Human Beatboxing – Jimmy Castor?

Back in the old days of Radio Lancashire’s “On The Wire” programme (see earlier post), Steve had lots of carts (Wikipedia, Repflug, The Cart Guys) with sound effects, drops, fillers, jingles, theme tunes and other such radio audio paraphernalia.

For years and years through the 80s and 90s they were stored in a large box in the studio with a bit of paper plopped on top of them “On The Wire carts”.  I last worked on the programme regularly in 1999, and before I left I took copies of most of them, which I transferred to minidisc.  At some point after then, I think, the box was lost or whatever, and times change and in this digital age the studios don’t even have physical cart machines of the like of the Sonifex any more (although the ancestry remains in the digital replacement: the computer application often presents a “cart wall”).

Anyway, back to the matter in hand.  Many of the drops were taken off records, and there was one in particular I asked Steve about one time.  It’s a human beatbox thing, that goes on for about 40 seconds.  Now Steve reckoned it was from a Jimmy Castor record, but if it is, I haven’t found it yet.  But at least one other one that we used certainly was: the intro to Bertha Butt Boogie (“Bom bom, bobba-dom, baaaa bom-bom bom, bobba-dom”).  If you listen to some of the other track excerpts on Jimmy Castor’s discography website, you might recognise several others: King Kong, It’s Just Begun, and so on.  Many are listed on the web pages.

But I’m still stuck on identifying my 40 seconds of human beatbox.  A dirty copy of it is here.  “Yam *phh*-*phh*, yam *phh* *phh*; Yam *phh* *phh*, yam *phh* *phh* …)

Denver lyrical

A few days ago I was discussing the odd lyrics to an old 80s Radio One jingle.  While I was poking around on t’Internet (in fact to listen to the JAM Song again), I found reference to the package from which presumably that Radio One jingle originated, which was produced for KIMN Denver.  You can hear it here, the lyrics are:

“Show me a show you can hear at D.U.,
Washington Park and even the zoo;
Show me a show that’s the best show of all,
And I’ll show you the best show in Denver.
The best show in Denver, KIMN!”

As a sidenote, it is always odd to hear old familiar radio jingles with different lyrics for different stations: the nature of the jingle business is (was) that a package gets written for a client (or maybe no client in particular), and then is available to be re-sung for other stations that might want it.

Glasgow lyrical

Who remembers this:

“Send a request we can play on the air,
From Cardiff, Belfast or Glasgow Square;
Ask for a song that’s the best in the world,
And we’ll play it just for you.
The best sound in Britain, Radio One!”

Although who knows what “Glasgow Square” is supposed to be; there is no place of that name.  I suppose they could mean George Square which is in the city centre, but I suspect it was just a case of finding a rhyme.

Of course the other famous mention of Glasgow in a song is from Abba, in Super Trouper:

“I was sick and tired of everything,
When I called you last night from Glasgow;
All I do is eat and sleep and sing,
Wishing every show was the last show.”

Writing in The Telegraph, Neil McCormick appears not to be enamoured with this lyric:

“Has any song used a reference to “Glasgow” less convincingly than Super Trouper, where it is shoe-horned in just to rhyme with “last show”?”

On The Wire – 25th Anniversary – press release

From:  Steve Barker
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009
Subject: On the Wire – 25th Anniversary

ON THE WIRE

On Saturday 19th September 2009, between 10pm and 2am, BBC Radio Lancashire’s “On the Wire” show will celebrate 25 years of continuous weekly broadcasting as the longest running alternative show on British radio.

For the past 25 years Steve Barker has produced and presented On the Wire,
which was first broadcast on 16th September 1984. (Check Radio 1’s playlists
for that month compare and contrast).  Way back then there was no such thing as ‘dance’ music – hip-hop was confined to NYC and LA – and the UK was in the grip of the New Romantics. Smashy and Nicey still ruled at ‘Fab FM’ and the London dance mafia were still with their mums shopping for shells. Reggae was apparently dead.

On The Wire’s first guests were Adrian Sherwood – who provided its now legendary theme tune – and collaborator Keith le Blanc, who had earlier launched the ’sampledelic’ hip-hop classic, “Malcolm X” on the world via Tommy Boy. The following week Depeche Mode turned up in the studio, and  then in December a three hour live special was broadcast with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry – still fresh from torching the Black Ark a couple of years earlier.

