Tuesday, February 18, 2025

CHAPTER 20

 
This Is Niecy - Wikipedia
 
Announcing* Charles Stepney - Step on Step // 2xLP, CD, Cassette, Digital  out 9/9/22 // Pre-order available NOW — International Anthem | A  Chicago-Born Recording Company That Produces And Promotes Progressive Media
 
#81: DENIECE WILLIAMS

"Free"

from the album This Is Niecy

Released: August 1976
 
Whilst on the subject of the Glasgow of my mid-seventies youth, I should iterate that this was not the grim, two-dimensional one which was its outward appearance for most of that period, but the sunny Saturday morning/school holidays Glasgow. The type of Glasgow where you could stand at the corner of Sauchiehall Street, looking downhill into the cascading Georgian terraces leading to Central Station, or walk the imposing uphill route from St Vincent Street through West Nile Street, heading towards a road to nowhere, or to the Mitchell Library, and imagine you were in Rome or New York. A smoke-laden Glasgow; not the crass fumes of cigarettes, but of rolled pipe tobacco, a scholarly, meaningful scent.


The music I'd associate with those visions was that unique strand of, shall we say, pacific soul; not the upmarket hustle of Philly, but the cool, long-held gazes of things like Kool and the Gang's "Summer Madness," Smokey Robinson's "A Quiet Storm" and Earth, Wind and Fire's "That's The Way Of The World." Part of this was no doubt due to imagining that I was Pacino as Serpico, hurtling hairily but placidly through streets of stoned sun (and the International Herald Tribune; I neglected to mention my daily consumption of that newspaper - ah, even the smell of that paper, its inherent authority, the feeling that in those pre-internet days you were connecting with the world by just holding a copy in your palm).


Earth, Wind and Fire's principal member Maurice White makes a good segue point, as he began his career (when not depping for Roger Blank in the Sun Ra Arkestra) as a studio drummer for Chess Records in the mid-late sixties. There he encountered the writer, producer and arranger Charles Stepney, a name less celebrated than those of Gamble and Huff, or Whitfield, but a man equally eager to lead soul music into a new and vaguely opulent dawn. More than equal; the man was a fucking genius.
 
 
Stepney was responsible for some of the most sublime musical art of the 1966-76 ear; he oversaw and co-wrote for Minnie Riperton's early group Rotary Connection (an avant-garde Fifth Dimension) as well as orchestrating their still astonishing reworkings of songs like "Respect," "Sunshine of Your Love" and the Stones' "Salt Of The Earth," and also provided the ideal framework for such visionaries as Marlene Shaw and Terry Callier to produce their most committed work. There were also The Dells, The Ramsey Lewis Trio and Billy Stewart. I WILL GO ON.


Stepney was another one of those who did not survive 1976 - he died in May of that year, aged merely forty-five - and one of his last works, in collaboration with White, was "Free," tailored for the then 25-year-old ex-Stevie Wonder backing singer Deniece Williams - ironically, "Free" went on to keep Wonder's own "Sir Duke" at number two in the UK. So the record is an elegy, of sorts, and though Williams seems already to be singing as a ghost for Riperton - the latter was still recording, but the breast cancer had already been diagnosed - the record sums up all that was warm and good about the best soul music of this period; the comforting conduit of bubble from the low-pitched electric piano, the distant but stalwart horns, the cloud-like non-motion of the song's central harmonics - every element flows into each other, like rum into blackcurrant.


Williams' voice doesn't soar quite as high as Riperton's, but her performance is radiant, albeit slightly impassive. Her expansive tributes to the power of good union ("Whispering in his ear/My magic potion for love," "Teasing hands, all his might/Give our nights such mystery") cleverly mask the fact that "Free" is a song about not wanting to be in love, turning away from commitment; thus "But I want to be free, free, free" is a plea for extrication, and the aura of impermanence is discreetly underlined by the couplet, "Let's not waste ecstasy/'Cos I'll only be here for awhile." As, regrettably, are we all. Billy MacKenzie, who gazed at the song under the British Electric Foundation's 1990 remit (Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume 2) realised that more and sooner than most. Dundee in the blackberried haze.
 
