FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
‘A Trip to Bolgatanga’: Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah on African Head Charge’s first new album in 12 years


Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah (courtesy of On-U Sound)

Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah and Adrian Sherwood inaugurated the daring studio project African Head Charge in 1981 with My Life In A Hole In The Ground. Both in the studio and in live performance, African Head Charge has burned up the intervening decades exploring unknown Mystery Spots of sonic experience, transmitting dub sonar signals in every dimension where sound travels.

A Trip to Bolgatanga, the band’s first LP in twelve years, may be the most sublime entry in the African Head Charge catalog. I recently spoke with Bonjo about Africa, drumming, his youth as a runaway Rasta, and much else. An edited transcript follows.

First of all, my condolences on Mark Stewart’s death. He was a person I liked very much.

That is a very big loss for not just me, but for all On-U Sound.

You played with him throughout his career, right?

Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah! I was a part of the original Maffia, the band, yes. I was a part of it, the original one, before Skip [McDonald] and all that, yes. So I knew him very well.

Did you meet him through Adrian?

Yes, I got to know him through Adrian.

When you and Adrian started African Head Charge, had you been to Africa yet?

No. That time I didn’t go. I didn’t go to Africa until ’94. But even then, I still had Africa inside me, you know, Africa was already in me because of the way I was brought up.

Those early records, I guess it’s an imaginary Africa, and I’m curious about how that compares to your experiences in Africa. Did you have any ideas about Africa that have changed?

Oh, yes, I’ve had a lot of it, because I was born in a place in Jamaica called Clarendon, which is the rural part of Jamaica. And in that area you’ll find, apart from the big Rasta camp there—my grandmother’s sister was the head of the Rasta camp there, yeah?—and then up the road from where I live, about five minutes’ walk from where I’m living, there’s a Poco church there, Pocomania church, Poco. Which is a part of the African culture. These people brought—you know, they’re slaves, then, let’s use the word “slave,” the people, them that was taken from West Africa, they were maintaining their spirituality and their culture. Although it wasn’t a lot of them, ‘cause the colonial people tried to beat it out of them, but a few of them kept it.

There’s a woman that was close to where we’re living, her name is Mother Hibbert. She was about two, three minutes’ walk from where I’m living, Mother Hibbert. That’s Toots, have you heard of Toots Hibbert, the Maytals?
 

Photo by @marg_yo

Of course!

All right. Well, Toots’ auntie. See, that’s where Toots gets that all that script from as well. Okay, Toots’ auntie, her name was Mother Hibbert, and she was like the spiritual woman in the area, you know? We have many churches, we have church like Catholics, we have church like Nazareth Assembly, which my mom and dad always were a part of that, Protestant, all kind of things. But we have this one church in the area where they were just doing African [spirituality], and her name was Mother Hibbert. So, from where I am, once I hear the drumming starts in the evening, some evenings, I just go there, even though sometimes my family, they would beat us for going there, but I would go.

Because our family, they thought that anything to do with the Black culture were like Obeah, voodoo, or ungodly things, or whatever, you know? But me as a child, I wasn’t really thinking about—had nothing to do with no Obeah, voodoo spirituality or anything, it’s just: I heard the drumming, I heard it and that draw me to go there. So I used to go there, ‘cause when they see me, some of the drummers and their people, they saw that I keep coming all the time, so they start to give me something to play, like a tambourine or some sticks or something, until I start to play some drums as well, you know? And that’s when I was about eight years old, I was very young. So because of that I learned the Poco drumming, which was drumming that came directly from Africa, which later, that same Poco drum slowed down to become Nyabinghi drumming, same Poco drumming, okay? So that’s where I got the African drumming inside me before I even go to Africa.

It’s in a spiritual, religious context, too, which I think is interesting.

That’s right. Exactly, exactly. ‘Cause Mother Hibbert is a woman, like, when people have a spiritual problem they will go to see her and she will solve it or something like that. She’s a spiritualist, you know? She can heal people and all that kind of thing. She used a lot of herbs, she knows about herbs and different trees and bush and whatever, but she’s also a spiritual person. She believes in, she work with the ancestors.

So were Poco and Nyabinghi the first drumming techniques—

Yes, well what happened with the Poco drum, the Poco drum was the original drums that came with the slaves, you understand what I’m saying? That drumming. But the thing is, like you say something is bad—people don’t want it because it’s too Black, it’s too African, it’s too whatever. And our great-grandparents, they were taught to only believe in whatever religion the slavemasters gave us, they had to follow that. Well, there was a few people like the Maroons and these people, who decide “no, we’re going to maintain our thing.” Which is a very small amount of people, not a lot! Out of a hundred, maybe you’ll get two percent. So I was just lucky that I lived very close to Mother Hibbert. And there was another person again, his name was Arwa (?). But it’s Mother Hibbert that I really went and get that African spirit inside of me.
 

A Trip to Bolgatanga

Tell me about Bolgatanga and the name of this album.

Bolgatanga, you know, I was in Ghana, and the time came for me to come back. So the same week that I had to come back, the planes stop running. They say no plane is running ‘cause of COVID and all that kind of thing. So I thought, well, I did record some drumming earlier anyway, you know? But I decide, yes, I’ll go and spend time in Bolgatanga because it’s very hot there and they said COVID don’t like heat.

So I had a friend lived there, one of them was King Ayisoba who was a top musician in Ghana. He’s the king of the kologo. The first track you hear on it is him playing the guitar and the chanting, and we collaborate on doing that. But he was the king of kologo music, he was the number one, and he had a hit song some years ago, number one hit song in Ghana, “I Want to See My Father.” So while I was in Bolgatanga, I get to know him and we become friends. And Adrian suggest to me—I told Adrian what I’m doing, I said, listen Adrian, I’m doing this, I’m doing that, and I’m using most of my money to do it; if my money run out, I’ll let him send me more money so I can pay the musicians and the drummers and whatever—and he suggested if I can get King Ayisoba to do something. I don’t think he knew that he was in Bolgatanga. So when he said that, it was easy for me to do. I just went to King Ayisoba and pay him and some of the drummers and play a session, and we just went in the studio and did two tracks, you know?

So I was spending a lot of time in Bolgatanga. I love Bolgatanga. Bolgatanga is a place where it is extremely hot. When I say hot, hot, hot, hot! So hot that when you go to any drinking spot, or a club, or any place of entertainment, they have a swimming pool there. Everywhere you go there’s entertainment going on near a swimming pool. ‘Cause when people are dancing or enjoying or drinking or eating or whatever, they get hot, so they wanna jump in the pool, and sometime they stay in there and enjoy the music or whatever. So that place is very hot, so I decide I’ll stay there.

And in fact, my woman, there’s a girl on the album who sings and plays some percussion on it, and her name is Angela Akanuoe, she’s from Bolgatanga as well.

It sounds like you did some of the recording in Ghana?

Yeah, most of it. The foundation of the album was done in Ghana. I just came over here with Adrian and we overdub other things on top of that, like some bass, some keyboards, some this and that. But we did the vocals and the drumming there, and the chanting.
 

 
So the contributions of Skip [McDonald] and Doug [Wimbish]—

They came after, they came after. They came, and I think I’m gonna be working like that now, because I like that idea, you know? Well, I’ve always been setting the foundation, anyway, for African Head Charge, and then other people come and do other things on top of that, you know? That’s how it works from a long time. But this time, it wasn’t just me alone as drummer, there’s other drummers as well. And I wanted to get some different vibes of drummers, you know? I have one of them who’s working in the band with me right now, you know, one of the drummers from Ghana. But he’s a part of the Ga. I did some of the drumming in Bolgatanga, and I did a lot of it in Accra. Accra, you have the Ga. It’s a different tribe. And they’re good drummers.

Different drums.

Yeah, different types of drummers, yes. Every tribe has got a different way of expressing drums and dance, you know?

Is it different instruments, or different ways of playing?

It’s the same instrument but different ways of playing.

Why has it been so long since the last African Head Charge album?

Well, after you’ve done—is it twelve albums we’ve done already, you know? We’ve done twelve albums. So maybe it was time for us, and for me as well, to really start to think about the next move, you know?

I’ve been to going to Ghana from ’94. And I just decide that, so many different tribes, I want to record a lot of different kind of drumming, from not just Ghana, you know. Maybe next time I’ll go to Gambia, or to Sierra Leone, or to somewhere else. But that is what my plan is for the future. Because it’s African Head Charge, so I want to cover as much of Africa as possible, and combine it with the Jamaican thing, just combine that, you know? Because I was born and grew up in Jamaica, but at the same time I have the African inside of me through the Poco church and the Nyabinghi and so forth. So I’m just trying to link them together, find a way of putting it all together, or as much as I can. I can’t put it all, but I put as much as I can, yeah?

So I’m planning on the next album—I start to plan the next album already, I start to write things down, you know, and things like that. So when I go to Africa—I’ve got family there, you know, I have children there, I’ve got grandchildren there as well. So it’s not just going there to have fun and to see my children and whatever whatever. When I go there I want to do creative things, so that when I come back here, me and Adrian and whoever else is there, we can come together and take it from where I’ve taken it.
 

African Head Charge c. 1993

There’s an interview that you gave to the Wire a few years ago, and I might have misunderstood something you said. Did you play with Fela Kuti?

