I’m K-Classic, an upcoming artist who grew up in Zimbabwe and now residing in Nottingham, UK.

I will be writing a new blog every few days on the new music available out there that you most probably haven’t heard… from Club Bangerz, to R&B Love Jamz to New Age Hip-Hop Classics.

Today’s blog features The Game, Lupe Fiasco, Lil Twist, Fabolous, Trey Songz, Skepta and more.

Wiz Khalifa – Black & Yellow (First Single) (Official Version)

Fabolous – You Be Killin\’ Em

Lupe Fiasco – Go To Sleep

Whatcha Thinkin (Lil Twist ft. Aleise)

The Game – Higher feat. Swizz Beatz & Jay Electronica

Trey Songz – Alone

Big Sean \”Supa Dupa Lemonade\”

Skepta ft. Preeya Kalidas – Cross My Heart

Visit my website for my music – I have 3 tracks AVAILABLE  for FREE DOWNLOAD!

Peace & Love

K-Classic

http://www.kclassicmusic.com

]]> http://2tasty.net/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=304 1 http://2tasty.net/wordpress/?p=288 http://2tasty.net/wordpress/?p=288#comments Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:58:30 +0000 admin http://2tasty.net/wordpress/?p=288 On the morning of 21 September 1966, a Pan Am airliner from New York landed at Heathrow, carrying among its passengers a black American musician from a poor home. Barely known in his own country and a complete stranger to England, he had just flown first class for the first time in his life. His name was James Marshall Hendrix.

On 18 September 1970, four years later, I picked up a copy of London’sEvening Standard on my way home from school, something I never usually did. There was a story of extreme urgency on the front page and a picture of Hendrix playing at a concert – still ringing in my ears – at the Isle of Wight festival, only 18 days earlier. The text reported how Hendrix had died that morning in a hotel in the street, Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill, in which I had been born, and a block away from where I now lived.

During those three years and 362 days living in London, Hendrix had conjured – with his vision and sense of sound, his personality and genius – the most extraordinary guitar music ever played, the most remarkable sound-scape ever created; of that there is little argument. Opinion varies only over the effect his music has on people: elation, fear, sexual stimulation, sublimation, disgust – all or none of these – but always drop-jawed amazement.

The 40th anniversary of Hendrix’s death next month will be marked by the opening of an exhibition of curios and memorabilia at the only place he ever called home – a flat diagonally above that once occupied by the composer George Frideric Handel, on Brook Street in central London, in the double building now known as Handel House. The flat will be opened to the public for 12 days in September and there is talk about plans for a joint museum, adding Hendrix’s presence to that already established in the museum devoted to Handel. Involved in the discussions is the woman with whom Hendrix furnished the top flat of 23 Brook St, and with whom he lived: the only woman he ever really loved, Kathy Etchingham.

In a rare interview by telephone, (she has moved abroad), Ms Etchingham explains: “I want him to be remembered for what he was – not this tragic figure he has been turned into by nit-pickers and people who used to stalk us and collect photographs and ‘evidence’ of what we were doing on a certain day. He could be grumpy, and he could be terrible in the studio, getting exactly what he wanted – but he was fun, he was charming. I want people to remember the man I knew.”

When she met Hendrix (the same night he landed in London), he had already lived an interesting, if frustrating, 23 years. He was born to a father who cared, but not greatly, and a mother he barely knew – she died when he was 15 – but adored (she’s said to be the focus of two of his three great ballads, “Little Wing” and “Angel”). He had always been enthralled by guitar playing – a “natural”, immersed in R&B on the radio and the music of blues giants Albert King and Muddy Waters. When he was 18, he was offered the chance to avoid jail for a minor misdemeanour by joining the army, which he did, training for the 101st Airborne Division.

His military career was marked by friendship with a bass player called Billy Cox from West Virginia, with whom he would play his last concerts, and a report which read: “Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations. Misses bed check: sleeps while supposed to be working: unsatisfactory duty performance.”

Hendrix engineered his discharge in time to avoid being mobilised to Vietnam and worked hard as a backing guitarist for Little Richard, Curtis Knight, the Isley Brothers and others. But, arriving in New York to try and establish himself in his own right, Hendrix found he did not fit. The writer Paul Gilroy, in his recent book Darker Than Blue, makes the point that Hendrix’s life and music were propelled by two important factors: his being an “ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace” and his “transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules”.

Hendrix didn’t fit because he wasn’t black enough for Harlem, nor white enough for Greenwich Village. His music was closer to the blues than any other genre; the Delta and Chicago blues which had captivated a generation of musicians, not so much in the US as in London, musicians such as John Mayall and Alexis Korner, and thereafter Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page among many others.

As luck would have it, the Brits were in town and Linda Keith, girlfriend of the Stones’ Keith Richards, persuaded Chas Chandler, bass player of the Animals, to go and listen to Hendrix play at the Cafe Wha? club in the Village. Chandler wanted to move into management and happened to be fixated by a song, “Hey Joe”, by Tim Rose.

“It was a song Chas knew would be a hit if only he could find the right person to play it,” says Keith Altham, then of the New Musical Express,who would later become a kind of embedded reporter with the Hendrix London entourage. “There he was, this incredible man, playing a wild version of that very song. It was like an epiphany for Chas – it was meant to be.”

“To be honest,” remembers Tappy Wright, the Animals’ roadie who came to Cafe Wha? with Chandler that night, “I wasn’t too impressed at first, but when he started playing with his teeth, and behind his head, it was obvious that here was someone different.”

Before long, Hendrix was aboard the plane to London with Chandler and the Animals’ manager, Michael Jeffery, to be met by Tony Garland, who would end up being general factotum for Hendrix’s management company, Anim. “When he arrived,” recalls Garland now, sitting on his barge beside the canal in Maida Vale, west London, where he now lives, “I filled out the customs form. We couldn’t say he’d come to work because he didn’t have a permit, so I told them he was a famous American star coming to collect his royalties.”

It is strange, tracking down Hendrix’s inner circle in London. His own musicians in his great band, the Experience – Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell – are dead. Likewise, his two managers, Chandler and Jeffery, and one of his closest musician friends, the Rolling Stone Brian Jones; the other, Eric Burdon of the Animals, declined to be interviewed. But some members of the close-knit entourage are still around, such as Kathy Etchingham and Keith Altham, wearing a flaming orange jacket befitting the time of which he agrees to speak, in defiance of a heart attack only a few days before.

Music in London had reached a tumultuously creative moment when Hendrix arrived and was perfectly poised to receive him. “The performers were just your mates who played guitars,” recalls Altham. “It was tight – everyone knew everyone else. It was just Pete from the Who, Eric of Cream, or Brian and Mick of the Stones, all going to each other’s gigs.”

