Just breezed back from a weekend in London, a bag of books under one arm and a stack of CDs under the other, radiating with big-city nous and sophistication. Had a fun time, meeting new family, catching up with old friends and strolling around as if I own the whole damn town.
[“Breezing back” would not be strictly accurate – it was a characteristically bubble-breaking, tiresome journey which involved two cancelled trains, reservation angst and an eventual Corbyn-style seating arrangement, on the floor outside the toilets. Ho hum, “effing and jeffing” might have been a more accurate verb to use…
A strongly-worded email is on the cards. Oh yes…]
There’s been a lot of justifiable coverage of the sad loss of Charlie Watts this week (what a man…) but I currently have another recently-departed drummer in my head this morning.
Tony Allen
Having left myself too little time to do the record shops of Soho any justice, I ended up with a paltry 15 mins to spend in Sister Rays on Saturday. Fortunately, it was one of those occasions when a number of gorgeous CDs slid coyly into view, like so many “is this the card you were thinking of?” denouements and I came out with a whole host of music that I didn’t know I was looking for. (The very best sort and well worth the ensuing 25-minute sweaty scamper down to Kennington)
Like this cracking posthumous record, There’s No End, for instance – released this year on the anniversary of Tony Allen’s death:
The whole record is a series of sinewy collaborations with African poets and rappers which despite the feisty contributions from younger souls, still absolutely sparkles with Allen’s complex, lavish rhythms. It’s a fantastic balance between new ideas and old truths and the man never at any point in the record loses or drifts out of focus. A series of brash, confident young blades step up and are gently, politely upstaged by Allen’s octopoid brilliance.
There’s a great quote from one of the contributors, Nigerian poet Ben Okri, which I couldn’t hope to better:
“This man could have lived another 150 years and kept creating new worlds. He had become the master shaman of his art. He knew himself and his mind. He wanted the album to be open to the energies of a new generation… but like a great mathematician or scientist who found a code for a new world, with just a few beats, he created this extraordinary canvas.”
One of the great things about the record is also the absolute treasury of new artists that have to this point been impossible for a middle-aged white bloke to access. First and immediate favourite is a track called “Mau Mau” which features Kenyan rapper and model Nah Eeto:
As a linguistically curious (and sadly limited) English guy, I’m always … very impressed by a facility to switch back and forth in different tongues, even if her impossibly cool intonation wasn’t already something of a killer. She bobs up and down the busy stream of Allen’s bubbling backbeat and a bassline that has been winding around my consciousness all weekend, steering her course with an unerring nose for dry land.
Captivated, I googled the name and there’s a host of other stuff for me to obsess over… Here’s something similarly irresistible and just as exotically unfathomable, sung as it is in Swahili (mostly)
Sometimes I think I find hip-hop a whole lot easier to like when it’s not done in English – the tumbling delivery of outlandish tongues, rolling over me, without the thorny problems of catching it all. Mmmm…
Effortlessly casual, there’s a load more she could say, I’ll warrant.
I’m imagining there are a number of other rewarding searches to be had amongst the contributors to There’s No End but let’s leave that for another time…
There are a couple of other official videos from the record which are worth watching (“Osmosis” is great) but with characteristic modesty they don’t actually feature an awful lot of the great man’s artistry. So it all comes down (as it so often does) to Damon Albarn. Here’s a wonderful performance of “Go Back” from French TV:
Marvel at the man’s economy and the easy business of his style, for sure, but don’t forget to enjoy a somewhat rare smile. He loved his craft.
I’m also keen on the whole “you’re my fuckin’ singer” vibe to the performance. Which brings us back to Charlie again…
I wouldn’t want to work up to some sort of facile conclusion about which of the two was the greater man – I feel both would demure to each other – but perhaps we can just say how lucky we’ve been to live in a world graced, embellished, by musicians such as this.
Partly Porpoise 