City Red Hot

Even typing is hot work at the moment. I'm not one to moan about hot weather, we get precious little of it in the north of England and once a year go abroad seeking it, but it does make doing everyday things difficult. As Lee Scratch Perry noted in 1977, city too hot.  

City Too Hot

Lee's solution was to go 'go cool out/ upon the hill top' which makes perfect sense especially when chanted over the top of one of those spacious, otherworldly rhythms he conjured up in the Black Ark in the 1970s. Eight sweltering minutes of dubbed out rhapsody. 

In 1990 Mark E. Smith set his sights on British people in hot weather. We're not really prepared for it are we? One hint of sunshine and there are men walking round with their shirts off, moorland fires started by people with disposable barbecues and an array of milk bottle legs and hastily dug out shorts. 

British People In Hot Weather

The song turned up on the B-side of Telephone Thing. Mark clearly found it all too much. 

'British people in hot weather/ Fill green envelopes and send them to you/ On train ride remarks tracks/ Play Walkmans loud behind you/ Demonstrate on Oxford Street/ About what the hell they couldn't tell you.... 

...people in shorts drunk before you/ Beach wailing Wapping/ His armpit hairs are sprouting/ Designer tramp goes grrrrr/ Looking jolly from Stoke as he walks through/ And makes up titles like this to order/ They're well off their trolley/ Smoking like a chimney/ The spectacles stared out/ British people in hot weather'.

In 1993 The Fall and Lee Scratch Perry came together with The Fall's Why Are People Grudgeful?, a splicing together of two Jamaican singles, Lee's 1968 single People Funny Boy and Joe Gibbs' answer record People Grudgeful. Mark took lyrics from both and combined them as the then current version of The Fall cooked up a post- punk/ alt indie skank.

Why Are People Grudgeful?

Oblique Saturdays

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 Ghost echoes.

It led me to Patti Smith's book about her young life with Robert Mapplethorpe and to Circle Sky's Ghost In The Machine. The Bagging Area Oblique Squad struck gold with Ghost Box and Dudgrick Bevins, Clientele, Lee Perry and Mouse On Mars, Model 500, Prince Far I, The Specials, Blur and Screaming Soul with Adrian Sherwood. Thank you Chris, Ernie, Rol, Khayem, Mr Ed, Al G and Ghostly Liz. 

Here's some Prince Far I from 1976, echo laden dub produced by Joe Gibbs in Kingston, Jamaica.

Under Heavy Manners

Today's card is this- Revaluation (A Warm Feeling)

A revaluation is to take something and increase its value, to reassess the value of an asset. In 2021 Saint Etienne took some samples from a specific time and place- late 90s and early 00s UK the first term of the Blair government- from a variety of unlikely and uncool sources- Honeyz, Natalie Imbruglia, Lighthouse Family, Tasmin Archer, The Lightning Seeds and Samantha Mumba- and made a concept album about memory, loss, nostalgia for the recent-ish past, a life before the social media age. Was it really a golden age? Saint Etienne seem to be asking or is it a trick of memory? I'm not sure they answer the their question. All the song were named after race horses that won on the day of New Labour's 1997 election victory. Pond House, Little K. Penlop. Broad River. 

Whatever we may think about the good things Tony Blair and the Labour government achieved in their first term- and there were many achievements- they pissed it up the wall with the invasion of Iraq and every time now Tony Blair opens his mouth his utterances surely cause an angel to die. 

Saint Etienne's album played around with all of these things and had a sense of melancholy about it but Pete and Bob really wrote some tunes as well, laptop beats, off kilter loops and samples, found sounds and modern 21st century production. Blue Kite takes ages to build, loops and woozy synths, the dull thud of a kick drum- a revaluation of late 90s/ early 00s pop and urban sounds into something ethereal and dreamlike. 

Blue Kite

Penlop sampled Joy by The Lightning Seeds, Ian Broudie's CD age stadium indie- pop revaluated into woozy, gossamer ambient pop. A remix EP (available only from Rough Trade I think when buying the album back in 2022) further played around with the source material- the samples and the Saint Etienne songs with Vince Clarke, Daniel Avery and Jane Weaver providing the revaluation. Jane Weaver's slow motion ambient/ folk is a low key marvel. 

Penlop (Jane Weaver Remix)

'The name of this song is new feeling... and that's what it's about'...

New Feeling

Half An Hour Of Lee Scratch Perry

I had the idea of a Lee Scratch Perry mix a long time ago but then baulked- where to start??? In the end I just went with my gut. Part of me then thought, having selected Soul Fire as the starting point, 'how on earth do you follow that?', but when I relaxed into it and just let it flow, it seemed much easier. There's an embarrassment of riches with Lee and I was tempted to include some post- classic roots/ dub 70s material- his song with the Beastie Boys, a Terence Trent D'arby remix or his stuff with The Orb- but decided eventually that was a mix for another Sunday. After finishing this mix I looked back through my folders and files and found hundreds of tracks and songs that could appear on it but by that point I decided to leave it alone. As it is, this is Lee Scratch Perry, The Upsetter, straight out of the Black Ark, for your Sunday morning. 