For reasons never quite explained, the blues – both in their acoustic Delta form, and Chicago blues plugged into an amplifier – had captivated this generation of English musicians more deeply than their American counterparts. Elderly blues musicians found themselves, to their amazement, courted for concerts, such as an unforgettable night at Hammersmith with Son House and Bukka White. Champion Jack Dupree married and settled in Yorkshire. “People [here] felt a certain affinity with the blues, music which added a bit of colour to grey life,” Altham continues. And as Garland points out: “White America was listening to Doris Day – black American music got nowhere near white AM radio. Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.”

Things happened at speed after Hendrix landed. “‘Come down to the Scotch,’ Chas told me the day Jimi arrived and hear what I found in New York,” recalls Altham. “Jimi couldn’t play because he had no work permit, but he jammed that night, and my first impression was that he’d make a great jazz musician.” That was the night, his first in London, that Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham. “It happened straightaway,” she recalls. “Here was this man: different, funny, coy – even about his own playing.”

“A short while later,” recalls Altham, “Chas took me to hear him at the Bag O’Nails club [in Soho] for one of his first proper gigs, turned to me and said, ‘What’ya think?’ I said I’d never heard anything like it in all my life.” At a concert in the same series, remembers Garland, “Michael Jeffery put an arm round Chas, another round me and said, ‘I think we’ve cracked it, mate.’” They had: Kit Lambert, according to Altham, literally scrambled across the tables to Chas at one of the shows and said, “in his plummy accent”, he had to sign him. Chas needed a record contract, Decca had turned Hendrix down (along with the Beatles) and Lambert was about to launch a new label, Track Records, with interest from Polydor: “The deal was done, on the back of a napkin,” says Altham.

Hendrix had formed his band at speed: a rhythm guitarist from Kent called Noel Redding – who had applied to join the Animals but to whom Hendrix now allocated bass guitar – and Mitch Mitchell, a jazz drummer seeking to mould himself in the style of John Coltrane’s great percussionist, Elvin Jones. With a stroke of genius, Jeffery came up with the only name befitting what was to follow: the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Is there any line in rock’n'roll more assuredly seductive as: “Are you experienced?/ Have you ever been experienced?/ Well, I have” (from 1967′s “Are You Experienced”)?

Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the other Beatles quickly converged to hear this phenomenon, along with the Stones and Pete Townshend. Arriving one night at the Bag O’Nails, Altham met Brian Jones “walking back up the stairs with tears in his eyes. I said, ‘Brian, what is it?’ and he replied, ‘It’s what he does, it chokes me’ – only he put it better than that”.

There was also curiosity from the emergent powerhouse of British blues: Cream and Eric Clapton. There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: “Hendrix blew into a version of [Howlin' Wolf's] ‘Killing Floor’,” recalls Garland, “and plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that – it stopped you in your tracks.” Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song “which he had yet to master himself”; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: “You never told me he was that fucking good.”

With a reputation, a recording contract and the adoration of his peers, Hendrix was allocated a flat belonging to Ringo Starr, in Montagu Square, in which he lived with Etchingham, Chandler and Chandler’s Swedish girlfriend, Lotta. It was not ideal, but base camp for an initial tour – as opening act for Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck, with the Walker Brothers topping the bill.

Something was needed, Chandler thought, whereby Hendrix could blow the successive acts off the stage and Altham had the beginning of an idea. He said: “‘It’s a pity that you can’t set fire to your guitar.’ There was a pregnant pause in the dressing room, after which Chas said, ‘Go out and get some lighter fuel.’” Garland remembers: “I went out into Seven Sisters Road [in north London] to buy lighter fluid. At first, it didn’t make sense to me – there were too many things going on to worry about lighter fluid – but it all became clear in the end.”

Altham borrowed a lighter from Gary – the third Walker brother and drummer – and that night, at the Astoria theatre in central London, Hendrix set his guitar ablaze for the first time. “One of the security guards said, ‘Why are you waving it around your head?’” recalls Altham. “‘Cause I’m trying to put it out,’ replied Jimi. Actually, he only did it three times after,” says Altham, “but it became a trademark.”

The touring began in earnest during that winter of 1966-7: around working men’s clubs and little theatres in the north of England. “That’s when I remember him at his very best,” recalls Etchingham. “And at his happiest. The small clubs in regional venues. When he was desperate to make a name for himself, but was also playing for himself. In the working men’s clubs, they just wanted some music to enjoy while they drank their beer. In the small theatres, people had come to hear him. But that was his best music ever – played for its own sake. None of these crazy expectations, no one hanging on – just the people he knew, liked and trusted, and his own music.”

But what was this music, this singular, uplifting, otherworldly, menacing, exotic and erotic sound? “Hendrix was a magpie,” says Altham. “He would take from blues, jazz – only Coltrane could play in that way – and Dylan was the greatest influence. But he’d listen to Mozart, he’d read sci-fi and Asimov and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix. Then there was just the dexterity – he was left-handed, but I remember people throwing him a right-handed guitar and Hendrix picking it up and playing it upside down.”

“And don’t forget,” says Tappy Wright, who acted as roadie at first, then joined the management team, “we were using the cheapest guitars. These were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic, but stretched to the fucking limit.”

The most precious insight comes from Etchingham. “People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious. And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason,” she says. “Well, I remember that very well, sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street. Sometimes, he would play a riff for hours, until he had it just right. Then this great smile would creep across his face or he’d throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he had got it right for himself, not for anyone else.”

Touring ran concurrent with work in the studio – first the singles: “Hey Joe”, the inimitable “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary”, written for Kathy when Hendrix was left alone at home after she had stormed out from an argument, so the story goes (Mary is her middle name). “I never realised quite how hard he worked,” says Sarah Bardwell, director of the Handel House Museum, researching her new charge. The Experience would finish a concert up north, drive south, record between 3am and 9am, then return north for two more shows each day. LSD had yet to play a major role – if the Experience were on amphetamines, it was to keep the schedule.

In various studios, ending up at west London’s Olympic, work began. “I used to ring them up to book time,” recalls Etchingham. “Thirty quid an hour and they’d want the cheque there and then.” Chandler was aware of this and would occasionally hasten things along by taking what the band thought was a warm-up to be the finished product. “‘What?’ the band would say,” recalls Altham. “‘That’s it,’ Chas would reply. ‘Now for the next one.’”

