Ah, yeah, it’s friday and your 20jazzfunksters have to go back to their lairs to dust their capes and shine their fangs (a shout out to little fang from here!!) before the Halloween wick-end… …so yeah, we leave you with two tracks that don’t need much of a comment, one of them is by Can,…
The Lost Boys might well be one of the ultimate 80s movies, with its blend of terror slasher and kid fantasy, US high school social struggle, leather jackets, a bonkers grandpa, nerdiness (one of the definitive comic bookshop scenes ever), brat packers, Corey Feldman, silly comedy and lots of hairspray. If the relationship between the…
(it feels weird and in a way wrong to keep posting songs here as if nothing had happened yesterday, because yesterday John Peel passed away, and he meant so much to us and many others, so let us keep silent for a respectful moment before continuing with the music, which is what he would have…
Undertones – Teenage Kicks John Peel was my best friend. At school he made me feel like there was something else out there and other people who were into the same thing as me. John Peel died of a heart attack last night while on holiday in Peru. We were very lucky to have you….
Mum and Dad- The Human Fly Total evil riffing stunt rider music from Manchester. Ok, so The Cramps did a different thing about a Human Fly(available here at bubblegum machine, Help me help me….). Sonovac did a good cover. Gregor Samsa first awoke to find himself as one, and Wire wrote about the annoying one…
BOO BOOOOO Hallowe’en is coming, and almost at the same time as the US election, creepy eh? Who will win? the forces of evil? the forces of not-so-evil? Is dumb evil? Is the Religious Right right? Ah, we won’t declare our allegiances althought you can imagine them, suffice to say i’ve read the whole of…
(He fights on our side and we’re lucky cos he’s got more ammunition than Robert Duvall’s Huey and more attitude that Lobo when the hairdresser gave him a toupee…Yei, Matt’s back with a double posting that goes into deep space (9mm) and comes back with the goods. Nah, your PC isn’t shining now, it’s just…
Sonic Boom- Rock and Roll is killing my life Spacemen 3 devastated the 80s landscape with a firestorm of abrassive drones and drug addled perversion. Then they split up and Jason Pierce discovered God in the thickest vein of his arm, extracted Her from there with a rusty air pump and launched Spiritualized, a zeppelin…
Mahjongg- Countdown (The chicken) Konk bump into Add (n) to (x) in a crowded Berlin bar. But neither Konk nor Add (n) to (x) are individuals, they are bands, collectives, post-punk latin percussion obsessed freaks the former, decadent very well educated northerners in a transition to full robot state the latter. You could imagine them…
DJ Grand Wizard Theodore- Military Cut B-Boys stealing from Kraftwerk the same way Can stole from James Brown and Fela and Miles and the rest of the black presidents, avant garde concepts such as detournement and cut-up and musique concrete inadvertently introduced in the sound of the streets, block party crowds bouncing to Burroughs and…
Josh Smith, Tim Green (a former Nation Of Ulysses)and Tim Soete are C4AM95, The Champs, The Fucking Champs, and now (together with Trans Am) TransChamps and The Fucking Am. I cannot tell if they are trying to do something brilliant and original to an overblown cliche riddled genre, or if they are having a huge…
Pixeltan – That’s The Way I Like It Phoenix used to this thing live were they played the riff from Yes- Owner of a Lonely Heart in the middle of their song Funky Square Dance. Here is an entire song based on (almost) the same idea. Was it Lennon who said to Bowie before they…
Kreidler – Coldness (Sunroof Mix) In which German men sing with the delicate beauty and refinement, which makes women (not girls) think they are sexy in that sophisticated European way. Helmut Newton has taken there photo and it is forever preserved in the loft. I got really confused when I first saw this video. Kriedler??…
TV On The Radio – New Health Rock A guy with these huge great big pair of maracas which he was using to cut his toes , Lee Ranaldo, and Andre 3000 once jammed together in the hope of forging a new era in sonic art, but couldn’t get a good song out of it….
3rd Face- Canto della Liberta As a child on my first summer holiday abroad I was shocked to discover the local kids didn’t speak the same language. What was this strange sound coming from there mouth, all fierce and gutural! I was a bit scarred. This soon changed into fascination and the inevitable swapping of…
I only got into the Red Crayola (or Krayola) recently, Jim O’Rourke and Pere Ubu (fans/collaborators) introduced them to me (I mean, not personally, I read about stuff they had done together, it’s not like I’m mates with Jim O’Rourke…yet) plus I really enjoy painting with crayolas so I thought, ok, let’s see what this…
Pere Ubu – Final Solution Taking the bass line straight from Blue Cheer’s summertime blues ain’t a bad place to start for a 1976 pre-punk garage band with a power fuzz peddle. We all know there is no cure for the summertime blues, so instead David and co suggest the Final Solution. Pere Ubu were…
The Vanishing – Lovesick Are Goths allowed to do dissonant jazz analogue disco? I think Bauhaus may have but without the synths. The synths on this track are what renovate it from some Slits/Ze Records funk into something entirely darker. On there own they could be from Riz Ortolani’s score to Cannibal Holocaust, and in…
(these are review that our fellow conspirator Matt wrote as part of his jazz funk greats participation- he’s been the first Jazz Funk greatster-night-guester and he did amazingly, it couldn’t have been any other way. All our respect and love to him, we hope he writes more for us because this is simply brilliant!) Nick…