Cal Gibson's Secret Soul Society has been drip feeding us with new tracks all summer, a series of dubby weird disco tunes blurring the boundaries of new music, edits and versions. The tracks below are all highly recommended, hazy and dubbed out soul/ dance music, old and new fused. I'll leave it for you to work out where the source material comes from.
First, in mid- July- Situation Station, a low slung, machine funk song with a soulful vocal.
A couple of weeks after that, bubbling, summer sounding funk soul/ cosmic disco About2Believe, the singer telling us, 'You're about to believe/ In love again'.
Then, in late July there was Emotional Dub, dub and disco spliced together, a slinky floor filler with choppy guitar, bubbling bass and killer vocal.
A couple of days later in early August there was Lemonade All Day, trippy cosmic/ Balearic with chanting and FX
A week on from that came Mountain Of Tears, a bass driven soul number, urgent and impassioned night time music, drums pushing and synth FX splashing around.
In mid- August, Dub Sultanas, headband wearing guitar wranglers filtered into something darker and groovier.
Last week, Dubbing In The City, slowed down groove, taut bass and fractured vocals with an oddness that gives it an edge- very tasty.
All of these (and more) can be found at The Secret Soul Society Bandcamp page here. They work very well individually but probably best sequenced one after the other, a forty minute late summer dub/ disco/ soul compilation or mixtape.
Back on 20th March 2010 when this blog was less than three months old I wrote this post...
My 6 year old daughter has seen me doing this and asked what I'm doing. When I explained about the blog she said she wanted a go, so here it is, a guest post by E.T.....
'I like this song because i like dolly parton .I like the rhythm and i like the music i also like the way she sings.'
Eliza shouted up the stairs to me on Tuesday night that Dolly Parton had died, and followed it with, 'Dolly Parton, my queen...'
Dolly Parton has been everywhere in the two days since she died and rightly so. Not only did she write some songs that are universal, she was a hugely compassionate and right minded person- her work donating trying to get kids to stay in school, her Imagination Library, paying for scholarships, supporting and paying for research into pediatric diseases and Covid vaccines, for AIDS charities and Black neighbourhoods in Nashville are all examples of what you'd hope the rich would be doing with their money- doing some good. As many people have said in the last two days, she's the best of America. The contrast with some of its public figures could not be greater.
I don't listen to her songs that often but this one always, always sounds good...
Jolene was written in May 1973 about a red headed bank clerk who'd sometimes flirt with her husband Carl. The name came from an encounter with a fan who had red hair, pale skin and green eyes who came backstage for an autograph. These are the sort of details I love, that get under the skin of where a song comes from.
In 2013 there was a phase where people discovered the joy of slowing down 45 rpm singles to 33 and posting them on the internet. Jolene sounds magnificent at 33 rpm, a heartbroken cowboy who's lost his love to another woman.
In 1993 One Dove released their own version of Jolene, a trippy comedown dub/ ambient house gone country version, Dot Allison's voice giving Dolly a Glasgow make over. I could listen to this on repeat for ages. It came out as a B-side to their Why Don't You Take Me single, the record company looking for a hit. The 12" came with two more tracks, the ice cold reggae of Skanga and an Underworld remix of the title track. Four stunners on one piece of vinyl.
In 2004 The White Stripes covered Jolene too, a raw and electrifying version of the song, Jack and Meg at the edge of their senses under Blackpool lights.
Mano Negra were a French band founded and fronted by singer Manu Chao. Manu took his roots- Galician- Basque parents, Cuban heritage, upbringing on the outskirts of Paris (the family had fled Spain when Franco issued a death sentence to Manu's grandfather)- and fused them with all the excitement of punk, folk, ska, rockabilly, reggae, salsa, rai, hip hop and everything else he'd heard coming out of the speakers in a multi- cultural Paris suburb. They would switch between singing in Spanish, French, Arabic and English, sometimes within the same song, and found success in Europe and South America, supported Iggy Pop on a US tour, but they were never more than a cult concern in the UK.
In 1989 they made Puta's Fever, eighteen slices of high energy, fully committed, world fusion/ rock 'n' roll. Voodoo is from that album and starts off like some drunken French uncles singing at a wedding. Then a whistle blows, the drums thump in and the song kicks in, bass pumping away and Manu singing, 'Last night I saw you diggin' in my cemetery baby/ Now you better watch out/ Cause you can't get back from Voodoo!'. Tyres screech and layers of varnish are scrubbed from the acoustic guitars.