And so it went through the eighties as On The Wire slowly built a reputation beyond Lancashire and the North West, throughout the UK and onwards – before the internet – via cassette to the outer reaches, Greece, Sweden, Australia,Italy, USA. The show was fairly expansive: releasing a compilation, “Bugs On The Wire”; putting on The Fall – a free gig at Clitheroe Castle when 2,500 people and one policeman turned up; a Xmas party at the Ritz in Manchester featuring Adrian Sherwood with Gary Clail, 808 State, A Guy Called Gerald, Little Annie plus a heavily pregnant Neneh Cherry absconding from a Bomb the Bass gig.

On the Wire saw the first radio plays for in the UK for numerous artists and bands, including Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson as well as specific tracks such as 808 State’s “Pacific State” and A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray”. As  the nineties turned, OTW was under threat from inside the BBC, but at the last minute the show was saved by the BBC board pegging the show as “a unique BBC product”.

For the last 7 years Steve has contributed from Beijing with the invaluable help of Jim Ingham co-producer in Blackburn, the indefatigable local  commentator Michael ‘Fenny’ Fenton, plus American exile and co-founder of the China-based nu electronic unit fm3, Christiaan Virant. Steve now DJs out in Beijing and Shanghai, and recently played the Big Chill festival in the UK. Steve has been the dub columnist for The Wire magazine for the past decade.

On the Wire’s celebration show:

The celebrations for the show will include mixes from friends far and near who have contributed to the show over the years, including:

• Mick Sleeper from Toronto, controller of the net-based show Radio Scratch, exclusively featuring the work of the legendary Lee “Scratch” Perry both as artist and producer (http://www.upsetter.net/)
• Pete Holdsworth from the world’s premier reggae revival label Pressure Sounds based in the UK and Japan (www.pressure.co.uk)
• Alan Bishop from the Seattle based label Sublime Frequencies (www.sublimefrequencies.com) a collective of explorers dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, international folk and pop music, sound anomalies, and other forms of human and natural expression not documented sufficiently through all channels of academic research, the modern recording industry, media, or corporate foundations.
• Stephen Hitchell from the Detroit based label Echospace (www.echospacedetroit.com) one of America’s finest imprints currently setting the bar for dub-influenced techno worldwide.
• Steve Goodman aka the London-based DJ Kode9, and owner of the influential Hyperdub record label. Steve holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Warwick and recently worked at the University of East London as a lecturer in media production, and course tutor for a master’s programme in sonic culture April 2004 (www.hyperdub.net)
• Steve Hardstaff aka Jahcuzzi, the North West’s most prolific creator of record album art. He recently had his work collected in a book published jointly by the University of Chicago and John Moore’s University in Liverpool, he was one of the Peter Blake’s assistants for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album artwork.
• Rob Ellis aka Bristol’s DJ Pinch, and owner of the label Tectonic Recordings, will be presenting a history of drum and bass music from the city that spawned so many artists who based their music and success on dub and reggae (www.myspace.com/tectonicrecordings)
• David Toop author of definitive books on both rap and ambient music (Rap Attack and Ocean of Sound) and musicologist extraordinaire will taking time off from writing an opera to offer a special mix (www.davidtoop.com/)
• Steinski aka Steve Stein and his pal Doug DiFranco (aka Double Dee) were hip-hop producers who achieved notoriety in the early 1980s for a series of underground hip-hop sample-based collages known as the Lessons. Although they never had a hit record, they proved highly influential for hundreds of subsequent artists both in hip hop and wider field of sound art. (www.steinski.com)
• Noel Hawks is perhaps best known for his authoring of hundreds of well informed sleeve notes since the start of the revival reggae business. A long time collaborator of On the Wire, Noel will be contributing a mix of personal favourites.
• Ashley Beedle is the man who introduced house music to the Notting Hill Carnival, founder of the Black Science Orchestra and The Ballistic Brothers, record-label owner of Soundboy Entertainment, Afroart, and Ill Sun. He recently recorded an album with reggae legend Horace Andy.
• Beijing-based Yan Jun, works in the realm of sound and language manipulating feedback, drones, voice and field recordings for site-specific sound installations, improvisations and environmental sound. He founded the Sub Jam and its sub-label KwanYin Records. He has run the weekly event Waterland Kwanyin and annual festival Mini Midi in Beijing since 2005 and published five essay collections on Chinese new music and three poetry collections.

For more information please contact Steve Barker steve.barker@bbc.co.uk or Jim Ingham jim.ingham@bbc.co.uk.

