JB84

Around 1980, James Brown suddenly became a reference point

So this Cabs song from 1984 is a bit behind the mark

Here's an earlier tune that name drops him ("Jaaaaames Brown") along with a bunch of other funk and black dance innovator ("Bohannon Bohannon Bohannon Bohannon", "reggae's expanding with Sly and Robbie")



The flipside of the Cabs single continues the homage with the wittily titled "Bad Self (Part One)"



There is little indication in the lyrics to "James Brown" why it is titled "James Brown".

The lyrics sound more like Michael Gira

With a touch of this fellow - who now I think of it, might have been the person who started putting James Brown back on the rockworld map




One band who got JB via JC/JW was Fire Engines.






See it's hard to remember the extent to which - back then - really recent pop history could just drop out of memory. When I first saw the name, circa 1980, I had no idea who James Brown was except that he had something to do with funk.

Suddenly he was being spoken of with such reverence and relevance, that I set out forthwith to do some catching up.

But there was nothing in print except for a live album recorded in Japan at the end of the 1970s. That's how I first heard "Sex Machine", ""Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", etc - as these slightly padded-out live renditions, not the skeletal minimalism of the recorded originals.

I'm guessing this must be the one - although the cover doesn't ring a bell.



I no longer have the record but it served its educational purpose, providing the rudiments of Brownian knowledge.

The discography stuff was still scarce on the ground by the time I was a student - but I found the Sex Machine Today album in the second-hand stalls of Oxford market



I remember breaking into a ball at one of the Oxford colleges - Wadham  - me and Monitor colleague Hilary were wandering along Holywell Street late at night, saw people clambering up a shop face into a student's bedroom via an open window, and on impulse followed suit, because we had nothing better to do then than stay up til dawn. In the marquee tent, around 4 AM, the deejay dropped "For Goodness Sakes Take A Look At Those Cakes"  - and we danced, my feminist friend smiling indulgently at the Benny Hilly innuendo. This was the summer of '84, I think.




But although the old classic stuff was hard to find, as a current-release recording artist James Brown had resurged in prominence. 1980 was when he put out "Rapp Payback (Where Iz Moses)", a near-hit in the UK. Staking a claim as the progenitor of  rap(p) - not for the borrowed breakbeats (at that point not featuring in recorded hip hop, which was all live-band backings) but for the speak-sing style of vocalisation.




He did a rather arid collaboration with Afrika Bambaataa in '84, firming up the rap godfather idea.



Then JB had a proper hit in 1985 - #5 UK (his only UK top ten hit; #4 US, his first Top 40 hit in a a decade) - with this:



Going back to white Brit emulators, this was fairly flagrant



The punmanship is excruciating, isn't it?

Fancy the Endurance Test mix?



What the hell is this?



This is just embarrassing



Haines managed this bunch



Merest spindrift from the tossing waves of postpunk music paper discourse, much touted by those bewitched by their own rhetoric, Stimulin never even got to make a record

And here's another completely different kind of James Brown homage - although just a semiotic nod at the start rather than a musical one (the music is a sort of scrawny-puny  Happy Shopper version of... Motown? Sam & Dave? 



Black horn section added on to bolster the stiff and parched fare from Redskins  - JoBoxers meets the SWP.

The bongo playing =  a particular embarrassment.

Bad Music Era (second-wave avant-funk)

Actually Cabaret Voltaire kept on making good records all through this period (84-85-86 = BME prime-zone) - I particularly liked The Covenant, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord and interviewed them in '86, when they seemed a little lost (as did another Sheffield group, Heaven 17, also interviewed around that time)

Flipside has a nice hypnotic electro-refrain in the "Sensoria" mode



Another from Microphonies



But Cabs are first-wave industrial-funksters who just kept on keepin' on - pioneers turned settlers.

What about the real second-wavers?

Also from Sheffield, there was Hula



Also from Sheffield, there was Chakk



Also from Sheffield, there was The Box (an offshoot of Clock DVA)

Not from Sheffield, there was Portion Control...



