Hard for me to pick a favourite song by Etta James, impossible in fact. Over at The Guardian site Richard Williams (a man forever reliable when it comes to soul) has managed to get it down to ‘her ten finest performances’ (listing a couple that I have never heard but certainly will have before tonight is over) but his list doesn’t include Seven Day Fool, Can’t Shake It, Tell Mama…I could go on. Richard’s tribute is obviously worth a read and you can find that HERE. I’m going to pour myself a beer, put on Can’t Shake It and go look for those tunes that Mr Williams has hipped me to. Rest in peace, Etta. (JB)

by Tim Dee.

The poet Peter Reading died on 17th November. I knew him for nearly twenty years and I loved him. He was a great poet and a great birdman, and consequently among the greatest bird poets though he was better known for other things. I wrote about him in The Guardian, here.

My first proper job at the BBC was as a producer on the Radio 4 arts programme Kaleidoscope (the forerunner of Front Row). In our office in Broadcasting House we kept a card index of contributors. It filled four drawers, I think. The cards were red and about 6” x 4”. This was before computers and before the Data Protection Act. As well as the address and phone number of each contributor the dates were noted of his or her appearance to discuss a book or review a film or read a poem. After each show one of the producer’s jobs was to write a few words next to the date assessing the quality of the performance the contributor had given. Kaleidoscope was mostly live in those days and it was good to know how someone who sounded fluent (in a book or when recorded and de-ummed by a studio manager) might manage when the green light went on and Paul Vaughan dangled a question with only thirty seconds to go before crashing the pips became a real possibility.

I looked up Peter Reading in the index early on in my stay. His poems had been enjoyed though they were gloomy, what he’d said hadn’t added much to his reading apparently, and he was marked as definitely BBL. Best Before Lunch. Quite a few poets were. A BBL didn’t get you banned from the programme but producers would be careful about making the call to book the boozer and if the next appearance went wrong some sterner words would mark the card and no one was likely to call again.

Peter wasn’t a reviewer; he wasn’t the reviewing type. He wouldn’t have missed the call. When I first knew him he’d not long stopped his day job as a weighbridge operator. He appeared on the radio only when he had a new book out and usually just read a poem or two with short and pointed introductions. In the BBC archive now there are plenty of his poems but very little of the writing life chitchat.

I didn’t book him for Kaleidoscope but thought his poems were more than good: he’d written about the mess of life caustically and comically but also about the difference in the hand between a greenish and an arctic warbler. No one had done this and it was wonderful to find a poet so thoroughly alive to both the pleasures and horrors that I knew.

Later, working for Radio 3, I was able to commission a few long poems and sequences from him. I had lunch with him a number of times. It always worked out that we’d finish our recordings in the morning. He’d take an early train from Craven Arms or Shrewsbury to Bristol. Every lunch he taught me a new wine: the whites offered him ‘plasma’ he wrote, and I remember and still always look out for the ferrous and earthy Mas de Gorgonnier from Provence.

One of the Radio 3 commissions marked a shared birthday, the network and the poet both turned fifty in the same year fifteen years ago. The poem, called Three, and in the bag by half past midday, was basically a list of various people who had died since Radio 3 had come on air. Basically a list, but not only that: he used a three-stressed line that gave the poem the rat-a-tat-tat of a snare drum, he sampled and dubbed old radio appearances of his own, he remembered dead poets he’d known, and he quoted Propertius: Sunt aliquid Manes: letum non omnia finit – ghosts do exist, death does not undo all things.

The phrase recurs in others of his poems. I don’t think he believed it but I think he liked getting close to it. Reading through his books since he died another touchstone came brightly from the pages. In Book V of The Odyssey Odysseus (also called Laertides) on his long journey home is shipwrecked and on an unknown island crawls beneath the knotted tangle of a wild and cultivated olive that have grown together (the botanical term is inosculated). Their fallen mixed leaves make a bed and pillow and Odysseus sleeps. In C (1984) – Reading’s masterwork, I think – the story is retold: ‘When I was a boy and read that section…I was deeply and permanently influenced. Since then the idea of such a comfortable and comforting solitary and impregnable bower has been inseparable for me from the concept of profound sweet sleep – and more…Almost every night since that time, except when drunken or erotic diversion has rendered such conceit impracticable I have snuggled into the warm bedlinen metamorphosing it to dry Sabaean insulating leaves, blanding approaching oblivion.’

In Final Demands (1988 – every title of Reading’s seems terminal) the second page of the long poem returns to the incident:

Crapulous death-fright at 3 in the morning, grim fantasizing…
Morphean, painless, idyllic expiry, easeful, Sabaean…
duvet and pillow-case metamorphose to sweet-smelling sered leaves,
thick-fallen under two olive boles grafted, canopied tightly,
such as the storm-wrecked Laertides, life-wracked, sunk in exhausted
snug at the end of Book V…and a phial of bland analgesics
(comforting rattle) and, fumous, a single-vintage Madeira,
buttery caramel fatty, the cobwebbed bottle of Bual
stencilled COLHEITA 1915 in white relief paint runes…

dreamingly crawls and his hands have now raked a litter together,
spacious and deep, for the leafage is lying in plentiful downfall,
lays him to rest in the midst of the leaves and piles them around him,
just as a man might cover a brand with char-blacked ashes,
guarding the seed of the fire for his tribe to use in the future,
so does he deeply immerse in the fall of past generations…

Finally – though there may be other references that my sad re-reading of Reading didn’t find – in Faunal (2002) we find this:
Again the Homeric dream,
Olive and Oleaster,
under which the fallen leaves are scraped
and demise commences.

Peter Reading, born July 27th 1946; died 17th November 2011

Dave Haslam pays tribute to the writer Shelagh Delaney, who passed away on Monday.

