Sound At The Science Museum

I went along to the Science Museum Lates night because it was exploring the science behind music. I was imagining exhibits about the power of sound waves, or perhaps some music, and maybe some machines. What I got instead was a metaphorical punch in the heart courtesy of a remarkable man called Professor Nigel Osbourne, Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. You can see a YouTube clip of him talking here and here.

The billing in the programme looked cool: ‘Music, Neuroscience and the Real World’ and I hustled Robbie and Petra from Live Magazine, who’d come down to cover it, down to the ground floor so we made sure we got in. We were led down to the basement and into a room with round primary-coloured cushions on the floor and a jolly looking chap standing at the front. He used the microphone to tell us he didn’t want to use the microphone, putting it one side with a comment about not wanting or needing a ‘digital advantage’ and began a fascinating, moving half an hour which we heard about children he’d worked with in war-torn Sarajevo, in northern Uganda, in the world’s most densely populated place, Balata camp in Palestine, and along a disputed border of Thailand and Myanmar.

He interspersed stories about these traumatised children with facts about how trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder have a physiological effect on breathing, heart-rate and movement – and how music can counter these negative effects. It can alter the heart-rate, and slow the over-charged heartbeat of a traumatised person. Singing exercises the lungs (you use 100% of the lung capacity when you’re singing, as compared to 60% when exercising hard) negating the shallow, irregular breathing of someone suffering from PTSD, and music can deal with the hyperactivity or lack of response that’s common in children suffering in this way. We’re hardwired for sound, he said, banging a cupboard. We respond to noise, react to it, get information from it. Music, he said, probably exists as a response to our need to move to sound.

The real choker was when he showed us some footage to reinforce what he’d been saying. In one clip we saw him singing songs to a primary school-age group of children with disabilities who usually spent most of the day beating each other up and thus spent the day in a specially padded room. One boy was sitting in the circle, just to the left of the Professor. He never vocalised, we were told and was sitting mute with a tambourine on his lap. But half way through the song he stood up, began banging the tambourine and started making sound; singing, really.

Music, he said, can’t heal anything, but it can assist in the process of healing: it can make healing possible. It can be an agent for social change. We know that… but it was wonderful to see some of the science behind it.

Enter The Positive Hustle

So, Generation Next, presented by Gemma Cairney went out on on Sunday and it’s on iPlayer til the end of the week. The idea was to shine a light on the young people coming up with creative responses to the recession but it also required some historical digging. This was a highly enjoyable part of the process.

It was clear to me that grime had a big part to play in this story. I remember seeing what my friend Kevin Braddock once called ‘crews with a business plan’ right back at the point where UK Garage turned into grime. Acts like So Solid Crew might have seemed like a raggle-taggle bunch of talented MCs but from their perspective, they were an early incarnation of band as brand. They were a business, with a record label, promotions arm, radio station and huge fanbase. They were a Wu Tang Clan, born from a Battersea estate rather than Staten Island projects. To the front and centre of Wu Tang were crews like Ruff Sqwad, More Fire, Pay As U Go, Musical Mobb who were channelling music and business without the former polluting the latter. The old idea that art and money shouldn’t mix was being broken down by a new generation of artists with an eye on the future.

I didn’t actually cover So Solid in the documentary but that’s because you have to make fairly brutal decisions about what to include and what to leave to the side. I did catch up with JME though, who provided a perfect Year Zero for the new generation of grimepreneurs. He was the first person to monetise the impulse sent out by the UKG Wu Tangs in a way that resonated outside of the margins. Boy Better Know became famous within and outside of grime for selling thousands of T Shirts, and built a solid base primarily by being one of the funniest and smartest MCs on the block, but also by making sure his business was on point.