No. Well, I jammed with them, I jammed with them. What happened was, a long time ago, it could be the early Eighties or something like that, I used to audition a lot. When I found out that drumming is what I really wanted to do, I used to go and audition, sometimes just playing in a pub. I look in the Melody Maker, at that time, at the Melody Maker and the New Musical Express. And it used to come out like Thursday and I used to buy it, and of course they had adverts, “Musician Wanted,” “Conga Player Wanted,” or whatever. I’ll ring them up and go for the audition.

This time, a band from Nigeria came to London, and the band was called the Funkees. And the Funkees, one of their conga players didn’t make it, I think it was a visa or a passport problem or whatever. So they put an advert in the paper, and when I went there I met up with this player called Sonny Akpan, and Chyke, and all these other—I mention those names ‘cause those were the ones, sometimes you’re in a band and you get close to one or two people. I got close to Sonny Akpan, I got close to Chkye; Chyke was another drummer, the kick drummer.

So what happened was, through the way we like, ‘cause I mean in those days I used to smoke a lot of ganja, anyway. I don’t take any drink, but I smoke a little weed sometimes, and I think Fela love it, you know? At that time, we have this ganja that’s coming in from Jamaica, it’s called Red Beard. We don’t have it anymore. That ganja was like medicine. It gives you appetite and it’s really good. Up to now, today, I don’t see anymore herb like that, you know?

So I used to get it and I used to go down there with it. And the first time I went there, I didn’t meet Fela the first time I go, but someone took it and give him and tell him, say, “Hey, we have a Jamaican friend who’ll come here and bring this weed,” and he love it! So the next time I went there, the herb was sent up to him, and then I start playing, ‘cause in those days I didn’t really talk a lot, somehow. About 35, oh, many years ago, more, 40 years maybe. So if I see a drum, that was my way of communication. I’d just start to play it. I’d start to play bloong! bloong!, I’d start to play some riddim, play something. And then some of the other drummers from Fela’s band, all the other musicians, they’ll come and they’ll sit close, and they started playing! So we’ll find, after about an hour, we’ll find like about 30 people are playing. And some nice girls was there, too, playing, and I realize that all of them was Fela’s wife and all that. So we could only look, but nothing, you know what I mean?

And then Fela came down and saw me playing with all idren, and Fela: “Bonjo!” Fela himself called me Bonjo. My name was not Bonjo at that time! So he call me that, and I try to find out why, why’d he call me that? And they said I look like someone in Nigeria with that name, and the person is also a percussionist, so that person is like my twin, you know what I mean? So he called me that name because I look like somebody, one of his people that he knows in Nigeria. So that’s how I got the name from Fela.
 

via Discogs

But I never played with him live. ‘Cause he was living in this big mansion. Ginger Baker, there’s this guy called Ginger Baker, this drummer. Have you heard of Ginger Baker?

Yes!

Well, Ginger Baker have some big mansion, I forget where the place was, and Ginger Baker give the mansion to Fela so he could live there with all his wives and all his musicians and everything, big place. That’s where I used to go, me and Sonny Akpan and Chyke and that, we used to go down there. So I used to jam with them, I did jam with them.

They had a big room downstairs. Massive room! They have all the rooms upstairs around the place, but downstairs was just a big room and playing the drums, you know what I mean? So much drums. I never seen so much drums in one place like that before.

They were speaking their languages there, you know, and I didn’t talk because I didn’t know how to communicate with them too much in their language. Although some of them like Sonny and Chyke, some of them could speak English, so I could talk with them, but I didn’t really talk a lot. Burn my weed, burn the smoke, and play some African drum, some Poco drum, the one that I learned from all small. And that fit right in, you know? I suppose if I’d hung around much or if I was a bit pushy or whatever maybe I could’ve been playing in the band, but I was playing in the other band, the Funkees. ‘Cause the Funkees is the band that warm up before he plays. Then later, the band changed from the Funkees to Efya (?), and I was still with them when they were in Efya (?), too, until that split up and Sonny went to work with Eddy Grant.

He was a great player. He was like my teacher, to tell you the truth, he put me further than where I was in the African drum. He took me further than where I was in the drumming, ‘cause I had to learn from him. You play something, and then I have to play what he’s playing, you know? And so that’s how it goes. And that’s why they like me as well, ‘cause when you go for the audition, Sonny would come to you and play something, and then he’d tell you to play it. When I hear it, I just play it, ‘cause I don’t know, I’m like that. I hear something and I learn to play it, you know? And that’s why they like me.

So I was playing more like the rhythm, he was playing the lead part. That’s why even now, I play lead in some song, but I’m more of a rhythmic player. Pulse, maintain the pulse. I learned that from working with some of the guys from Fela Kuti. ‘Cause if you listen to the Fela Kuti music, you notice they maintain the pulse. If somebody’s playing “one, two, three, one, two, three,” if they’re playing that, they’ll play that for an hour, and it won’t slow up and it won’t speed up. They had that discipline. I learned that discipline from them too, although I learned it from Jamaica anyway, but I learn it more when I got to meet them.

I feel like that’s why those performances can go on for so long, is because the groove is steady.

That’s right. They can play one song for half an hour, or more than that. It’s a groove, and you can get hypnotized in the groove, and get carried away. That’s what we like, we like to get into that, where it gets inside you.
 

Photo by Jeff Pitcher

It sounds like you’ve been a student of drumming techniques since you were a kid.

From I’m seven years old, from I’m seven years old. Because even my grandmother auntie, her name is Nana Bonchie, she had a camp which is a Rasta camp—some people said a Rasta church, but it’s a camp, really—where this man was head of the camp. If you Google his name, his name is the Reverend Claudius Henry. At that time, he was the top Rastaman in the whole world. The number one, the top Rastaman, the founder, the first Rastaman, his name is Howell, Leonard Percival Howell. Then after Howell, the toughest or the greatest out of them was Henry, because he was the one who was organizing for us to go back to Africa and all that. ‘Cause when I was about eight, nine, I remember a lot of them left the camp, said they were going to Africa and they all came back. I remember I used to talk to him and ask him why. When I grow up, I came back to London, and I came back to Jamaica, and I went to, at this time he built a church in a different place, near May Pen, which is the capital of Clarendon, he built a church there, and the church is called Bethel. And you know me, I always like to ask these elders questions. I asked him why did he build a church and call it Bethel, he said God told him to do that. And then I asked him why he organized that trip for all the people to go to Africa, and he said he wanted to see how serious the people were, ‘cause they didn’t go! You know, somehow they turned back, and they come home, people was laughing at them and all this kind of thing.

And there’s other things he tell me to make me strong as a Rasta, as well. There’s other things that he shared with me. But he was a revolutionary Rastaman. The hung his son. In those days, they used to hang Rasta, hang people who were thought to be criminal, you know? So one of his son, Ronald Henry, they hung him and four other people with him. I was there when all that was happening. I was about maybe ten, eleven years old, but I remember when the whole thing was going on, you know? Yeah.

And he showed me where they shoot him in his head, where the bullet chip in his head. When I come there, and he heard that I was there, I remember I heard him say “Oh, the messenger has come?” Because I’m so young, they think I’m the one who’s gonna go around, and go around, and tell the world about what was happening. So he called me a messenger. I never take up on that, like go around and say this or that, I don’t do that, but I remember hearing him say that.

And then, because I’m always asking him a question, he took me and showed me different rooms. And he showed me a room, he said, “Marcus Garvey’s spirit is in this room.” Told me, “Haile Selassie’s spirit is in this room.” He told me, “Kwame Nkrumah’s spirit is in this room.” Different leaders of Africa’s spirit is in this room. And later when I went to Africa, I realize something he’s telling me that is there in Africa, ‘cause in Africa you have stool rooms. And those stool rooms are where the kings are, all the kings dem have stool rooms. When somebody’s gonna be a king and take over, they get the spirit of some king that passed, maybe a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, or something like that. So they’ll take you in there and let you sit on the stool three times, and then they give you a name, which is a stool name. Like they wanted to give me a name called Nana Kwabena Agyekum because they wanted me to be a chief there.
 

Baking Peacemaker bread (via Duke University Libraries)

But I realized that what the Reverend Claudius Henry was showing me, he showed me a lot of things, what I would then see thirty years later, twenty-odd years later, in Africa! He started making bread as well in my area, Clarendon. If you do any research about it, this bread things is called Peacemaker bread. And I would ask him about that. The answer he’d give me was “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall see God.” So, every question I’d ask him, he’d give me an answer, you know? I remember one time I even said to him, “How come people look at you like you are God?” ‘Cause he’s like my grandfather, you know, so like a grandson, you can say anything. But I was like that, I was always asking questions.

‘Cause I remember going up there to the Sabbath, we’d take a truck from lower Clarendon, to move to the next place, Bethel, where’s he’s moved his church. And I say, “How come the people are looking at you and singing songs as if you are God?” And that’s when he was telling me that we are all Gods. That cleared a lot of things up for me as well, to know that we are all creators, we are all God, but we are the creative force, which is nature, you understand what I’m saying? That is really the power, the force. So I learn a lot from him, and because I learn so much from him, sometimes I have problems. Because a lot of people didn’t get the chance to sit with somebody great like Reverend Claudius Henry. A lot of people didn’t get the pleasure of opting to sit and see people like Mother Hibbert answering other people, you know? And so, at a very small age, I was drawn to these people. Even though my parents, they are Christians.

