Fuzzbox - XX Sex EP mp3

Vindaloo
UGH11
1986



People try to tell you that the 80s was all Thatcherite greed and squeaky corporate Stock Aitken Waterman pop. Yet far more people were listening to Crass than making millions off privatisation. Still more were putting money in the collection buckets for the miners strike.

It's this 80s that spawned Fuzzbox (as they were always known due to their full name - We've Got A Fuzzboz And We're Gonna Use It - being too unwieldy for anyone to use).

As a teenager at the time, this first EP of theirs hit me like an amphetamine pessary. The songs were rough and playful, sleazy and aggressive, assertive and boisterous, big-hearted and defiant. I played the opening song, XX Sex, over and over and genuinely thought I might have found the greatest track ever recorded.

These were simple shambolic and heavy riffs. Like the Jesus and Mary Chain's seminal album Psychocandy a year earlier, they took classic pop structure and layered it with distortion.

Unlike the Mary Chain, this was four women conscious of having something to say. It wasn't from a swanky London major but on some provincial indie label. Their songs addressed sexism yet, like Strawberry Switchblade before them, they eschewed the brand of feminism that saw dressing up as a sop to male desire. It's no coincidence that the EP was issued with some copies on pink vinyl, some on blue.

They exuberantly self-defined even as they declared that they were still searching for who they were. More than anyone else, Fuzzbox paved the way for the Riot Grrl bands of the early 90s, yet unlike some of those they never got pretentious.



They got in there, made their point and fucked off. No noodling about. The longest song on the EP is short of three minutes. The other three clock in at under two minutes each. This was all the integrity of punk with a new pop effervescence.

Ignore their corporate makeover and plasticised comeback attempt a couple of years later. This is the real fucking deal.

download XX Sex (2.7MB MP3)

download Do I Want To? (2.6MB MP3)

download Rules and Regulations (4.2MB MP3)

download She (1.8MB MP3)

The Rattles - Zip a Dee Doo Dah mp3

Philips
BF 1277 345617PF
1963




A vintage Merseybeat style version of Zip a Dee Doo Dah? What more could you want in life?

And this is no twee Freddie and The Dreamers stuff, it's got that tough, bright, raucous jubilance of the Swinging Blue Jeans' Hippy Hippy Shake or I Want To Hold Your Hand.

Such is their beat music proficiency that you'd never know they were in fact German, they've got that transatlantic thing down perfectly.

It's no surprise, because The Rattles cut their teeth on the same hard Hamburg rock n roll circuit as the Beatles, and were the first German band to get a contract at the Star Club where the Beatles forged that punchy buoyant post-Chuck Berry rock n roll sound.

Zip a Dee Doo Dah is actually the B-side of The Stomp ('Stompin, oh yeah, Stompin...'), a track that sounds like you imagine it does. This track, though, is the one most likely to get you out of your chair and bouncing round the room.

After this they had a Thamesmen-to-Spinal Tap style makeover, and then came their only international success, a ploddy single called The Witch in 1970. And, like the Tap, they're still going.


download Zip a Dee Doo Dah (3.3MB MP3)

Fortran 5 - Bike (Sid Sings Syd) mp3

Mute
12MUTE126
1991




Fortran 5 were an early 90s sampletastic ambient dance outfit, sort of like a cross between the Justified Ancients of MuMu and The Orb. Producing a broad mix of tracks and ideas, and remixing for bands as diverse as Erasure and Laibach, it is nonetheless the genius one-joke novelty of Sid Sings Syd that calls me back more than anything else they did.

You know that bit in the end credits of Spinal Tap where David St Hubbins is explaining the tapes he's listening to?

I've been listening to the classics, I belong to a great series. It's called The Namesake Series cassettes, and they send you the works of famous authors done by actors with the same last name.

So I've got Denholm Eliot reading TS Eliot, I've got Danny Thomas doing A Child's Christmas In Wales by Dylan Thomas. Next month it's McLean Stevenson reads Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island, I believe.