But the soundscape unique to Hendrix, pushing the technology to its limits, was not serendipity, nor was it only about Hendrix’s genius: there was science behind the subliminal magic. “This was not ‘psychcolergic’, as Eric Burdon used to call it,” says Garland. “Hendrix knew exactly what he was doing.” And this process began with a man called Roger Mayer.

“We call this the Surrey blues Delta,” says Mayer, with a wave of his arms across the crazy-paving pathways of Worcester Park, near Surbiton. “Eric over here, Keith down the road, the Stones from there.” Mayer was an acoustician and sonic wave engineer for the Admiralty, a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, but also an inventor of various electronic musical devices, including an improved wah-wah pedal and the “Octavia” guitar effect with its unique “doubling” effect. “I’d shown it to Jimmy Page, but he thought it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met, ‘Yeah, I’d like to try that stuff.’” “One of my favourite memories of all,” says Etchingham, “is Jimi and Roger huddled together over the console and the instruments, talking about stuff way over my head, and then this glorious thing happening.”

“We started from the premise that music was a mission, not a competition,” says Mayer, who describes himself as a “sonic consultant” to Hendrix. “That the basis was the blues, but that the framework of the blues was too tight. We’d talk first about what he wanted the emotion of the song to be. What’s the vision? He would talk in colours and my job was to give him the electronic palette which would engineer those colours so he could paint the canvas.

“Let me try to explain why it sounds like it does: when you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form,” he adds. “The electronics we used were ‘feed forward’, which means that the input from the player projects forward – the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing – so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive – it is speed-forward analogue, a non-repetitive wave form, and that is the definition of pure music and therefore the diametric opposite of digital.

“Look, if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples – it depends on how you throw the stone, or the wind. Digital makes the false presumption that you can predict those ripples, but Jimi and I were always looking for the warning signs. The brain knows when it hears repetition that this is no longer music and what you hear when you listen to Hendrix is pure music. It took discussion and experiment, and some frustrations, but then that moment would come, we’d put the headphones down and say, ‘Got it. That’s the one.’

“But I take none of the credit,” insists Mayer. “You can build a racing car just like the one that won the 1955 grand prix. But if you can’t drive like Juan Manuel Fangio, you’re not going to win the grand prix. Jimi Hendrix only sounds like he does because he was Jimi Hendrix.”

Everyone knows that Hendrix had hundreds of women, often concurrently – but that is not as interesting as the fact that, says Altham, “Kathy Etchingham was the love of his life”. Mayer recalls them “oozing affection, even when there was a row – he needed her very badly indeed”. Hendrix called the flat into which he moved with her in 1968 “the only home I ever had”.

“We knew we wanted Mayfair,” says Etchingham, “so we could walk to the gigs, but the prices were high, even though it was a little seedy – £30 a week.” The couple furnished the split-level, top-floor apartment together with prints and wall hangings from Portobello Road. When Hendrix found out that Handel had lived downstairs, “he went round to HMV or One Stop Records to get Messiah,” says Sarah Bardwell. “What is so interesting is that they were both musicians from abroad, who came to London to make their name in this building.”

It feels extraordinary now to walk over the venerable floorboards past a replica of Handel’s harpsichord, portraits of the composer and the score of Messiah in the room in which it was composed, then up a wooden staircase to Hendrix’s whitewashed sitting room and bedroom above. Sarah Bardwell’s aim is for a joint Handel-Hendrix house museum of some kind. Blue English Heritage plaques accompany each other on the wall outside; Hendrix was added in 1997, a labour of devotion by Kathy Etchingham, who recalls English Heritage balking at the fact that the shop front below was a lingerie shop, “all mannequins wearing suspenders and knickers”, which needed covering up while the plaque was unveiled.

Now, it is the posh Jo Malone perfumery, though “in our day it was Mr Love’s cafe,” she recalls fondly. “On the corner of Oxford Street. And there was an Indian tea shop we’d go to in South Molton Street, and always HMV or One Stop – and we’d walk to the gigs along Regent Street or across Hanover Square, and maybe take a taxi home.”

The memories of the people who actually knew him overshadow the tragic, antiheroic Hendrix of popular imagination. Etchingham and Keith Altham recall a man with a sense of humour. “If things were getting tense in the studio,” says Altham, “he’d just play ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’.” Adds Tony Garland: “If I told Jimi to ‘kiss my arse’, he’d answer, ‘You’ve got a rubber neck, do it yourself’ with a sly grin. You always knew you were with someone quicker-witted than yourself.”

Altham also talks about Hendrix “saying nothing to reporters, or contradictory things, on purpose. He would pat his fingers against his lips mid-sentence and go, ‘etcetera, etcetera, etcetera’, in order to say, in effect, nothing. He wanted the music to speak. He also had this way of saying things that made you do a double take: ‘Did he really say that?’ Such as, just before he went on to play with Clapton, who was his idol, for the first time, he told me, ‘I want to see if he is as good as he thinks I am’ – which is not at all the remark you first think it is.”

But many of those who comprised Hendrix’s inner circle in London now talk about some demise in his mental agility once he became popular in his native US, a mass commodity caught between the triangle of his own “racially transgressive” music, his blackness and the black power movement, and his overwhelmingly white audience. Even then, though, Hendrix closed the 1969 Woodstock festival with a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, which became the anthem for both the movement against the war in Vietnam and Hendrix’s own complicated empathy with the young American fodder sent to fight it, as a former military man himself. Many of his childhood friends were over there, some never to return. The anthem made Jimi famous worldwide, veering into a vortex out of which emerged “Purple Haze”, a glorious, lyrical dirge – for something, for everything; an endpiece not only to Woodstock but to so many dreams.

“Chas Chandler would come into the studio and find two women in his chair,” recalls Tappy Wright. “‘Get out of my chair!’ he’d say. And then, well, there were drugs, drugs, drugs. I never took any, because I had to make sure everyone got out of bed in the morning – but they were around, too much around.” Altham says that Chandler told him “that he gave Jimi an ultimatum: ‘Either I go or the hangers-on go.’ But there was no getting rid of them, so Chas quit and Jimi was left with Michael Jeffery”.

“Jimi was at his best when the fame never got in the way of the music,” says Etchingham, “and at his worst when the fame took over, when people who hardly knew him suddenly became his best friends.” “He had this thing,” says Altham, “of not being able to say no to people – and this became a problem.”

Even the flat on Brook Street became an open house, to journalists, anyone. “It’s funny,” says Sarah Bardwell. “Here we are trying to contact his old friends who are now superstars for our events and exhibition, and it’s like laying siege to Fort Knox! Yet Hendrix was available to anyone, perhaps almost too much so.”