Like my mom used to go to a church called Nazareth Assembly, and when I went to where my grandmother was living, my grandmother was living in August Town, so one time I went and spent some time in August Town, and they wanted to send me to some Catholic church, and my spirit couldn’t take it! For some reason, my spirit couldn’t take it. Everywhere they send me, my spirit couldn’t take it. I went and live in the country, in Victoria, Thompson Town, which is upper Clarendon, up in the mountains. My spirit couldn’t take it neither, ‘cause these people are so much into church! Mmm. I’m not saying anything is wrong with it, because people do what they want to do, but when somebody want to force you to go, and if you don’t go, you’re a bad boy, you know? And some people will go because they want, “I am a good boy,” so they go, I’ve seen some of my sisters and some of my brothers, they’ll go to church, because after that, you’re gonna be treated really nice, you know?
 

 
So truth, I was treated like the black sheep of the family—well, that’s what they call it, right? I was treated as the bad one. Out of nine children, I was the bad one. That’s the reason why I didn’t go to school by eleven. I didn’t go back to school at eleven years old because I had to run away, because I just didn’t like the idea of [laughs] when I saw those churches. Especially the Catholic church. I went to the Catholic church, and I saw those statues, and it freaked me out! It give me nightmares, you know what I mean? 

And plus, I had a strong voice when I was small. And when I was six and five and all that age group, before I start to realize, no, that’s not what I want to do, ‘cause I realized no, I didn’t want to do that when I was seven and a half years old. I used to go and sing in my mother’s church, a church called Nazareth Assembly, and I used to sing, like, “Jesus loves all the little children, all the children of the world,” and every Sunday they’d dress me up and I’d sing. And I was a good boy, [made] my mom proud of me, dress me up nice, a good boy. But once I decided to go, when I hear the Nyabinghi drums and the Poco drum, I felt good about those places! I decide I want to go there, and I didn’t really want to go back to that church. So I was like the outcast. I was like the outcast of the family.

I ran away. Everywhere they send me, I would run away. I would go and sleep under people house, because I didn’t like it. When I went to August Town, that’s what I was doing. I’d run and jump over the fence and run, and go and sleep in graveyards, and all kind of thing. I was only about eleven, twelve years old. But what I’ve learned, that’s what give me a good life. ‘Cause although I didn’t go to school to learn about physics and all these kind of things—I was good at math. But it’s the drumming, that’s what helped me when I came to London. I was doing workshops and also going to schools and get children and teach some of them drumming and so on. And I see some of those children grow up to be big boys now and playing drums and playing different instruments!

The drumming, to me, is my life. ‘Cause I didn’t learn mechanic, I didn’t learn anything. I just, you know, my ears, when I hear something, I would just hear something and I would play something that fit it. You understand? It doesn’t matter what music it is. When I’m in the studio, people are playing a song or playing something and I hear it, and I would play something that suits it.
 

 
Even as a small boy, you felt the pull of these other teachers away from that Catholic tradition. It’s like you were already kind of formed. It’s mysterious to think about what that is in a child.

Well, I think I was lucky. I was lucky in a way, you know. Some people are brought up in a upper area where people are rich and they go to good schools and they this and that. I was brought up in Clarendon, which was very poor at the time. The only way people used to survive is by cutting the sugar cane and load it on a dray or a truck and taking it to Yarmouth or Monymusk. These are the places where they would make rum. So that’s how they would live. Or they would go and dig sand and pull up a truck. That’s what my dad used to do, put sand in a truck, fill up a truck with sand, him and his friends, and then they take the truck, weigh it, and whatever it weighs they pay them for how much it weighs, you know what I mean? And then the truck will come back, and they’ll fill it up again, and so forth. In Clarendon, there was a lot of work like that. Task work. Work where you get paid for what you do. Like somebody will say to you, “There’s some grass there, from there to there,” and they’ll measure it and tell you how much you’re getting for it, and if you agree to do it for the price, “Let’s do it!”

So that’s how I used to survive. I used to survive by cutting cane, loading sugar cane—I’m talkin’ ‘bout I’m twelve years, ‘cause I was very strong when I was that age. My mom and father wasn’t there, and plus I ran away anyway; I had run away, because I couldn’t take the pressure that they were giving me, and I didn’t want to go to the [laughs] Catholic church. So they looked upon me as a bad boy! ‘Cause in Jamaica at that time, if you don’t go to church, they think that you have some evil spirit in you or you are bad or something like that. You have to talk about Jesus all the time, “Jesus, Jesus,” and be baptized like some of my sisters. They got baptized and they were treated well! And I used to think, it’s not fair. Because if you have children, and you have, say, nine children, and one or two of them is not in church, you should still love them the same way. But the Jamaican parents, it wasn’t like that, you know. And it took me a long time, I think I had a chip on my shoulder, as well; it took me a long time to get over it. ‘Cause I wanted to be loved like all my brothers and sisters were loved, and so forth.

But I think, in the end, we come to something where I knew that my mom loved me. ‘Cause my mom, before she died, and my dad, they actually expressed their love for me, and that made me feel good. Because at first I thought they hated me. Sometimes I was looking in the mirror thinking, “Hey, maybe I’m ugly! Why is it, what’s the problem? Why?” This Christianity thing is so serious about Black people—I’m talking about where I know, I know about Jamaica, very serious. If you don’t go to church, they think that you are something bad. And especially with me, I go to place where they don’t like, I mean, I go to the Nyabinghi church. I go and play Nyabinghi drums, ‘cause I like the chanting.

One time I was a part of the Nyabinghi group. I’m talkin’ ‘bout when I was eight, nine, seven to nine, those age group, three of us, me, Vern and Owen, we were the three youth drummer in the camp. We play before Bongo Black and all the rest of Count Ossie. The great Count Ossie used to come there when I’m a small boy. And sometime they would teach us one or two things, you know what I mean? I learned to play lead keke. Out of the three of the young group, I was the leader of the keke. And I had a strong voice, so I was leading the chant as well. And nothing could keep me away from there, nothing at all could keep me away from going to the Nyabinghi gathering or the Poco gathering.

I remember they used to beat me so much that I run away, because I thought I can’t take no more beatings, so I run away. So now when I run away, I’ll go and run and stay with some people who had dray. We have this thing in Jamaica called “dray.” Dray is a thing where, it’s a cart, like a chariot. Two wheels, and you have three mules, right? And then you load the sugar cane on the mule and you take it to Monymusk or Yarmouth, where they take the sugar cane and they’ll weigh it and then they’ll pay you. So I used to work for some of these people. I used to work for this guy called Billy Paine, and I worked for the Charoos as well. I remember when I ran away from home, I would go and sleep in the Charoo place. ‘Cause they had a room there where they put all the, you know, this and that you put on the back of the animal, like the thing you put in his mouth and the saddle on his back. They have a room there where they keep the saddles. I remember I used to go and sleep in there, because I couldn’t go and stay at my parents’ house. But at the same time, I was free now to go to the Poco church, I was free to go to the Nyabinghi, without getting beaten. And I was earning my own money from that age, so I was okay. Until later, they sent for me to come to England. I think I came to England when I was sixteen, nearly sixteen.

Did Count Ossie make a big impression on you?

He was like my teacher. He was like—when I say “my teacher,” he used to come to the gathering, right? And a lot of us were playing and they’re teaching us songs to sing, like “Sodom and Gomorrah,” and “Babylon Come Down,” and “No Night in Zion,” they teach us all these songs. So I just learn them and chant them. I remember we had the Clarendonians. Have you heard of the Clarendonians?

No.
 

 
Which is Freddie McGregor, you heard of Freddie McGregor?

Yes, I’ve seen Freddie McGregor.

Alright, well, Freddie McGregor was in my area, ‘cause I’m from Clarendon. He’s a Clarendonian, and they used to win all the competitions. When Freddie was about ten, eleven years old, he was like a star, you know? I remember once they had a competition in May Pen, which is the capital of Clarendon. They sent me there, the three of us. That’s where I see the Skatalites and all those people. I was a lickle boy, maybe this time I was about like nine, ten years old, and I saw Don Drummond. I remember this tall man standing in a corner all by himself with his long trombone. I see them, but I never really talk to them, you know what I mean? I saw them because I went to the competition.

He must have had a sweet voice when he was a boy.

Oh, listen, Freddie McGregor—I remember, ‘cause I’m close to his age, yeah? And I remember when young women, like my aunties and all those people, they all of them love him! Especially the women. I’m not talking about the young girls, you know, I’m talking about woman, like who could be his mother and auntie, they just love Freddie!

And Yabby You doesn’t live far from where I live. He lives in a place called Longwood. So in Clarendon, they produced a lot of good artists around there. And I think people like Yabby You and certain other artists, they would pass through the camp, they would come through, you know? That camp was a very famous camp. Police used to come and raid it sometime. And as I said, they hung some of my—well, let me call them uncles, they were like father figure to me, you know? So that’s when Rasta was a revolutionary movement.

The man, Reverend Claudius Henry, his motto was, he came as the “repairer of the breach.” He came to repair the damage that’s been done to us, the mental and spiritual and physical damage that’s done to Black people, he came to repair. ‘Cause when I ask him, and he told me that’s what it was, the repairer of the breach. Just like when he told me about the Peacemaker bread, he said “blessed are the peacemakers, ‘cause they shall see God.” I’m always asking him questions so he was able to tell me things.

