V.A. Saturday

In 2004 Don Letts compiled a various artists compilation for Heavenly, Social Classics 3 Dread Meets B- Boys Downtown. It was a hugely listenable sixteen track compilation recreating the summer of 1981 when Don accompanied The Clash and they took over New York with a residency at Bond's Casino in Times Square. The stories are legendary- the promoters oversold the shows, the fire department shut it down, The Clash promised to  honour all sold tickets and ended up playing seventeen nights, an exhausting experience. While that was going on and Don filmed them, the band immersed themselves into New York's street and club culture, Mick Jones especially, and the nascent hip hop scene. Support acts for the group at Bond's included Grandmaster Flash, The Fall, Dead Kennedys, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, The Slits, ESG and The Treacherous Three. 

Don's has various slices of old school hip hop (Grandmaster Flash, Grand Wizzard Theodore, The Fearless Four, Fab Five Freddy, the Wild Style OST), some classic New York dance tracks (Babe Ruth's The Mexican and Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band's version of Apache), some cutting edge early 80s electro (Al- Naafiysh by Hashim), along with Malcolm McLaren, Kraftwerk and The Clash. It's wall to wall early 80s bangers and cutting edge too. 

Grand Wizzard Theodore is from The Bronx, NYC, and is the DJ who is largely credited with inventing scratching. 

Subway Theme

Babe Ruth were an early 70s funk rock band from Hatfield, Hertfordshire. The Mexican was recorded at Abbey Road in 1972, a hugely influential song later on in the decade when the New York hip hop DJs picked up on it and played it, mixed it and sampled it to pieces. 

The Mexican

The Clash were inspired by New York , it sent them into a spin they never really pulled out of. This Is Radio Clash  was a standalone single and 12", fired up by New York. the city's sounds and radio stations. Outside Broadcast was a remix version of the main track, seven and a half minutes of dub sound effects, samples, traffic sounds, rapping and studio experimentation. 

Outside Broadcast

Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Girls is an essential early 80s record, 1982 hip hop produced by Trevor Horn, after Malcolm saw what was happening in New York. He'd been in the city looking for a support act for Bow Wow Wow and went to a block party where he heard hip hop and scratching for the first time.

Buffalo Gals

Fab Five Freddy is a New York hip hop legend, graffiti artist, film maker and face. In 1983 the film Wild Style was released,a document of New York's nascent hip hop scene in 1981 and the track Down By Law comes from the soundtrack. Chris Stein of Blondie worked on the soundtrack and the score too and Freddy would famously later on turn up in the lyrics to Rapture. 

Down By Law

Futura Music

I've been feeling a bit out of inspiration this week. In Pennie Smith's book of photos of her time touring with The Clash in 1979 the band members provided captions- in one Joe Strummer wrote 'to have output, you gotta have input' and maybe that's the problem, not enough input recently. Tying that and some of this week's posts together (Unkle, David Axelrod, DJ Shadow) brings me to Futura 2000, the New York graffiti artist who provided words and artwork for The Clash. On their 1981 European tour he would paint the band's stage backdrop live behind them. Coincidentally I found this magical clip recently, Mick Jones playing guitar while Futura raps with Fab Five Freddie at the Bataclan in Paris, Mick looking every inch the hip hop/ punk rock star. 

Futura did the lyric sheet on Combat Rock and the sleeve for This Is Radio Clash and was instrumental in kicking off the French graffiti and urban art scene. In the 1990s he hooked up with James Lavelle and alongside Ben Drury worked on the sleeve art for Mo' Wax and Unkle- his distinctive graffiti aliens adorned the front cover of Psyence Fiction and established a strong visual identity for the label. Mick has largely retired from music. Ten years ago he resurrected Big Audio Dynamite for a tour of the UK. I missed it due to being on holiday, something I still regret. Last year Mick came out of his retirement and appeared on The Avalanches multi- guest star album We Will Always Love You. The song We Go On was one of the highlights, a bouncy, optimistic piece of cosmic pop built around a Karen Carpenter sample and a rap from Cola Boyy- 'we go on/ hurting each other' Mick and Karen sing. 

Mick's friend and Clash bandmate Joe Strummer died nearly two decades ago but previously unreleased recordings still surface. A solo best of called Assembly has just been released, remastered versions of the pick of his post- Clash work and featuring a 'new' solo acoustic recording of Joe singing Junco Partner, a song he sung throughout his adult life from The 101ers to The Clash, from Latino Rockabilly War to The Mescaleros. Junco Partner, a 50s New Orleans blues written by James Waynes for and about users and dealers, appears on Sandinista! in both reggae and dub versions and it's one of the handful of Clash songs that I'm a bit ambivalent about, I can take it or leave it.

Junco Partner

This version though, just Joe, a guitar and some echo, shows the man in fine voice.