Despite the distractions, there was one project consistently dear to Hendrix’s heart: the state-of-the-art Electric Lady Studios in New York, opened with a party on 26 August 1970, the night before he was due to fly back to England to play the Isle of Wight festival. Only Hendrix was almost too shy to appear and, when he did so, he retreated to the steps outside, where he met a young singer-songwriter too shy to enter the fray – Patti Smith. “It was all too much for me. Johnny Winter in there and all,” recalled Smith in a past interview with the Observer. “So I thought, ‘I’ll just sit awhile on the steps’ and out came Jimi and sat next to me. And he was so full of ideas; the different sounds he was going to create in this studio, wider landscapes, experiments with musicians and new soundscapes. All he had to do was get over back to England, play the festival and get back to work…”

It had been a long weekend on the Isle of Wight and, for me, an exciting one. I was compelled – not disgusted, as is the official history – by the determination of French and German anarchists to tear down the fences so that it be a free festival. I loved the fact that Notting Hill’s local band, Hawkwind, played outside the fence in protest at the ticket prices. The strange atmosphere added to the climactic moment, after the Who and others: the one set, at 2am on the Monday, for which it was imperative to get down from among the crowds on Desolation Row and force a way right to the front and concentrate or, rather, submit to hypnosis. The set by Jimi Hendrix.

It is written in the lore of Hendrixology that this was a terrible performance. Hendrix had arrived exhausted, by the previous month’s events, the upcoming tour, the day’s violence and by walkie-talkie voices that somehow made their way into the PA system. But all I remember, having just turned 16, is a dream coming true: the greatest rock musician of all time (one knew this with assurance) dressed in blazing red and purple silks, actually playing the version of “Sgt Pepper’s” about which I had read so much in NME, playing “Purple Haze”, “Voodoo Chile” and a long, searing “Machine Gun”, just yards away. I remember the sound – the sounds, plural – bombarding me from the far side of some emotional, existential, hallucinogenic and sexual checkpoint along the road towards the rest of my life. I remember him playing the horn parts to “Sgt Pepper’s” on his guitar! I remember the deafening and painful silence after he finished his fusillade and in the crowd a mixture of rapture, gratitude, enlightenment and affection.

Afterwards, Hendrix went on a reportedly disastrous tour of Scandinavia and Germany (failing to meet one of his two children, by a Swedish girlfriend – the other he had sired in New York and also never met), before returning to the Cumberland hotel and the room in which he gave his last ever interview, to Keith Altham. (To mark the anniversary, the Cumberland has designed and decorated these rooms in a swirl of colour, stocked it with Hendrix music and called it the Hendrix Suite, in which people can stay.)

“There were two women in the room,” recalls Altham. “One of them was a girlfriend called Devon Wilson and she was dodgy – she dealt him drugs and I can say that now because she’s dead. But he knew me well by this time and he seemed better than I’d seen him previously.” The interview is a remarkable one, utterly devoid of all the nonsense that would ensue about suicide and a death wish. On the tape, Hendrix laughs and jokes; he tells Altham about plans to re-form the Experience and tour England again.

On the night of 16 September, Hendrix went to Ronnie Scott’s without his guitar, hoping to jam with Eric Burdon’s new band, War. Burdon considered him unfit to play. The following night, he returned and joined his friend on stage. “I was tired, I missed it,” says Altham, “though, of course, I regret that now. It was the last time Hendrix ever played the guitar.”

Hendrix went on to a party with a German woman, Monika Danneman, and back to her rooms at the Samarkand hotel in Lansdowne Crescent. There are so many accounts of exactly what happened next, but all converge on the fact that he had drunk a fair amount, taken some kind of amphetamines (“Black bombers, I think, given to him by Devon Wilson,” surmises Altham) and some of Danneman’s Vesparax sleeping pills, not knowing their strength. He vomited during the deep ensuing sleep, insufficiently conscious enough to throw up; Danneman panicked, and telephoned Burdon, who urged her to call an ambulance. But the greatest guitarist of all time was dead upon arrival at St Mary Abbot’s hospital, aged 27. (Sadly, Danneman took her own life in 1996.)

So it was, back in September 1970, that I made my way up Lansdowne Rise and round the corner to the Samarkand hotel after reading the news today, oh boy. I was amazed to have the pavement outside the address at which Jimi Hendrix had died that morning all to myself for a good couple of hours – not a soul. I went home, got some chalk, and wrote: “Scuse us while we kiss the sky, Jimi” on the flagstones (OK, but I was only 16) and retreated to watch. Nothing happened and after another hour, a man came out and washed the words away and I returned home to write a lament in my diary, which I still have, theStandard‘s front page folded at the date.

Speculations about suicide and murder are too ridiculous to contemplate – most of them are probably concocted in order to dramatise and distract from the awful reality of such a genius dying in this way – but what does matter are Kathy Etchingham’s reflections. “Jimi died because the simple things got complicated. He was born to a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who died and he died because he was in that flat in Notting Hill with a complete stranger who gave him a load of sleeping pills without telling him how strong they were. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

“I’m older and wiser now,” she says. “I enjoy culture and the fine things in life. I can look back and see all that more clearly than I did at the time – I was so young, only 24.” Of the compelling memoir she has written,Through Gypsy Eyes, she says: “I’d like to go over it again, fill in a few things, but what I want now, most of all from this anniversary, is for people to understand that it was in Britain that he was welcomed, it was there he was happy and such fun to be around – yes, grumpy at times, and a handful – but such a man. I’d like the young people to know that.”

“Let’s face it,” says Tappy Wright, “if Jimi had stayed with Kathy, he’d probably be alive and playing still. Plus, he always said he wanted to be buried in London, not Seattle, where he was born and his family lived. It wasn’t just me he told that, it was plenty of people – that this was home.” “Still,” says Etchingham, “at least we’ve got the plaque, the Handel House Museum, and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in September. They were great times and we’ll take a trip down memory lane. Only 40 years is a long time and Jimi won’t be there.”

by Ed Vulliamy

The Hendrix in Britain exhibition runs at Handel House museum, 25 Brook Street, London W1, from 25 Aug-7Nov. Hendrix’s rooms will be open from 15-26 Sep

At 180 bpm, shangaan combines MIDI keyboards with marimba beats, distorted vocal samples and lyrics that Honest Jon’s, the record label which is putting out a compilation, described as “African soap operas, tied up with domestic matters and a yearning for the slower life”. But equally important is the dancing that goes with it; hyperfast footwork, the odd avian-like leg movements and, for the women, a lot of ass-shaking in colourful skirts. There’s also a propensity among Shangaan dancers to dress up, as is evident in the clip of the Tshe Tsha Boys, which shows the trio (including one child) wearing bright orange jumpsuits and clown masks during performances.