Because of what I know, even sometime I’m here in London, I have problem with other artists ‘cause they don’t really know what it’s all about, ‘cause some of them just came, and I get the whole thing from, I’m a first-generation Rasta.

It was hard to be a Rasta in that time, right?

Yes, like in the Fifties, it was difficult to be a Rasta. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn’t easy at all. Even your own family will fight you. ‘Cause even my grandmother—I love my grandmother, I love her, she’s one of the women that I love—but she didn’t really get on with her own sister, Nana Bonchie, which is the Rasta Queen, ‘cause she married one of the Rasta elders, and the elder came from Pinnacle, where Rasta go and live, and the government tried to break Pinnacle up. So the Rasta start to move all over Jamaica, I’m talkin’ ‘bout in the Thirties, they start to move around.

So that’s when my grandmother now, she took her—like everybody in my family, or most Jamaican family in those days, when your family died you inherit—if they have ten acres of land and there’s ten children, everyone will get one acre each, you understand? So Nana Bonchie, now, which is the Rasta Queen in Clarendon, she take her land—it could be about, say, four, five acres—and she build a church, and it’s a Rasta church, right? And then Claudius Henry, now, he was having problems where he was, in a place called Rosalie Avenue, and they were chasing Rastas all over Jamaica, killing them, locking them up, cutting their dreadlocks, and he ran away. So when he ran away, he come to my grandmother’s place. And my grandmother place was a place, if you’re running away from somewhere, you can come there, they’ll accommodate you. They’ll give you food to eat, and you’ll get involved in the work or whatever or whatever. So that’s how Claudius Henry came there. So when he came, he was the high priest there. Google that name and you can remember that I told you about him.
 

Rev. Claudius Henry (via the Jamaica Gleaner)

What was the music like around Claudius Henry? Nyabinghi drumming?

Hundred percent Nyabinghi. When you go to the Poco church, though, it’s strictly Poco drumming. The Poco, the African drumming. That’s what you get there, it was a different type of drumming. When I went to Africa, that’s what they were playing there.

[After an exchange, Bonjo resumes the subject of his youth.] It was rough, I was rough, ‘cause running away from home and sleeping under people’s houses, and all this kind of thing, it was rough. But I just wanted to play drums. I used to even make drums, I just love drums. I just like the sound of drums. When I am in Africa, anywhere I go, you can guarantee drumming is going on there. [Laughs] You know what I mean? ‘Cause when I go to Accra, now, I go to a place by the beach where I know that every Friday, and Saturday, and Sunday, it’s drumming! So sometime I’ll go there, I’ll maybe book into a hotel for a day or two just to see the drumming. And my woman, Angela, who’s on the album, she’s also into the dancing and the percussion playing. I don’t think they allow the woman to play the drum, but she can play it, and then she play the percussion. And I suppose that’s what bring us together, drumming and dancing. Well, she’s more into the dancing.

Do you have a big collection of percussion instruments?

Yeah, I have a collection. I have my drums, I have my big thunder drum, I have my other drums. Some of the drums I have, people have it. ‘Cause sometime I’ll go away, like I’ll go to Ghana and I’m there for a while, so I just leave my drums with different people.

At the moment I have two drums here, I have two big conga drums, the main drum. But the bass drum and the other percussion, I let friends use them, because some of them, they don’t have it.

It’s good for them to be used rather than just sitting there.

That’s it, that’s it, yeah. Yeah man!

‘A Trip to Bolgatanga’ is available from On-U Sound, Bandcamp, Amazon, and quality record stores.
 

 

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
08.04.2023
11:29 am
|
Dennis Bovell MBE on the Pop Group’s ‘Y in Dub,’ with exclusive live audio!
03.14.2022
07:40 am
Topics:
Tags:


Dennis Bovell, Mark Stewart, and Gareth Sager (photo by Chiara Meattelli)
 
On Y in Dub, released digitally last year, producer Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell MBE and the Pop Group revisit every track on their 1979 Radar Records album Y and single “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” creating looking-glass complements to the originals that seem long overdue. In advance of the album’s vinyl release on April 8, Bovell gave Dangerous Minds a tour of Y in Dub‘s vast, echoing mental space. 

If you can cast your mind back to when you first encountered the Pop Group, what was it about them that made you want to work with them? What were your first impressions of the band?

My first impressions of the band were that, here was a bunch of budding young musicians who could handle jazz riffing and were also into, not tuneful singing, but meaningful lyrics, you know. I think to say something is better than to be beautifully in tune and saying nothing. I applauded their militancy and their approach to music in general, their likes and their dislikes. And in fact, later on in life, Bruce Smith, the drummer, joined Linton Kwesi Johnson and me with the Dub Band.

I wanted to ask about that too, because I think the Pop Group and Linton Kwesi Johnson co-headlined a number of shows together, right?

Absolutely.

Can you tell me about that? Were you at the controls ever for the Pop Group—

No, no. I had worked with both of them, and then by that time I was, like, more in the studio person than being out on live gigs, because by then, I had had it with live gigs, to be honest, you know: the confusion, the lack of organization, the long traveling hours and then being expected to perform like a circus flea, you know, I’d had it with that by then, and they hadn’t! So they were about to experience that, while I was about to crawl back into the studio with my normal self, work at my own pace.

Are you maybe ten years older then they are? They were quite young when they recorded this.

They still are quite young. [Laughter] I never really thought about how much older I was than them, but I guess that made them listen to me as the producer.

Nowadays, when I listen to the original record, but also this dub set, it strikes me that they were such young people—I think Mark was still a teenager.

I think he was about seventeen or something, yeah.

But the music in a way—I know what you’re saying about everything not being perfectly in tune—but at the same time the music is kind of sophisticated.

Absolutely.

It doesn’t sound to me like a bunch of young people playing.

Well, a lot of people said that about Coltrane. [Laughs] He was never on time, he was never in tune, but he was genius.
 

 
So how did you approach this dub set of Y?

First of all, we made sure the tapes were still playable, were still audible, and then we passed them over from analog to digital files. File by file, right? Each file: the kick drum file, switch it over, the snare drum—the whole recording. And then we went into a digital room with a young lad called Dave McEwen, and he kind of helped us to put them on a digital level where I could actually revisit each channel and have full control over it, as it were.

So I had the files transferred to digital files, and so we could manipulate them on the Pro Tools level. And then we put them in a computer and then sent them back onto an analog desk, right? So I was just using the computer to synchronize the files, but when the files came back, they were coming back to an analog desk, and I was equalizing them as I felt for that room, for those speakers, and giving the right amount of delay, et cetera, just to kind of take us back into the analog age, but using digital files.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
03.14.2022
07:40 am
|
New video for Mark Stewart’s first solo release in seven years, a DM premiere
04.18.2019
08:02 am
Topics:
Tags:


‘Pay It All Back Vol. 7’ on On-U Sound
 

In a secret world of forbidden knowledge,
power comes at a terrible price.

A tour of every department of our media saturated society,
the most explosive conspiracy ever conceived,
the people shapers at every turn
we see ourselves as they want us to be.

Immersed in their options,
surrounded by their representations,
reality melts.

                            —Mark Stewart, “Favour”

The latest installment in On-U Sound’s Pay It All Back series of compilations, named after William S. Burroughs’ demand in Nova Express, gathers new music by Gary Lucas, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Roots Manuva & Doug Wimbish, Nisennenmondai, African Head Charge, Coldcut, Ghetto Priest, Sherwood & Pinch, Little Axe and Horace Andy, among others. Best of all, side three of the double LP kicks off with “Favour,” the first new solo material from Mark Stewart since 2012’s The Politics of Envy and its ghostly dub twin Exorcism of Envy.
 

Adrian Sherwood and Mark Stewart, London, 1985 (photo by Beezer, courtesy of Mute)

The video for “Favour,” directed by Stewart and Ruth Perry, sets the song’s opening lines, about emerging from a coma, deep in the sidereal void. Parched after his long sleep, the singer asks for a soda and receives dynamite—a better deal than Howlin’ Wolf got.

Everything in “Favour,” from the symbols of circular time suspended onscreen to the drum the size of New Jersey reverberating on the soundtrack, suggests a vast mental space where all that is solid has melted into air. The only landmarks are memories that vanish as soon as they surface, represented here by footage from Tøni Schifer’s documentary On/Off: Mark Stewart (Pop Group to Maffia). Perry and Stewart have processed these images from the singer’s life to resemble the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” sequence of 2001.

Mark Stewart told DM in January that he’s got “like two or three albums worth of new stuff” in the can, so keep your eyes on the stars.

Pay It All Back Vol. 7 is available from On-U Sound and Amazon.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
04.18.2019
08:02 am
|
A short film on the making of Mark Stewart’s ‘Learning to Cope with Cowardice’ (a DM premiere!)
02.28.2019
01:14 pm
Topics:
Tags:


Mark Stewart and the Maffia live in Kentish Town, 1986 (Photo by Beezer)

Last month, when Mute brought out a double-LP reissue of Mark Stewart’s solo debut from 1983, Learning to Cope with Cowardice, we interviewed the man about the record and its historical, political, and musical context. Now we have a new short film by Charlie Marbles about the making of the album to show you.