At 5.30pm on Monday 21st November Channel 4 News tweeted “Morrissey inspiration Shelagh Delaney, author of A Taste of Honey, has died”, and it’s true that as well as more than a handful of Morrissey’s lyrics coming straight out of Shelagh Delaney’s ‘A Taste of Honey’, he drew deeply from her kitchen-sink sensibilities, and shared her caressing way with words – but Channel 4 were underselling Miss Delaney’s contribution to the modern theatre, and to the creation of our sense of Salford, the North, and England.

When ‘A Taste of Honey’ was staged by the Theatre Workshop in May 1958, it hit the theatre world like a jolt, the shock that an 18 year-old lass born in Salford, part-time usherette, one time clerk in a milk depot, could produce a piece of theatre so funny, dramatic, current, heart-felt and important knocked British theatre off its axis. ‘A Taste of Honey’ is a jewel in the crown of modern British theatre. Tethering her to Morrissey only explains a little of status, her appeal.

“Tether” is a word Shelagh Delaney uses to great effect in a 1960 BBC profile of her by Ken Russell, as she describes the restlessness of the young folk of Salford, particularly her feelings as a young teenager in the mid-1950s, “tethered like a horse”, in a working class world circumscribed and frustrating her urge to break free, to find life.

In 1959 another interviewer, Lawrence Kitchin, met and described her thus; “She is six feet tall, with the poised, rangy figure of a dancer or a Californian tennis player, has hazel eyes and dark hair, worn in a style she cannot classify, though it could be Italian”.

Her spirit shines through in Ken Russell profile, and wisdom far beyond her years. You can sense how ahead of the world Shelagh Delaney was at this point, freaking everyone out with her looks, her sweet voice, her amazing writing, her spirit.

‘A Taste of Honey’ started out as a novel, but Delaney confessed to Lawrence Kitchin that it barely got started and she got distracted from it; “I was too busy enjoying myself, going out dancing. I wasn’t getting very far with the novel and I suddenly realised I could do a play better.”

What triggered her determination to turn the novel into a play was a trip to a theatre in Manchester to see a hit Terrence Rattigan play called ‘Variation on a Theme’. Having sat there squirming in her seat, disappointed by its deadly dullness, she returned home. We know this to be true; that less creative artists might see something successful and want to it rip it off, but it takes a brave and greater soul to see something successful and want to rip it up.

The mainstream was saying nothing to her, so she looked local, setting ‘A Taste of Honey’ in a “comfortless flat” in Salford and telling the story of a teenage daughter and her mother (who’s described as a “semi-whore”), the daughter’s relationship with a homosexual art student and her liaison with a coloured sailor. The first performances by the Theatre Workshop were well received, and the influential critic Kenneth Tynan became one of her champions; “Miss Delaney brings real people to her stage, joking and flaring and suffering and eventually, out of the zest for life she gives them, surviving.”

The local Salford press joined the excitement, tracking her down to her house on Duchy Row in Pendleton and giving her the full local-girl-makes-good treatment. Within weeks, though the ‘Salford City Reporter’ was less enthusiastic; hostile, in fact. A few local people had seen the play, and realised the portrayal of Salford was not what might be called flattering. A front page comment piece attacked her. The people, it turns out, were all too real. The language was a bit ripe. The mother was a whore, the best friend queer and the father of the child was a Negro.

It’s not unusual now to see plays with sympathetic gay or black characters, or unmarried mothers, so maybe we need to be reminded by this kind of evidence just how revolutionary ‘A Taste of Honey’ was; featuring characters and situations no-one had expected on a stage. People bickering and swearing. Scandalous!

Several years later, Delaney wrote a story called ‘The White Bus’ in which she describes an encounter between a young female writer and a Lord Mayor, during a guided tour of his town (which is recognisable Salford). He tells her how unpopular she is in the town, writing about “Unmarried mothers and things and homosexuals – you’ve given us a bad reputation in the eyes of the country”. He tells her to write about “clean decent things”. When he asks if she writes from experience, she replies “All the time”.

She didn’t stay in Salford, and, if truth be told, once disconnected from her roots, she didn’t hit the same artistic heights as she did early in her career, although her screenplays for ‘Charley Bubbles’ and particularly ‘Dance With a Stranger’ were both well delivered.

But ‘A Taste of Honey’ never went away, and, if anything, its influence grew. Tony Warren devised and wrote ‘Coronation Street’ in its wake; set in the same streets and, at its best, glorying in the same colourful cadences of everyday Salford speech. I saw a performance of it a year or so ago, and whilst some of the shock it engendered in 1958 wasn’t there, this just underlined its other, more universal qualities; funny, clever, humane, but with a dark shadow of desperation lurking.

The early burst of publicity that Shelagh Delaney attracted was followed by years avoiding the public eye. My three increasingly desperate written requests to interview her – the first, dating back to 1984 – were never even acknowledged. But I quite like the fact she couldn’t be arsed. I like that the footage we have of her has that freshness about it, that unselfconsciousness, the wisdom, that determination not to be tethered. A free spirit with a wonderful way with words.

Shelagh Delaney, born 25 November 1939; died 20 November 2011

Mick Houghton remembers musician, songwriter, Jackie Leven, who died yesterday:

I was working in the press department at Warner Bros when I first met Jackie, then fronting Doll By Doll. It was sometime in the spring of 1978 and I’d been assigned to them or them to me. Representing Doll by Doll at the meeting were Jackie and guitarist Jo Shaw both of whom were quite obviously tripping wildly. I gave them my usual press spiel, we’ll get the NME blah blah blah, the cover of Sounds blah blah blah, Melody Maker blah blah blah… before asking them if they had any thoughts, to which Jackie responded: “I‘d like to meet a man in a castle.” I sent them off to be interviewed by Robin Denselow, then (as now) writing for The Guardian. As one of the few broadsheets which covered pop music, it was as close to a castle as I could come up with.

