Black Bones, a Belfast duo, released a six track album last year that took nightclub music- techno, dub, disco, whatever else gets people dancing- and lit a fire under it. Tough beats, wonky experimental sonics, a dark Balearic feel, more than a little influenced by various points in Andrew Weatherall's back catalogue- the noir feel of Sabres, the basement beats of 2000 era Two Lone Swordsmen, the adventurism of his solo work from the 2010s.
Black Bones have followed that album with a new 10" single, two more slices from Belfast. The A- side, Barrios And Barricades is an urban trip with voices, a banging bassline, a rattling snare, shrieks and cries, the thump in the chest you get when music is played through a big soundsystem and the staccato flash of the strobe. Full blooded music that makes you feel alive and in the moment. Listen and buy at Bandcamp.
On the flip is Cruising, a Black Bones- Autumns collaboration. Cruising drives in with the same four four thud, the drum sound pushed to the edge and a bassline that would chew up the carpet at parties. Swirling around those two elements there are crashes and FX, echoed shouts, metal on metal and at two minutes forty seven seconds a breakdown, a brief pause before the tension and the rhythm returns.
A few weeks ago I came across the lyrics to The Broad Majestic Shannon, a Pogues song that is absolutely one of their finest songs and one of Shane's greatest lyrics. Looking at the words on my screen it occurred to me that they work perfectly as just the words, a poem.
The last time I saw you was down at the Greeks There was whiskey on Sunday and tears on our cheeks You sang me a song that was pure as the breeze On a road leading up Glenaveigh
I sat for a while at the cross at Finnoe Where young lovers would meet when the flowers were in bloom Heard the men coming home from the fair at Shinrone Their hearts in Tipperary wherever they go
Take my hand and dry your tears, babe Take my hand, forget your fears, babe There's no pain, there's no more sorrow They're all gone, gone in the years, babe
I sat for a while by the gap in the wall Found a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball Heard the cards being dealt and the rosary called And a fiddle playing "Sean Dun Na Ngall"
And the next time I see you we'll be down at the Greeks There'll be whiskey on Sunday and tears on our cheeks For it's stupid to laugh and it's useless to bawl 'Bout a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball
Take my hand and dry your tears, babe Take my hand, forget your fears, babe There's no pain, there's no more sorrow They're all gone, gone in the years, babe
So I walked as the day was dawning Where small birds sang and leaves were falling Where we once watched the row boats landing By the broad majestic Shannon
Every line Shane writes in The Broad Majestic Shannon, every image he paints, can be seen and felt. That's how it seems to me, written down. The Pogues matched Shane's words with a glorious, swooning, lilting tune and performance.
It took a while to suss out the penultimate line. I couldn't understand why after all these scenes Shane depicts so vividly, flashes of life from his childhood and teens, the tears and optimism of the chorus, and the new day of the last chorus, why Shane was watching robots landing. It made no sense. Was this a War Of The Worlds thing? Why were robots crossing Ireland's longest river? Back in the early 90s, having mentioned this to a friend, I got a postcard from him while he was on holiday in Ireland. He wrote an update of his adventures and places he'd been. The P.S. at the very bottom of the postcard read just this- 'it's row boats, not robots'.
Not long after I saw the lyrics in front of me on my screen and had these thoughts, news of the death of Pogues drummer Andrew Ranken aged 72 appeared on my screen too. RIP Andrew.
It sounds overblown not to mention a little pretentious to state that with the release of Selected Ambient Works 85- 92 in 1993 Richard D. James invented a new language for electronic and ambient music. Many of the elements he used- basslines from house and techno, spongy synth tones, clicky, repetitive rhythm tracks made from drum samples, a sound that felt ultra- modern and futuristic yet seemed anchored in something from the past- were already familiar but the way he put them together, the way as Aphex Twin he constructed and layered his tracks, was something else and new too. A problem with Selected Ambient Works is that it is almost too good, so full of beauty, ambient/ dance music with ambition and nuance, that what came after would never sound as good. Richard continued to make many, many great records, tracks that flipped what electronic music could be, but the magic he conjured up on the thirteen tracks that make up SAW is almost unique to that record.
This is Tha, a nine minute odyssey that starts out with the sound of a tap dripping and then transforms into ambient/ techno, outer/ inner space, excursion.
Hiss, clicky drums, a warm bassline that dances about that I can almost see (I can definitely imagine it visually), the hint of voices, keyboard notes in a space above the rest of the track and a murky, middle of the night feel- an otherworldly, dream energy.