Mano Negra formed in 1987 and split in 1994. When touring Puta's Fever they'd often abandon the stage and troop outside to play the encore in the streets. After the split Manu Chao went solo making several albums and touring with his Radio Bemba Sound System. His self described patchwork style of music and solid left wing politics and activism place him as one of the true inheritors of punk and The Clash, someone who walks the walk as well as talking the talk. I thought I had one of his albums, 2001's Proxima Estacion: Esperanza but it's not on the shelf under either M or C so your guess is as good as mine.
It doesn't really require any words of explanation from me, the song and the footage speak for themselves and the life affirming nature of the dancers, captured from various pieces of footage from the 20th century and more recently, brings a smile to the face- until the last few seconds which has the capacity to shock you out of your complacency.
Two weeks ago David played a live two hour set for Never Never, a Belfast clothes shop. The set is a blast, a sublime blurring of the boundaries between psyche, jazz, blistering hip hop, soul, funk and repetitive wonky acid house. You can listen at Mixcloud. David has got lots of irons in the fire at the moment- The Five Techniques project and his production on the imminent Dexys album have both been 2026 projects along with his various DJ gigs, and a few weeks ago he spent an afternoon in his home studio with Eric Cantona who turned up unexpectedly...
Birds Of Pandæmonium have been gearing up to an album release, out on Sprechen next month. Their epic uber Balearic cover of New Musik's On Islands came out in July complete with three Hardway Bros remixes and prior to that there was Days Go By, remixed by Richard Norris.
The last single before the release of the album came out last week- Could Heaven Ever Be Like This, ten minutes of dreamy, sun kissed psychedelia, slo mo chug with cosmic house pianos and multi- tracked vocals that come down like soft, warm rain.
The EP comes with remixes including two courtesy of Hifi Sean, the man who was once a Soup Dragon and is now a DJ/ producer/ songwriter (you might remember his albums with singer David McAlmont particularly 2022's Happy Ending). Sean vocoders the vocal and goes four- four with the drums, turning up the whammy and whacking the bass to the fore. There is a Birds Of Pandæmonium remix, a Hifi Sean dub, an instrumental and deeply addictive, goth dance Dub Poem version which has really stuck around in these parts over the weekend.
Get the Could Heaven Ever Be Like This EP at Sprechen's Bandcamp page.
Could Heaven Ever Be Like This was originally a lush jazz- funk/ disco jam by Idris Muhammed and was played at David Mancuso's Loft. A celebration of love and romance and a longing for transcendence- you can see why it struck a chord in mid- 70s New York.
The Birds Of Pandæmonium album comes out in mid- September and is called Eudæmonia, a Greek word which translates as living well by doing what is right and fulfilling one's potential. It is a central concept of Aristotle's philosophy, where a eudæmonic life is one of 'virtuous activity in accordance with reason'. Something to chew over on a Monday in late August.
Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros came together in the late 90s. Joe started working with Richard Norris and Pablo Cook and the Mescaleros formed around that trio. In his memoir Strange Things Are Happening Richard Norris recounts how Joe and a cavalcade of cars turned up at Real World Studio in Wiltshire. Richard was sitting on a grass bank as the convoy arrived and Joe leapt from a vehicle brandishing a drum machine and shouting, 'does anyone know how to make this thing work?'. Richard raised a hand and said he did. Joe, Richard and Pablo wrote Yalla Yalla, with Anthony Genn coming on board to mix. They went on to write Techno D- Day, Tony Adams and the beautiful From Willesden To Cricklewood. Richard Norris Joe wrote Sandpaper Blues, Diggin' The New and the late career rock/ reggae/ acid house classic Yalla Yalla. All those songs became part of the first Mescaleros album, Rock Art And The X Ray Style.
The Mescaleros grew from there with Scott Shields joining (bass and guitar), Martin Slattery (keys and guitar), Richard Flack (various instruments) and Steve 'Smiley' Bernard (drums). Genn hung around for a while but eventually left. In 1999 Joe and the Mescaleros recorded Rock Art And The X Ray Style having played a load of gigs including Glastonbury (where Joe smashed a BBC camera during the broadcast with a mic stand). In Strange Things Are Happening Richard tells the story of his departure from being Joe's creative partner whilst out in LA- the circles around Joe and the former members of The Clash come across like the worst aspects of Succession, in crowds and out crowds and hangers on all jostling for elbow room and access to the top table. At an audience with event I went to Richard was asked how it ended with Joe and he replied, 'badly'. A rueful silence and some regret.
In 2000 Joe hooked up again with Tymon Dogg, a former 101er and Clash guest. Tymon joined the Mescaleros for Global A Go- Go and the band toured the UK, US and Europe, playing festivals and small gigs, combining Clash songs and Mescaleros songs in fine style, gigs awash with beer flying, and reggae, rock, dub and global sounds, joyous celebrations of Joe's music and life. I saw them twice at Manchester Academy in the 1999- 2002 period and on another occasion at Nynex Arena where they supported The Who in a largely empty arena. They were superb, a life affirming blast of energy and punk rock righteousness. Joe never gave less than everything, the band gave their all too to match him and there was no reason to think it shouldn't carry on for some time. Joe died suddenly at home on 22nd December 2002.