Doll By Doll didn’t fit into any recognisable or convenient niche. They were no ordinary group and had an attitude that was genuinely uncompromising. The group’s declared goal was to bring emotions to the surface, to make all your private agonies public. This was reflected in their highly charged but colourful and lyrical music and their ferociously climactic live performances. Doll By Doll took no prisoners, and more than any other group I’ve worked with – before or since – they completely polarised opinions. John Peel positively hated them, Record Mirror loved them. Figure that one out. They were either reviled by people or somehow cast a spell over them.

Where punk bands mildly threatened, Doll By Doll completely intimidated its audience. Punk, in Jackie’s phrase, offered a kind of cartoon violence, what Doll By Doll dished out was more ominous and emotionally cranked up. Their live shows were a fearsome tour de force with Jackie Leven a mesmerising, towering, threatening presence on stage. I first saw them at the tiny Rock Garden in Covent Garden along with the six other people who had turned up. Jackie always transfixed you with a drug-fuelled stare which dared you to leave or look away. Nobody ever moved. The music was stark but melodic, harsh but colourful, hinged round Jackie and Jo’s meshing guitars and building up to a crescendo of shattering white noise and blinding strobe lights on the epic, closing song “Palace Of Love“. Doll by Doll revelled in a dramatic grandeur and their music was always more colourful than the usual Velvet Underground rhythmic chug, and Jackie’s rich vocals (and the group’s harmonies, yes harmonies amidst the furore) were soulful and rousing rather than sneering and shouting.

They were intense both on and off stage. I remember taking Hugh Fielder from Sounds to a gig in Burton On Trent. At one point we were sitting in a fish and chip restaurant to do the interview when Jo stood up, declared “I’m leaving”, and stormed quietly out. Everyone looked at each other in uncertain astonishment. Had he just left the restaurant or left the group? No-one was sure. Another more famous encounter was Doll By Doll’s interview with Nick Kent. It was mid-afternoon on a Friday when I took Nick over to the group’s insidious West London squat, and introduced them before sodding off. I thought no more about it till I had a call from Tony Stewart, then Deputy editor at the NME, sometime on Monday asking if I knew where Nick was? He never made it out of the Doll By Doll house all weekend. The piece got held and we were bumped off the cover by Dennis Brown of all people.

Doll By Doll didn’t exactly have a master plan but they had a purpose and a game plan which cast them as bad boys, as loners among their musical peers. They spurned traditional rock causes like Rock Against Racism or Gay Rights in favour of discussing mental health issues. They performed benefits and donated money to controversial psychiatrist R D Laing’s Philadelphia Association. The flyers they distributed at gigs declared: “You are spending an evening in the company of the most untranquillised band in the land – Doll By Doll – in return for a donation to the Philadelphia Association.”

Their singular outlook was backed up by inflammatory press statements and images that left followers and critics alike convinced that this band, that these people were both individually and collectively fucked up. Their name may have been taken from a poem by e.e. cummings but it was the image of the tortured Antonin Artaud (one of the first victims of E.S.T) which they regularly used on their art work which truly set the tone. Even Doll by Doll’s self-penned mini-biography from 1978 emphasised their alienation and individuality, it’s heading- KEEP DEATH ON THE STAGE. Jackie’s mini-CV read: guitar, vocals – Secondary Modern, Planet Windows, Metal Box, 3 Divorces. 5 months Inside.

My part in Doll By Doll’s career (and their part in mine) didn’t last much beyond their debut album, Remember, although I came to work with Jackie Leven again a decade or so later, the amphetamine gleam in his eye now a more mischievous twinkle. The man himself, a gentler giant; was no less imposing and certainly no less impressive. By now it was 1994 and he released two exquisite and emotionally heart-warming albums in rapid succession, The Argyle Cycle, and The Mystery of Love is Greater than the Mystery of Death. I moved on or he moved on after another gem of an album called Night Lilies in 1998 and thereafter, from something of a distance, it seemed as if Jackie released an album every year without fail, sometimes two, one year he threatened to release four. Whether under his name or the thinly disguised Sir Vincent Lone, as prolific as he was, the quality control never lapsed on Jackie‘s records. Unfortunately, Jackie’s steady stream of releases somehow diminished the level interest in the media. He never made that one defining album or at least one that was recognised as such. He never crossed over into the big league. Let’s face it, artists tend to be celebrated more for intermittent bursts of creativity than Jackie’s remarkable plane of distinction.

Jackie was a lovable rogue, a teller of tall tales, some of which were even true. He once claimed to have met Bob Dylan in a Berlin hotel bar sometime in October 1988, and subsequently travelled with him by train from Berlin to St. Petersburg in Russia. During the journey, Leven claimed he showed Bob some song lyrics he had written, and Bob suggested he set them to the melody of “One Too Many Mornings“, crediting the song (“As We Sailed Into Skibbereen” from The Argyle Cycle) to Jackie Leven and Bob Dylan. I never believed a word of it – that twinkle in his eye was always a giveaway- and was found out, of course, when some spoilsport Dylan fanatic pointed out that Dylan was known to have been in Beverley Hills on the day in question.

That was Jackie all over, a lovely man who’ll be sorely missed by all who were touched by him and his selfless music. He was born three days after me and he used to enjoy winding me up that I was an old man by comparison. Jackie weaved in and out of my life for over thirty years. I never saw enough of him during that time but then you never do, until it’s too late.

Jackie Leven, born June 18th 1950; died 14th November 2011

Will Burns pays tribute to his Grandpa, who passed away last week.

Henry Donne, or Roy as he preferred, was not a famous naturalist or fisherman. He was not a prize winning sports writer, or big game hunter. What he was however, was the single biggest influence on three generations of one family’s pronounced and continual relationship with the natural world; the natural world both as a living, vital thing – seen, felt and perhaps most importantly heard, and also the way in which that experience of nature can be subsequently transmuted in words. Roy Donne was a fisherman, hunter, birdwatcher, gardener, and storyteller. And he was my father’s father; brought up in India in a colonial military family that he left forever to join the Royal Indian Navy during the Second World War.

