Adrian and Ari, early 80s, photo by Kishi Yamamoto
 
On-U Sound released their comprehensive New Age Steppers reissues, four studio LPs (1980’s New Age Steppers, 1981’s Action Battlefield, 1983’s Foundation Steppers and 2012’s Love Forever), Avant Gardening, a newly compiled collection of outtakes, rarities and a 1983 John Peel session, and a five CD box set titled Stepping Into A New Age 1980 - 2012 earlier this month, and today they posted two previously unseen vintage promo videos, which you can watch below.

If the New Age Steppers moniker is unfamiliar to you, Mark Stewart of the Pop Group—himself a participant—called the band “the only ever post-punk supergroup.” New Age Steppers (“stepper” refers to a particular reggae riddim, and is a word in Jamaican patois meaning both dancer and criminal) was more of a long term project helmed by producer Adrian Sherwood and Ari Up of the Slits, than it was a proper band, with a revolving door cast of musical notables that included the Pop Group’s Bruce Smith, Public Image Ltd’s Keith Levene, a young Nena Cherry, Sounds editor Vivien Goldman, Steve Beresford, Slit Viv Albertine, Raincoats violinist Vicky Aspinall, Rip, Rig + Panic’s John Waddington, and vocalist Bim Sherman. The foundation of the New Age Steppers sound was provided by Eskimo Fox, Style Scott, Crucial Tony and George Oban, musicians who’d worked with Aswad, Burning Spear, Prince Far I and Gregory Isaacs and extensively with Sherwood. (There is a lot of personnel overlap in Adrian Sherwood’s various projects and it’s difficult to say where one “band” truly ends and another begins, certainly during his early 80s output.)
 

 
The New Age Steppers’ self-titled debut album is an incredibly trippy musical experience. The music is both spacious and spacey. The haunted vocals languid and distant, just floating along in the mix. Inventive sound effects that have been sliced, diced and transformed into something you don’t even know what it is anymore. Time and space are distorted. It’s the dark stuff, druggy, even a little scary. When I first heard it—as part of a cassette only release (which came in a plastic bag with a snap top and poster) titled Crucial Ninety that came out in 1981—it was still a good two years before I would ever hear Jamaican dub, so my idea of the “dub” concept was nearly entirely formed by the first two New Age Steppers albums and a Slits b-side. As a testament to just how far out the sounds were that Sherwood was able to squeeze from his mixing desk, when I first started exploring reggae, none of the “proper” JA dub I was finding sounded nearly as weird or as hard as the New Age Steppers or Creation Rebel and I was initially very discouraged! Crucial.
 

“Radial Drill” (original video)
 

“Fade Away” (original video)

 
Though Dub’s processes and sonic lexicon were basically already in place in the 1960s, forward-thinking producers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry developed it from its beginning as a method of creating mere instrumental remixes of existing songs to a compositional process in its own right. It’s fair to argue that 1976 was the year that Dub truly transcended its status as a reggae subgenre—in that year, Tubby and Augustus Pablo released King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown and Perry, under the imprimatur of his studio band The Upsetters, released Super Ape, both high-water marks and turning points in the art of Dub.

Perry—possibly best known in Caucasia for his contribution to the Beastie Boys’ “Dr. Lee, PhD”—recorded Super Ape at his Black Ark studio, a modestly appointed facility that was years behind the mid-‘70s state of the recording arts, but by dint of his creativity and bottomless mad-scientist eccentricity, he created sounds that continue to amaze. Per Michael Veal in his 2007 book Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae:

Over the five or so years of its operation, as Perry realized some of the most distinctive sounds to come out of Jamaica, the Black Ark control room and mixing console simultaneously grew into a virtual art installation with photos, random objects, scrawled words, and other items that served a talismanic function for Perry’s creative energy.

Perry was known to run a studio microphone from his console to a nearby palm tree, in order to record what he called the “living African heartbeat.” He often “blessed” his recording equipment with mystical invocations and other icons of supernatural and spiritual power such as burning candles and incense, whose wax and dust remnants were freely allowed to infest his electronic equipment. Perry was also known to blow ganja smoke onto his tapes while recording, to clean the heads of his tape machines with the sleeve of his T-shirt, to bury unprotected tapes in the soil outside of his studio, and to spray them with a variety of fluids including whiskey, blood, and urine, ostensibly to enhance their spiritual properties. In fact, [music journalist] Richard Henderson draws a direct correlation between the technical decay of Perry’s facility and the unique sounds he was able to realize from his studio equipment. In this case, Perry’s “craziness” functioned to reanimate the symbol of sound science with black personality and black spirituality, drawn from a diverse array of ostensibly potent organic sources.