Half An Hour Of Lee Scratch Perry

• Soul Fire
• I Am The Upsetter
• Roast Fish And Corn Bread
• People Funny Boy
• Disco Devil
• Cloak And Dagger
• Throw Some Water In
• Scratch Walking
• River Stone

Soul Fire, Throw Some Water In and Roast Fish And Corn Bread are all from Lee's 1978 album Roast Fish Collie Bread And Corn Bread, his first solo album to feature his vocals, recorded at his Black Ark studio, Kingston, Jamaica. Soul Fire is absurdly good, so far from home, so rich in sound and so righteous, as Perry sings, Soul fire! And we ain't got now water...'. Lee's unorthodox approach to production and instrumentation is typified nowhere more than the use of a cow mooing in Roast Fish And Corn Bread. Still startling. 

I Am The Upsetter was a single in 1968, recorded with legendary producer Joe Gibbs.

People Funny Boy was a 1969 single, an attack on Gibbs with whom Perry split the previous year. The crying baby, heard as Perry walked past a church was to catch the vibration of the people. People Funny Boy's fast chuggy beat and distinctly Jamaican sound was a game changer on the island, sending the sound systems and producers down an entirely new path. 

Disco Devil is a dubbed out version of the song he produced for Max Romeo in 1976, Chase the Devil, with the famous 'put on me iron shirt' line. 

Cloak And Dagger was recorded with Tommy McCook and The Upsetters in 1973, recorded on his TEAC four track at Black Ark. 

Scratch Walking was recorded with The Upsetters, dating from the Return Of The Super Ape album in 1978 and the last album he recorded with The Upsetters before he shut down Black Ark, is wonky instrumental reggae from another world. 

River Stone is the B-side dub of River, a Perry produced track by the group Zap Pow. In the mid- 90s Pressure Sounds released an album called Voodooism, thirteen Perry productions with their dubs on two sides of vinyl. Blew my mind then and still does now. 

Uptown

It takes a special kind of genius to cover a song and completely reinterpret it and produce a version that is the equal of the original. In 1998 Luke Haines' post- Auteurs group Black Box Recorder achieved this with their cover of Althea and Donna's 1978 classic Uptown Top Ranking. Haines along with former Mary Chain and Expressway man John Moore and singer Sarah Nixey approached Uptown Top Ranking on their album England Made Me, the usual Haines mix of sardonic songs, shocking/ funny lines/ song titles and a take on modern life inspired by the 1970s. Songs on the album included Girl Singing In The Wreckage and Kidnapping An Heiress, typically Luke Haines song titles. Uptown Top Ranking was one of those one off hits of the 70s, a massive playground song as well as being genuine roots reggae from two Jamaican teenagers and a legendary producer (Joe Gibbs). Slipping a cover of it onto an album called England Made Me is as Luke Haines as it gets.

Haines and Moore created a mechanical, strictly non- reggae backing track, stripped of feeling and off beat rhythms, led by a horn blast and an occasional piano melody line. Over this they got Sarah Nixey to recite the words. According to Luke she didn't know the song and they wrote the words out in Jamaican patois, phonetically. To add to the performance Nixey had a hangover. The vocals are so detached and devoid of life, so completely glassy eyed that they almost become meaningless, the absolute opposite the total celebration of youth and being young in the original. But Sarah's deadpan delivery of the lines works, lines such as 'see me in me heels an' ting', 'see me in me 'alter back', 'love is all I bring in me khaki suit an' ting' and 'gimme little bass make me wine up me waist' transformed by a haughty English accent looking down her nose at you as she sings them. 

Uptown Top Ranking

The original version with Joe Gibbs at the controls had Althea and Donna, seventeen and eighteen years old, ad- libbing Trinity's Three Piece Suit over a 1967 Alton Ellis song, I'm Still In Love. Although Gibbs saw it as a bit of a joke, there's no doubting the authenticity Althea and Donna bring to their vocals and performance. 'Nah pop no style, we strictly roots'.

Uptown Top Ranking

Two Sevens Clash

Meanwhile, in Jamaica in 1977...

Two Sevens Clash

Culture formed in 1976 and recorded several singles with Joe Gibbs which had a huge impact, none more so than Two Sevens Clash. Released in 1977 it was picked up by John Peel and played at The Roxy by Don Letts ensuring its popularity with the London punk crowd. Two Sevens Clash predicted the apocalypse on July 7th 1977. Righteous roots reggae- the whole album is well worth your time.

I try really hard not to pour scorn celebrities wearing band t-shirts. I understand the knee jerk reaction when a celeb is pictured in a band t-shirt. 'I bet they couldn't name two songs by xxxx' we think, 'I bet they don't even know the name of the drummer' we mutter.It's a bit unfair- they might genuinely be a fan, they might love the artist's work as much as we do. And who's to say someone might not look at us in a band t-shirt and think the same?

But...

Yes, that's Paris Hilton.

No Pop, No Style

What could be less appropriate for this week's weather than a blast of summer from Jamaica? Althea and Donna were 17 and 18 respectively when legendary producer Joe Gibbs took the rhythm from Alton Ellis's I'm Still In Love and got them to sing over the top. Less than a year later, in 1978, this went to number one in the UK singles charts. Strictly roots, as the girls remind us repeatedly, strictly roots.

Uptown_Top_Ranking.mp3