Update 5thSep: Now confirmed, legendary producer Adrian Sherwood from On-U Sound will be live in the studio to join the celebrations.

back to the edit

Years ago, as a teenager in the late 80s, I was mad for remixes and the like.  Those were the days of the 12″, 12″ remix, 12″ re-remix, and so on (Paul Morley, Trevor Horn and Frankie have a lot to answer for), and for some records, I’d want all of ‘em (I still have them all too, taking up an awful lot of room!).  But for a period of a few years, I did my own remixes and re-edits of favourite songs.

It was all pretty simplistic stuff, record-to-cassette (at best) or cassette-to-cassette pause-button editing together of different mixes of songs.  Later I found that my midi hifi at the time (record player plus double cassette deck and tuner) had a way of playing one cassette, playing a record at the same time and mixing the two sources together, and recording to the second cassette, which allowed me to do simple blending of two sources.

I can remember doing mixes of “Rock Me Amadeus” from (sadly departed) Falco, Whistle’s “Just Buggin’”, some hip-hop megamix stuff, some Mel and Kim mixes or edits, and who knows what else.  I’m not sure I have any of them around still.  Later still I worked on a independent music radio programme on my local station (On The Wire, still going strong, and celebrating its 25th anniversary soon), where I had access to multiple gram decks, CDs, and reel-to-reel tape machines.  Despite that, I don’t remember doing much there other than a version of The Concept’s  “Mr DJ” (a very early release on the might 4th and Broadway Island Records offshoot label), which I re-edited and overlaid samples and snippets that we used on the radio programme (and I do still have that on minidisc somewhere).

Anyway, the point of all this is twofold.  First, in my last post I mentioned the similarities between a LaRoux track and a Billie Rae Martin one.  I decided to revive my interest in editing and so forth, downloaded the latest Audacity, and tried to remember how to do all that stuff again.  The result isn’t quite finished, it needs a bit of something else (and I think I know what I will use), but suffice to say I am pleased with the result (if rather fed up of hearing both the songs).  I will post it somewhere at some point.

Secondly, today I heard a new “hot track”: “Rocket” by Sub Focus (look it up on YouTube or Juno).  And I was instantly struck by similarities with another tune from a completely different genre.  I’m not going to give the game away just yet, but it may well be the focus of my next audio editing adventure.  So don’t touch that dial.

Digging the electro revivial

The last few years, I have really been digging the musical revival of the 80s sound, particular its electro influences.

This month, for instance, we have seen a hit record from Black Eyed Peas, Boom Boom Pow!, which is a very modern take on the 80s electro/miami bass sound, and recently we’ve also heard it in and no end of R’n'B records with a classic electro beat.

I am essentially a musical child of the 80s, and was really into hip hop and related in those early days (I got bored of it somewhere in the 90s).  I still get excited when I put on some of those records again, however basic they seem now compared to today’s vast dense production values.

I’d almost forgotten about electro for many years, when suddenly it reared its head again in 1997 on one of Mark Bell’s remixes of Bjork’s Bachelorette.  What a cracking revival that was, and it got me listening to all my old 12″ and compilations again, and now I hear the beat everywhere.

In particular, I’m quite entranced by Laroux at the moment, particularly “In For The Kill”.  Most worthy of note too is Skream’s Let’s Get Ravey remix.  Not only is the angelic simple ambient vocal sweet in itself, but then the downtempo dubstep beat comes in and it stomps along, then we get to the ravey bit …  The ambient part reminds me of a fairly obscure Billie Rae Martin track, a cover of Throbbing Gristle’s “Persuasion” with Spooky, however I only know it for the excellent ambient version on the Trance Europe Express compilation (not-ambient version here).

The latest single is “Bulletproof” (not the PWEI one , and that’s good too.  There’s also some other material at Kitsune, including a nice CD issue of “In For The Kill” with other tracks, available through places like Juno.

Does Google know the answer to everything?

Probably … you just have to ask it the right question.

How about you ask Google: Does Google know the answer to everything?

and see what you get.

Compare the results with the same search in Bing and Yahoo (for example).

And of course, http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/.

Serving suggestion

For years I had, in a little notebook I carried with me at all times (OK it was a Woolworth’s pocket diary), a list of matters to “write about”.

Back then, “writing about” didn’t mean a weblog, because they didn’t exist.  In my case, it meant starting a thread adding a comment on a bulletin board system called Monochrome.  (Maybe I will write more about Monochrome another time).

I never did get around to writing about most of those things, but the only one I really remember just now is “serving suggestion”. I don’t know why it came to mind after all these years, but a few moments of Googling reveals I don’t need to spend any time pontificating about it. As usual, there is one answer in wikipedia (Serving_suggestion), but in finding a discussion here, I discovered the wonderful Common Sense Consultancy site, which is just Right Up My Street.