Fortran 5 painstakingly sampled Sid James to make him say the words of Bike by Pink Floyd. This was 1991. None of this was done by googling any samples, this must all have been from sitting there watching hour upon grinding hour of Sid James movies on VHS, occasionally exclaiming, "There! He said 'cloak'! Rewind it while I press record!".

There's an extra twist in the fact that the session was helmed by producer Stephen James, son of Sid. It was released on the B-side of the Groove EP, and later on the album Blues.

For their next project they moved a step closer to David St Hubbins territory, actually getting Derek Nimmo into a studio to sing Layla by Derek and The Dominoes. Genius.

download Bike (Sid Sings Syd) (7.8MB MP3)

Wilson Pickett - Sugar Sugar & Cole Cooke and Redding mp3

Atlantic
45-2722
1970




Known to everyone for mid-60s belters like In The Midnight Hour, the late 60s found Wilson Pickett applying his gritty yawp to some unusual covers. The drawn-out anguish in his version of the Supremes You Keep Me Hanging On is just glorious.

More incongruous - and regular Dusters will know I'm a sucker for the weird shit - is his cover of Sugar Sugar, a bubblegum pop tune so twee the Monkees turned it down for being too cheesy, so it was released by a fictional band of cartoon characters, The Archies. It was the monster hit of summer 1969, and still high in the charts when Pickett gave it his solid soulful treatment. (For an equally unlikely take, check out Bob Marley's version, a Jamaican 45 that finally got worldwide release on The Complete Wailers box set).

For the B-side, Pickett did another bizarre recut. Abraham Martin and John was a late 1968 American hit for Dion, previously best known for turn of the 60s edgy-end-of-cleancut pop fare like Teenager in Love, Runaround Sue and The Wanderer. This song was quite different, a reflective ballad grieving the deaths of progressive public figures Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and John Kennedy. The verse simply replaced the name in order to draw a sense of moral lineage between the three men, adding a fourth verse for Bobby Kennedy.

Has anybody here, seen my old friend John?

Can you tell me where he's gone?

He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good, they die young

But I just looked around and he's gone.

Here in the UK we best knew it as a top ten hit for Marvin Gaye, whose impeccable intelligent subtlety of phrasing and gliding molten chocolate voice perfectly suited the lyric's mix of stoicism and thoughtful melancholy. For reasons unknown (was Motown already showing a fear of Marvin getting into political ideas that would lead to such a battle to get the What's Going On album released?) this version was never released in the USA.

In his preamble to the song, Wilson Pickett credits Moms Mabley's then-current 1969 version as his inspiration. Pickett, however, remoulds it as a tribute to three giants of soul music who died young.

I have simultaneous contradictory feelings about it. On the one hand it's an inventive, touching and sincere nod from one soul singer to his antecedents, drawing on soul's gospel roots to address mortality.

Yet it also seems a tasteless belittling of the fact that dying of lung cancer, being shot in dubious circumstances or going in a plane crash aren't the same as being assassinated by reactionaries because of your political beliefs. You know Bob Dylan's comments at Live Aid about how it would be good if some of the money could go to help American farmers? It's a bit like that.

Whatever, it's certainly a great piece of vinyl era oddity, which is exactly what this blog's about.

download Sugar Sugar (4.3MB MP3)

download Cole Cooke and Redding (5.4MB MP3)

The Spotnicks - Hava Nagila mp3

Oriole
45-CB1790
1963




Several years ago I had my musical gland squeezed in the middle of the night by a track played on Charlie Gillett's show for the BBC World Service. He was playing a selection of tracks that first made the West aware of other musics, antecedents for what we call world music. The one that made me sit bolt upright, switch the light on and write the details down so I could buy a copy was Soul Makossa by Manu Dibango. It has a couple of killer funk-soul hooks but with this great spacey loose funk groove that was unlike any of the American funk or soul I knew.

That was the clue that 70s soul wasn't just an American affair, that there was stuff around the world that would be every bit as rich, dirty and face-twistingly funky.