Also not from Sheffield, there was A Primary Industry (some of whom would become Ultramarine). Sweatbox, the label they were on (RIP Rob Deacon), was a hotbed for 2nd-wave A-funk)




23 Skidoo, 400 Blows,  and Shriekback were kind of on the cusp between first-wave and second-wave (first wave I would say was Cabs, A Certain Ratio, Clock DVA)



Shriekback in their abstruse first phase, before the EST-shaped upfulness of Jam Science.



But going back to the Sheffielders



Chakk was my first cover story for Melody Maker

By that point they'd signed to MCA for a supposedly massive amount

Certainly it was substantial enough to set up the Fon studio (whence would come the early Northern house tune "House Arrest" by Krush, a huge chart hit  (you can find copies on discogs going for 13 pence!) and through which some notable bleep tunes would later be sluiced. Mark Brydon of Chakk would go on to be the music-man in Moloko, while Krush's Mark Gamble would be half of Rhythmatic, major bleepologists on the Network label.



I remember going up to Sheffield in mid-86 for my very first visit to the fair city. Kipping on the sofa in the flat of Amrik Rai, Chakk's motormouth manager (and former NME journo). Cheapskate didn't spring for a hotel!

(While I was there I also interviewed Treebound Story, another of Amrik's bands - a pleasant janglepop group loosely aligned with C86 but more instrumentally able - an outfit notable mainly for featuring the precociously proficient guitar stylings of Richard Hawley.)

Amrik was pals with, or perhaps management-ly involved with, Cabaret Voltaire - and I recall we also went around Richard H. Kirk's gaff. I remember being surprised they smoked pot - somehow it didn't seem like something Cab Voltaire would be into, a bit hippy-ish  (how naive I was in those days).

Talking of being green...  A little later there was a trip down to WOMAD to see Chakk play live, in a e mini-bus paid for by MCA.  (There was a label executive on board renowned as one of the last of a dying breed who bought coke on expenses).

Chakk were good but like all second-wave avant-funksters suffered from that sound having become formularized -  terra cognita rather than a startling surge into the unknown.

A year before, I'd in fact written a critique in Monitor of this very development: avant-funk as codified genre. From "Radical Dance Fictions", the relevant portion:

".... A genre developed based on a profound perversion of funk’s sexual tension into a different sort of het-up charge, one of unease and dread. The disco backbeat became the given, the “natural” springboard for these experimentalists with their collages of industrial decay and social fragmentation. One reason was the neutrality of disco--it wasn’t loaded with associations that rock was, it was outside pop history, so it could be used as an element in futurist music. The idea was simple--marry technology and savagery, control and madness, the cerebral and “feel”. Music embodying both the system of industrial society and the breaking free (into violence, debauchery, excess) of instincts suppressed by the system. The musicians’ ambivalent feelings towards Control and Collapse (attracted to both) is bound up with the old egghead problem/project--how to think yourself past thought, or as Talking Heads’ put it--“help us lose our minds”, “stop making sense”. Jam Science, the Shriekback LP title, is the most succinct and distressingly pat expression of the goal... 

Chakk and Hula are two current outfits who reveal both the extent and the limits of what can be achieved within this genre. The obvious musical strands--found voices; distorted, FX-ridden vocals; trails of discordant sax; somber swathes of synth; filched ethnic noises; basslines and drum patterns that bear a formal resemblance to funk but are fatally drained of sex and soul--are strung around the familiar concepts and content: cut-up theory; the ambivalent obsession with religious/jingoist fanaticism, atrocity, psychosis (via J.G. Ballard); totalitarianism (via William Burroughs’ Control). Even the titles instill a sense of deja vu--“Delirium”, “Cut the Dust”, “Tear up”, “Out of the Flesh”, “Pleasure Hates Language”. Hula’s Murmur and Chakk’s recent Peel session contain music that can emote and excite, but both groups make worthy additions to a pre-existing field, rather than enlargements or developments to it..."