 

 
The Black Ark burned down in 1978, after he recorded the second Upsetters album to bear the “Super Ape” name—Return of the Super Ape. Perry has long claimed that he burned it down himself because it was infested with vampires (though by “vampires” he may have meant bad wiring and by “burned it down himself” he may have meant no he didn’t), and last year, Perry released Black Ark Vampires as an act of revenge on the vampires that drove him to destroy his studio. That recording was made in collaboration with Brooklyn’s Subatomic Sound System, who’ve served as Perry’s live backing band for ten years now, and next month, Perry and the SSS will be releasing Super Ape Returns To Conquer. This is at least the fifth Perry album to boast “Super Ape” in its title, depending on whether/how you regard unofficial releases and comps, and this one directly references the first one—It’s not exactly a track for track remake, but all of the tracks from the 1976 album are transformed somehow on Super Ape Returns To Conquer.

On the subject of revisiting a 40 year old album, the 81 year old Perry helpfully offered “Times changed. It’s not about Black Ark anymore. Evil get squeezed. Too much vanity… Now I come to conquer ragga and destroy raggamuffin, conquer raggamuffin with a new beat and a new sound of dub.” Mononymic Subatomic member EMCH was a bit more specific about the process:

The 1976 original was my top ‘desert island album’ so I made sure we revisited the music with respect but also pushed it somewhere else that might make it feel fresh to new and old listeners alike, as an alternative perspective on the same music and not just cover versions or straight remakes.  Although many people know Scratch, I don’t feel like he really got his due for all his contributions to music and culture and so I hope it shines light on what he has done and, despite what many might expect for an 81 year old, continues to do to inspire people, myself included.

Scratch often jokes that he has no time for the past. His curiousity is ravenous and coupled with energy that drives him every minute of every day to try something new: whether singing, painting, drumming, joking around. He’s still as easily bored as a little kid with ADD. So it took me 7 years of touring with him to convince him to go back, only after I proved that we could do something new with the old music not just repeat it. He has vowed never to perform the same song the same way twice because he says he would be faking the feeling and betraying the audience.

After the jump, the premiere of “Underground Roots,” a remake of a Super Ape track originally titled simply “Underground.” The new version features vocals from the late Ari Up of The Slits…

 
Ari Up and friend sing a little ABBA, with ABBAesque choreography, no less! I love ABBA, and I love The Slits, so watching Ari Up do a little “Knowing Me, Knowing You” here is the height of comfort. Nothing like a little reassurance that the incredibly uncool music I love was also loved by the incredibly cool Slits!

Ari’s admitted ABBA fandom wasn’t even compromised by a chilly introduction at a record party. ABBA have a reputation for basically being crazy rich eccentrics who rarely descend from whatever Nordic palaces or islands they own to mingle with plebs. Rumors like these are not refuted by Ari calling Björn Ulvaeus a “twat.”
 

 
Ari Up of The Slits was a punk pioneer, self-described “child star,” reggae and dub-world artist (known as Baby Ari and Madussa), and a mother. She became pregnant with her twin sons, Pedro and Pablo, around the time of the Slits’ break-up when she was barely in her twenties. She and her boyfriend Glenmore “Junior” Williams moved to Belize and Indonesia before more or less settling in Kingston, Jamaica and Brooklyn, New York. She had another son, Wilton, in Jamaica in 1994. Wilton’s father was tragically shot and killed before his birth.

I interviewed Ari in Brooklyn in August 2004 after she had decided to reform The Slits with Tessa, Sex Pistol drummer Paul Cook’s daughter Hollie on keyboards, drummer Anna Schulze and guitarist Adele Wilson. Our conversation drifted to Ariel Gore’s Hip Mama magazine and motherhood. She was packing to go back to Jamaica the next morning. I told her that Hip Mama’s readers would love to hear about her experiences. 

Ari said:

That’s a whole fucking book! A natural lifestyle. Natural birth. Empowering women. Breastfeeding and being out there [outside] naked wherever you can.

Below, Ari Up with her son Wilton on ‘Checkerboard Kids’ (2003)

 
Here’s a first: even though Neneh Cherry and Ari Up both sang in The Slits as teenagers, they have never been immortalised on wax together. Until now.

Thanks to the Swedish act House Of Wallenberg—whose work with the late Harlem ballroom queen Octavia St Laurent we covered here—these two legends can finally be found on the one song, a catchy little dance-pop ditty taken from the appropriately titled album Legends.

Sadly, Ari Up passed away a few years ago, but Neneh Cherry is still touring, and, in fact, has special appearances lined up for this year’s Manchester International Festival. I’m glad somebody finally made a record featuring these two!

Below, House Of Wallenberg featuring Neneh Cherry and Ari Up, “Real Woman”:
 

 
An amusing little anecdote from Ari Up of the Slits about the time she met Patti Smith after a show in the 70s (which doesn’t go quite as you’d expect.) As ever, Up oozes oddball charm here, she is still very much missed!
 

 
You can see another extract from the same interview on this previous Dangerous Minds post. 

