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When Smokey Sings

Tim Clifford — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:56:07 +0000

Sesame Street is 40 years old. Here’s a genius Smokey Robinson appearance on the show to celebrate. Also heartily recommended is Little Richard’s rubber ducky.

watch?v=UyUxVCR0p9g

Sporting life

Tim Clifford — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:08:27 +0000

It’s 233 days until the World Cup kicks off in South Africa on June 11 2010. I know this because one of the British tabloids has started to run a countdown to the Cup on its sports pages.

Between now and June we can expect delivery of thousands of column inches of speculation, gossip, hysteria and, who knows, maybe even some serious analysis about the beautiful game.

It’s interesting that sport plays such a central place in the lives of so many people yet there are very few songs that utilise sport either as a central theme or as a source of metaphor. A quick rummage around the internet uncovers very few great ones:

When An Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease: Roy Harper
Hurricane: Bob Dylan
Centrefield: John Fogerty
England 2: Colombia 0: Kirsty MacColl
Tour de France: Kraftwerk
World In Motion: New Order

One tune that more people should know about is Canon Kpa Kpum by African System Orchestra. The band from Cameroon recorded a fizzing, impassioned epic to celebrate Canon FC de Yaounde’s 1980 victory in the Confederation of African Football’s Champions League. For once, a song that is as exciting as a game.

For a limited time, you can download it here:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/8w9z8q

Orch TP Poly Rythmo de Cotonou

Tim Clifford — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:19:31 +0000

Sunday, 27 September witnessed an enthralling performance by Orchestre TP Poly Rythmo de Cotonou at London’s Barbican Centre. Anyone who has heard one of the band’s compilation CDs on Soundway or Analog Africa will understand why it was so special.
What’s not to love about a group that appears to be soundtracking a 1970s voodoo detective television series? Complex ever-shifting rhythms? Check. Blaring horns? Check. Atmospheric organ fills? Check. Taught and snappy guitar riffs? Check. In concert, the band aren’t flash – if anything they are almost too self-effacing – but they mesmerised the London audience.
The wonder of it is, though, is that it was the last date on the 11-piece band from Benin’s first European tour of its 40-year existence.
How can such an accomplished set of performers be so little known outside West Africa for so long? Quite easily as it happens. The history of African popular music is only sporadically documented. When Samy Ben Redjeb of Analog Africa went to Benin to try to make contact with TP Poly Rhythmo and to explore licensing their music for reissue he was astonished to discover more than 500 recordings by the band.
In some ways Samy was lucky, in that key members of the group such as saxophonist Clement Melome are still alive and still eager to get their music to a wider audience. In many instances, however, the bands are long disbanded, their key members are dead and nobody knows who owns the rights to their music. That’s because the African record industry largely worked on the Jamaican model, where the producer paid the musicians a flat fee for their work and assumed all title over it.
Factor in the widespread bootlegging of music via cassette and CD and the dismantling of state-run broadcasting institutions, which provided the only recording facilities in some African states, and it is easy to see how information is lost and rights to anthologise music become buried in a tangle.
Kenyan music, my special interest, is particularly ill-served by this legacy. In Nairobi, East Africa’s sole pressing plant produced up to one million singles a year in its late 1970s heyday. EMI, CBS and Polydor had a presence in the country yet I have searched in vain for catalogues of records released by these companies.
To try and preserve some of this legacy, I have built up a database of Kenyan and Tanzanian 45s over the past 18 months with help from collectors around the world. Viewable at www.kentanzavinyl.com, it lists more than 2,000 singles from the region. The sad fact is, though, it is only scratching the surface in terms of recording information and the next step, obtaining rights to re-release some of this music, is still a distant dream.
The spirits do lift on occasion, however. Earlier this year, I was in Melodica, a Nairobi record store and a major independent producer in the 1970s, enquiring about their back catalogue. “These are the records we produced,” I was told by the manager as he handed me a thick printout – of pages from my own website.

An unfortunate coincidence

Tim Clifford — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:40:04 +0000

Kraftwerk live on stage in Cracow, Poland, 2008

Waxwork of the last meeting of the Great Fascist Council in 1943 on display in the Museo delle Cere, Rome

Music Go Music

Tim Clifford — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:55:47 +0000

Gala Bell of Music Go Music, ICA, London, 22 September 2009

A five-foot-tall hourglass stood on stage, its sands unmoving, when Music Go Music made their London debut at the ICA last night. The prop seemed a wry acknowledgement that the LA band’s sound is rooted firmly in the past.

The core trio of singer Gala Bell, keyboardist Kamer Maza and guitarist Torg, augmented on stage by a rhythm section and two backup singers, serve unashamed, well-crafted, radio-friendly pop that harks back, as others have already noted, to the likes of Abba, Blondie and the Carpenters. In this digital age, where the charts are dominated by beats and samples, MGM are like a breath of fresh air.

Live, the sound is more muscular and driven than on record yet there’s no deviating from the template: keep it tight, keep it simple, keep it up upbeat. No messy solos distract attention from Bell, who has an unforced charisma and a voice that seems to come from a more innocent age, one when Phil Spector was behind a mixing desk rather than behind bars.

It’s dance music, pure and simple, and the audience lapped it up. The next time the band headline in London, I suspect, they will be playing to a sell-out crowd.

Set list: I Walk Alone; Light of Love; Just Me; Love Violent Love; Explorers of the Heart; Reach Out; Warm in the Shadows; Goodbye Everybody