His childhood in India forged a life-long love affair with rivers and birds particularly, but a respect and yearning for the flora and fauna of the sub-continent in general manifested itself in recollections that litter my own memory of childhood; the particular nature of a tiger’s call, the feeding habits of the leopard (expertly assessed upon the untimely death of an aunt’s dog when he was a boy), the differences between African and Indian elephants and all other manner of forest lore, myths, stories and knowledge that he brought to bear on our many walks in the woods of the Chiltern Hills. No big cats out there in the twilight, but tawny owl calls, the diagnostic flight of jays, mistle thrushes and green woodpeckers (he especially loved the undulating flight of these birds, I think), and homely mnemonics to remember the songs of the chaffinch and the yellowhammer seemed to bring equal pleasure, and became, in my early teens, a profound (and monumentally formative, for me) bond between the two of us.

My brother and I saw first hand a red deer stag he shot in the West Country, hanging in the stable of the farmhouse in which we were staying, and we accompanied him on successful shoots; my brother as an official beater, me mostly with a camera and by then long haired ambivalence toward that particular sport (an ambivalence at least partly shared by the old man, who far preferred the solitary even handedness of a deer stalk to the pseudo machismo, snobbery and “set-up” of so much pheasant shooting). And plenty of big rainbow and brown trout on our ever more occasional fly-fishing trips left us envious of his knowledge, cast and of course, as we saw it, raw good luck.

But it is love and not bloodlust for animals that I will choose to remember him for. Garden birds were treated with as warm a welcome as human guests, wood mice in the garden were fed with apple cores and looked upon with fondness, and I think he took as much enjoyment from looking after the pheasant pens, partridges and other game birds for his shoots, or capturing the beauty of a bird’s plumage, or a butterfly’s colours in his water colours as he did in actually shooting at or catching animals in nets.

I am glad, above all, that the red kites which have almost made a home on the bird tables of our village and that have become such a successful re-introduction story over the past decade or so were able to give the diminishing contact with nature in his last years a touch of both the exotic and the tooth and claw drama that he loved; he never tired of telling me, or latterly his recent great-grandchildren that he had seen a sparrowhawk in the days prior to a visit, even if it had been just a fragmentary glimpse of the bird’s deft, agile flight. And I will also remember the many stories. Stories of fishing and walking trips in India, the Lake District or Scotland and being read to as a boy from Jim Corbett or Gerald Durrell (that arch hunter turned conservationist and the pre-eminent naturalist-storyteller); and stories of the war, and the Navy; and plenty of made up stories, too. He was after all, like all the great storytellers must surely be, first and foremost – a fisherman.

Henry Cecil Roy Donne was born in January 1926 and died on Wednesday 26th, 2011.

Mick Houghton pays tribute to a friend:

Bert Jansch died in the early hours of the morning. I must have said those words a hundred times yesterday. From the moment around 8.30AM when, twice in rapid succession, my office phone rang, followed by the confounded mobile, I knew Bert had died. He’d been battling uncomplainingly with cancer for close on two and a half years and for much of the past two months he had been seriously ill in hospital. Quite selfishly, it was a moment I’d been dreading as I knew I’d have to field calls from journalists about someone who meant so much to me and whose music has been a constant pillar in my life. As a kid trying to wean myself off drip fed pop music, folk music was the first music I discovered for myself. Dylan and Baez may have opened the door to this alien strain of acoustic music, along with Donovan who, of course, paid tribute to Bert in several early songs, but it was hearing a Bert Jansch Peel session sometime in 1966 that pole axed me. It wasn’t particularly his guitar playing, more a mood Bert‘s music conveyed, and the sheer emotional impact of him singing the traditional Scottish love song I Loved A Lass. I was sixteen, what did I know about forlorn love but the song and Bert’s aching performance went straight to the heart.

You’ll read a lot about Bert’s guitar playing and rightly so, but for me he possessed one of the great voices. So many of Bert’s songs have that emotional charge which his distinctively touching voice brings to them – It Don’t Bother Me and Fresh As A Sweet Sunday Morning are but two of Bert’s songs which I love, or forgotten ones like Morning Brings Peace Of Mind. As with his singing, Bert’s song writing was overshadowed by his revelatory guitar playing. For me, Bert was also the first to personalise traditional folk song on recordings of Jack Orion, Bruton Town or Blackwaterside. He brought those ancient songs to life in a way that I could understand. At sixteen, what did I know or care about their origins? It was Bert‘s rendition of the material that moved me. We’ll always have Bert’s music. It was truly life changing for me so to have known the man…wow, such a privilege.

Not that Bert was easy to get to know at least not for me. I was always too shy and just a little star struck around him, certainly when I first met and worked with him in 1996. He’d recorded the When The Circus Comes To Town album for Cooking Vinyl and was playing a three month residency at the tiny 12 Bar club on Denmark Street within walking distance of one of the great folk music haunts, Les Cousins on Greek Street. It was there I‘d fist seen him play as an underage teenager out of place in Cousins‘ seedy, bohemian atmosphere and the all night world of Soho’s beatnik troubadours which Bert has always epitomised for me. Thirty years later, I made my pilgrimage to the 12 Bar every Wednesday night when Bert played, usually with a journalist or two in tow or musicians I then worked with. The great and the good of the Britpop world all turned out to see Bert at the 12 Bar, all mesmerised by his playing and perplexed as to why or how someone like Bert could be playing in such a dive? I remember William Reid being transfixed by Bert’s unassuming dexterity. “He must have a fucking invisible third arm,” William said afterwards. That comment has always stuck with me. Week after week I’d take people upstairs to meet him in what passed for a dressing room though I swear he hadn’t a clue who I was or half the people I introduced him to. He must have thought I was some obsessive stalking fan, and he was right even though I had a pretext to be there.

Happily, I got to know Bert a lot better in the last ten years or so but would still be pinching myself to think I was his PR during that time. Folk music went through another of its revivals in the 90s and Bert rightfully became a revered and respected figure again, name checked by present day musicians queuing up to play with him or enlist him to play with them. Not that Bert paid too much heed to the attention. That‘s not to say he wasn‘t pleased or grateful for the renewed level of interest but Bert was never comfortable with the adulation of others. He’d shrug it off, welcoming the recognition though never seeking it. Bert was simply a natural, he just did what he did and what he had been doing all his life.