 
Alternatively it is an early Tuesday morning in early May 1977 which I seem to remember with fairly startling clarity. It was mid-spring and the day promised to be sunny and lovely. It was nearly the end of the school year; we had sat our exams and were now permitted to loosen up a little. We could come to school out of uniform. I wore a red Adidas T-shirt with white piping at the neck and short sleeves, as did most boys in my year at that time. I came out of the house - that is, the flat - early that Tuesday morning, before most of the shops on Uddingston Main Street had opened, so there was this eerily splendid aura of space, light and freedom. We were all rehearsing for the end-of-term House Shows and plays (I only participated in the latter). But I think of that sense of freedom, light and space and wish, as my friend in Cornwall C.F. recently expressed it, that I were that age again, feeling immortal with the future still all in front of me. Later that day, "Free" climbed to number one, and that was how I felt.

Above the M8 | Roads.org.uk




Sunday, February 16, 2025

CHAPTER 19

Let My Children Hear Music - Wikipedia 
Watts, 1966: Photos From the Streets a Year After the 1965 Riots
 
#82: CHARLES MINGUS

"The Chill Of Death"

from the album Let My Children Hear Music

Released: February 1972
 
 
A hornet's nest of bowed double basses buzz with barely suppressed anger as though you'd just stepped on it accidentally. Then the Richard Strauss touches - the timpani, low brass, high woodwind, harp as pulse, though Bernhard Kaun's Frankenstein theme also comes to immediate mind - before a deep, weary voice resembling an aged and bruised Isaac Hayes tells a midnight story.


Actually the voice tells the same story as had been told throughout the whole history of the blues - since this is basically a blues piece - the story of the devil woman there to end the man's life and make sure he pays for his lifelong transgressions, killing him with her embrace. We knew that anti-philosophy was always fundamentally wrongheaded, but the best blues performers, whether shouters or whisperers, can momentarily engage a deep emotional connection with the most wishful of listeners.


As the piece progresses, the voice way upfront and the large orchestra seemingly two blocks away, you can get the feeling that maybe he's enjoying this death thing. He's already scheming, looking forward to claiming the gold on that assumed pathway to Heaven. As if he'd ever imagined they'd ever let him in.


Of course the gold vapourises and he realises that he's been entombed in an inescapable Hell. One step was always too far beyond reason. But he sounds resigned to his fate, and even grateful for it. As though Hell was actually all he had ever wanted.


One sustained organ note and the piece is then repeated but with the speaker having metamorphosed into a saxophonist, already behind the barriers, unreachable and incomprehensible, but you can still sense the underlying emotion. Can't you? Help me, let me out, or, come on in, the heat is on?


* * * * * *

 
In late seventies Glasgow I was in the habit of picking up jazz albums from the discount bins or bargain basements of record shops and sometimes supermarkets, department stores and even newsagents, since these were the only places you'd find jazz albums in late seventies Glasgow. The ones you wanted, anyway. Well, some of them. The rest were located in mysterious shops in London, and initial mail order satisfaction blossomed into an urge to escape.


You'd hear Peter Clayton play these astounding things on his Jazz Record Requests show on Radio 3 at Saturday teatime, and there was Charles Fox to spin the new stuff on his Jazz Today programme on the same station, teatime on Tuesday. For the latter I used to rush off home early from our weekly school Debating Society meeting, much to the vocal disgruntlement of my classmates. But how to get those records? Many were already swiftly out of print, hence the habitual rummaging through what was then by far the least fashionable form of music because then you'd most likely find them retailing for next to nothing.


On one of those rummages I encountered Let My Children Hear Music, a then-recent relic of a brief era where somebody in Columbia Records thought that jazz might be going somewhere profitable, hence the signings of Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and Charles Mingus, among others. But while the post-Bitches Brew glee club of Milesian musicians - not just Miles himself but also Hancock, Mahavishnu, Weather Report and Cobham - profited comparatively enormously, the knottier types didn't, and were quickly offloaded.


