Everyday People

I went back to The Whitworth last week to revisit the Beneath The Great Wave exhibition, a selection of surviving prints from Edo period Japan by Katsushika Hokusai and Utogara Hiroshiga. I loved it when I went in March, its free, I'm off work- what's not to love? 

The Whitworth is a beautiful building, stepping in through the front into the modernist interior and recent re- modelling is in itself a joy. The woodblock prints of Japan's floating world are visionary- the colours, the lines, the perspectives- and seem to be both old and modern at the same time. There are drawing of nature- the great wave of the exhibition's name and numerous prints of Mount Fuji.

The scenes portrayed in some of the prints, show Japanese people going about their daily business- farmers, travellers, actors, Geisha, merchants, urban dwellers and rural peasants, Samurai. The floating world (Ukiyo) became a phrase used to describe the growing urban world, where Edo (future Tokyo) became a place for hedonism and urban lifestyles. It and the prints also brought Japan into contact with the West. 

As I walked into the gallery last Tuesday a primary school was in the large open room that overlooks Whitworth Park and as I started to make my way round the prints the children started singing Sly and The Family Stone's Everyday People.

I poked my head round the corner to have a look and the children's choir were singing for parents and carers, a teacher conducting this group of multi cultural and diverse ten and eleven year olds singing...

'There is a blue one who can't accept the green one for living with a fat one trying to be a skinny one, different strokes for different folks, and so on and so on and scooby- dooby- doo one... I I I I am everyday people'

It was quite a moment, completely unexpected and a little overwhelming. 

In 1992 Arrested Development borrowed Sly Stone's hit for their own song, a tale of respect (and the lack of it) and a warning about the dangers of violence. Arrested Development were a big thing for a while in 1992-3, an alternative voice in the rap world. 

People Everyday

 

Sly Stone

The death of Sly Stone rippled and then flowed through the world of music and social media on Monday evening and into Tuesday. He was 82 and had lived quite a life. I think I first caught sight of him in 1989 with the 20th anniversary release and TV screenings of the Woodstock movie. His name became a fashionable one to drop and Sly And The Family Stone's multi racial, mixed gender, good time dance music from the late 60s fitted in with the times. When people mentioned acid house, S- Express, The Stone Roses, Bass-o- Matic, De La Soul and a host of others, Sly Stone and The Family were never far away. Like many people I bought the Greatest Hits album, an album stuffed wall to wall 60s dance floor hits, a fusion of pop, soul, funk and psychedelia played by people with long hair and Afros wearing dungarees and floral shirts. They were tailor made for 1989- I Want To Take You Higher, Dance To The Music, Everyday People, Hot Fun In The Summertime Everybody Is A Star...

It's fair to say as well that when the Woodstock film is taken as a whole, Sly is very much the star... boom lackalackalacka...

Later on in the early 90s Arrested Development sampled Sly for their hit People Everyday and then people began to refer to There's A Riot Goin' On. In 1991 Los Angeles went up in flames with the acquittal of four policemen who had been filmed brutally beating Rodney King. It seems frighteningly apt that when Sly died, there was indeed a riot goin' on again in L.A., this time caused by the President and (again) racially motivated.

The album There's A Riot Goin' On is a very different record from the feel good anthems the Family Stone made in 1967/68. Recorded largely by Sly on his own and featuring one of the first sues of drum machines, it's a dense, pessimistic and disillusioned album, murky funk. The arc of the civil rights movement is reflected in it, from I Have A Dream in 1963 to the assassination of King in '68, from the Freedom Rides and the Greensboro Sit Ins in the early 60s to the Watts riots and Black Power by the end of decade. It's a pissed off, militant and on edge. Sly had mixed with the Black Panthers and was being urged to make music that reflected the times, with an all Black band. Drugs and paranoia play their part. It's one of those albums that everyone should own a copy of. 

Luv N' Haight

Family Affair

RIP Sly Stone. 

All We Need Is A Drummer

Sometimes we all need a bit of boom-shackalackalack boom-shackalackalack in our lives and Sly Stone is just the man. In this live performance on Soul Train Sly spends a few minutes meeting his adoring fanbase, with Japanese subtitles, and then leads the band through Dance To the Music with a detour into I Want To Take You Higher.

Fact- I first bought a Sly Stone record because they were mentioned in relation to The Stone Roses, in an NME article. Fact- neither band sound remotely like each other.



Here's the studio version, audio only. Life affirming and all that, from 1968 and before the drugs, paranoia and disillusionment with the hippy dream set in.



That drum break's been recycled a few times.

Life And Death

World Of Twist, Manchester's long lost turn of the 90s band, made at least three outstanding singles- The Storm, Sons Of the Stage (one of my favourite records ever) and She's A Rainbow- and an album which was badly mixed (at a cost of a quarter of a million pounds). Quality Street had some good songs on it but no matter how loud you played it, it lacked oomph. A shame since they had real potential, magnetic stage presence and a sound combining 60s pop, Northern Soul and psych with an early 90s sensibility- a definite sidestep from the Madchester sound, more like a sharper, rawer Pulp. I saw them at Manchester Academy and they were a blast, MC Shells keyboards housed in a giant shell, and spinning round newsagents signs and stage props. Front man Tony Ogden died a few years ago, one of the era's lost souls. He was devastated after the band were dropped and spent several years doing little but taking smack and watching World War II documentaries. Drummer Nick Sanderson followed the band by forming Earl Brutus but died of lung cancer in 2008. The lp has recently been remixed/remastered and is due for release next Monday, hopefully giving the record and the band the sound it needed twenty odd years ago. A second disc has radio sessions for John Peel and Mark Goodier and b-sides. This is the extended 12" version of their cover of a Sly Stone song.

Life And Death (12" Mix)

In this interview clip for Snub TV they are interviewed in Withington baths, just up the road from where I grew up and where I once nearly drowned as a kid (I stuck my finger in a grid at the bottom of the deep end. To see what would happen). Proper swimming baths they were- cubicles around the edge, freezing cold, fag ends and plasters floating in the chlorine.