If you’ve never heard Learning to Cope with Cowardice, it is a collection of sounds that wraps your nervous system around the spools of a cassette deck, then uses your brain to degauss the tape head and your cerebrospinal fluid to lubricate the capstan: a variegated cut-up of genres, styles, media, times, places, and identities. In the film below, Stewart and producer Adrian Sherwood describe the mixing and editing techniques they used to make this mental work of art, some imported from New York hip-hop and other audio collage forms—Stewart, in particular, credits Teo Macero’s work on On the Corner and William S. Burroughs’ tape experiments as inspiration—and some invented on the spot and probably never yet repeated, such as “scratching” multitrack tapes.

The singer and producer describe Stewart’s desires for unconventional sounds (Sherwood remembers a snare so trebly “it was actually cutting your eyeball off”) and his struggles to get them through the technocracy of the mastering process onto the finished record. Stewart:

I was constantly fighting with engineers about buzzes and hisses and noises, and trying to make helicopter sounds, and then they’d try and change it, they’d try and normalize you. I’m not gonna be fuckin’ normalized!

Learning to Cope with Cowardice plus The Lost Tapes is available on double vinyl (benefiting Mercy Ships) and double CD. Check out Mark Stewart’s new political resistance playlist, too.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
02.28.2019
01:14 pm
|
Mark Stewart talks with Dangerous Minds about ‘Learning to Cope with Cowardice’


Illustration from the cover of the ‘Jerusalem’ 12-inch and the ‘Mark Stewart + Maffia’ compilation

Head above the heavens, feet below the hells, the singer Mark Stewart has embodied the international rebel spirit since he fronted the Pop Group as a teenager, giving voice to activist and imaginal concerns shared by punks, Rastas and b-boys. Mark Stewart and the Maffia’s moving, mind-mangling, amazing debut album, 1983’s Learning to Cope with Cowardice, whose sounds still beckon from an unrealized future, will be reissued on CD, vinyl and digital formats tomorrow, supplemented by an extra disc of recently discovered outtakes that differ radically from anything on the finished album. Sales of the double LP edition benefit Mercy Ships, an organization that provides lifesaving surgeries to people in poor and war-torn countries around the world.

I spoke with Mark Stewart last week by transatlantic telephone line. After he expressed his respect for Dangerous Minds, affably breaking my balls about the post in which I outed him as the owner of the face in Discharge’s logo, we talked underground media and mutual aid briefly before settling in for a discussion of his solo debut and the current historical moment. A lightly edited transcript follows.

Mark Stewart: I’m so pleased to be working with Mute again, and Daniel Miller has kind of rejuvenated Mute, and the independents—it’s a pleasure, you know, to work with cool people where something flows, you know? It’s really important for us that there’s those kind of columns in the underground.

Dangerous Minds: Holding it up.

Holding it up.

I wouldn’t have asked you about this, but I interviewed Adrian Sherwood the day after the Brexit vote, so it strikes me as funny that I’m talking to you now, right after the deal failed. Do you have anything to say about the situation?

I think it’s a total distraction. [laughs] I think it’s a complete smokescreen, and I’m very scared what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s like, I was watching something about Goebbels’ control of the media on some history channel, right, and how he learned from Madison Avenue. I’m not taking a position right or left on it, but I think it’s the most bizarre distraction in the last few years, and God knows what’s going on. But, you know, behind the scenes, our health [services]—there’s all sorts of things, all these laws are being passed behind the scenes, but that is the only thing journalists are looking at. Not the only thing, but do you understand what I’m saying? That isn’t a comment against whoever and whatever.

The problem is, in England, and I’m not being rude, is it is so class-ridden, it’s a problem for both sides of the spectrum. I was living in Berlin for a while, and I was talking to a very cool Japanese guy yesterday, who’s translating this friend of mine, Mark Fisher’s, this theorist’s book on capitalist realism. And in Germany, and I think until fairly recently in Japan, skilled laborers were treated with ultimate respect. The unions worked with the entrepreneurs, or the bosses, or whatever, and there was a kind of “synergy,” to use a wanky name, and so the economy was quite strong, and there was a social service system. . . you know, Germany’s quite an interesting model. But here—the craziest thing is, people are speculating, people are making big money out of these sudden changes, they’re spread-betting against these sudden changes of polarity, you know? I was reading, ‘cause I always read all sides of the spectrum, I was reading in a financial thing, suddenly sterling has got very, very strong. You know? And these politicians are being played. Do you know what I mean? They’re being played.

I can sit and talk to a Tory boy, I can sit and talk to whoever. And I’ll listen to people and try and talk to them in their language, and try and understand their point of view, right? ‘Cause being opposed to people, you don’t really get anywhere. But they think they’re doing something for whatever bizarre, medieval idea of nationalism or identity politics or whatever you call it, and there are some—there used to be this thing in England which was called “caring conservatism,” which was quite feudal, it was like how the king of the manor would give the employees some bread. [laughs] Scraps from the table or whatever. But here, the problem is, the working class are envious of the rich, and the rich want to squeeze the working class until it explodes to get every drop of blood out of them. It’s quite a strange system. And the middle ground that you’ve got in Germany, with the, whatever they’re called, Christian Democrats or something; back in the day, when people like Chomsky and everybody used to attack these middle-left kind of parties—you know, I read a lot of theory, but now, that is heaven compared to what’s happening these days! “The center cannot hold.” Everything is just. . . it’s bizarre, you know?
 

Adrian Sherwood and Mark Stewart, London, 1985 (photo by Beezer, courtesy of Mute)
 
But the problem is, again, my personal Facebook is full of loads of cool people who I really respect, so I get utterly impressed when, like, these Italian theorists start talking to me about how this album or our early work inspired people to get into different ideas about the planet. But I’m sick to death of people moaning about these non-events, which could be like—it’s like an orchestrated ballet of distraction. You know, it’s bollocks! “Never mind the bollocks” is never mind the fuckin’—it’s bollocks! And people are constantly talking about it.

And what I would be doing—so many of my American friends are just constantly posting this stuff about Trump, right? And I’m like—sorry, I’ll probably lose a lot of respect for saying this, I’m sorry, but as soon as the polls were looking like that, the guy’s been democratically elected, we’d roll up our sleeves and try and organize for 10 years down the line, if not five years down the line, and try and grow some sense of hope! Spread seeds of hope, culturally, in these small towns. That’s what things like punk are about. You know, with punk, a youth center opened, or a squat opened, and little places changed a bit, you know? Now people are just tutting. Saying “Oh, he’s bad”—so what? You’re bad for not fuckin’ doing anything! Sorry to rant, but there’s this culture, this narcissistic culture of wallowing in defeat. Which is basically another way of saying “I’m not going to do anything, but I’m gonna pretend to have a conscience by tutting.”

Yeah, people are glued to their TV sets and the news constantly, and it makes them feel powerless, and they don’t do anything. I don’t know if it’s a similar thing with Brexit.

I don’t know. I think people make a choice not to care from an early age. I’m not being rude. You can blame this, you can blame something outside of yourself, but as I grow a little bit older and I get more pulled into weird, sort of Taoist sort of things, it’s to do with putting a foot forward and breaking outside of the mold, and if you get hit, you get hit. Or if somebody says you’re a nutter, like they said about us back in the day, you know, or they say you’re wrong, or whatever, at least you stepped forward, outside of the embryonic—do you understand what I’m saying? You have to do provocations. In my sense, it’s kind of art provocations. What I do is, even if I’m not sure about something, I think It’s enough of a curveball to go in that direction, or to spin against my own stupid sense of conditioning: sparks will fly. Let’s go! Let’s do it. Do you know what I mean?

It’s this sitting back—and now you’re getting people kind of reminiscing about the Cold War! Which again was a distraction. It’s just nonsense, you know? People want to live in this nostalgic bubble. And now they’re saying that the fuckin’—a journalist in an English paper was saying that the Cowardice times were more paranoid than now? What the fuck? [laughter] With Cambridge Analytica, we got fuckin’ algorithms—if there was a Night of the Long Knives overnight and somebody got control of the algorithms, thousands of people could just be rounded up for reading Dangerous Minds. Do you understand what I’m saying? And it’s all sold to the highest bidder; there isn’t even any politics involved. It’s naked capitalistic control. But, you know, now I’m moaning like I shouldn’t have done. Daniel Miller had this idea of enabling technologies, and in America, there was always like Mondo 2000 and Electronic Frontier Foundation. So I’m positive as well as being. . . it’s very interesting times. And when there’s change, there’s possibility.

One of the main reasons I wanted to interview you about this record is that “Jerusalem” is one of my favorite recordings.

This one, or another one? My one, or somebody else’s?

No, your “Jerusalem” is one of my favorite records. Part of it is, there’s the Blake poem, which has all this revolutionary, visionary significance, but then there’s so much layered on top of it—all this patriotic meaning, and it’s in the hymnal, and I don’t know if you know that story about Throbbing Gristle playing at the boys’ school and the boys singing them offstage with “And did those feet in ancient time”—

No.

—so I wonder if you could tell me about what that song means to you, and whether you were trying to recover some of the William Blake in that song.

Well, it’s a long, long, long story, and a lot of it’s got to do with an ancient tradition of kind of English, kind of Celtic mysticism, which is—I’m gonna sound like David Tibet now or something—but I’m a Stewart, right? And our family history is linked to this other family called the Sinclairs. My father died a couple of weeks ago, and he was a real, to use the word nicely, occultist. He was a Templar, and he taught remote viewing. But for me, I feel, growing up near Glastonbury—this might sound very, very hippie, this, but it’s the kind of mysticism of Blake that I really liked, right? There was a review in the Wire, when the record first came out, back in the day, and they said me and Adrian, it was a perfect alchemical marriage, or something. If you can be kinda hopefully mystical at the same time as being hopefully an activist, there’s an uplifting sense of that tune in specific.
 