When Glasspiegel was introduced to Shangaan electro, it was largely unknown outside the city of Malamulele in Limpopo, South Africa. Already an aficionado of African music through his work with Nabay and as a radio producer, Glasspiegel decided to travel to Malamulele to experience the music. “It reminded me of arriving in Kingston or Havana,” says Glasspiegel, “because there is just music everywhere all the time. It’s in the air.” His aim was to get to the source of shangaan electro, and then see if he could distribute the music in the US. And that source was a man named Dog. “We found this DVD in a record shop in Malamulele by the Tshe Tsha Boys and Dog’s number was on the back.”

Dog (real name Richard “Nozinja” Mthethwa) is the man at the helm of Shangaan electro. A former mobile phone repair shop worker turned music entrepreneur, he is responsible for recording, producing and selling more than 50,000 records a year (he also sings himself) through his Nozinja label. Dog runs his empire from a home studio in Soweto, where he edits a slightly surreal stream of music videos, most of which are filmed in front of a green screen and interspliced with clips from shangaan township dances and, occasionally, stock footage of joggers, lakes and western business centres.
“It seems strange to us that these mundane images would be edited in, but to Dog, an image of white-collar workers circled around a xerox machine is still a bit foreign and exciting,” Glasspiegel explains.

After a week of trying, I eventually got through to Dog on the phone late one afternoon. First things first, why the name? “My grandfather was called Dog – he would say to people ‘you can’t touch me!’, because he was fearless. So I just took the name too.” Dog says the story of shangaan electro started in 2005. “I wanted to take traditional, marimba-based Shangaan music and make it faster. At that point, the most popular music was at 130-135 bpm. I wanted to put it up to 180.” When Glasspiegel and Dog first met, the former was greeted with scepticism from the latter. “People come to Africa all the time from the UK and America promising to do great things for our music – we sign a contract and then we never hear from them again.” But Glasspiegel managed to persuade Dog that there would be no profit-hogging. “Wills did everything he promised me he would do. When I tell people that I have an international release for Shangaan music they don’t believe me! But it’s all down to him.”

Glasspiegel aims to bring the acts on the shangaan compilation to the US to perform live. For Dog, there is a more immediate concern: “I want to make it faster still. The last record was at 183 bpm. I want to increase that, keep going up!”

The best shangaan artists, by Wills Glasspiegel

Tshe Tsha Boys are named after the “tshetsha” dance that originates in the village of Ka-Mukomi in the northern province of Malamulele. When Dog first saw the dance in 2006, he bought a case of beer for the performers and held a contest to see who could dance the best. Days later, Dog brought two of the top dancers from Ka-Mukomi to Johannesburg to record their break-out hit Tshetsha. Wearing orange overalls and clown masks, Tshe Tsha Boys make music that appeals to all ages – Dog’s 11-year-old son is also in the band. “Young people have the buying power,” Dog says.

BBC stands for Beautiful Black Culture. The group comprises three sisters, also from Malamulele. They’re known for the way in which they dance in unison – a rare and magical sight in Shangaan. The sisters are often thought to be twins, which they play up to in videos and performances.

Tiyiselani Vomaseve are the queens of Shangaan dance. Featuring three sisters and two friends, they were Dog’s first hit-makers and among the first women to be at the forefront of any shangaan group. Traditionally in Shangaan culture, women/wives sing backup for a lead male voice, but Tiyiselani bucked the trend. Though BBC and Tiyiselani are on the same label, “they don’t sit in the same room together”. Dog says there’s a competitive spirit at play.

Mancingelani was the first artist to join the Nozinja label in 2005. He comes from a family of musicians in Soweto and has the rare honour of being the first Shangaan artist to have his own DVD, which is now a necessary component for any release in the dance-focused genre. Mancingelani means “security guard” – it’s his day job.

Zinja is Nozinja himself, although Dog says that he “hates performing”. He first started singing as a way of showing artists what he wanted from them in the studio. In the video for Nwa Gezani from 2009, Dog performs in a jacket and tie with gigantic super-imposed yellow tulips in the background. Perhaps Dog is the Shangaan Dr Dre – a man behind (and sometimes in front of) the beats.

Posted byRosie Swash Tuesday 3 August 2010 16.54 BST

Seen as sheer waste, potlatch horrified western colonisers and ended up illegal for much of the 20th century. But modern music marketing is closer in spirit to this practice than you might think. As recorded music becomes devalued, a wild kind of inflation emerges, best seen in the evolution of the deluxe CD reissue.

At the height of the CD boom, a reissued album might throw a couple of extra track-shaped scraps to fans. Initially these weren’t lavish – a typical 90s reissue series such as the Byrds catalogue restoration project had five or six bonus tracks each. Some acts aimed higher – Elvis Costello expanded short albums with a dozen or more extras. Then came the double CD deluxe treatment, with the original album complemented by a second disc of contemporary work. For acts that released much great work on singles – such as Pet Shop Boys or New Order – these were ideal.

But the expansion continues. The Cure’s Disintegration reissue this year was a three-CD box set. Two Boo Radleys albums also got three discs each. At this point, you may be forgiven for thinking that the format is ballooning just as the stock of albums left to reissue dwindles. Whatever next – a triple CD release for the first Mansun album? As it happens, yes – the 12 original tracks of Attack of the Grey Lantern now come with a 38-track appendix.

There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s a quirk of history that a likable Britpop period piece gets the treatment previously reserved for Kind Of Blue. If you’re a Mansun fan, you’re delighted and everyone else can raise an amused eyebrow at the desperation of labels to sell any kind of physical product.

Away from the physical, the aesthetics of glut have been obvious for a while. It’s not just that music downloaders can hoard albums by the gross, or that streaming services offer libraries that dwarf even the greediest pirate’s hard drive. It’s that increasingly we’re seeing completely legal compilations of brand new music offered for close to free and on a scale that would have been baffling even a few years ago. Barcelona DJs Buffetlibre, for instance, followed up a collection of 120 gratis cover versions with a gigantic 180-song slab of tracks from around the world, paid for by donation, with proceeds going to Amnesty International. Meanwhile, files circulate before the SXSW music festival, compiling songs given away by every band playing – this year’s collection weighed in at 1,038 tracks, enough to make Wiley seem parsimonious.

Taking all that in would mean roughly five days of near-monastic dedication, so potlatch culture needs new listening strategies to cope with the suddenness of having so much new music to hear at once. Following the Wiley giveaway, fans inevitably compared notes online, compiling personal favourites and generally outsourcing the job of hearing all this stuff.

