20. The Semi Colon – Nekwaha Semi Colon

/ Onye nzuki, EMI Nigeria, 1973

A while back, in the days before it was possible to download my way to knowledge, I did something I would not normally countenance, and bought a couple of Rough Guide CDs in an attempt to get to grips with the music of Africa.  Aside from the obvious routes in via the groups most frequently played by John Peel and Andy Kershaw back in the day – Bhundu Boys, Four Brothers – I was at a loss as to where to start my exploration of that vast continent’s sounds.  And so I found myself before the African music compilations in one of the chain stores on Oxford Street.

Rough Guide’s ‘world music’ series tends to cover a range of styles and are not limited to the golden periods of any particular country, which is a good thing or bad depending on your point of view.  I can never quite escape the feeling that this might be like listening to an equivalent guide for Scotland and discovering – with the recent BBC4 documentary Caledonia Dreamin’ in mind – that it contains not only the music of Orange Juice, Teenage Fanclub and Belle and Sebastian but also Hue and Cry, Deacon Blue and Wet Wet Wet.  But ears can’t be deceived – they like what they like, and when a Brazilian compilation goes soft and diva-ish and the sheen of a modern production replaces the fresh acoustics of that artiste’s earlier recordings, I skip to the next track.

To give the Rough Guides their due, Congolese soukous contains Kanda Bongo Man’s ‘Saϊ’, which has a glorious guitar sound at least as humdinging as your favourite indie picker’s and singing to match, and kicks off courtesy of ‘Cooperation’ by Franco and Sam Mangwana with ten plus minutes of equally glorious guitar, brass and deadly deep subs.  Nigeria and Ghana offers the skittering rhythms and choral harmonies of King Sunny Ade’s ‘Maa jo’, Sir Victor Uwaifo (more of whom later) and recent directions in music from Fela Kuti’s drummer Tony Allen in the stretched and lunar form of ‘Asiko’, which you could seamlessly segue into ‘Bug in the bassbin’ by Innerzone Orchestra (Carl Craig) or any one of its remixes.

I remain very much a novice on the subject of African music.  But anyone wanting to undertake their own investigations could do no better than start with Nigeria special: modern highlife, Afro-sounds & Nigerian blues 1970-6 (Soundway) , where the unfamiliar bends until it is familiar, and the familiar – calypso, A love supreme, the organ of Jackie Mittoo, Scratch playing the studio, the scratchy funk of Sly & The Family Stone, the foot-stompin’ disco of Hamilton Bohannon, even motorik Neu! – is charged with the celebratory energy of a West African perspective, built on the foundation of the brassy big band highlife style of the sixties.  With the ante subsequently upped by the emergence of Fela Kuti and James Brown’s first tour of West Africa in late 1971, there followed an explosion of musical experimentation and stylistic hybridisation, and it’s this which Nigeria special so spectacularly documents.

Let’s consider for a moment the music of our own sceptic isle during those years.  I’ll let you have Nick Drake, John Martyn, Bowie, Kevin Ayers, and Robert Wyatt, and at a push, Roxy Music.  I don’t have to remind you of the prog, soft rock and dead-carcass-in-the-road pop crimes committed after Plastic Ono Band and before punk’s tabula rasa inspired or allowed minds and hearts to work differently, and no amount of recasting these crimes as guilty pleasures will force me to concede the point.  Those years were without doubt British music’s darkest hours.  Across the pond and elsewhere in the world, innovation was in full swing; boundaries were being pushed back, destroyed.  It would be a while before that was happening again here.

I have to confess, on sizing up Nigeria special as a purchase, that I balked at the air of kitsch attaching itself in my mind to group names like St. Augustine & His Rovers Dance Band, the Nigerian Police Force Band, and Dan Satch & His Atomic 8 Dance Band Of Aba, but I needn’t have worried.  The names reflect the traditions of Nigerian music, and its recent history, with many musicians learning their trade in army or police force bands.  And cuts like ‘Feso Jaiye’ (‘Take life slowly’) by the Sahara All Stars Of Jos have musical space and rhythms as generous as the best funk of the time, the best conscious jazz of the previous decade, and (generalising it to an archetype) a guitar sound that stands against any style of music, any place, any time.