I've never been quite sure what to make of Let My Children Hear Music, despite having listened to it a thousand times. Mingus thought it his best record but he said that about nearly all his records, at the time they came out. A quasi-orchestral remodelling of previously rehearsed and abandoned pieces, dating from 1939 through the sixties, several outside arrangers were engaged and may even have helped write some of the music. Moreover, a combination of contractual obligations and sloppy bookkeeping meant that we can never quite be sure who exactly is playing on what. We know that the record was based around Mingus' working small group of the period - Charles McPherson and Bobby Jones saxophones, Lonnie Hillyer trumpet, Roland Hanna and/or John Foster piano, the ever-imperturbable Dannie Richmond drums - with the enhancement of most of New York's top session players (and a few others get solo credits on the album sleeve).


But it's also true that, as compelling as this music is, the experience is like Mingus once removed; he is there, in the studio, on his bass, but others are doing most of the work for him, as though he were the main guest at his own memorial. We're hearing his music through a filter. "The Chill Of Death" was apparently written back in 1939 - I'm not sure whether he means the poem and/or the music - and to wait until one is nearly fifty before it could be performed and recorded would be enough to make anybody resentful.


Nonetheless, Mingus addresses the high school poetics with grave vim - at times ("if not, I'd have the gold") akin to Orson Welles (I guess one admirably stubborn Taurean recognises the other). After the lone(ly) organ note (probably played by Patti Bown), the piece goes into looped syndicate with an alto saxophone which hints at an uncredited Ornette but its more settled sense of key awareness probably points to the player being producer Teo Macero, who played alto in Mingus' Jazz Workshop of the early fifties. He too is left alone at the chasm of a climax, speaking more to Dolphy than to Bird.

Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl 2025 Halftime Show Easter Eggs





Thursday, February 13, 2025

CHAPTER 18



Killing in the Name - Wikipedia 
When LA Erupted In Anger: A Look Back At The Rodney King Riots
 
#83: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

"Killing In The Name"

from the album Rage Against The Machine

Released: November 1992
 
 
If this allegedly devalued world has told us anything, it is that people respond most quickly and deeply to slogans. Repeat the same thing over and over, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. The point is that it has been expressed, not suppressed.


This song creeps like an expectant panther. I wouldn't recommend trying it on any dancefloor - too slow, then too free, then the brain's senses get clouded and people get fatally confused. It doesn't fit square into anything, hence its efficacy at repelling squares. Its tempi follow the emotional pattern of the song; they change as often and as naturally as those of another Columbia recording artist, Laura Nyro.


What they are saying on this song, though, is pretty much "Save The Country," a nation being gladly or glumly beaten back a century and a half. Those who work forces also burn crosses with equal fervidness. The backward guard of the robber barons who recede back into the time of Brown and Lincoln remain as stolidly and violently reactionary as they are salaried to be. MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN is what they crave, or savour, and too bad for any Rodney King who happens to suggest otherwise.
 
 
The song was a direct response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots and knew that the only way it was going to make any impact was to hammer its slogans to something approaching emotional home. The singer howls and hisses the song because what did you expect him to do, croon it over the reassuring backdrop of some incredible high school marching bands? The solo - what is that? A guitar? A synthesiser? Nothing you could hitherto pinpoint? Exactly.
 
 
The reaction, the only workable reaction to a dead anti-culture poised to kill everything you and I were taught to believe while we were growing up, which determinedly fails to differentiate between life and existence, which would regress civilisation into an everlasting medieval feudalism with lords who think that everybody else should be serfs, that having been the default setting of human society since forever, with democracy an accidental and momentary blip, is to refuse, and to refuse loudly. Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. The singer final, extended shriek of "MOTHER-FUCK-ER!!" is a moment of exultant triumph, as though he knows that we have already won. Then the song tangos to a halt because it's made its point, abruptly and lengthfully. The social contract is smash, smash, smashed. Cornelius Cardew would have thought Rage Against The Machine impossibly vulgar and naïve. But the ancestry of lies and deception have been thought through, and transcended.
 
