the last months of '93 I had written for the then-new US rap 'n' B mag Vibe a much larger piece on jungle - including more quotes from Goldie - and making the hip hop connection central to my pitch to the readership as to why they oughta take heed. Owing to longer lead times with a monthly mag, this appeared in spring '94.  

Now I think of it there was actually there was another smaller piece on Goldie in among this flurry - from October 1993. Using that same odd, disconcerting photograph - his press shot of the time.

 

Getting a lot of use out of that first interview with the G-Man! He could cram a lot of words into a 45 minute phone chat. I particularly enjoyed Goldie's swipe at Sven Vath - at that time, the superiority of jungle over trance was self-evident to me, if no one else. Indeed around this time I did yet another piece, this time for The Wire, that was based around this trance v. jungle counter-view.  

But back to the January '94 piece. It was part of a big Melody Maker issue dedicated to the electronic dance music explosion - Underworld on the cover, page upon page upon page of coverage of the kind of artists that would be the staple of Muzik magazine (essentially a club culture offshoot of MM). The singles page was put in the hands of Orbital. Even the technical-muso pages were given over to electronica (The Drum Club talking about their gear - pass the smelling salts). 

The whole of that issue is below for your delectation. Seldom has such a confraternity of pale, male, bald-bonced individuals been gathered within a single publication! 

Jungle was included on the periphery of this feature package, held at arm's length as it were - the (literal) black sheep of the family. 

Scanning the contents today, what strikes me about all these names - then automatically given more credence than your 4 Heroes and LTJ Bukems -  is how few have them have endured. 

Tips for '94

 

My picks for "ones to watch for '94", in a January 1994 issue of Melody Maker. The other writers picks are right at the bottom.

Foul Play makes sense.  (Later in '94, the "mysterious outfit" became less mysterious as I met Brad + John in a cafe in Belsize Park, where I lived for most of the year, for an interview). 

The other nomination, though, is a bit of a head-scratcher, because clearly I must have been pretty taken with Keiji Haino at precisely the time of writing  - but it's not something I followed through with, at all. 

If memory serves, Kevin Martin - we used to hang out quite a bit in those days and back then he was  almost as much a critic as a musician, had a column in the Tower Records magazine  - Kev gave me a tape of Fushitsusha.  

Pretty soon jungle and electronic music took up all of my bandwidth, the avant-rock stuff got shunted aside pretty much.  

Vague memories of actually seeing Haino, much later, playing in NYC.

Listening to this again - almost certainly for the first time since - it really don't sound like my cup o' tea at all!

Whereas this, this is what I want played at my funeral. 

Apropos of nothing: a place Kevin liked to meet was Bunjie's Coffee House, in Litchfield Street (where The Mousetrap played for decades, and where I saw it as an 11 year old). Much, much later I learned Bunjies had been a legendary folk cellar.  Now I get a retrospective thrill at the idea of having once been in a space through which passed Anne Briggs -  and who knows what other folk goddesses and occasional god -  and breathed song into the air.  But in the early '90s such ancestral vibrations would have meant nothing to me. I remember the food being cheap and cheerful, if a little dull, and the decor utilitarian -  seem to remember tiles everywhere.

 

 

These sort of joint-prophecy / tip-sheet / ones-to-watch session always interesting to look back at -  kudos to those who mentioned Liz Phair, Elastica, Mu-ziq, and, at least in terms of predictive accuracy, if not quality assessment, Echobelly, Oasis, Sleeper, Guided By Voices....

  But then Fin? Not to be confused with Fin De Siecle (also ?). Southpaw? Not to be confused with Paw (also ?). Throneberry? Thrum? Ad, or maybe AD - either way, ? Honky? Baby Chaos? AC Acoustics?