Mark Stewart and the Maffia’s first performance, CND rally in Trafalgar Square, 1980 (courtesy of Freaks R Us)
 
What happened was that the last ever Pop Group concert and the first ever Maffia concert were on the same day. Basically, I’d got sick to death of music, I’d kinda packed it all in, I thought we weren’t ever gonna get anywhere with it, and I was just bored of it, right? And I became a volunteer in the office of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in London, in Poland Street, right? And one day in the office, Monsignor Bruce Kent, who was in charge of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the time, we were organizing what turned out to be the biggest postwar demonstration against nuclear weapons, and the center of London was brought to a standstill by 500,000 people. People came from far and wide, from Scotland, from everywhere. And he turned round and said, “It might be good to have some music,” ‘cause, you know, Tony Benn and all these amazing people were speaking, and I said, “Oh, I’ve got a band!” And I said, “I can ask some of my mates.” So I asked the Specials and Killing Joke; Specials couldn’t do it, but Killing Joke did it, and we ended up playing between the lions in Trafalgar Square. My brother and loads of my weird artist mates did this huge kind of amazing mural of this baby coming out of this atom bomb.

Basically, I was thinking to myself, What would be a classic rallying song, that people young and old—you know, ‘cause very few people would have known about the Pop Group in this demonstration—young and old, like Woody Guthrie, or Pete Seeger, or something like “We Shall Overcome,” what would be good for England? And immediately I thought of “Jerusalem.” And the Pop Group was going all sort of free-jazzy and out there and stuff, where I couldn’t get it together with the Pop Group. I was already hanging out with Adrian and starting to make some sort of reggaeish stuff, so the first version of the Maffia got up and played “Jerusalem” and a few other songs a few hours later in the day, ‘cause people sing it on marches and stuff in England.

So that was the reason for the “Jerusalem” thing. And that moment, that moment in the middle of London, you know, it was the proudest day of my life, to actually be involved in—I’m just trying to organize something just now, just before you phoned, to try and kick off a big sort of demo this year, because that’s what gets me going! It’s like when we used to do Rock Against Racism; we did stuff for Scrap SUS, when they used to just stop black kids on sight and search them, the police; Anti-Fascist League, you know, and now we’re doing this stuff for these Mercy Ships people, who build these boats—they do up these old kind of trawlers and park them out in international waters, outside war zones, and make them into little floating hospitals and operate on kids and stuff. That’s what the money from the limited vinyl’s going towards. But it’s just like—when it’s a benefit, you can get other cool bands. There’s a band here called Fat White Family and all these offshoots of them, Black MIDI or something, there’s these conscious young bands who are mates of mates, and I know in a couple of phone calls I can get an amazing bill together, and the people around me aren’t gonna ask for so much money, they’re more likely to answer the call, you know? And people remember those events for years to come.

Well, I remember you said something in an interview years ago, “The political and the mystical go hand in hand.”

[laughs] I always say the same bollocks! You’ve caught me out!

Much, much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
01.24.2019
10:36 am
|
John, Yoko and Jerry Lewis play reggae on the MDA Telethon
09.07.2018
07:51 am
Topics:
Tags:


John, Yoko, and the Nutty Beatle

This was once the time of year Harry Shearer called Telethon Season. Back-to-school sales coincided with the annual broadcast of the Jerry Lewis Telethon, whose host would come totally unglued over the show’s 21-plus hours, sobbing, geshreying and fulminating against his critics in the press.

But the golden age of telethons is over, and the show people who gave of themselves until we begged them to stop are mostly dead. The Chabad telethon still happens, but even if I could find it on the cable box (LA has a channel 18?), it wouldn’t be the same without Harry Dean Stanton and Bob Dylan playing “Hava Nagila” together, or my own sainted grandfather cutting up beneath the tote board.
 

 
So I was delighted to come across this clip of John and Yoko’s performance on the 1972 Jerry Lewis Telethon, even though Lennon biographer (and emeritus history professor and Nation contributor) Jon Wiener identifies this moment as the nadir of Lennon’s life in showbiz. The Nixon administration was then aggressively trying to have Lennon deported, and he and Yoko hoped the appearance would help them remain in the country, Wiener writes:

Before and after John and Yoko appeared, Jerry Lewis went through his telethon shtick, making maudlin appeals for cash, alternately mugging and weeping, parading victims of muscular dystrophy across the Las Vegas stage, and generally claiming to be the friend to the sick. Most offensive of all was his cuddling up to corporate America. Public-relations men from United Airlines, McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, and others appeared to hand Jerry checks. He responded by pontificating about what wonderful friends we all have in the corporations.

John and Yoko permitted themselves to be exploited in this way because they were trying to clean up their act, to impress the immigration authorities that they were good citizens. And, to be fair, many big stars went on the telethon; Paul and Ringo did in subsequent years. However, there were other points where John and Yoko could have stopped on their way from Jerry Rubin to Jerry Lewis.

 

 
Below, backed by Elephant’s Memory, John and Yoko play “Imagine,” “Now or Never,” and a reggae arrangement of “Give Peace a Chance.” Jerry Lewis blows his trumpet on the last number.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
09.07.2018
07:51 am
|
‘Man Vs. Sofa’: Premiere of new music from Adrian Sherwood & Pinch
02.21.2017
09:03 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
You could be streaming all of the brand new UK bass album by Sherwood & Pinch, Man Vs. Sofa, at the bottom of this post right now. But instead you’re here, reading this, like a sucker. It’s as if, rather than walking directly through the entrance to a massive party, you paused to listen to a guy in a ratty sweater who was standing by the door shouting about how much fun he had inside.

Sherwood is Adrian Sherwood, the English record producer and dub adventurer I interviewed for DM last summer, during the all-too-brief period when it was possible for me to feel smug about Brexit. The music on his second LP with the Bristol dubstep artist Pinch gets its science-fiction quality by superimposing claustrophobia on a wide-open dub soundscape: it gives you the experiences of contraction and expansion at once, like a spacesuit or a TARDIS.
 

 
However you interpret the title, couch-lock is not the vibe. It’s late-night, clenched-jaw music. You could, perhaps, bathe your mind all day in the jazz chords resonating in Martin Duffy’s piano on “Midnight Mindset,” if they did not hang over beats the press materials describe as “technoid, insectoid and paranoid.”

Sherwood’s longtime collaborator Skip McDonald, who played guitar in the Sugarhill Gang before he joined Mark Stewart’s band and founded Tackhead, is on here. Lee “Scratch” Perry appears on “Lies” to matter-of-factly inform the world’s liars of their damnation, as serenely as a postman delivers a disconnection notice. The London rapper Taz turns up on the last track, “Gun Law.” And is that Buckminster Fuller talking about infinity and self-deprogramming on “Unlearn”?

Of particular interest to the DM reader is the Sherwood & Pinch remake of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s theme from Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, the 1983 film starring David Bowie as a British officer in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, which enters unexplored territory. (My friend from German Army recognized the tune immediately when we were listening to Man Vs. Sofa in his car yesterday.)

Have a listen, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
02.21.2017
09:03 am
|
Sun Ra meets Natty Dread: Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari


 
Who knew the power of the boogeyman better than the Rastas? Despised pariahs, the “blackheart man” your mother warned you would steal and eat you if you were naughty, Rastas knew the score on being a scapegoat. They were “the stone that the builder refused.”

That must be why, as I read in S. Baker’s notes for the Soul Jazz comp Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83, which largely focuses on the contributions of Count Ossie and nyabinghi drumming to Jamaican music, the Rastas took the name “nyabinghi” straight from the racist tall tales of Italian fascists:

Propagandists of the Italian government, in the middle of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, invented a story that a secret society of black warriors known as the Nya-Binghi (meaning ‘Death to the oppressors of the black races’) had been formed under the leadership of Haile Selassie I of Abyssinia (also known as Ethiopia). A threat to civilised society, the group had (potentially) 190 million members throughout the world. The Ku Klux Klan in the United States was the first to become aware of the power of the Nya-Binghi. Apparently Klan members in numerous American cities had recently been smitten with a strange and mysterious lethal disease. With publicity like this who wouldn’t want to join the Nya-Binghis!

 

 
Count Ossie (né Oswald Williams), who is widely credited as a, if not the, inventor of nyabinghi drumming, founded a Rastafarian community near east Kingston’s Wareika Hill during the 50s. He and his band only recorded sporadically over the following decade, Baker writes, because their “community-based” music was essentially devotional and not made for material reward.

In 1973, Count Ossie and his group joined forces with the Mystics, a jazz-influenced band led by saxophonist Cedric Im Brooks, and the resulting combo was known as the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. After several years playing cover tunes in clubs, Brooks had left Jamaica in ‘68 to study music in Philadelphia, where, it’s said, Sun Ra and the Arkestra made a strong impression on him. (I haven’t yet found a source on their relationship that isn’t exasperatingly vague; Baker writes only that, while in Philadelphia, Brooks “established an association with Sun Ra’s artistic Arkestra commune.”)