 
Or so it was hoped. An online campaign hoisted the song to number one in the U.K. at Christmas 2009. Victory. The following week Joe McElderry climbed to the top as though nothing had happened. The song was chanted by Trump supporters following the 2020 Presidential election. You tied one set of door knockers to another for a week then went back to school. But it's like Eric Dolphy said; you send those notes out into the air, it's up to us to make what we will of them. Los Angeles, home of punk rock. Where else could it have started?


Here are 10 L.A. projects to watch in 2025 | Urbanize LA
 


Wednesday, February 12, 2025

CHAPTER 17

78 RPM - Lonnie Donegan And His Skiffle Group - Putting On The Style /  Gamblin' Man - Pye Nixa - UK - N.15093 
London Palladium - Wikipedia
 
#84: LONNIE DONEGAN AND HIS SKIFFLE GROUP

"Gamblin' Man"

From the 78 rpm disc "Gamblin' Man/Puttin' On The Style"

Released: August 1957
 
 
The man is at the end of his tether. He has gambled everywhere he's been, which is pretty much everywhere. But he's run out of luck. Maybe he tried gaming the saloons and was lucky to escape with his limbs and life intact when caught out.
 
But then he meets this woman in Washington and she wants in, even though she, and more vocally her mother, know exactly what type of man he is. She doesn't care. She's attracted to the transient glamour. Farmers spend too much time in the rain, never wear a gold watch and chain. Train drivers? They always lie. The gambler's mien may be bullshit, but she appreciates and is attracted by it; see Jeanne Moreau and Claude Mann in the film La baie des anges. It is an adventure and, whatever becomes of her and her gambler, will never, ever be boring, which is what life should be constructed to avoid.
 
The singer begins his song rubato, patiently outlining his own impending doom, mourning his messed-up self. But there's a light at the end of this tunnel and it isn't the Rock Island Line train coming to mow him down. His voice moves from austere to enthused, the fast tempo comes into view, life is being restored to him with those expectant finger snaps and the excited, Christmas morning whisper of "many more weeks than three."
 
The song picks up like the most efficiently insolent of express trains. One by one the cancellation options present themselves only to be briskly ironed out of existence by the music's growing stampede - the accelerating snare drum, backing vocals that side of androgyny. The song's pace just keeps on gathering until the ecstasy of tongues transmutates into ejaculatory babble "HEY JIMMY!" roars the Glaswegian barely buried beneath the singer's smart suit and Cockney tones, and lead guitar, bass and drums form a battering ram ("HOW-A-BOUT-THAAAAAT?").
 
The piledriving increases until practically all that is left is practised incoherence. This song is erupting beyond the boundaries of politesse. There are no barriers left; the two of them have broken them all down. Little is now readily comprehensible in the song, with everyone rushing to batter down that wall of restraint and reason, other than a suddenly clear "STRAIGHT IN EVERY NERVE," as straight down the middle as Bing Crosby's golfing technique.
 
They have gotten away with it, these two, and are gloriously happy. The climactic "MA-AA-AA-AA-AN" gives birth to the future, and the musicians joyfully collide with this dimension before collapsing and reassembling in others. They will gamble, and therefore live, forever, and the audience you didn't hear before are firmly behind them. They cannot, and will not, die. They have won.
 
In childhood I didn't know Lonnie Donegan as anything other than a comedic light entertainer who came on peaktime or children's television to sing comic songs about dustmen and chewing gum. It wasn't until later that I realised what skiffle had been, and how immense an irruption into the achingly chuckling world of Alma Cogan and Dickie Valentine it proved. In 1957 his music must have felt like it was detonating the residue of war memorial clinging.
 