It always amazed me how little Bert changed over the years, listening to his music as far back as his classic 1965 Transatlantic debut, looking at those wonderfully iconic photos of him and my memory of first seeing him at Cousins. Forty years on, he was the same a slightly stooped, raggedy-dressed and tousle-haired figure who mumbled as much as I did and, something else I felt we had in common, he never seemed entirely at ease among a crowd of people. Perhaps he was, and that’s just me projecting my own unease, since Bert was always affable, always friendly, up for a quiet chat, and blessed with a wry sense of humour. Needless to say, Bert was always happiest talking about music and when playing guitar. Like so many great musicians, he looked naked without a guitar in hand or resting on his lap.

Early in August, the week before Bert was taken to hospital, he was back playing with the mighty Pentangle at the Royal Festival Hall. As someone who had seen Pentangle’s official debut there in 1967 and aware of his health problems, I probably wasn’t alone in fearing that this would turn out to be Pentangle’s final public appearance. That it was also Bert’s last ever was a tragedy but when he ambled on stage, acknowledging the cheers with a raise of his arm, it was as if time had stood still. As he sat, hunched over the guitar and wrapped up in his own timeless music, in that moment, Bert was probably oblivious to an audience that was completely captivated by the songs, dazzled by his technique and in awe of the man himself.

As a PR and as a writer I abjectly refuse to use the words legend or iconic about anybody. They have been so diminished by unwarrented overuse but in Bert’s case they are perfectly applicable. Bert Jansch was a true legend and I’m so proud to have known him.

Bert Jansch, born 3 November 1943; died 5 October 2011

Co-founder of All Platinum and Sugarhill Records and one half of Mickey & Sylvia.

This portrait of Sylvia Robinson was written by Kevin Pearce in 2006 and originally published in the Fifty Thousand Reasons collection on the Tangents blog.

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Nik Cohn’s written the best pop books ever. I Am The Greatest, Says Johnny Angelo, Awopbopaloobop, Today There Are No Gentlemen, and so on. That’s not news. What did surprise people though was his 2005 book, Triksta, on life and death and New Orleans rap. It was an unexpected treat, and it worked ridiculously well.

There’s a lovely bit in Triksta where Cohn describes hearing the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ for the first time on a cool, bright morning in 1979 – “I thought it was inspired ­ the freshest thing I’d heard in years ­ and started rocking to that ‘Good Times’ beat in front of the Planter’s Peanut shop.” His girlfriend is appalled, and by the end of the day is no longer his girl, but Nik’s got a new love.

Now in many ways the person to blame for all this is Sylvia Robinson. There’s a lot of stories out there about this, but the best one explains how sometime in 1979 at a family birthday party at a Bronx disco Sylvia witnessed the kids rocking to DJs chatting over records, and decided there might be something in this. She put together her own rap group, called them the Sugarhill Gang, put together a label Sugarhill with her husband, got a single called ‘Rapper’s Delight’ recorded, stuck it out on a 12”, and it sold like hot cakes. Rap and hip hop never looked back.

Sylvia Robinson is one of the great pop figures. She would still be one of the great pop figures if the only thing she’d been involved in was the ‘Love Is Strange’ hit for Mickey & Sylvia back in the r’n’r ‘50s. What a song! One of the great moments of cinema history is Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen on the run in Badlands, dancing away to ‘Love Is Strange’. The guitar wheedles and needles, and the singers vamp it up, with Sylvia coolly coquettish. And like Barry Gifford wrote about the film Badlands, “it meanders but it’s meaningful as hell”.

After a string of great pop-light Bo Diddley-esque hits as part of Mickey & Sylvia, we’d next see Sylvia again in the late ‘60s when with her husband Joe Robinson she started the All Platinum group of labels, releasing a fantastic flurry of soul/disco records for years to come. There were hugely successful and highly influential compilations of All Platinum singles, that contained absolute classics like ‘Hypertension’ by Calender, ‘I Dig Your Act’ by the Whatnauts, Brother to Brother’s cover of ‘In The Bottle’, and the phenomenal deep soul of Linda Jones’ ‘Your Precious Love’.
Many of the All Platinum hits were written by Sylvia. Maybe her finest moment as a writer was the contagious ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’ by Shirley & Company (and incidentally Shirley too was an r’n’r survivor being the Shirley of ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ fame). But her closest association was with the close harmony soul group, the Moments, for whom Shirley wrote many gems before their fantastic populist-disco hits like ‘Girls’, ‘Jack In The Box’, and ‘Dolly My Love’. Sylvia herself would score a string of hits with what can best be described in the words of one of these as Soul ‘Je T’Aime’s.

So Sugarhill took off in a way that could not have been expected. Hip hop scholars will no doubt explain how what Sylvia put out initially on Sugarhill was not exactly cutting edge, was indeed shamelessly stolen, and that they did not go about their business in an upright and admirable way, but the fact remains she had the vision to get on and do something. And there’s no disputing the fact that the great Sugarhill releases stand the test of time, and indeed have grown more charming, in the same way the rawest of rockabilly or garage punk records have.

The most famous of the early rap releases are probably those of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and the holy trinity of ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster on the Wheels of Steel’, ‘The Message’, and ‘White Lines’. ‘The Message’ still has the power to shock. As Nik Cohn rightly writes: “For rap, all roads lead back to this. In the course of its three minutes and ten seconds, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, with Melle Mel on the mic, mapped out the hip hop universe. Everything that’s come since can be measured against the vistas it opened up, the promises it implied. More than party music, here was a world. ‘The Message’ was lived, every grimy, suffering bar of it”. This, after all, was what punk was supposed to be.

