GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

It was 1983  I think when I first came to Victoria Park, the East London Greenspace named after  That Old Queen. That Saturday afternoon I swam with friends in a large,  beautiful municipal swimming pool built back in Vic’s day .

I’d happened upon the pool with some friends and we couldn’t believe our luck. Entry was cheap as chips, the place was empty.

This was Saturday on a hot summer’s day in the middle of the Club Wham Tropicana Era. This was how  the east end was back then, gals all clad in ultra short minis, guys dressed up like divvies, many of the white uns affecting an orange ochre shade - the streets being full of disco pubs and tanning salons.

You could say that that was the time that Britain was under the jackboot of Thatcher, masochistically forgetting what was good and right. Maggie and the herald of free enterprise stealing from the people buddies knew what the people wanted. Fridges, microwave meals, a chanced to feed at the fatcat trough.

So the electorate, under the guise of getting what they wanted, lay back and allowed the government to tear up and do away with the things they needed.

When we came out of the pool the  old guy  manning the pool gate told us that was it - the last day the pool would be used.

We were flabbergasted but, sure enough, on Monday the bulldozers moved in and, by the days end, that old beautiful pool was gone.

But the will to experience and create beauty is innate  - and in recent years the space where the pool once was has become the location for the friendly vibey 2 day summer fest called Lovebox.

Ive seen tiny miracles there from Jimmy Cliff to the Bees, to Geno Washington laying it down, making his fiery 60s soul real again for a tent full of sweaty all ages groovers.

But, had you told me that it would be in Victoria park  near that pool that I’d finally get to see Sly Stone, or that I would be seeing Sly Sylvester Stewart Stone anywhere, ever …Id have to have said – you must be shitting me.

And – not just Sly. Round about 9 pm on 21/07/07 it was the indubitably righteous, musically magnificent totally exalted, mixed but mainly black, extensive band The Family Stone, the collective that spread out like a many tentacled beast from the stage of Woodstock and the studios of California into a possibility of a new America – A new fucking world mate - that took the stage.

I admit that – foolishly, because what do cynical, come and show me what you got critical ponces REALLY know? –I was worried about the show on the strength of a report from those who had read a review of the start of the comeback tour of the century in Perugia Italy earlier this month.**

 Headlined I Wanna Take You Lower the review was a depressing and all too predictable account of a washed up musician and a make do band.

And it was certainly NUFFIN’ like the show that graced Victoria Park and the space where the pool used to be and banished all the crimes and the sickness and the waste that has gone before.

The old Draconian jackboot was still in place though. People had been held up at the gate earlier in the day, ticket holding folk, prevented from getting in to see the music they paid for.

You can see whats going on in Britain now,20 years after a right wing government changed into one that was , momentarily, disgusised as a left of centre one. Its swinging so far tgo the right again its like being in the Reich.

WE burn thousands of innocents in the Middler East, we live in fear of bombs from the desperate ansd insane and there’s things like the  the constant and ludicrous war on drugs, the anti skunk propoganda, pedalled by  allcomers and  the lets put Pete Doherty in a cage and use him as pin cushion voodoo doll mentality – sheee-it!

So its no surprise that Sly’s show would be the focus for a heavily enforced zero drug policy. Sly’s great - and never ever fully appreciated enough - contribution to the raising of the collective human consciousness has been downplayed in favour of prurient interest in what drugs the guy is taking or has taken.

Reviewers like the guy in The Observer, and no doubt when I been “doing my job”, me,  every sad sick fuck, in fact,  who works in an industry over obsessed with the medicine behind the magic – we’ve allowed the great pool of life to be contaminated by these concerns.

But a little of how important this music is was rammed home on the way in. The only doing their jobs Boys n Gals in Flurorescent jackets, their vans all around, the guy beside me, eyeing me up like the Narc of legend while the security guy goes through bags  one intones loudly into the mic “this is a drugs bust”.

If someone was carrying - or stoned – Sly’s well seasoned paranoid anthem Somebody’s Watching might have sprung to mind.

 But shit on all that.

Shit on the rain and the corporate presences and all the gimmicks and all that and ….DANCE TO THE MUSIC!!

Listen to those horns soar, the feelnomenal  12 string bass, look at those beautiful women and that guy with the dreads onstage  singing and you fall in love all over  again as you realise that THIS was Sly and The Family Stone’s 60s revolution was all about.

Not a cult of an individual, not about the drugs, not about all that superstar hooey -  but a powerful conjoining of cultures  OF A WHOLE COMMUNITY.

The names may have changed but these were - and are - the hottest musicians imaginable playing music that they loved, deeply appreciative of the legacy ( a legacy not aired out in a live context for over 30 fucking years)…

Certainly some things were the same as the show the Observer critic saw. Sly only came onstage for a short time, Sly looked different to the way he did 30 years, the band members were different and…. no shit Sherlock?

And you – were you onstage at all?

 Have you invented a whole style of music, has your prose come within a fucking light year of lifting the collective spirit to the places Sly and Family did ?