"Gamblin' Man" was a modified arrangement of a folk song by Woody Guthrie and was half of a double-sided disc recorded live at the London Palladium - at the heart of the fortress of reaction. The other side was a vaudevillian ditty called "Puttin' On The Style" which made affectionate fun of Kids These Days and perhaps outlined the path Donegan would eventually take. In fairness it probably got the bulk of radio airplay. But anyone who bought it would be faced with the Rosicrucian apocalypse of "Gamblin' Man" on the other side.
 
Although the record carries production credits for Alan A Freeman (an Australian producer, not to be confused with the Australian disc jockey Alan "Fluff" Freeman) and Michael Barclay, the real recording work was done by a rabid young engineer, sitting in the audience, crouching down over his equipment and watching dazed as the volume pointers stayed firmly in the red. So the sound is alternately focused and fuzzed. The young engineer's name was Joe Meek, someone who was already always there when something different needed doing.
 
And this record, this performance, was definitively and defyingly different. That final "MA-AA-AA-AA-AN," bleated like a newly-born lamb by a Glaswegian man who in hindsight looks like the father of Billy Bragg, gives birth to the voice of John Lydon, to the end of reserve. The lead guitarist was Jimmy Currie. The breathless backing vocals were by household middle-of-the-middle-of-the-road duo Miki and Griff. The whole experience is as if Donegan had decided to yell "I DOUBLE DARE YOU MOTHERFUCKING BRITAIN TO POP!" Pop as in, to protect other people, as well as to burst, or shine.

Protect Other People by Saaf





Tuesday, February 11, 2025

CHAPTER 16

FIRST UK CHART No.1! 1952 AL MARTINO 78 HERE IN MY HEART CAPITOL CL 13779 V+ 
Filignano - Il comune molisano dei dodici borghi
 
#85: AL MARTINO

"Here In My Heart"

from the 78 rpm disc "Here In My Heart"

Released: April 1952
 
 
My mother spent most of the Second World War being held prisoner, along with most of her family, by the Germans in their own home in Filigano, Italy, just over the hill from Monte Cassino. Specifically, they were kept in one room of their own home by the German army. Her family farmed, and their crops were burned and their cattle slaughtered. For fully four years, from 1941-45, they were more or less kept at gunpoint. That was my mother's youth. She saw far, far worse things than you or I are ever likely to see. Her family were finally liberated by, firstly, the Canadian army, then the U.S. Army. The soldiers in the frontline were largely Black, and were the kindest to my mother's family. Then came the British army. Still regarded as the enemy, the English were on the point of executing the entire family, but then the Scottish soldiers came through and prevailed; they offered the family food, drink and clothing, among other things.
 
This would in itself explain why, in the ruined post-war Italy, so many of its citizens would flee the counrry for Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales, rather than England; the Scots were nicer to them, treated them as equals.
 
My mother came to Britain in February 1953, two months past her twentieth birthday. One of her uncles had gone ahead of her to Glasgow and sent for her. He gave her a job as an assistant in an Italian café situated near the Botanic Gardens, and therefore close to Glasgow University. In 1956 my father would walk into that café and start talking with her about things Italian.
 
Despite arriving in this country without knowing a word of English, my mother was very quick to pick up the language, albeit filtered via the Glaswegian dialect, and soon felt at home in a city which to a great extent was a Little Italy in itself. The decade she found fun and lively.
 
She loved cinema and especially music. She had brought over with her a few ten-inch Italian 78s of popular ballads, her favourite being Luciano Tajoli’s 1941 reading of “Mamma Son Tanto Felice" (the song would subsequently be anglicised to "Mama" and prove a huge hit for Connie Francis). There was little, really, in Glasgow other than a wind-up gramophone but that, at the time, was enough for my mother, and the first record she purchased in this country, once she had saved up some of her wages, was the 78 of "Here In My Heart" by Al Martino.
 