The Semi Colon on the other hand immediately presents itself as a great name to possess; one imagines that Lasbrey Colon really was born with that surname, and was therefore bound to punctuate the name of any group he formed.  His self-congratulatory Afrobeat foot-stomps like Bohannon and speeds with the urgency of ‘Time has come today’ by the Chambers Brothers.  Miles Cleret’s notes state that ‘Nekwaha Semi Colon’ ‘doesn’t sound much like anything else from the time’ – nor since, I would add.  There’s an argument to be made on this basis for flipsides as a staple of the archival collection or retrospective, for it was in those shadowy, dusty vinyl corners that possible paths were experimentally pursued.  Often these were paths not subsequently followed, or they were simply dead ends, but when history casts its eye back, it occasionally sees what was missed at the time, and this collection delivers on that remit.  A number of the tracks are culled from the flip or from EPs, demonstrating the thoroughness with which Miles Cleret carried out his research, and making this an essential purchase not only for the novice but listeners who already know their way round Africa.  On ‘I want a break thru’, the Hykkers anticipate the rough desert licks of Tinariwen with an instrumental as funky as anything released in the US that same year (1972).  The compilation even presents – from the B side to his dad’s A – what is thought to be the only recorded work by the Tony Benson Sextet.

The A sides and album tracks are equally delicious, offering songs as varied as the languages in which they are sung, and infinite in the unique patterns – the ceaselessly ingenious repetition and variation of fuguelike arabesques – that are sprung from the strings seemingly of any African who picks up a guitar.  That they should be set against similarly inventive rhythms stemming from ancient tradition is part of why Soundway are right to append the word ‘special’ to Nigeria.  The first three tracks on the compilation (by the Anambra Beats, Celestine Ukwu & His Philosophers National, and the Don Isaac Ezekiel Combination) are typical in having awesome guitar and rhythm which at any given moment has the quality of seeming to be without end, which is just how the listener wants it to be.  The fourth is ‘Akula owu onyeara’ by The Funkees, which blends James Brown with ‘Popcorn’-style Lee Perry, a mad echo-laden vocal about a madman, and, as the notes suggest, ‘a bassline that sounds like it was produced in Detroit about fifteen years later.’

And so it goes on – there’s barely anything that you wouldn’t want to listen to repeatedly, and always something that connects with your non-African listening.  On the intro to ‘Osalobua rekpama’’, Sir Victor Uwaifo’s guitar chimes out a melodic line that is spookily reminiscent of Paul Weller’s guitar on both ‘Liza Radley’ and ‘Mr Clean’.  Perhaps the biggest name on Nigeria special, and one of the most consistent to judge from his appearances on other compilations, it’s great to hear that a Soundway retrospective dedicated to Sir Vic is forthcoming.  Soundway’s production values obviously owe a debt to the consummate repackaging of archive material espoused by Soul Jazz, with fabulous graphic design and comprehensive sleeve notes – as thorough as the often sketchy local knowledge of individual artists allows, that is – and recordings you would swear come from the original masters rather than cleaned-up transfer from vinyl.

Treat yourself to Nigeria special and keep your ears peeled for more.

19. The Bodines - I feel

/ Therese, Creation, 1986

After our Dunedin detour, it’s time to get Backed with back on track with a proper B side by a group who almost had it all, but never quite managed to build on the bright and shining promise of their early recordings, and so lie relatively forgotten in a few ageing vinyl collections of Creation Records vintage.