And while Wiley made his songs available in one glorious data dump, there are ways for artist generosity to exist in a more user-friendly frame. Fugazi this week announced plans to put recordings online of almost every show they ever played. The idea is that fans will first turn to shows they themselves attended, which will give people wanting to navigate this archive some context and a vital startpoint. Diving into the sea of free music is a thrill, learning to swim in it will be even better.

The Sexy Office Wear Party!!!!

…Its a fancy dress kinda party, you dont have to dress up but you will look good if you do!!!

Its going down @ Ethio Cubano on Saturday 4th September 2010, everyone knows Cubano is the place for bashment raves!!!

BASHMENT // RNB // UKFUNKY // LOVERS ROCK // UKGARAGE // SOCA // ETC

Music on the night will be by:

Black Heart Sound (With Bizzy & Crew)
Millennium Sound (With MrLion From Peterborough)
Desert Eagle Intl (With Infa Red, Kriminal & Diamondz MC)
Willpowa Foundation (With Mr Mention, Skinny, Ivan Powas & Kojak)
Vybz Star Mvts (With CB & DC Killa)
Dj Rich Coleman (Sheffield BCR 103.1FM)

Admission: Tickets £8 & £10 all night if you pay at the doors!!!!!

online Tickets :
https://www.theticketsellers.co.uk/buy_tickets/events/?id=10012208

Doors will be open 11pm till 5am so reach early.

There will definately be live video recording on the night as well as professionaly pictures taking so dress to impress and make a godo effort!!!!!

Invite all your friends, this is a party not to miss …. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN SHEFFIELD!!!!!See more

Clarks Originals have long been a staple of Jamaican fashion, but Kartel lifted them to another level. Vendors in Kingston doubled their prices. Thieves, the Jamaica Star reported, targeted stores that stocked them. Knock-off copies of the design started appearing and multiplying.

“Right now you can’t go less than $10,000 Jamaican for Clarks,” says Andre “Popcaan” Sutherland, one of two Kartel proteges, along with Vanessa Bling, who also appears on the single. “It was six or seven grand before the song. It’s been a massive change, that. People feel dem haffi have ‘em.”

Kartel, a provocateur whose X-rated content has seen him banned in the past from several Caribbean nations, appears to have found a new, more airwave-friendly lyrical direction in the wake of the single. In a blatant attempt to milk his own fad, he’s released follow-up records called Clarks Again and Clarks 3 (Wear Weh Yuh Have). His latest single, Jeans ‘n Fitted, acts as yet another fashion manifesto.

To be sure, the unrest in Kingston that all but shut down business in the capital last month has tempered the phenomenon somewhat. But as Clarks has reverberated across the Caribbean and throughout the diaspora – it’s currently receiving daytime spins on BBC’s 1Xtra, after topping the station’s dancehall chart – the trend is being echoed from Brooklyn to Brixton.

“I’ve gotten a few emails and texts where a young lady has said to me, ‘Robbo, it’s because of your show with this song that we’re working overtime at Clarks,’” says BBC 1Xtra DJ Robbo Ranx. “Online, I went to order a pair of black ankle Deserts . . . sold out. You go out to find Clarks, you can’t find Deserts. In my local in west London, there’s none in there.”

Michael Borge, marketing director for Clarks North America, confirms it has seen increased demand in Jamaica and many US markets in recent months; however, an “upswing in the Originals business overall” makes it difficult to quantify the song’s effect. Likewise, Gemma Merchant, senior account manager for Clarks Originals in the UK, says the company has seen “increased interest and demand in particular areas of the UK, shortly after the song became big in Jamaica”.

But while Clarks – with its chorus, “Everybody haffi ask weh mi get mi Clarks/ Di leather hard, di suede soft, toothbrush get out di dust fast” – has boosted enthusiasm for the brand among young Jamaicans, it is just the latest chapter in the country’s lengthy embrace of the shoe brand. “Clarks is as much a part of the Jamaican culture as ackee and saltfish and roast breadfruit, I swear to you,” says Kartel, whose real name is Adijah Palmer. “Policemen wear it, gangsters wear it. Big men wear it to their work. Schoolchildren wear it to school.”

If Clarks have long been in Britain the shoes of schoolchildren and pensioners, in Jamaica they are a long-standing symbol of upward social mobility, valued for their versatility and – important in a tropical climate – their breathability.

“The generation who had immigrated to England to work in that period after the second world war would return to Jamaica wearing these Clarks, and people developed a fascination,” Ranx says. “You go back to Jamaica on holiday, the first thing they ask you for is: ‘Bring back a traditional Marks & Spencer string vest, or a pair of Clarks.’”

By the time reggae exploded internationally in the 1970s, Clarks were the preferred footwear for Rastafarians and “baldheads” alike. Rummage through LPs from reggae’s golden era, and you’re likely to turn up at least a few photos of rude boys with their trouser legs rolled up to reveal ankle-length desert boots. But it was in the 1980s, as the social consciousness of the Bob Marley era gave way to dancehall’s rampant materialism, that the shoes gained iconic status. “The 80s was a hyper-materialistic time in Jamaica and Jamaican music,” says Jason Panton, owner of the Kingston fashion boutique Base Kingston, and I&I Clothing, a Jamaican streetwear brand. “After the whole scare over Jamaica going socialist, a lot of importance was placed on brand names. People wanted other people to know him stepped up him life. Part of the way you show that is you have a Clarks, you have a gold chain around your neck, and you ain’t afraid to wear it on road.” The teenage toaster Little John (not to be confused with rapper/producer Lil’ Jon) even scored a 1985 hit with Clarks Booty. “Hol’ up yuh foot and show your Clarks Booty,” went the song’s chorus, a riff on Yellowman’s Zungguzungguguzungguzeng, “Fling out your foot because your shoe’s brand new.”

In fact, Jamaica’s love of Clarks spread through music beyond the Caribbean. In the mid 1990s, the New York hip-hop band the Wu-Tang Clan famously made Clarks Wallabees their preferred footwear. The cover of Ghostface Killah’s 1995 solo debut, Ironman, depicted the “Wally Champ” (as Ghostface often calls himself) and Wu members Raekwon and Cappadonna surrounded by custom-dyed Wallabees. The Clan’s own clothing brand, Wu Wear, was among several American brands that produced Wallabee derivatives in the following years.

Ghostface and his Wu-Tang associates had borrowed the style from the Caribbean immigrants who poured into New York City in the 1980s. “People had stopped wearing them, so Ghostface and Raekwon started rocking them for that reason,” says hip-hop journalist Alvin Blanco, author of an upcoming book on the Wu-Tang Clan. “The idea was, ‘Other rappers are rocking Timberlands and sneakers, we’re going to stay ahead of the curve by going back and rocking Wallabees.’ They also weren’t that much. You could probably finagle a pair for $60 or $70 on Canal Street in Chinatown.”