Earlier this year my dear friend the venerable Gyrus sent me a copy of Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound Of The Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-79. Like most various artist compilations it's not of consistent calibre, but fuck me when the spectrum ranges from the good to utter riproarers that's no bad thing.

Then more recently I found this page of 70s Iranian funk. Who'd have thunk the funk would be out that far? The authorities banned pop music in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution, but it seems up till then there was some magnificent stuff being made and played in Iran. As an extra reason to hate their vicious regime, the Iranian funk page gives us a clue to what musical talent has been suppressed.

Weirdest of all is the version of Hava Nagila, a traditional Hebrew tune of celebration. Iranians doing an African-American style version of a Jewish tune. It'd be worth hearing just for the on-paper incongruous nutness of it, but play it and hear that it stands tall and firm on its own merits too.

This, in turn, sent me off to dig out the version I already have, an equally improbable early 1960s Tarantino style surf guitar version done by a Swedish band who wore spacesuits on stage.



download Hava Nagila (3.4MB MP3)

The Freshies - I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk mp3

Razz (through MCA)
MCA 670
1980




This fabulous piece of perky provincial powerpop faintly pestered the charts outside the top 40. Nice postpunk Skidsy guitars combine with 60s harmonies to give it a crisp playful momentum that matches the lyrics.

Mistakenly seen at the time as something of a novelty record, it's actually more the kind of indie wit that the Wonder Stuff would make a career of.

The lyrics are a fine documentation of that attitude, so common at the time but slightly mystifying now, that records were in and of themselves sacred and wonderful artefacts. And so, just like the way people disproportionately fancy bar staff due to some subconscious primal understanding of them as providers, we'd readily swoon at cool people working in record shops.

It takes the minimum of effort to have this song remind me of the woman who worked in Our Price in Southport. How I hoped she would be impressed by my pre-ordering cool records like Starfish by The Church. If she was, she hid it very well.

The Freshies continued that vinylophilic theme with their ploddy follow-up 45 I Can't Get 'Bouncing Babies' by The Teardrop Explodes.

But before that there was a problem to overcome with the Virgin Megastore single. This being the 1980s before everything was sponsored, and with the BBC putting masking tape over brand names when using cereal boxes to make stuff with sticky-backed plastic on Blue Peter, the namecheck in this single's title was a commercial hindrance. So it was recut as I'm In Love With The Girl On A Certain Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk. (Hear that version here).

Perhaps the rewording accounts for the words bring in the wrong order on this version's label ('Virgin Manchester Megastore' instead of 'Manchester Virgin Megastore').

Freshies mainman Chris Sievey later invented a Freshies fan, the staggeringly unfunny 'comedy' character Frank Sidebottom. Somehow he ended up doing Sidebottom for years on end, along the way spawning a cohort, Caroline Aherne's - who'd have thunk it possible - even less funny Mrs Merton character.

But never mind, because this single is such a glorious uplift.

download I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk (4.1MB MP3)

Lunar Funk - Mr Penguin Pt.1 mp3

Bell (USA)
45 172 (Bell 1225 in the UK)
1972




Over at one of my favourite blogs, The Quiet Road, Jim has posted a Youtube video of the Mothership Connection. I see no reason why we shouldn't let the funk seep on over to our place.

If, like me, you had never heard of this record before you saw a second hand copy, I sincerely hope you would feel as I did. Namely, any record called Mr Penguin by something called Lunar Funk has to be worth hearing.

Whilst it doesn't have the heavier sturm und thang delivered by some of their contemporaries, it grooves along with fuzzy guitar, trippy vibes and tricky rhythm.

Most importantly, it has what - as the venerable Adam Warne rightly observed - any track needs to be truly funky: a man with a deep voice saying funky stuff.

download Mr Penguin (4.1MB MP3)

If you're a funkafreak and want me to email you the Part 2 that appears on the B-side (pretty much another three minutes of the same), leave your email address in the Comments.