Recorded for Creation in 1986, and also appearing as the flip of their major label debut ‘Skankin’ queens’ the following year, ‘I feel’ is a tour de force of jangle, a Cartesian affirmation of the self via the four-piece pop group and the three minute pop song; or, maybe, a fuck off note delivered to the establishment, or God, or the stifling limits of a small town.  Singer Michael Ryan delivers his somewhat enigmatic lyric with a surety that tips its balance from the vague and meaningless towards the emotionally wise.  What’s being sung sounds important to the singer.  You feel obliged to take note, and when the plectrum-plucked treble strings insist on the point, you are won over to the cause.  Michael Ryan’s is an essentially 21st century voice; not unique, or idiosyncratic, but one which without much forcing conveys emotional weight, freighting the words with a hint of melodrama that he may have learnt from Ian McCulloch.  ‘Paradise’ on the first single bears this vocal influence most strongly, while its double A flip ‘God bless’ enters the fray with a riff that might have been stolen from the Bunnymen’s ‘The back of love’.  By the time ‘Skankin’ queens’ appeared not much had changed, and yet everything had.  The Bodines had cast aside notions of influence, and played with the swagger of a football team on the rise, certain of victory, surprised when they were held at bay or beaten.  So here we have yet another dream featuring four lads who wanted to shake the world, but that dreams are the lifeblood of pop culture is beyond dispute.  The songs of the Bodines come wrapped in dream textures, are performed in the same dream bubble as enveloped the Beatles or the Monkees, and with no less dream accomplishment.  In contrast to the innocence of those sixties templates, they exude an arrogant but brittle cool; the (relatively) sophisticated side of Creation, besides whom Oasis are a crude and oafish caricature.  With their handful of singles and a solitary LP, the Bodines felt their way towards the two moments of glory given us a decade later by the Verve.  And in ‘Therese’, they minted their own classic pop 45, complete with a dream pop pun and a dream pop reference: ‘It scares the health out of me / I’m weakening, I’m shakin’, rattlin’ and everything’.

Michael Ryan – an earlier incarnation of Richard Ashcroft – was described in the pages of the NME as ‘sex on a stick’ and I remember friends concurring with this.  They recorded two sessions for Janice Long before their solitary date for Peel.  They played a sell-out show at the Astoria (footage here comes from their earlier show at the Astoria supporting the Go-Betweens), and the house moved.  Truly, they could have been contenders.  They signed to a major, issuing releases on their own Pop imprint via Magnet (part of BMG) in a guileless attempt to defuse the unexploded bomb at the centre of the then contentious move from cottage industry to corporation – and the LP flopped.

Like Shack’s Zilch, Played was produced by Ian Broudie, and while it’s tempting to saddle him with the blame again, it’s not actually fair.  On this occasion little or none of the production damage reportedly inflicted by Broudie at the time of release is now visible.  If there are limitations, they are of scope rather than engineering.  Like the truism about everyone having a novel in them, perhaps the Bodines only had one set of songs in them, and all of a type.  But what a set, what a type, and how well and how consistently they managed to realise them.  ‘Therese’ aside, if you were presented with their song book as a folder of mp3s, it would be difficult to tell A side from B, or B side from LP track.  By today’s standards, the songs sound like mainstream pop, with their timeless melodicism and a sense of purpose underlined by a fondness for dramatic intros – the exclamatory clanging guitars at the top of ‘Tall stories’ and ‘Clear’ being two of the finest.  The delivery of their songs shows an ambition beyond Creation, beyond indie, but being ahead of the time when such talent stood a chance of being more carefully nurtured and much better exposed – not to mention better recorded – they found themselves beached as major label rejects.  If not damaged goods, then goods without long-term value.

There was a 1989 single for Dave Haslam’s Play Hard label, ‘Decide’, which featured Laugh’s Spencer Birtwistle on drums, and two decently baggy-sounding run-outs on the B side.  Despite trying to catch hold of Happy Mondays’ coat-tails, all three songs were on a par with the earlier set, and belied the view that they were stuck in a dimension from which they could not move on.  But their heart mustn’t have been in it, for this was the final word from the Bodines.  Played out.  Having been leaders, albeit briefly, they evidently did not want to be followers.

There are however two postscripts.  One in the shape of Medalark Eleven, the group subsequently formed by Michael Ryan, who released an LP on Creation in 1994.  The other courtesy of recordings made in 1988 and issued by German label Firestation in 2007.  ‘Shrinkwrap’ is redolent of what came before, although its melody does seem to have wandered away from the studio at the crucial moment.  But the B sides see the Bodines actively searching for the direction that would be more evident on ‘Decide’, expanding their envelope with gentle reference to what was happening in Madchester by grinding out a guitar-flanged letter to a girl in a league above the writer’s own on ‘With you’, and punching out naivety with the élan of Lowlife-era New Order on ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’.

With a second-hand vinyl copy of Played currently retailing on Amazon for £100, it surely won’t be along before someone is astute enough to put out a collection that brings together everything that the Bodines recorded – B sides and all.