Wallys grew less prevalent in the States as the Wu-Tang’s influence over hip-hop waned in the late 90s, but they never became unfashionable in Jamaica. There was already a bubbling resurgence even before Kartel released Clarks in March.

“At Sting [the annual Jamaican concert], all the top dancehall artists – Aidonia, Mavado, Assassin – were wearing Clarks,” Ranx says, chalking the revival up to a broader return to classic fashion in dancehall. “A lot of the major artists aren’t allowed to travel out of Jamaica now. Kartel’s [US] visa has been revoked. So they’ve just got to go downtown to buy some footwear. Before, these guys would go out of the country and come back wearing foreign brands like Gucci.”

Kartel offers a more basic explanation: “I personally have more than 50 pair of Clarks,” he says. “I have more than there are states in America. The concept for the song came when Vanessa Bling saw my Clarks. She said, ‘Every day you in a different Clarks, and a badder Clarks. Weh you get so much Clarks from?’”

Kartel is famed as a canny commercial operator. He already endorses rum and condoms. But he didn’t receive a penny from Clarks for boosting sales of their shoes. Maybe he didn’t need to, though: as the Jamaica Observer has reported, he has a new idea after the success of Clarks. It was inevitable, really: Kartel is to launch his own brand of shoes.

Bling’s the thing

The unlikely brands that seduced the streets

Kangol

How it happened: The Cumbrian hatmaker went from supplying berets for British troops to outfitting hip-hop’s early foot soldiers in the early 80s. British-born Jamaican Slick Rick and his Kangol Crew helped popularise the beret-turned-to-the-side look; in his pre-Hollywood days, LL Cool J rarely appeared without his trademark Kangol bucket hat and its distinctive kangaroo logo.

Signature shout-out: “Stepped out my house stopped short, oh no/ I went back in, I forgot my Kangol” – Slick Rick, La-Di-Da-Di.

In the long term: Although Kangol found itself the height of street fashion, it didn’t help those who worked for the company at its factory on the Cumbrian coast. Over the last few years, the company has been passed from one international owner to another, with just seven jobs remaining at Kangol’s old HQ in Cleator Moor after Bollman Headwear’s latest round of cuts.

Timberland

How it happened: Following the lead of drug dealers who found them ideal for pounding the pavement during cold New York winters, underground rappers adopted these rugged, waterproof boots as their uniform in the early 1990s.

Signature shout-out: “Tims all seasons for ass-kicking reasons” – Smif-N-Wessun, Wrekonize; producer Tim Mosley adopting the name Timbaland in tribute.

In the long term: Fearing association with this unexpected new market might scare its established clientele of wealthy outdoor enthusiasts, Timberland limited availability in urban areas in an effort to discourage fashion-conscious African-American shoppers from buying the shoe for the “wrong reason”.

Cristal

How it happened: Cristal became a key rap accessory after Jay-Z made frequent references to the upper crust-approved French champagne on his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt.

Signature shout-out: “My motto, stack rocks like Colorado/ Auto off the champagne, Cristals by the bottle” – Jay-Z, Can’t Knock the Hustle.

In the long term: Jay-Z himself called for a Cristal boycott after the managing director of parent company Louis Roederer referred to the champagne’s hip-hop fanbase as “unwanted attention” in an interview with the Economist in 2006.

Prada

How it happened: The Italian fashion house, along with Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, was part of a wave of European luxury brands celebrated by rappers and dancehall artists in the noughties.

Signature shout-out: “Getting paid not played, pushing Escalade and rocking Prada” – Buju Banton, Paid Not Played.

In the long term: With dancehall’s international visibility at an all-time high in 2005, Prada returned the favour with a Caribbean-inspired spring collection complete with Rasta-striped knitwear.

It’s an ignominious turn for a career that began with so much promise. It was the release of the Fugees album The Score in 1996 that announced Hill as an audacious new talent. Two years later, she returned with Miseducation, a solo debut steeped in classic soul, with a spine stiffened by hip-hop. Written while Hill was pregnant with her first child with on/off partner Rohan Marley (they now have five children together), the album brilliantly pondered love, heartbreak, spirituality and still-raw wounds from the collapse of her relationship with Wyclef Jean.

Miseducation went straight to the top of the charts in 1998 and, the following February, won five Grammy awards including best album – hip-hop’s first victory in this category. Showcasing her skills as a rapper, singer and songwriter, it should have been the start of a glorious solo career, but soon after Hill had completed promotional duties on the album, it became apparent something was seriously wrong.

2001′s MTV Unplugged 2.0, her sole album release since Miseducation, sketched in some details. Hill performed new songs before a studio audience, accompanied only by her acoustic guitar (she had since parted ways with New Ark, the musicians who helped her record Miseducation; they later sued for songwriting credits, settling out of court for a reported $5m). The songs themselves, many of which were works-in-progress, and some of which were brilliant, were darker than Miseducation’s soulful confections, painfully honest and powerfully cathartic, but lacking the memorable hooks and melodies that had made Miseducation such a success.

More troubling were her rambling, vulnerable between-song “interludes”, where she discussed at length the troubles her new songs represented, including depression, severe discomfort with fame, and a creative perfectionism that, seemingly, has rendered her inactive.

Since Unplugged, Hill embarked on a short-lived reunion with the Fugees, beginning with a 2004 open-air concert filmed in Brooklyn for Dave Chappelle’s Block Party movie, and yielding one poorly received new single – Take It Easy – before the group dissolved again, in even more acrimonious circumstances than before. “At this point I really think it will take an act of God to change [Lauryn],” Pras told Allhiphop.com in 2007, “because she is that far out there.” Friend and former tour-mate Talib Kweli took a more sympathetic line on his track Ms Hill, from 2005 album Right About Now: “The industry was beating her up / Then those demons started eating her up / She need a saviour.”

Her record label, Columbia, claims to have spent millions on sessions for her unfinished, unreleased second solo album, which supposedly features collaborations with soul legend Ronald Isley and similarly troubled and AWOL neo-soul auteur D’Angelo. In this vacuum, New York label Think Differently has released an unofficial compilation of highlights from her decade of inactivity, Khulami Phase, currently available via Amazon.

The gem among these scraps is Lose Myself, cut for the soundtrack to 2007 kids’ cartoon Surf’s Up. It boasts a synth-pop fizz with autobiographical lyrics Hill wrote in the shower, describing her anguish these past years as a trial she’s having to endure to discover true peace and self-love. It’s a powerfully moving track, both bleak and hopeful, suggesting the serenity Hill has been searching for is finally within her reach. But Lose Myself was released three years ago, and still Hill’s sophomore album has yet to materialise. And those rumours about Rock the Bells were, sadly, unsubstantiated.