And , furthermore, are you hanging out with the people you did over 30 years ago, and looking the same? Oh yeah and have you in the years in between experienced the ravages of a musician life, the death dealing war on Black American Poet God Princes, COINTERPOL, seen an industry you helped create turn into a fashion obsessed corporate feeding trough?

And have your articles inspired a whole new generation of musicians to dare to go to the places where the fuckers who keep us down (rather than let us get down) don’t want us to go?

Oh yeah and, recently,  have you fallen off a cliff before writing your review ?

LOOK!! LISTEN!! Its Sly and The Family Stone - for fuck sake. Those beautiful women singing Everyday People, an absolutely top whack band  making those great avant garde right on the money and deep in the pocket pop tunes live and breathe and fire again?

Good THIS is beautiful I am bathing in a place beyond that old pool tghats just a memory - long BEFORE Sly ever walks on stage.

This is so real and good and it makes up for the pool not being there. And thankfully the  miracle of music across time and space is there to be witnessed in the little kid –can’t be more n 7 0r 8 - on his dad’s shoulders in front of me.

The kid is fucking having it, dancing like a loose goose head jutting, arms out, totally in there with Dance To The Music.

The kids joining in on the great big “Gulders” too, the wordless vocalising that grows out of the phenomenal funk, making real the urge to raise our voices to the sky and praise the miracle of the king and his clan returned.

And when Sly does  appear the similarity isn’t  with some old sad washed out hasbeen - its with a giant of American music.

Late period Miles came to mind - that lovely slurred, sinewy snakey  voice was right in there, the sly slouch of the body of course, the whole persona that engaged and sidled his way in like a golden worm going into the pop brain, was miraculously intact. And the great band where right there, curled in round him.

 The chemistry changed subtly, brilliantly when he appeared, the way it always does among a group of crack players when a great musician, a legendary forcefield (James Brown, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison) enters their orbit.

Sly wasn’t just there – as so many bands are these days – to be witnessed he was there, as his best music always has been, as a motivating force, extolling and getting our participation.

Come to bless us, to say a little thanks , perhaps, to the people, the people who have, through their dancing and listening, through their we will not judge you, you giant, you bigger beautiful part of ourselves, attitude.

I mean that little kid on his dad shoulders he aint never going to get to swim in that ole Viccy Park pool. But what did he need to know of  what was past, what was gone?

And what did he need to know of what Sly had smoked or fucked or injected or snorted?

What did he need to  know of the Sly myth as he was right there with us in the ever living now -  feeling the miraculous thriving surviving beauty of the Sly and The Family Stone REALITY.

Honestly if this aint something to get down and give thanks for - I don’t know what is.

So, on your knees please. Stop pedalling corporate cack and critical canards because - as the great Liverpudlian minstrel Dean Johnson put it earlier in the week when he graced London with his natural born to be on stage greatness…kneeling down IS better than bending over.

Thank you Mister Stewart, thank you Mister Johnson!

 

1 Otherwise you are left with the smarm buckets of the agressively sectarian BPI to confer status and privilege in their annual wing ding. Y’know - the one that rhymes with Shits.

Not inappropriately the new Martin Simpson album is called Prodigal Son.
Simpson, 54, made his first album, the also appropriately named Golden Vanity, in 1976.
1976 was the key year in ukpunk, an era which the late Ian McDonald says augured a weakenening of the skills base of British music.
Of course the inherent musicality and curiosity of performers as disparate as Mick Jones and John Lydon could not allow the year zero Stalinisms of punk to preside.
But   McDonald does capture an attitude  prevalent at the time, and in subsequent eras, that learning, the pursuit of excellence, technique were all in excess to getting up there and doing it.
Simpson isnt all learning - there’s oodles of tender and sharp feeling too.
Prescience, even - in the choice of Randy Newman’s greatest deepest water song, Louisiana 1927 on his new album, rewritten to take account of Katrina, but recorded prior too the advent of recent North East English floods (Welcome to Hull - shat on by two Jags and rained on by God) its resonance is unmistakable.
Music over time, music over water, music as healin’ magic.
Louisiana 1927 is played with the same thrumming accuracy and pellucid splendour Simpson exacts elsewhere on Trad arrangements The Granemore Hare and Andrew Lammie.
He plays possibly the greatest ever version of Little Musgrave too.
Instead of going on TV to complain about minstrels giving their music away wouldn’t the business be better off highlighting stuff like this?
Just a thought.
Im sure there’s a moral attached to the Prodigal Son story in the bible (maybe in the Quoran and Kabbbalah and Scientology and Torah too) to tag on here.. but I cant remember what it is.

,

Just a quick note with details on the programme to which you kindly contributed an interview.

The programme is called Year Zero and is being broadcast on Saturday morning, July 21st, 11′03-12′00 on Radio Ulster.

There is also a website to accompany the programme (active as from the end of this week).

It’s at bbc.co.uk/radioulster/yearzero and people are encouraged to contribute a few thoughts, photos from the period, etc.