Some of the music on it was made by a teenage Richard, using homemade equipment and recorded onto cassette. Jon Savage, a man who knows about many things but especially music, said that Selected Ambient Works 'defined a new techno primitive romanticism' and the primitive nature of the music is absolutely part of its beauty.
A few days ago I posted Colourbox's Tarantula and the wonderful Pandit Pam Pam v Darkinari cover version of it (out two days ago here). Eduardo sent me this video he made on Friday, filmed on the forty five minute flight between Sao Paulo and Rio.
Today's forty five minute mix is some Colourbox tracks thrown together/ skillfully sequenced, a celebration of a band who threw soul, reggae and dub, electro, industrial and sampling together into a big stew and came up with some genuinely pioneering records between 1982 and 1987.
Some biographical details first. Colourbox were formed in London in 1982, brothers Martyn and Steve Young, Ian Robbins and singer Debion Currie. Currie and Robbins left a year later, after the first single was released (Breakdown/ Tarantula) and singer Lorita Grahame joined. They signed to 4AD, a street counterpoint to the ethereal, indie/ gothic sounds of the rest of the 4AD line up (Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil) and released three albums, all called Colourbox, and a slew of great singles. In 1987 Colourbox and AR Kane collaborated as M/A/R/R/S and between them, despite a rather difficult studio relationship, created an international hit- Pump Up The Volume. Pop star fame and long running legal bother over Pump Up The Volume and sample clearance led both Martyn and Steve Young to abandon Colourbox. 4AD issued best ofs and box sets and in 2000 Andrew Weatherall included them on his 9 'O' Clock Drop compilation. Steve Young died in 2016.
Forty Five Minutes Of Colourbox
Looks Like We're Shy One Horse
Baby I Love You So (12" Mix)
Breakdown
Say You (12" Mix)
Edit The Dragon
Tarantula
The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme
Arena II
Looks Like We're Shy One Horse, packed with gun shots and Spaghetti Western samples, was the B-side to Colourbox's 1986 Baby I Love You So single. The slowed down dub section at the end is genuinely thrilling after six minutes of drum machines, guitars, keys, samples, river dredging bass and South London via the Great Plains.
The A- side was Baby I Love You So, a cover of a Jacob Miller and Augustus Pablo song from 1974. King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown was constructed around the dub version of it. Colourbox's cover is a dub version it its own right, a masterful and superbly produced slice of 80s British street sounds with a bassline that you could chew.
Breakdown was Colourbox's debut single, released in 1982 with Debian Currie on vocals. Tarantula is industrial synth with a detached, numbed vocal. Breakdown is New Wave synthpop, a very of its time song but one that should be better known than it is.
Say You was a 1984 single, a cover of a U- Roy song from 1976, one of those reggae songs that has a complicated back story with umpteen versions, dubs and covers. Colourbox's version is sweet 80s electro dub- soul.
In 1985 Colourbox released their first full length album- Colourbox (a mini- album called Colourbox came out two years before). It included Just Give 'Em Whiskey which I wanted to include here but couldn't find a digital version and a cover of Keep Me Hangin' On, the Motown classic. William Orbit plays guitar on Manic. The first 10, 000 copies with a second album, also called, wait for it Colourbox. The mini- album had versions and tracks extra to the first including Edit The Dragon, an electro/ sample piece that in some ways sounds like one of Pump Up The Volume's origin stories. Arena II is a different version of Arena, a mid- 80s soul/ torch song that could have been huge.
Official Colourbox World Cup Theme was a 1986 single released on the same day as Baby I Love You So. The track was recorded to coincide with the 1986 Mexico World Cup and was nearly chosen by the BBC as the theme music for their coverage. It is Martyn Young's favourite Colourbox song and came in a sleeve that had Jimmy Hill on one side and Bobby Robson on the other. England went to the 1986 World Cup, managed by Bobby Robson and Jimmy Hill was the anchor in the studio- they reached the quarter finals where they lost to two pieces of Diego Maradona audacity.
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 Saturday's card said [blank white card]. I went into my downloads folder and selected at random the first songs that came up with those three words in the title- Blank Stare by Pye Corner Audio, White Shirt by The Charlatans and Master Card by Mogwai.
Liz Ard suggested the deep listening trilogy/ meditation on death, Triloge de la Mort by Eliane Radigue and in a weird coincidence, Radigue died a couple of days later aged 94. Koume, the third and final part is here. RIP Eliane Radigue.
