Revisiting my Electro-Funk past this Saturday with a gig at Café 1001 in London’s Shoreditch for Memory Box. The night, titled ‘A History Of Electro’, will feature a live performance from West Coast rapper Egyptian Lover, whose 1984 tracks ‘Egypt, Egypt’ and “My House On The Nile’ assured his place as a pioneering Hip Hop artist.
Just finished a captivating and, to my mind, long overdue book, which covers the history of black music in the capital spanning (almost) 100 years, the recently published ‘Sounds Like London’. By bringing all the threads together, its author, Lloyd Bradley has made a telling contribution to our understanding of how British black music evolved, following the lineage of its direct influences in the Caribbean and Africa, in juxtaposition with the impact of African-American innovation throughout the 20th century.
During recent times I’ve been intrigued to hear about the growing schism on the House scene here in the UK, brought about by the introduction, primarily by young black dancers, of ‘foot shuffling’ (aka ‘cutting shapes’), an increasingly popular style of dancing that has been met with much hostility in certain quarters, and, somewhat bizarrely, resulted in shufflers being banned from some clubs for dancing in this way. The accusation is that not only do they take up too much dancefloor space, but there’s a general ‘moodiness’ with regards to their attitude. Although it no longer seems to be online, there was even an ‘Anti Foot Shuffling Campaign’ page on Facebook, with some of the posts suggesting underlying issues of racism. As one person commented, “It’s not that all these people on here hate shufflers, they just don’t like fact that black people are into House music now.” Although this comment may be well intentioned, it’s also somewhat misguided given there are, and always have been, plenty of black people in the UK who are big into House – it’s just that their presence is usually to be found away from the mainstream, in more specialist avenues like the Deep and Soulful House scenes. Furthermore, some of the older black crowd are also resistant to this new wave of shuffling, so to present it as a purely black / white issue would be wrong.
2013 sees Greg Wilson taking his first steps back into record production, starting off with Schooled In The Classics, a series of groove based dance tunes put together to play out at his gigs, the initial tracks being first road tested in Chicago and New York last year to a great response. Greg now plans to issue 8 Schooled In The Classics tracks this year, both digitally and via 4 limited edition 180g vinyl releases. The first 2 tracks in the series, ‘12-Turn-13’ and ‘Blue Angel’, are issued this week.
Happy Mondays ‘Wrote For Luck’ & ‘WFL’
Filmed at Legend, Manchester 1988 & 1989
Just wanted to give you a heads-up on the new Electronic Magazine, the first issue of which was recently published. The brainchild of Push, who edited Muzik between 1995 and 1998 (having previously been a writer for Melody Maker), Electronic could be described as a Mojo for the electronic generation.
Earlier this month Leftside Wobble shared an edit of Man Friday’s ‘Love Honey, Love Heartache’ on his SoundCloud. I left a comment highlighting the history of this track, which read as follows:
For my 100th blog post thought I’d flag up another personal anniversary this month.
I got involved with Vintage on the back of ‘Music Played In Discotheques’, the mix of tracks I put together from the years leading up to when I stared deejaying in the clubs in late 1975, illustrating an era when disco music wasn’t a genre as such, but the music played in clubs and discotheques. This was something Wayne Hemingway and his son Jack (who’d been to some of my DJ dates) had asked me to do for the silent disco space they’d curated at Liverpool’s Tate Gallery, the centrepiece being an underlit disco dancefloor.
Set of 15 bubblegum cards designed by Jack Hemingway for the upcoming Vintage Festival in Goodwood (Aug 13/14/15). Here’s a short YouTube clip with the lowdown on The Warehouse and Roller Disco arenas, which I’ve curated with Jack:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uiVehoybvs
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