 
I first met Peter Boyd Maclean about twenty years ago, when he was about 12, or so it seemed, as he was precociously young and at the same time incredibly wise, and most annoyingly Talented with a capital ‘T’. He had arrived from the ether to work at the Beeb as a top director / producer, having made a splash on that TV earthquake known as Network 7. He was funny, witty and always made work fun. I recall at the time Peter had just “Shot the shit” out of some island to placate his over-zealous exec, who repeatedly demanded “Pictures! Coverage! More pictures! More coverage!” every 10 minutes by ‘phone, fax and pigeon post. Since then m’colleague, has gone on to greater achievements and awards and hairstyles of interesting description.

He also made this rather super documentary on Punk, 1-2 FU with Jonathan Ross taking a personal odyssey through the music of his youth. It’s quirky, orignal, and has an impressive line-up of the punk bands who most effected the TV showman, including Steven Severin, Ari Up, The Damned, Adam Ant, etc. Like the best of Peter’s work, F-U 12 takes an original approach to a subject, rather than the usually biblical reverence of “In the beginning was Punk and the Punk was with…” etc. Of particular note here, is Jonathan’s bus tour of London’s punk clubs, and his rendition (as in torture) of “Anarchy in the U.K.”

Now here’s more of the same from the official blurb:

1-2 FU

Jonathan Ross presents the ‘Memoirs of a Middle-Aged Punk’ in this authored documentary charting the rise and demise of the most nihilistic movement in the history of British music.

Jonathan delivers a fast and furious rant confessing his passion for punk and the lasting effect it’s had on everything, from music and fashion to art and television.

As a forty-something whose life has been defined by punk and all the anarchy it stood for, Jonathan sets out to discover if punk really changed the world or was it all overblown hype?

To fully explore the legacy of punk, Jonathan gets a Mohican and grabs Captain Sensible to join him as he transports an open-top bus full of punks on a tour around London’s most notorious punk hotspots.

Finally, it’s Jonathan Ross as you’ve never seen him before when he fulfils his ultimate punk fantasy performing with Vic Reeves as The Fat Punks for one night only.

If you live in or plan to be visiting New York over the coming weekend, this is the place to be on Sunday.

On the eve of what would have been her 49th birthday, there’s gonna be a party for the dearly missed Ari Up at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY, January 16.

The growing lineup of bands and musicians include:

original and current members of the Slits, including Tessa Pollitt, Hollie Cook, Neneh Cherry and AnnA Ozawa; Bruce Smith of PiL and the Slits; members of Brave New Girl; Band Droidz; legendary Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas; Afrobeat superstar Wunmi Olaiya; Felice Rosser (Faith); Dee Pop (Bush Tetras, Radio I-Ching); Lizzi Bougatsis (Gang Gang Dance); Afro-Punk avatar Tamar-Kali, King Django; Honeychild Coleman; Barbara Gogan (The Passions); Sherleen Nubro; Lisa Samuels and many luminaries from the punk and reggae worlds backed by Ira Heaps and the True Warriors performing classic Slits hits, dancehall and previously unheard originals by Ari Up. Lyrical Readings and Remembrances by Michael Patrick McDonald, Greg Tate, Sara Marcus (Girls To The Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution) and Angela Jaeger (ex-Pigbag).

Tickets are available here.

Ari talks about her friends, her peers and rivals in this short video filmed at the Brooklyn Museum’s “Who Shot Rock and Roll” exhibit (October 30, 2009–January 31, 2010).
 

 
Via The Village Voice.

 
This short interview with Ari Up, conducted by Jonathan Ross for the BBC, captured some of the singer’s vitality, exuberance, and sheer joy, especially when she told Ross “to follow the poom-poom.”   R.I.P. Ari Up
 

Sad news via John Lydon.com:

John and Nora have asked us to let everyone know that Nora’s daughter Arianna (aka Ari-Up) died today (Wednesday, October 20th) after a serious illness. She will be sadly missed.

Everyone at JohnLydon.com and PiLofficial.Com would like to pass on their heartfelt condolences to John , Nora and family.

Rest in Peace.

 
Thanks Jimi Hey

I have loved The Slits, the original female punk band, since I first heard their debut album Cut. I’ve owned it on vinyl, cassette and on two different CD versions. It’s an album I have played—and played often—for over two decades. I used to have a life-sized record store stand-up of the Slits in my bedroom in London that I bought at the Portobello Market and lugged all the way back to Brixton. That’s dedicated fandom as far as I am concerned.

And when I first met my lovely wife, she gifted me with a Japanese issue CD of Return of the Giant Slits, so I knew she was “the one” for me!

A great new website devoted to all things New York has recently launched called Revel in New York, that takes a look at Gotham through the lens of some of its residents. Here’s Ari Up from The Slits and what she has to say about her adopted home town.