But Sugarhill was about more than rap, and the early days of hip hop. Sylvia maintained her connections with soul traditions, and the label issued many sides that could have been on All Platinum too. These included recordings by the great soul singer Candi Staton, in one of the several stages of a great career that has broached deep country soul, glorious disco, straight gospel, through her regular reappearances in the charts with the magical ‘You’ve Got The Love’, to her renaissance with Honest Jons in 2006.
Another soul singer who also found her voice at Sugarhill was Angie Stone, then a member of the femme-rap trio Sequence. Sugarhill also provided a temporary home for Washington go-go outfit Trouble Funk, and took advantage of hip hop’s diversion into electro experimentation, courtesy of her son’s involvement in the West Street Mob.

Should anyone be brave enough to look down on the populism of Sugarhill they should be reminded that the label’s house band would continue to send ripples through the most adventurous outreaches of music for years to come. The musicians on many a Sugarhill release included Keith LeBlanc, Doug Wimbush, and Skip McDonald, who would go on to work most importantly with Adrian Sherwood as part of Tackhead, and on many of the On-U Sounds recordings. The three would also play together as the Mafia, backing Mark Stewart on his post-Pop Group recordings.

Mark Stewart still talks excitedly how he was lucky enough to spend time in New York as the ‘70s became the ‘80s, rubbing shoulders with No Wavers like DNA and James Chance and the Contortions, and the hip hop pioneers like the Sugarhill crew and Afrika Bambaataa, and the areas where these cultures collided as captured in the Jean Michel Basquiat film Downtown 81. You could cite Grandmaster Flash’s ungracious but highly effective appropriation of Liquid Liquid’s ‘Cavern’ for the (ahem) phenomenal ‘White Lines’, but that may lead into discussion of the more unpleasant business practices of Sugarhill, and indeed the legal dispute over the use of the ‘Cavern’ rhythm led to the demise of the great New York underground 99 label.

There at the end of Downtown 81 there is ‘Beat Bop’ by Rammelzee vs K Rob, a taste of the future, described in the liner notes to the Depth Charge compilation Beat Classic by David Toop as a “unique immersion into a cyberian echozone of 808 beatbox, latin percussion, slow funk bass and guitar, soaring droning violin and Rammelzee’s streaming unconscious word cutting, swooping in and out of reverb, in and out of perfect nonsense and street reality”. Within a short space of time Sugarhill was overtaken in the hip hop stakes, and Sylvia decided the fun was gone. But the echoes resonate still.

Sylvia Robinson, March 6, 1936 – September 29, 2011

Kevin Pearce’s writing can be found at Your Heart Out

Remembered by Bob Stanley

When I moved to London in 1986 I thought I’d get in touch with my favourite music writer, Tom Hibbert. He was responsible for a book I loved called Rare Records: Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures, and had edited another called The Perfect Collection. His writing was offhand, intensely knowledgable, iconoclastic, conversational and very funny. He had no time for “the canon”, but plenty for the Monkees’ Porpoise Song. I liked the Porpoise Song too; I thought he might want to be my mate. So I wrote to him at Smash Hits (or “ver Hits” as he had re-styled it pretty much single-handedly) and asked if he wanted to go out for a pint. He wrote back, said yes, and very soon we found ourselves in a pub in Hammersmith on a Friday night.

What the hell was I thinking? Bare faced cheek! I was 21, looked about 12, and had the arrogance to think my hero would go out for a drink with a total stranger just because we had a shared “affection” for Annette Funicello? More to the point, what was HE thinking?

Rare Records had a major impact on my taste in music (and on my writing style when I eventually had the confidence to start a fanzine). I’d never read anything quite like it. In the introduction Tom seemed intent on alienating potential purchasers by saying “The Beatles, Elvis and Rolling Stones are largely ignored in favour of a lot of terrible old singing buffoons and groups in which no-one with any sense has the slightest interest.” Sharon Tandy’s Hold On – with which 99% of readers must have been unfamiliar in 1982 – was described as “a work of unparalleled genius.” I found a copy; it really was. But I searched in vain for the Virgin Sleep’s Halliford House on Deram, which Tom described as “eerie to the point of nightmarishness.” He gave equal praise to Mae West, Dick Dale and Adam Faith, and nailed his aesthetic when describing Bubblegum as being “based on the correct assumption that all pop music is stupid.”

Here was a writer who could use the expression “Phew, eh readers?” and get away with it! (Even Smash Hits, at this point, was bone dry). Here was a writer with a sense of humour, someone who wasn’t afraid to laugh at his own tastes and laugh harder at other people’s. Apparently, when he was commissioned to write a book on Billy Joel, he wrote most of it about his psych band, The Hassles, and dismissed the rest of his career in the final chapter.*

Tom was never afraid to carry a torch for distaff pop, which was barely taken seriously by the press back then unless it had ‘agit’ tendencies. He devoted a whole chapter of Rare Records to girls, singling out the then thoroughly undocumented Billie Davis: “I fell in love with her beautifully controlled, shivery voice before I even noticed Annette”. At Smash Hits he went “a bit squibbly” for Sheila E, and once described Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s dj Spinderella as “rather handsome”.

If this was all gently subversive, Tom went out on a political limb with a shortlived Smash Hits column on “fascinating facts about McDonalds” – “facts” such as they played the sound of a human heartbeat, slightly sped up, behind the muzak so that customers ate their fast food faster. Or that they once offered to buy an elephant for a zoo as long as they called the elephant “Ronald McDonald”. It ran for about three issues – presumably the lawyers “nipped” it in the “bud”.

After our evening in the Hammersmith pub, me and Tom went back to his place to watch Cheers, a Friday night ritual for him and his wife Allyce. Looking back, this was extraordinarily generous of them. With Tom’s helping hand I soon “sashayed” through the doors of Smash Hits, and I was on my way to journalistic “fame” and, err, fortune. As I arrived, though, he was off – to Q, which was too serious and canonical for me, and I lost touch with his writing and with him.