Back in Jamaica, Brooks played on a number of Studio One sessions and formed the Mystics with trumpeter David Madden. Their debut with Count Ossie and group as the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari was the triple LP Grounation, recently rereleased by the Dub Store label. If a reasoning session with jazz horns sounds like a novelty item, far from it—in fact, The Rough Guide to Reggae says this is the nyabinghi album to get:

Though serious musicologists had made occasional field recordings of nyahbingi sessions, the first album to give the music the studio time it deserved, while remaining as true to its original forms as possible, was the triple LP set Grounation, from Count Ossie & the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. The MRR was an aggregation of accomplished musicians which brought together both Count Ossie’s African-style hand drummers and the horns and bass of tenor-sax man Cedric Brooks’s Mystics band. This historic set has never been superseded, but the establishment of Rastafari as the dominant reggae ideology in the mid-1970s, plus the emergence of an audience for reggae albums that were more than collections of singles, created a climate in which more sets of nyahbingi-based music could be produced.

Hear ‘Grounation’ by Count Ossie & the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
11.11.2016
09:01 am
|
The Dangerous Minds interview with Little Annie (Annie Anxiety Bandez)
09.09.2016
09:14 am
Topics:
Tags:


Photo by Clinton Querci
 
The strange and fabulous career of Little Annie, also known as Annie Anxiety and Annie Anxiety Bandez, is like an index of Dangerous Minds’ musical obsessions. We wriggle in the web she weaves. Some connections are personal: DM’s own Howie Pyro was the bassist in her first band, Annie Anxiety and the Asexuals—Annie says below, “Howie is the reason I ended up on stage”—and DM chief Richard Metzger has mentioned his friend’s encounter with Annie at an Islington anarcho-punk festival in 1984. But then, consider that she’s worked with Crass, Coil, Marc Almond, Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Adrian Sherwood and the On-U Sound crew, Youth, Kid Congo Powers, ANOHNI (formerly Antony Hegarty), Keith Levene, Swans, et al.—and then, consider what a shame it is that every article about Little Annie has to mention all these associations in its opening paragraphs, when her own performances, her own powers, are so extraordinary. That’s why all those people wanted to work with her in the first place.

On Little Annie’s latest album, Trace, she is both the torch singer she claims to be and the streetwise narrator of “Bitching Song,” who patiently explains why, no matter your profession, location, or standing in this world, you’re just another bitch. Her wonderful memoir, You Can’t Sing The Blues While Drinking Milk, published in 2013, is scarce in hardcover (this looks like your best bet), but the Kindle version is a steal at $4.99.

When I called Annie last week, my first question was about Hermine, the hurricane then approaching her current base of operations, Miami. Thanks to Julian Schoen and On-U Sound for putting me in touch with this great artist.
 

Trace (2016)
 
Annie: I haven’t seen the news all day. I was out shooting. It’s like the rest of the planet; it’s getting gentrified, Miami, so I was out shooting some of these Darth Vader buildings that are going up about ten miles up the road.

Dangerous Minds: So you’re taking pictures, you’re documenting the gentrification of Miami?

Well, you know what it is, a friend of mine, she said—because I love buildings—she goes, “These are really ugly, you’ve got to shoot them” [laughing], you know? And they really are, they’re really sinister-looking skyscrapers. I love skyscrapers, but we’re below sea level here as it is, and they’re really like… gunmetal gray. Like, everything you wouldn’t do in this kind of light, just really ugly. Almost so that they’re beautiful. They’re so sinister, they almost have a kind of eerie beauty to them. I just got a high-definition camera finally so I could shoot and print for online stuff, and I thought, “Oh, that’s a good place to start. Let me get my chops going on some ugly.”

Man, it did not disappoint. They’re using all these gunmetal grays; it looks like either it’s the Church of Scientology or Masons, there’s something really… like prisons for the very rich, you know? Really grim.

So how did you wind up in Miami, Annie?

That’s a good question. You know, it was a place I had no interest in whatsoever. I’d been down here with some friends of mine whose father used to live down here; I came down in ’93, you know, and really it was only a place I ever went to go somewhere else.

New York, I had to move, and all of a sudden I realized, even if it was possible to live anywhere, I realized I wasn’t interested in any of it. So I don’t drive—I’m a confirmed non-driver—and I couldn’t think of where I could live on the East Coast that was near an airport for work, or where I could get away without a car. Miami, it’s difficult, but you can be a non-driver down here. And then, I kind of fell in love with it… one morning I woke up and said “Miami.” I was thinking about that today, I was trying to figure out how that happened.

’Cause I could picture you in Cuba somehow.

In my neighborhood? You could be anywhere in Central America or South America. I would say it’s around 90 percent Spanish-speaking, and there’s French. You hardly ever hear English in my neighborhood. You could walk down one street and it looks like Rio, and another street will look like the West Indies. It’s all new for me.

I guess I was starting to dislike myself. I was starting to become one of those perpetually angry [New Yorkers], “This is gone, and this isn’t like this anymore,” so I wanted somewhere where I didn’t know what it was like, so I have nothing to compare it to. I can’t get nostalgic over it because I don’t know what it was.

Sure, I can imagine. I’m from Los Angeles, and that’s changed so much over the last 20 or 30 years. And New York was so fabulous at one point.

Some of it here feels like New York in the ‘80s. Not always in a good way, too. What I do love about it is what I hate about it. It’s very corrupt. You know, like, I love this: their idea of gentrifying one area was to put a strip joint in it. [laughs] And that’s what I love about it. Literally, like New York used to be, like you could walk a few blocks and you were in a different world? Miami still has that flavor. Not so much the beach, but the inland. My neighborhood’s the last old neighborhood which hasn’t been fucked with yet. They want to, but you’ve got a mixture of, like, millionaires living next to Section 8. It’s really like an eclectic, wonderful little neighborhood two blocks from the beach. But because it hasn’t been gentrified, people don’t want to move here, which is why I wanted to move here. I really do love this area.

But L.A., I’ve got a little crush on Los Angeles from the last time I went there. I was with Baby Dee and we played downtown L.A. and it’s so beautiful, the light! The way the light hits things and the buildings.

There’s something special about the light here, for sure.

It was just gorgeous. We played in a place where Charlie Chaplin had a fistfight with Buster Keaton or something, and the upstairs place, it was some kind of—not three-quarter housing, but some kind of housing association… 

But then you go out, by the same token, I would be there all day, and like, thinking like I’m walking through Calcutta to get home, because I’ve never seen homelessness and pain like that! You’ve got these beautiful buildings, and then the homeless thing in downtown L.A., I just felt so bad for people.

Oh, it’s disgraceful. It’s kind of like what I imagine happened in New York under Giuliani. As the city becomes gentrified, they’re just shoving homeless people into different quarters of town where they’re getting more and more pressed together. There are blocks that are just covered with tents.

Yeah! That’s what I’m—I couldn’t believe it. I was outside having a cigarette. I must have had—in less than 20 minutes, ten people came up and asked me for money, you know? Which I would have gladly given. If I knew I was going into that, I would have gone in with food or something.

Miami is terrible. There’s no safety net for people. There’s no social services as such. They blame the homeless—‘cause we are fighting, they want to gentrify this area—and people will say things like, “If we let the developers in, then it will solve the homeless problem, and the rapes will go down.” And I go, “Wait: unload that sentence. You just called homeless people rapists.”

There’s this way that they deal with the homeless, is to criminalize them. New York is terrible, but Miami… and L.A., I love it and hate it.
 

State of Grace (with Baby Dee, 2013)
 
You’re singing my song, Annie. You know Howie Pyro writes for Dangerous Minds?

I love Howie! You know that I’ve known Howie since I was sixteen years old.

He was in the Asexuals, right?

Yeah. Howie is the reason I ended up on stage. Because we were hanging out, we really were like punk kids in the sense of like punk, juvenile delinquent, like little silly kids—we used to put “KICK ME” signs on people’s backs. We were totally juvenile. They asked me to support them, the Blessed, and I’m like, “Yeah!” And I didn’t know what “support” meant. So I had to throw a band together or something. Howie and them really kind of were the ones who—I was writing poetry and doing little bits of I don’t know what, but I didn’t have any direction, I was just being a kid, you know? And it was really because of the Blessed that I ended up in show business. I love Howie; I love those guys so much.

When did you have a sense that you had this voice? I know you didn’t set out to be a performer, and they encouraged you to go on stage. But when did you realize that you had this talent? I just read your memoir, so all this stuff is fresh in my head, you singing at the park in the a cappella group as a teenager…

You know what? It was funny, because I really didn’t realize I had a voice until… actually, very recently. Like, I knew I had a very good sense of… I’m very percussive, so I’ve always had like a sense of cadence. I mean, I was told not to be in the choir, because I was basically a contralto when I was a child. I had this voice—I was a belter, and I could belt like an old gospel singer when I was a little kid, you know? I could belt out old blues songs, and I sounded like I’d been drinking whiskey at age seven, you know what I mean? I had that kind of voice.

It’s only in the last couple of years where I’ve realized the ability I have, you know, like the physicality of singing? I realize that it’s not something that everybody has. ‘Cause I didn’t know what I was doing, I would luck into things, but I never knew how I got there, from point A to B. I just did it because it had to be done. I think it was on the Swans tour: I go, “Wow, now I’m understanding what people say, singing from the diaphragm, and the rest.” I actually didn’t realize what I was born with, you know? I’m shaped like a singer. Some of it actually happens from singing, you get a wider ribcage just from singing. But it was only really recently, I go “Wait, I could do that!” Or that I actually trusted my abilities. I always kinda knew my abilities as a writer, and to keep time: I write like a drummer or a conga player. But it was only really recently that I knew I had something.