"Here In My Heart" was also number one in the first nine British singles charts, which the NME's Percy Dickins had initiated in the week ending 14 November 1952. In those early days the chart was compiled from a relatively limited number of retailers, perhaps fifty in total, mainly in London and the South of England with a few northerly outliers. The record was far bigger here than in the U.S.A., largely because in Britain it was issued on Capitol, as opposed to the small Philadelphia independent label BBS. Martino had recorded it after his fellow Philadelphian Mario Lanza had passed on it, or passed it onto Martino at the latter's pleading request, depending upon which account you read.
 
Had our charts begun earlier, there is little doubt that "Here In My Heart"'s run at the top would have gone into double figures. As it is, the record certainly sounds, from Monty Kelly's arrangement on downwards, as though it wanted something big to happen, and as an introductory fanfare it did its job with pointed efficacy. Martino sings as though for his life, boisterous and soft in all the right places, offering his self, not merely his love or his heart but his very essence, to the person he loves. Trust in me, he seems to say, and I will promise you the greatest and most wonderful of adventures. Such a welcoming building block. Moreover, he bends away from the unreachable (even by Lanza, who also had a familial connection with Filignano and visited the village on at least one occasion during the fifties) final high note simply to prove that he is human like the rest of us, willing to settle for the nearest thing to perfection rather than perfection itself. In that way "Here In My Heart" is comparable to the opening and final chords of Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
 
As far as my mother was concerned, the song also served as a gate of welcome to a new world and a new life. Perhaps it explains my own primitive attachment to the pop charts, which were likewise brightly awaiting me in my extreme infancy. This is where so many stories started. Now I simply have to find a way to finish it.

Old Glasgow



Sunday, February 9, 2025

CHAPTER 15

16 Tons - song and lyrics by Tennessee Ernie Ford | Spotify 
 
Glasgow Corporation Tramways - Wikipedia
 
#86: TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD
 
"Sixteen Tons"
 
from the single "Sixteen Tons"
 
Released: October 1955
 
 
Capitalism thrives on owning its consumers, principally the people who produce its products. It continues to find ways of affirming that ownership but in the 1940s those mainly took the form of the truck system, where employees were paid not in money, but in kind, specifically credit vouchers which were not transferable and could only be used to purchase goods sold at the "company store." This clearly and intentionally made it impossible for workers to have any savings in cash. In addition, workers usually lived in houses or even dormitories owned by their employer, who automatically deducted the rent from their salary and could evict them if they raised even the merest of protests.
 
The song "Sixteen Tons" resembled nothing else in the brightly melancholic gleaming record charts at the time and that was intentional. It took the form of a jazz shuffle, cleverly skirting around the seven-note Dies Irae motif, over which emerges a warmly callous baritone voice. Warm because you get the impression that he's not taking the song too seriously (the chuckle midway through "And the straw boss said, 'Well, a-bless my soul'"), callous because he is fully aware of his power, indispensability and potential for fatality ("A lot of men didn't...a lot of men died").
 
Yet in the end this is a Pa Joad lament as the voice stretches "I owe my soul" in a Robesonian fashion across several Mississippi syllabic deltas before signing off with a quick "to the company store," who he knows fundamentally don't mean shit. Remorseful clarinets suggest a "Avinu Malkeinu" backdrop. The continuous, subtly relentless finger snaps could break the neck of the unwary. It is a genial cry against a system which has robustly failed to be dismantled in the nearly seven decades since its word became audible.
 
Or make that eight decades, because Merle Travis, who wrote and first recorded "Sixteen Tons" for his 1947 album Folk Songs Of The Hills, knew Tennessee Ernie Ford well, having played guitar on his first album. Ford performed the song on his daily NBC television show throughout 1955 to great reaction and received a standing ovation for it at that year's Indiana State Fair. The song's sentiments had been based on feelings expressed in letters written by Travis' brother and father. Recorded in haste as a B-side in September 1955 to fulfil a contractual quota with Capitol, it was flipped, quietly exploded and sold twenty million.
 
The song was a immensely decisive "NO" to the new fifties consumerist dream. It certainly penetrated deeply in the minds of the Scottish people of the period, including my father, and has tragically not yet passed into the past tense. Oh, and what put an end to this anti-culture of debt bondage in the working class United States? The rise of unions. And strikes.
 