A while later I heard he had chronic writer’s block, which was incredibly sad news. His impact on the pop lexicon remains underrated. While Paul Morley’s iconoclastic interviews (compiled in Ask, soon to be re-printed) are justly famous, Tom’s nicknames for uppity rock stars – Dame David Bowie, Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft, Lord Frederick Lucan of Mercury – were just as bubble-bursting, and a lot funnier to boot.

Goodbye, dear “cove”.

* I’m surprised to see that Billy Joel: An Illustrated Biography did get published, but I’d rather not read it in case this story isn’t true.

Jerry Leiber, 1933 – 2011

Bob Stanley pays tribute:

The Abbey Road medley is often cited as the perfect career closer: “And in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take” sums up the warmth, generosity and unbroken circle of the Beatles’ story. Mind you, a pair of furrow-browed, smirking, razor-sharp writers called Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller might have raised an eyebrow at the notion – “Yeah, yeah” they’d sneer, proving there is such a thing as a double positive: “So you haven’t you heard Is That All There Is?”

Leiber and Stoller wrote songs that were as indebted to Vaudeville as they were to their beloved R&B, and in the process they created a catalogue that nailed the recklessness, teendom and irreverent giddy joy of classic Rock’n'Roll. They were born just six weeks apart in 1933, grew up on the east coast, and finally met in 1950 when both their families relocated almost simultaneously to LA. It was fate. They were soulmates, they clicked, and began writing songs together immediately. But they were quite different people. While Mike Stoller was a beatnik, very laid back, with a penchant for classical music (the strings on the Drifters’ game-changing There Goes My Baby were his idea), Jerry Leiber was a motormouth. He wasn’t interested in any music that you couldn’t dance to. He had wild red hair and, like David Bowie, he had one brown eye and one blue: his passport listed his eye colour as “assorted”.

Doing deliveries for his mum’s grocery store in Baltimore, he had come across blues and boogie woogie on black customers’ radios, “music I never heard anywhere else”. In LA he developed a taste for “jazz and pigs’ feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean.” He and Mike “used to argue which one of us was the blackest.” Who won the arguments? “*We* did!” They would write five songs a day and, by the time Big Mama Thornton cut their Hound Dog in 1952, had their schtick down pat. Nothing was taken too seriously; their songs were skits – Love Potion No.9, Yakety Yak, Smokey Joe’s Cafe – that were smart and funny and snorted at sentimentality. They were a blast.

Leiber/Stoller were maybe the first names I noticed cropping up over and over in brackets under the titles of songs I loved, on Elvis’s 40 Greatest and The Very Best Of The Drifters. They started the Brill Building pop machine almost singlehandedly, moving there in 1958 when it was still the province of Irving Berlin and pre-rock publishers. They became godfathers of the scene, the hugest inspiration to Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, and especially Greenwich and Barry. As a team Laura Barton compared them in the Guardian to Morecambe and Wise, but I see them more like Statler and Waldorf, cynical birds bouncing one-liners off each other who would sniff at ‘pop’ acts one minute, then be drawn in and end up writing a classic for them: this is how they ended writing such unlikely but great songs as Tommy Roe’s The Gunfighter and Jackson for Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood.

Elvis was the ultimate case in point. Once Hound Dog had made them rich Jerry and Mike were asked to write something new for him. They didn’t like what he’d done to Hound Dog, thought it too fast and nervy sounding, so they came up with the (in their eyes) mewling, sarcastic Love Me. Of course, Elvis turned it into a sensual classic – listen to what he does with “I would beg and steal, just to feel, your heart beating close to mine” – that Leiber and Stoller had never thought possible. After that, with new-found respect, they gave him the valley-deep Don’t and large chunks of the King Creole and Jailhouse Rock soundtracks: Leiber/Stoller/Presley, the perfect R&R combination. Unsurprisingly, they stand up as Elvis’s best movies.

They knew how to make records, but never quite worked out how to sell them. Hooking up with inveterate gambler but proven record company stalwart George Goldner in 1964, they formed Red Bird records and its more soulful subsidiary Blue Cat. Straight away they scored a number one with the Dixie Cups’ Chapel Of Love: “I hated the fucking record!” sulked Jerry. Red Bird put out a higher percentage of mindsnappers than maybe any label before or since, but Jerry Leiber stayed in the back room most of the time. Once in a while he chipped in with a floorfiller like the Shangri La’s’ Bull Dog. When Red Bird folded, under the weight of Goldner’s personal debts in 1966, Leiber and Stoller pretty much bowed out of pop. They loved Rock’n'Roll, pure and dirty and true, and they weren’t built for the solemnity of the psychedelic era. When Peggy Lee cut Is That All There Is in 1969, it was the perfect curtain to fall on their career: death, destruction, busted
marriages… so what?! It won them a Grammy. It’s also the perfect funeral song.

Leiber and Stoller were inseparable – they wrote together, produced together, even had three marriages each. And apparently they were writing a biography together – I can’t think of another joint autobiography that isn’t by a married couple. Let’s hope Mike Stoller can finish it on his own.

The list of their achievements could (and hopefully will) fill a book, but just for starters… Stand By Me, King Creole, I Who Have Nothing, Searchin’, There Goes My Baby, Poison Ivy, Lucky Lips, Where’s The Girl, Some Other Guy, Drip Drop, Spanish Harlem, Bossa Nova Baby, Kansas City, Trouble, Tricky Dicky… I feel a party coming on. It’s the best way to pay tribute to Jerry Leiber.

He’s gone, but don’t be a blue cat.

Let’s break out the booze, let’s keep on dancing.

A tribute by Chris Roberts.