Thanks again for taking part. I’ll be sending you a CD of the programme asap.

A lot of what is done in music and why music happens - is to do with Family. That could mean escaping the one you are landed with to create or discover a new one with your friends and associates or, even better, it can mean extending the one you are part of - making it bigger and stronger. Family, the Leicester band fronted by blues soul shouter Roger Chapman (right up there with such homebred white boy soul singing contemporaries as Van Morrison, Eric Burdon and Joe Cocker), were one of my favourites back in the mid 70s. I have been playing them a lot recently (though the compilation I have doesn’t include Weaver’s Answer something that needs rectifying). But Family’s masterful hit tune, My Friend The Sun, played loud on the internal ipod (the one in the DNA) when the sun split the skies over a Dartmoor Tor on July 8th – the morning after the 070707 party hosted by Geoff and Graham and Robin the night before. That sunrise, those moors, the mists crawling over them it, a vision of wonder highlighted what a special world there is out there in Devon heaven. And it put a cap on a really wonderful day and night of music . At a secret Devon location invited revellers were given a glimpse of the magic at the heart of the county. Geoff is my pal Lakeman, a squeeze box playing journalist who is father of Sam, Seth and Sean, father in law of Cara Dillon and pals with such astonishing local – and on the bill – talent as flatpicking guitar genius Chris Newman and his harp playing genius partner Maire Ni Chathasaigh (herself the spawn of a celebrated West Cork musical family) There were special guests – including a terrific end of the night, mayhem inducing, tribute band the Rolling Stoned (THE tribute band, with Mick , Brian and Keef but no Ronnie and, very cleverly, Ian Stewart on piano), Mark from The Levellers, the dangerously heady local brew Jail Ale, a ram and a pig roast (with Fish chips and ice cream for afters). What a party … and what music. Mister Newman clean blew my head off with his pace and mastery and performance. A real player’s player and the guitar just a year old from India, specially made for him. In the queue for the chip van Chris explained how , when it arrived, he let it sit, unplayed, for 6 months “the wood is still alive, growing.” Magic! And the harp always soars in expert hands like Maire’s and .Cara, as Geoff correctly pointed out, is an angelic voice wonder and then Geoff’s pal and party host Graham Lobb’s daughter turned in a fantastic vocal performance no one even seemed to know she was capable of. Legendary Britfolk guitarist Nic Jones, unable to play now but still a music fan who, not surprisingly, is moving to Geoff’s village, was truly smitten. And then Seth’s band, musically directed by Sean, better than ever. One of the greatest rhythm sections anywhere and a real link to a primal throbbing rock n rolling Buddy Holly Everly Bros source pool going on in the guitar exchanges. The new album – done and dusted already – will be HAWT! Early in the afternoon Geoff’s trio had played 20s and 30s jazz of the Cole Porter variety. The way Geoff regards the outfit as a bit of fun, kind of sinking into the shadows while his sons take the heat, is fair enough but the immensity of his musical soul came later, long after the revellers had gone and Sean and Seth had packed up to go to play a festival in Oxford. Geoff was in the round with a collection of session players, an impressive Sandeman hat on his head, the various autoharpists and Goddknowswhatists round about came to a lull and… with the beer and the cheer all a sloshing from side to side something was eased out of the box and from his mouth came this bellowing yawl coaxed forth on the wings of the squeeze box, a full ballad (was it Jim Jones, Botany Bay?the Jail Ale, I fear, had taken away certain journalistic principles) ensued. Tghere was hardly anyone there so how do you quantify compare or eulogise over a performance like that. It just was what it transcendentally was. The ever living past in the ever present now. I could see what Sean meant sometime ago when told me that for him and his brother the important thing was to stay as true to music and themselves and their spirit as their father had. In musical life the genetic circle remaining unbroken produces many powerful moments - Noel G singing for his mammy on Live Forever. Jimi Hendrix dancing mother, dead shortly after his birth, but from picture evidence alone the evident source of his cosmic fire. John Lennon’s ukelele playing mother, the loss of whom must have been assuaged by the discovery of Paul McCartney’s music mad dad (who had piped the radio right into his son’s bedroom) and so on and on. Family - there’s no getting away from it, its what music is all about whether it be the B Boys getting down with their posse or Roger Chapman’s dulcet tones declaring… “I know that you’re lonely come in from the cold….” And let’s just leave Marvin Gaye and his old man out of this, OK?

Could someone tell me, please, I need some help here, how a pop star, appearing at a Save the Ozone live Earth Planet, who takes, wait for it , because the people who used to enjoy a “wee drink ” there would like to know, a fucking helicopter, out of Crawfordsburn beach, into Belfast to strum a tune (a few miles by fut r car or train) Is doing his bit to help the planet ? Im sure there is an answer. But Im soooo stoopid I dont know what it is! So an answer please..it would be nice.!

This is immense, fuck Neil Young and that pissant multimedia young generation on ice Greendale crap.