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Make it all the way through a career [laughs] before you start realizing. Because I’ve never had a pretty voice. I can do that, but if it was pretty, it was by accident. So now I go, “Oh wait, when I do this, this happens. Oh wait, I can get from this octave to another octave.” I’m only just starting to grasp what I’ve been blessed with. Yeah, so, just recent! [laughing] Last few months.

Well, you had an instinctive sense probably of how to work an audience, right?

That, yes. Live, I’m able to… hear people. Even if it’s silent, there’s something I hear from them, a dialogue that I’ve always kind of tapped into. And I don’t know why…

That’s why acting was so hard for me. Acting, I’m starting to learn, you’ve got to access a different part of you. But where there was something on stage, maybe it was what people get from gospel or something—I go into the zone, and when I’m in the zone, I’m able to supersede any ideas of myself, or anything. It’s probably the only time in my life I’m not in my head. I’m totally not in my head. I’m totally not conscious. It’s the safest place in the world, the stage, and it’s because it’s a dialogue, and I don’t know what it is but that’s something I’ve always had, which is why the stage felt so good. You know, to look straight in people’s eyes on stage. 

I mean, recording, I spent my On-U Sound years really getting into the technical side of, not the machinery, but of sound and of craft and the music part. But that other part, that was something that was always there. And it was a problem acting, because I’m so much myself on the stage, and when you go onstage and act, it’s not about being yourself. I mean, I’ve lost parts because I go in and I start rewriting the script in my head. And they want an audition, and you go in, you start going, “That doesn’t feel honest,” and acting isn’t honest. It’s about being believable.

When you’re singing with an audience, it’s absolutely about trusting that they can be themselves and you can be yourselves, because you have a moment of—fuck, it sounds really pretentious, but it’s almost like Zen—you’re so in the moment. Your mind can’t wander; if it does, you’re not in it. You don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks. You know when it’s right. It doesn’t happen all the time, of course, but fortunately, most of the time, where you’re absolutely in this kind of weird communion with other people. It’s such a gift to be able to go there.
 

Songs from the Coal Mine Canary (2006)
 
You’re an ordained minister now, Annie?

Yeah. I became ordained basically because I did needle exchange for a while. My main function was, I was outreach, so I’d be on the stroll with sex workers at night, like if they need condoms or syringes or something. But it almost became your beat, where anything that happened within a certain mile radius, I felt like, I gotta deal with—you know, you get a drunk that would fall down, break their arm.

What happened was, I had to call 911. I got the ambulance, and I asked where they’re taking the guy, ‘cause a lot of time with drunks, they would drop them off around the corner, and I wanted to make sure. And they go, “Why, who are you?” And I was standing in front of a church, so it just came out of my mouth, I go, “I’m his minister.” And they go, “Is that your church?” And it was St. Mark’s Church, which is huge, and I go, “Yeah, that’s my church.” And their tone totally changed. It was like, “You don’t understand, we get so burnt out, we pick up the same people day after day, and then they’re right back in the street again,” and all of a sudden they wanted to confess. So I go, “Wow, this could work, you know? Maybe this minister thing isn’t a bad idea.”

Much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
09.09.2016
09:14 am
|
Dub visionary Adrian Sherwood talks about his legendary career in music
06.30.2016
08:54 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
The ongoing series of Sherwood at the Controls releases surveys the recording career of Adrian Sherwood, the visionary dub producer and founder of On-U Sound. Volume One, released last year, covers 1979 to 1984, while the brand-new Volume Two takes us from 1985 to 1990.

As these discs demonstrate, Sherwood’s talents were too great to be contained by any genre. During the decade-long period under examination, his work connects everyone from Prince Far I, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and the Slits to Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, and Ministry. (“Al [Jourgensen] would go to the toilet and copy down the studio settings Adrian used for his effects on toilet paper and put them in his trousers,” Revolting Cock Luc Van Acker remembers from the Twitch sessions.) As I mention below, I think On-U must be the only point at which the discographies of Sugar Hill and Crass Records intersect. These comps also contain a sampling of the pathbreaking records Sherwood made with On-U outfits African Head Charge, Tackhead, and Dub Syndicate, which redefined what dub was and could be.

I spoke to Sherwood on June 24, the day after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.

Dangerous Minds: I spent yesterday listening to Don’t Call Us Immigrants as I was watching the Brexit votes come in

Adrian Sherwood: [laughs]

—I feel I have to ask you about that. What are your thoughts?

Well, we would like to have stayed. There’s lots of reasons I would stay in Europe, and I’m sad, really. Europe’s done a lot, really, for each other. Apart from keeping a lot of peace and stability, the farming lobby in France and the farming lobby in Italy’s very strong, Germany’s got the biggest Green Party membership in Europe, they’re very advanced in renewable energy, and the farming lobby makes sure that we’re not victim of any of the terrible things that happen in the States with the poisoning of the food chain. So they’re very, very good; they ensure the standard of organic food, et cetera et cetera, and they also fight for workers’ rights. So I could go on and on about it, but I firmly would have liked to have seen a strong EU that we were part of.

You know, if they’re worried about immigration, they could have a united policy, but it was all panic, panic, panic, and to be honest with you, it was more like the ignorant masses that wanted to get out, thinking “Oh, let’s stop immigration,” but there’s no such thing as an indigenous English person. Every last person in this country is of an immigrant extraction. Everybody.
 

Lee Perry and Adrian Sherwood, photographed by Kishi Yamamoto
 
I wonder if I could go back to the beginning of your career. What was the relationship like between the Jamaican roots artists and the UK scene? It seems like you were in a special position to observe their interaction. Was that a competitive relationship?

No, not in the least. It was very hard for the English artists to get credibility, because everybody was looking to Jamaica, as though there’s the great thing, like the British bands always looking to the great American bands. The situation was always the exciting new star coming from Jamaica, and everybody really wanted to see him or her—mainly males, but a lot of female artists as well—and people didn’t think they could get the sound. So it took quite a long time for the English… you know, that album Don’t Call Us Immigrants, it’s interesting that you mention that, ‘cause I’m proud of that album. But that reflected the development of the English reggae sound.

We developed a sound of our own in England, with bands like Steel Pulse and Aswad and Creation Rebel, et cetera, and, you know, Black Slate, Dennis Bovell, obviously, and then eventually the lovers rock scene and our own dub scene. But Jamaica led the way, so everybody in England was like “Oh wow, here’s the new hip hero coming from Jamaica.” It wasn’t really like competing as such, it was more “Bring on the new star,” really, and everyone in England was keen to see the new star. And a few of the really good bands in England got to back the stars, like Aswad did one of the most famous ever gigs backing a young Burning Spear in ‘76 or ‘77 or something.

Since you mentioned Creation Rebel, can you tell me a bit about Prince Far I? I’ve listened to a lot of Prince Far I but I have almost no sense of what he was like as a person.

Far I was a bit of a joker. He would stand on the table and do Elvis Presley impersonations. He had a very mad sense of humor. But his background was quite serious. He was friends with Claudie Massop who was a political gunman, and he himself had been like a security man at Joe Gibbs’ studio, the doorman. He’d worked on a bauxite factory, producing aluminum, where Claudie Massop was the foreman, and because of the politics, he was like a “big friend,” as Joe Higgs said, like a big friend to Far I. But Far I was a character, quite a complex character as well. He looked much older and seemed much older than he actually was.

Did he seem like a wise person? Was that part of it?

Yeah, he definitely had a lot of depth to him, was interested in things and read quite a bit. But he was a joker and a character, and I remember him being full of jokes and fun and stuff. Although he had a darker side as well, which was more one of feeling that people were working voodoo on him, y’know, things like that. So there was kind of a strange underbelly there as well.

From the little I know, it seems like the reality was pretty heavy for a lot of those guys. Tapper Zukie was involved in some violence… it seems like that was just part of life for a lot of those guys.

Well, I knew Tapper Zukie from that period. My friend, Clem Bushay, he lives about 200 meters from me; he actually produced the Man Ah Warrior album.

No way.

Yeah, the producer lives on the same road as I’m speaking to you from now. I knew Tapper Zukie for a long time.

They were all affiliated with politics, that was the thing. And in the seventies, in Jamaica, obviously, the CIA were moving in, trying to destabilize the country, because they didn’t want them to slip towards the Cuban model and affiliate with Russia, and have another Russian ally so close to the United States. So a lot of arms were put in to Seaga, who was affiliated with the Americans, where Manley wanted to stay with the Cubans and work more to a socialist state. That’s why there’s so many arms and, to this day, so much trouble for Jamaica.

It was a crazy election—I think it was ‘76—and I was eighteen at the time, and Far I was with us in England. It was mad. Phoning home and, you know, ten, 20 people shot a day in the political violence. And Far I obviously was close with Claudie Massop, who was one of the main enforcers, like his father Jack Massop had been. But we met a lot of those gunmen: Take Life[?], Bucky Marshall, Tapper Zukie, Horsie—not Horsemouth Wallace, another one called Horsie. Were some quite dark characters, really, but if you met them, you’d have thought they were really charming. But then what they actually got up to was a whole different thing.
 
Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
06.30.2016
08:54 am
|
Page 1 of 5  1 2 3 >  Last ›