“How did this thing that I love so much so easily and so quickly turn into something I loathe and hate?” she asked rhetorically, in one lucid moment during her 2001 Unplugged performance. It’s a riddle Hill sorely needs to solve, if she’s ever to graduate from the creative purgatory that’s plagued her since Miseducation.

Mixed Race was recorded in Paris, where Tricky now lives, but was strongly influenced by Jamaica, north Africa and the US, according to a press release. The lead single is Murder Weapon (listen here), a cover of the 1992 reggae hit by Echo Lott.

Besides its success in the reggae and dancehall charts, Lott’s classic was later remixed and embraced by jungle DJs. Under Tricky’s direction, the song retains all of its swagger, undercut with vocals by Franky Riley. Tricky apparently “fell in love” with the song when someone sang it to him at a shop, and he “has been obsessed with it ever since”. As with Black Steel, his 1995 reworking of Public Enemy’s Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, Tricky wanted “to hear how it would sound with a female vocalist”.

The album also sees contributions by reggae acts Hawkman and Terry Lynn, and Hakim Hamadouche, who plays, er, lute. “Every album is a learning experience and this is concentrated music, there’s no dilution,” Tricky said. “I’m comfortable in my own skin now, comfortable with being in the light. I’m not just a kid from Knowle West trying to build a future, I have some experience, I can experiment … and honestly, musically, I can’t be touched.”

In December, Massive Attack’s Daddy G met with Tricky, reportedly mending fences after years of estrangement. “I [asked] Tricky to come on board for this album [Heligoland] and there’s talk about him maybe coming on the next [one],” Daddy G told BBC 6 Music. “Things seem like they’ve healed between us … It’s not that well, but things have changed. Things have softened up.”

Tricky will play a handful of UK festivals this summer. Murder Weapon will be released on 30 August, followed by Mixed Race on 27 September.

London’s leading pirate radio station, renowned for promoting grime, continues to rule the airwaves with an official licence    

It’s been a long time at sea for London’s leading pirate radio station, but yesterday Rinse FM finally docked, in the sheltered cove of an Ofcom community licence. Starting in 1994 as a jungle station, Rinse FM has moved through as many underground dance genres as it has secret east London locations, and now, after 16 years, has been awarded a legal place on the FM dial. In the last decade the station became renowned for its role in the birth of grime and dubstep, forging the talents of Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Roll Deep, Tinchy Stryder, Skream and many others, and helping DJs Logan Sama and Hatcha to get shows on Kiss FM, and Target on BBC 1Xtra. While the announcement yesterday was a genuine surprise, it’s taken a number of years. In 2007 the station’s owner Gordon “Geeneus” Warren shared with FACT magazine the ill-kept secret that Rinse was looking for a legal FM licence, and promised it would not follow Kiss FM’s decline into commercial mediocrity: ”We want to be legal. We don’t want to be legal to play stupid adverts and make loads of money from advertising. We want to be legal to say; look at our scene, look at what we’re doing. We’re a business, we’re not criminals. We’re supplying something that no one else is supplying, and we’re professional.” As yet there is no suggestion there will be changes to Rinse FM’s music policy, and the station’s independent spirit will hopefully be protected by the community licence. The only noticeable difference in the (gulp) mission statement is the “Rinse Academy”, which will offer “formal and informal education and training, as well as broadcast and other media opportunities” starting this summer. That, kids, is how you earn brownie points with Ofcom. While yesterday’s announcement came with glowing pledges of industry support, Rinse FM was not always the sleek vessel it is today. Its folklore is as extensive and entertaining as befits a great cultural institution: a personal highlight being the show where a drunk Wiley spent an hour berating and calling out a rival MC, only for the MC in question to turn up at the studio, mob-handed, while the show was still on air. There is so much that makes Rinse FM special: having to slow-dance around the room with an aerial in search of a better signal, the beguiling patter of the shout-outs, the adverts for raves voiced by MEN WHO MUST HAVE SOME KIND OF HEARING IMPAIRMENT, THE WAY THEY’RE SHOUTING. Best of all is the sheer gusto the DJs have for the music they play, often brand new “dubplates” direct from the producers themselves; tunes that will become the club hits in the weeks, months or even years to come. While Rinse FM thrives on its parochialism, it has also taken advantage of web technology to reach beyond the radius of a towerblock-mounted aerial. When the station’s bid for legal status became serious in 2007, the internet was already exploding pirate radio’s block-party intimacyinternationally. London’s underground scene is now global, and hearing phrases like “big shout out to the Finland crew” on Rinse FM is no longer a surprise. In London or beyond, pirate radio stations continue to inspire a restless creative zeal that defies the authorities’ cat-and-mouse attempts to shut them down. For Steve Bishop, responsible for the recent Rinse: 11 CD as DJ Oneman, the obsession began at school in south London. “We would record our local station and bring the tapes in, spending break and lunch times checking for new tunes and lyrics from the MCs. Pirate radio has had such a big impact on everything I do. It was like having a rave in your bedroom before you were old enough to rave. I’d tape shows religiously. For Christmas, when I was about 13, I got one of those cheap Aiwa ghetto-blasters, no CD player – just a tape deck with a record button and an FM band. That’s all I wanted! A year later I got a pair of decks.” Rinse has long been a “community station”, only now it’s getting legal recognition for it.

***SUNGLASSES PARTY @ CUTLER BAR SHEFFIELD***

GET YOUR FREE SUNGLASSES ON ENTRY

SUNGLASSES PARTY
THURSDAY 29TH JULY 2010
@ CUTLER BAR
32-34 Cambridge Street, (ACROSS FROM JOHN LEWIS)
SHEFFIELD CITY CENTRE. S1 4EP.

*YOUR THURSDAY URBAN EVENT PRE-BAR*

8PM – LATE!!

UK Funky // Old Skool Garage // RnB //Hip Hop// Ragga

2-4-1 OFFERS ON DRINKS

*BUDWEISER*
*HEINEKEN*
*CORONA *
*VK*
*WKD*
*SPIRITS*

AND MANY MANY MORE

SO ROLL OUT YOUR SUMMER WEAR

**BEST DRESSED FEMALE RECEIVES A FREE BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE**

**WHISTLES AND HORNS WILL BE GIVEN AWAY TRU OUT THE NITE**

DJS

SCORPION

MOD
RANDY WATERS

WITH WEEKLY GUESTS