Long, long ago, before the words “darling” and “baby” became passé and infra dig, they were swoon-inducingly effective, within and without pop music. They were giddying, disarmingly romantic, and rarely more so than in the works of Nickolas Ashford, who died this week, and his wife Valerie Simpson. Among the songs they wrote for Motown were “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (sampled by Amy Winehouse on “Tears Dry On Their Own”), “You’re All I Need To Get By”, “Reach Out And Touch”, “Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing”, “Didn’t You Know You’d Have To Cry Sometime?” and – for Heaven’s sake – “Some Things You Never Get Used To”. They also later wrote “I’m Every Woman” for Chaka Khan and “Solid” for themselves. Ashford arranged, produced (“I’m Gonna Make You Love Me”, for example) and could sing a bit too.
These are all fantastic songs: “Some Things You Never Get Used To” on its own is better than anything revered white icons like Dylan and Wilson have managed in their over-celebrated, coddled careers, in terms of both emotional heft and structural genius. If you’re reading Ashford obituaries you’ll have by now digested the stuff about how he was born in South Carolina in 1944 and met Valerie in their Baptist church choir. They had a stab at being a duo, then wrote “California Soul” for The Fifth Dimension and “Let’s Get Stoned” for Ray Charles before Berry Gordy snapped them up for Motown in 1966. They then wrote 99% of the Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell songs. (Marvin Gaye went on record as saying Valerie sang most of Tammi’s vocals on the last album, as Tammi was fighting an ultimately fatal brain tumour, and if the album at least came out it’d help pay her medical bills. Simpson has denied this, though no with no real vigour). They wrote for Gladys Knight, The Marvelettes, Teddy Pendergrass, even Smokey Robinson.
Yet it was Diana Ross’ three early Seventies solo albums on which the Ashford-Simpson team transcended to a level higher than perfection. I say “higher than”, because mere “perfection” would be admirable but flat; worthy of applause but not passion.
In this period, as well as nominally bigger hits, they wrote “Remember Me” and “Surrender”, two of the most yearning, heartfelt and erotic pop songs in the medium’s history. As an iddy-biddy boy I would be as gripped with wonder at these constructions as I was by Bowie’s shock-headed alien or Bolan’s guitar moves. Before I owned any pop records, my friend’s big sister owned Best Of Bee Gees, Best Of The Four Tops and these Diana Ross albums. We’d play them all over and over, first because they were pop records (pop records! exciting!) and secondly because they were great. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” was epic, of course, but somehow too anthemic, too broad, too much everybody’s, to be the favourite. “Remember Me” and “Surrender” bore the smell and sweat of real, messy love, lust and abandon, all lips and tangled hair, presented behind glass, beneath a cunningly-designed sheen of shape and form and balance and poise.
Diana, all crucixion-pose diva-posture, glammy frocks and cross-racial-demographic-smiles, never shrieked or screamed or testified like an Aretha – she couldn’t – but those who criticise her vocals are idiots. Every word and line on these songs is placed with a new definition of grace. With every breath she takes, a butterfly is pinned. You’d think these two songs would be easy enough to cover: they aren’t.
Remember: Ashford and Simpson had been chosen for the plum job by Berry Gordy. Much depended on it. Diana, his inamorata, sans Supremes, had to work as a solo star if the plan to transition into movies (and to establish the uprooted Motown label in LA) was to pan out. Not only did the pair create outstanding songs, they created outstanding songs for her.
“Surrender” is unbelievably suspenseful and foreplay-flushed, piano stabs and drum guiding the voice through lyrics of insight and grandiosity, before exploding, cascading, into a chorus that goes up like a rocket and comes down like a brilliant sunset. The lyrics are stagey, cheeky, well aware they’re over the top but deploying a slow-burning fuse that keeps them, like our response, teetering dramatically right on the edge rather than tumbling over it. “Don’t you know that I’m taking my case to the highest court of love/ And these are some of the charges you’ve been found guilty of/ You’ve used me and abused me till I felt like I wanted to die/ You’ve created a need in me that only you can satisfy…”
And all through the last few words, seconds, of that, our senses are tingling with the magic of anticipation, preparing for that oh-hell-yeah BANG of the chorus and its exhortations, pleas, demands, commands to surrender. The song is both desperate and hopeful; it’s coolly smart yet doggedly insistent. It’s a seduction. (It doesn’t do any harm that Diana’s ad libs of “uh-huh, right now” and “give it to me!” in the tantalising mid-section are millisecond-precise and of a restrained conviction that a “better” singer would over-cook.)
Come along peacefully.
“Remember Me” – which features a stellar strings solo – is a lost-love lyric of nobility, honour and self-sacrificing heroism like they just don’t write any more because a younger generation wouldn’t be able to grasp such concepts. The first person narrator acknowledges that love didn’t last but is big enough to wish the ex-lover well, asking only that they “remember me” as “a good thing”, “a big balloon at a carnival that ended too soon”. It adds, “You’re gonna make it”, as only the still-enamoured but truly supportive can. For the greater good. The use of “I have no regrets” is knowing, shrewd, ideal for those of us who don’t want our Piaf-histrionics hurled in our face but would rather be enticed, allured, bewitched.
The genius Ashford and his gifted wife had a rewarding, rewarded career. It’s not like we’re talking here about some sadly unsung talents who ended up broke in a dive bar telling their neighbours they used to write pop songs back in the day. One imagines they had terrific fun all their lives, alchemising the minutiae of theirs and others’ relationships into timeless spun gold. They were, after all, solid as rock. But Ashford, and therefore the Ashford and Simpson dream team, are no more, and the world has lost songwriters with a portfolio as exultant and moving as any.
To at least two generations, the first of which, incredible though it now seems, was still learning that black people could write, Nick Ashford was a major force in conveying that music could sound and feel like the sensuous thrill of love chased, won, lost, regained. He may or may not have been dismayed by the predominance of bludgeoning, force-fuelled, sonic quasi-rape that engaged much of a subsequent generation, I don’t know. His best songs remain persuasive, interested, sincere, sexy because they’re real. If you think lyrics like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” aren’t real, you’ve never known desire. For some of us the words “darling” and “baby” still reach out and resonate because, among other things, for a moment it’s like you’re living in an Ashford and Simpson song. Some things you never get used to, so they last forever. A breath of Spring. A good thing.