Another V. A. Saturday, another Soul Jazz compilation- this one a 2001 post- punk/ punk- funk/ industrial party with the demob suits and short back and sides groups from the UK in the late 70s and early 80s. In The Beginning There Was Rhythm has action from the regional outposts of the punk funk/ industrial scenes, from Manchester (two ACR songs, Shack Up and Knife Slits Water) and Sheffield (The Human League's Being Boiled and Cabaret Voltaire's Sluggin' Fer Jesus) and also the London based bands 23 Skidoo, Throbbing Gristle and This Heat.
The title track is a song by The Slits, originally a 7" single released by Rough Trade and Y Records in 1980, The Slits on one side and Where There's A Will There's A Way by The Pop Group on the flip.
In The Beginning There Was Rhythm
It's a spindly, scratchy and idiosyncratic five minutes, the bass and beat bumping along and Dennis Bovell's dub production at the fore, Viv's abstract guitar and bursts of piano and Ari stopping every now and then to declare, 'Silence is a rhythm too'.
The Pop Group's She Is Beyond Good And Evil is also on the CD, a 1979 single with Mark Stewart using the language of unconditional love as an act of revolution, romance and politics bound together with some dub bass, wire scratch guitars and reggae drums.
From Bristol to Leeds and Gang Of Four's thumping, atonal, driving racket, the 1981 song To Hell With Poverty, a song that dances in the face of having only a fiver in your pocket until Giro day/ pay day, 'To hell with poverty/ We'll get drunk on cheap wine'.
We finished school for the summer holiday yesterday, six weeks off working stretching out ahead of me, thirty one years of teaching completed and like Jon King and Gang Of Four, cheap wine tonight's option.