Jase suggested, quite rightly, Going Blank Again by Ride (and that had been my second thought for the entire post but I went with my first). Ernie went for an index card related track by Khate and JC from The Vinyl Villain suggested The National's Blank Slate, The Associate's White Car in Germany and The Card Cheat by The Clash.
Today's Oblique Strategy card reads as follows...
Towards the insignificant
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'Cease to exist/ Givin' my goodbyes/ Drive my car/ Into the ocean...'
More from the Snub TV vaults. In 1989 Snub found On U Sound legend Bim Sherman in the studio, a rare TV appearance with Bim singing Power in 1989 (not the smash hit singleThe Power by Snap). Crunchy Skip McDonald, Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc backing, Bonjo from African Head Charge on percussion, Sherwood at the desk and the golden vocals of Bim Sherman.
In 1983 Singers & Players released their third album on On U, an all star reggae collective with members of Roots Radics and Dub Syndicate, Prince Far I, Mikey Dread, Ashanti Roy and on A Matter Of Time, Bim Sherman's voice.
In 1989 Barry Adamson was ex- Magazine and ex- Bad Seed and striking out solo with his Moss Side Story. Snub filmed on location in Moss Side, Manchester, with parts of the Moss Side Story album and some interview sections with Barry over the top.
In non- Snub related news this weekend is The Golden Lion's 11th birthday. Joe Goddard plays at the Todmorden pub tonight and tomorrow David Holmes returns with a live set from Belfast's Deeply Armed on the running order too. Warming up Saturday before and around those two are The Flightpath Estate DJ team, all five of us in the house, with bags full of tunes and our standard attempt at sequencing them into some kind of coherent order.
I've written about the music of Pandit Pam Pam several times previously. Pandit Pam Pam is the name Eduardo Ramos uses for his music a style he describes as 'unsettling punky ambience' but it goes way beyond whatever you might think that sounds like.
Eduardo lives in Sao Paulo, is inspired by European electronic music but is also obviously very much affected by Brazilian and south American music- those two influences combine to give his music very distinct sound and flavour. At the start of January he released a two minute track called Pause Rafraichissant, a soundscape that fades in with some ambient drones and synth FX, a very subtle and detailed track that you can listen to in two ways- you can let it wash over you as a background ambiance, a calming audio presence or really listen to it, paying attention to the small changes in pitch and tone and the static that replaces it at the end. It's at Bandcamp here.
It has recently been carnival in Brazil, the Mardi Gras celebration that marks the beginning of Lent. Eduardo's wife Bianca and young children developed a love for an old song by Olodum, Farao Divindade Do Egito, a song about ancient Egyptian pharaohs and spirits. Eduardo took the song his family were dancing to and did an edit, turning it into 'a dark, Balearic, dubby dream'- his words and I can't find any better way to describe it. The Pandit Pam Pam Deep Into The Bowel Of A Dub is at Bandcamp here. It's an infectious and affecting listen and a bit of a groover too.
Eduardo's on a roll at the moment- out tomorrow is a new track he's done as Pandit Pam Pam together with Darkinari, a cover of a Colourbox song, Tarantula. The Pandit Pam Pam/ Darkinari version is a treat, a deep dub bassline and wandering trumpet doing a dance, entwined and interlocked, the bassline descending, the trumpet weaving. Eduardo says that it was inspired by Andrew Weatherall, that he keeps making tracks that he'd like to have played for him, hoping for some kind of cosmic validation from the man. I think that if Andrew were alive, he'd have played Tarantula on his much missed NTS show. Find it at Bandcamp- I love it, it's highly recommended.
There's another new one, Familinea, lined up for a March release, a six minute ambient beauty but we'll come back to that nearer the time.
Colourbox's original version of Tarantula came out in 1982, their debut single along with Breakdown on the A- side, on 4AD. It was reworked the following year with producer Mick Glossop. Vocals on both versions were by Debian Currie who left in '83, replaced by Lorita Grahame. Tarantula is post- punk/ synthpop, drawing from their love of reggae and dub and also industrial synth music, dystopic dub disco with a numbed out vocal from Debian. It was later covered by 4AD supergroup This Mortal Coil.
Colourbox went onto make a load of great records- their 1986 dub/ soul single Baby I Love You So and it's B-side Looks Like We're Shy One Horse are 80s peaks (and both much loved by Mr Weatherall), their 12" Official World Cup Theme/ Philip Glass single is a good one. Their self titled album, a 1983 mini- album and a 1985 full length one, both contain much to enjoy and in 1987 they joined forces with AR Kane for a one off single as M/A/R/R/S, Pump Up The Volume, a seminal moment in UK sample/ dance music culture.