There are three Mescaleros albums- 1999's Rock Art And The X Ray Style, 2001's Global A Go- Go and the posthumously completed Streetcore from 2003. Between them they show a reborn and revitalised Joe Strummer, writing and recording and having the time of his life, making music that stands as not just the best of his solo career but alongside his songs in The Clash too. In the last year of Joe's life he'd been writing with Mick Jones again, songs that Mick assumed were for an upcoming Mescaleros album. Joe apparently thought they were for a new Clash album.
Yalla Yalla was released as a single in 1999 ahead of the Rock Art And The X- Ray Style album, Joe and Richard Norris summoning the spirits and the radio. Joe described the song as 'an ancient British folk song written in the year 1999'. Live at Manchester Academy they segued Yalla Yalla into Bankrobber, Joe disappearing offstage and returning with a child on his shoulders, arms in the air and red lights strafing the stage. Yalla Yalla is total Strummer- world with dubbed out references to Kool Moe Dee, The Treacherous Three, Brownie McGee, Ladbroke Grove, Ragga FM, Tae Kwon Do and the kebab shop. The Norro King Dub was on the 12", a Richard Norris dub of the original. According to Richard no one had ever called him Norro before and from that point only Joe did.
Fantastic came out in 2022, a posthumous release tied into a box set re- release of the three Mescaleros albums and fourth disc of outtakes and demos. It was recorded at Rockfield in Monmouth in December 2002, the month Joe died. Fantastic is an early version of Ramshackle Day Parade from Streetcore. Streetcore was completed after Joe died by various Mescaleros. Joe's vocals are guide vocals, not finished ones- this alone shows how much Joe put in to recording. The guide vocals for Fantastic, Arms Aloft and Coma Girl (among other Streetcore songs) are more impassioned than many singers manage ever. While we'll never know what Streetcore could have been and what other songs Joe might have written for it, the seven songs that the band finished for the album all stand up next to the rest of the Mescaleros back catalogue.
There are three other songs on Streetcore- Redemption Song, Silver And Gold and Long Shadow- that date from different sessions. Redemption Song and Long Shadow were done with Rick Rubin, intended for Johnny Cash to record, and were included on Streetcore at Lucinda's request (Joe's widow). The video for Fantastic is a lovely thing, footage of Joe from The Clash, solo and his family life spliced together.
At The Border, Guy is from Global A Go- Go, a seven minute freewheeling dub tune with scratchy guitar, organ and Joe singing about town planners, the Dow Jones and Leek town hall. Wonderful stuff, the genre hopping spirit of Sandinista! continuing long into Joe's solo career.
Burnin' Streets is from Streetcore and has a nice lyrically throwback to 1977 and London's Burning. Arms Aloft is a rocker from the same album. In the song Joe sees his (younger) bandmates on tour complaining about being tired and out of gas partway through a tour. Joe, ever the livewire and motivator, shouts at them, reminding them of their duty to rock 'n' roll, the audience and playing the gig, and how only a few nights before they were 'arms aloft in Aberdeen'. It's one of several songs on Streetcore that have a hint, a foreshadowing, of Joe's mortality. 'They say the stars can't see their rays/ Nor can they count the number of days', he sings near the end. At the start there's some cosmic Joe too with the line, 'Sometimes there's no stars shining/ Scouting the edge of the universe/ Sometimes you can't see a horizon/ Between the ocean and the earth'.
X Ray Style is a beauty, the title track from 1999's Rock Art And The X Ray Style (the cover was painted by Damian Hirst, a version of Neolithic cave art. Joe spent every summer from the mid 80s onward in Granada, Spain and in the nearby Nerja area there is a cave complex discovered by five school boys in 1959 containing the world's oldest known cave art- maybe this was the inspiraiton for the sleeve). The song X Ray Style is an acoustic guitar tune with a bongo groove, Joe singing about the stars and the hopes of a soul, Be Bop guns, rockabilly trains and how 'there's some people living who ain't got no heart and they never had none'. He finishes with the line, 'I want to live and I want to dance a while'. His voice ever sounded better.
Ocean Of Dreams came out on the 2022 box set, an unreleased Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros song dating from the Rock Art And the X Ray Style sessions with ex- Ex Pistol Steve Jones on guitar. It's got a lazy, laid back feel, Joe improvising and following his nose. In 1999 Anthony Genn had told him, 'You're Joe Strummer, you should be making an album!'. Other people had told him this at points in the decade between 1989 and 1999 but in 1999 the time was right.