Update on the 15 January strike at US ports - RAMINATRANS S.L. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Thursday, February 6, 2025

CHAPTER 14


Sleeping Satellite - Wikipedia 
Southbound M40 at Junction 6 © David Dixon :: Geograph Britain and Ireland
 
#87: TASMIN ARCHER

"Sleeping Satellite"

from the album Great Expectations

Released: October 1992

 

How those increasingly dark autumn journeys back home on the Oxford Tube in 1992 slowly yet elegantly assumed a new warmth in terms of expectations; how after both the best and the worst of weeks at work the highway, however light or dark – and if light, it was that unusually intense auburn glow of autumnal light – always led me back to the dream, up Hythe Bridge Road, past the ancient burger van just outside the railway station, then down Botley Road a little further and finally the loving lights of home. Likewise the music of that autumn took on an especially intense tendency; late Sunday night runs back from London, at the back of the coach singing “Man On The Moon,” the last track of Kitchens of Distinction’s The Death Of Cool, all of Stereolab’s Peng!, dC Basehead’s still extraordinary Play With Toys, just to mention a few very random examples (the albums Harvest Moon by Neil Young and Erotica by Madonna, the latter the silver to Automatic For The People's Warners gold, are yet two others).

 

It follows that I still have an extremely soft spot for the number ones of that period - including Charles and Eddie's "Would I Lie To You?" and the abovementioned "End Of The Road" - and “Sleeping Satellite" epitomises that welcoming autumn breeze (as opposed to a chill). Some called the young Black singer/songwriter from Bradford the new Tanita Tikaram, even though much of her debut album Great Expectations, including “Sleeping Satellite,” was written as far back as 1988. In fact she sounds like a female, softer Seal, radiating the same anxious curiosity of concern in her voice.

 

Is “Sleeping Satellite” arguing in favour of or against progress? With its accusatory hook of “I blame you for the moonlit sky/And the dream that died/With the eagle’s flight” there are reminders of my mother and grandmother, both of whom blamed the Apollo flights as precipitatory factors in the subsequent radical changes in the Earth’s weather, the systematic depletion of the ozone layer, and so forth. But she continues: “I blame you for the moonlit nights/When I wonder why/Are the seas still dry?/Don’t blame the sleeping satellite.” In other words, don’t blame the moon for existing, but did we seal our eventual doom by wanting to touch it (“And still we try/To justify the waste/For a taste of man’s greatest adventure”)? Or was it a luxury at the expense of more pressing needs at home (cf. Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey’s On The Moon”) – “If the Earth’s sacrificed/For the price of its greatest treasure”?

 

The performance balances its various strands of anguish; Archer’s plaintive voice breaking on the first “flight,” her hoarseness straining on “greatest adventure,” her underlying sweetness (especially on the wordless “wo-ho-ooh-wo-oo-ho”s between verses and at fadeout) bringing an older and sadly wiser Kim Wilde to mind – the sudden blossoming of backwards, dreaming harmonies in the middle eight sound like Dollar, but then the lid is roughly closed by two sets of four harsh guitar/piano strums.

 

And still Archer believes it might just be worth the price. “And when we shoot for the stars/What a giant step!/Have we got what it takes/To carry the weight of this concept?” The song dissolves between its gorgeous 1967-meets-1982 chords and its shards of organ and lead guitar. “Or pass it by/Like a shot in the dark?/Miss the mark with a sense of adventure?” “Sleeping Satellite” is a polite scream raised under a bluer moon, brilliantly produced by Julian Mendelssohn and Paul Wickens, which essentially asks its listeners to choose between past and future, expedience and long-term, adventure and safety – but somehow remembers to bear in mind that it shouldn’t really be an either/or situation.

 
Bradford businesses seek support for night-time economy - BBC News 

 

CHAPTER 20

      #81: DENIECE WILLIAMS "Free" from the album This Is Niecy Released: August 1976   Whilst on the subject of the Glasgow of m...