Johnny Appleseed is the lead song from 2001's Global A Go- Go, a solo peak and a song that demonstrates everything that was great about the man. Acoustic guitars, massed backing vocals, old friend Tymon on violin and Joe singing about Martin Luther King and Buick 49s, and how if you want to get the honey you don't go killing all the bees, a line that could be about the environment or it could be about capitalism. Whenever I need to hear some solo Joe, I often start with Johnny Appleseed. The video is very Joe too, Joe and the Mescaleros wandering the streets of London as the public come and go...
Sandpaper Blues is a Richard Norris co- write. Joe's love of what used to be called World Music is all over the Mescaleros songs. On Sandpaper Blues there's Caribbean vibes married to Country and Western and Mariachi.
Coma Girl is the lead song from Streetcore, rousing Strummer three chord, Clash style, electrifying guitar rock. In the song Joe describes his walk through the outer areas at the Glastonbury festival, wandering round the stages as the rain comes in and the oil drums clang, while singing to his daughter Lola, the coma girl, who didn't want to get out of bed. Coma Girl is as good a final song as Joe could have wished for in many ways, a song that summons the vision of him on stage, his left leg twitching away as he bashed out the chords and sang at the microphone stand.
A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion.
Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Water.
I ran with Sordid Sound System and Raymond Chandler, Dreems, Kalima, A Certain Ratio, Andrew Weatherall and Michael Smith and William Orbit, Beth Orton and Underworld. There was a big response from the Bagging Area community with Sundappledliz going for Alex Kassian and Jessica Lauren, Al G with Juan Wauters, Ernie Goggins and The Incredible String Band, Jake with The Avalanches, Ricky Otter and Richard Norris, Walter and The Woodentops, SRC with Bruce Lee and Underworld and also Fela Kuti, Rol and The Cascades, and Jase who had several suggestions- Ride, Blackwater and Elvis.
Jase's Ride suggestion was their debut album Nowhere which had that huge wave sweeping across the front cover, a visual representation of the band's shoegaze/ FX pedal wall of sound. The album's title track was missing from the album and eventually turned up on the Fall EP in October 1990.
This week's Oblique Strategy card says this- The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
Which is oblique indeed. And then some.
It made me think of memories, memory and the act of remembering. Which is always a deep rabbit hole. Not long after Isaac died in 2021- and by not long I mean weeks- I was in bed doom scrolling and a link to a newspaper article flashed up. The headline (from I think The Guardian) read something like, 'Scientists discover whether our lives really do flash before our eyes before we die'.
I didn't click through. At that point, I couldn't see any way that that article was going to be a comfort or a help. I've never been back and looked for it either although it has crossed my mind more than once since. I can still clearly recall that exact moment, the instant, I saw the headline, read it, thought about it and rejected it. I didn't really want to consider what would have flashed through Isaac's mind in the moments before he died, with the three of us in the hospital room with him. It's a strange memory that has stuck with me ever since, unforgotten.
Buried Memories is from Pye Corner Audio's 2019 album Hollow Earth, a radiophonic/ dark synth track that suggests all kinds of things. The Hauntology/ Ghost Box scene and much of Pye Corner Audio's output is partly about memory and the way past haunts the future. Boards Of Canada's albums, this year's Inferno included, deal in this too. One of the tracks on Inferno is this one...
As we get older it seems that more and more that what we are as human beings is a bunch of memories and experiences, encased in our bodies. Memory is a tricky thing. It's unreliable and inevitably one sided. It enables us to learn from the past. Sometimes it makes us cringe- things we said or did that we really wish we hadn't. One of the things about dementia that scares us the most is seeing loved ones lose their memory. What is a person without memories?
In Blade Runner the new generation of replicants (Nexus 7s) have been given memories. Rachael, played by Sean Young, has been implanted with the memories of Tyrell's niece and as a result she believed she was human. On discovering this, her entire world is turned upside down. Her relationship with the past, her past, is fake, a construct, someone else's past. In the film,this Vangelis song plays as Rachael visits Deckard's apartment for the first time. Tellingly, it finishes with sirens and the whirring and bleeps of a computer programme.
Jan van den Broeke's 2017 album 11000 Dreams is a deep dive into memory, found sounds, ambient and samples. This track is literally memories turned into sound, a woman's voice caught on tape with an ambient backing, '...things that happened years and years ago... incidents... memories...'
I don't know what Eno and Schmidt intended the most important thing to be or if they even had an intention. The most important thing for us as people could be many things- to be loved, to be remembered, to be live well without doing harm to others, to stand up for the things you believe in, to contribute to society in some way, to leave the world better than you found it. Big stuff.