You can’t look at grime without looking at hip hop. Dan Charnas wrote The Big Payback: The History Of The Business Of Hip Hop and provided the expert American voice for this section. I read the last part of his book before we spoke but hadn’t read the whole thing til afterwards. It’s an incredible read and one of the best music books I’ve ever read. He has a lovely style that fuses a minute attention to the detail of what happened with dialogue that reads like fiction. You don’t have artists telling you the boring stuff about what they did, you just hear them talking amongst themselves, as if you’re in 1984, hearing Rick Rubin motormouthing across a table somewhere, or as if you’re earwigging Damon Dash and Jay-Z shooting the breeze somewhere in the mid ’90s.

He placed hip hop firmly at the centre of this trend for a new wave of enterprise that sits comfortably with art: rap, he says, changed everything.

There was one more historical corner to examine. You couldn’t normally justify talking about punk on 1Xtra but it’s a jubilee year and the parallels were just too compelling to ignore. So I went along and interviewed Pete Donne from Rough Trade East who spelled out the links between the new wave of creatively-inspired entrepreneurs in 2012 and the kids inspired by punk to start record labels, make fanzines and start bands.

It’s up til Sunday, if you want a listen.

I just made a documentary for BBC1Xtra about the new wave of young entrepreneurs coming up with creative responses to the recession, presented by Gemma Cairney. It’s going out tonight.

It was a real pleasure to be able to make this, and not just because I’ve discovered I love making radio. It was a pleasure because I know there’s a huge disconnect between what the mainstream thinks about the youth and what I know from my work as editorial mentor at Live Magazine. Most people are just fed stories of doom and violence, dispossession and laziness. We hear that exams are too easy, that school-leavers can’t read or write, that young people are addicted to their phones or to celebrity and that’s not to mention the constant hum of our obsession with the tiny minority of youth who get involved in criminal violence, who end up as inaccurate poster children for a whole generation. They’re not.

I see a different reality, of a generation – or perhaps more accurately a sector of a generation – who are incredibly motivated and capable. These are people who are spending their teens and easily twenties making their own jobs, setting up charities and social enterprises, starting businesses that will end up employing other young people, or otherwise just doing stuff that will help make them more employable. Enterprise these days, says one of my interviewees, Andre Campbell, isn’t all about The Apprentice. It’s just “a positive hustle”.

I interviewed some positive hustlers for my documentary, like Sam Harris who set up Pedal Power in Bristol, or Live Magazine editor Celeste Houlker who also runs 12th Estate, a social enterprise to support young women who want to set up their own businesses.

The only downside was that I couldn’t include more people, like Beejay Mulenga who I first met when he was 13 and was hurtling headlong into a world of enterprise with his Supa Tuck Shop company and charity Supa Inspire, or the Rianna Price from the supa dupa fly Run Dem Youngers or Shadrack Straker who dreamed up a business that would bring people together and would solve youth unemployment at the same time. He became one of the first Virgin Media Pioneers and has subsequently met Richard Branson on a number of occasions. There are thousands more like them all across the country and I think they’re great.

An Antidote To Indifference

The always-interesting folk at Caught By The River have just released their next edition of An Antidote To Indifference. I’ve written something for them on nightclubs that explains how an illegal WWII jazz club in occupied Paris invented the disco as we know it and there are gorgeous illustrations from Kavel Rafferty as well as words from Andrew Loog Oldham, Jon Savage and author of the excellent How Soon Is Now, Richard King.

The Winter House

I wrote this piece for Caught By The River but thought I’d repost here. I should also clarify that when I say ‘shed’, I probably mean cabin.

There is a gap in my garden which should be filled with a shed. Not a flatpack shelf from B&Q or the Homebase up the road, but a shed built from skip treasure: walls made of windows and discarded doors, built around borrowed For Sale signs, with a panel of plastic for a roof.

However, the shed doesn’t exist yet, although the inspiration exists in ramshackle glory on a side street in Brockley. It’s in my friend Kev’s south London back garden where he and his girlfriend add lovely twists to their lives by, for example, inviting people round for a mini festival instead of a BBQ. Their artist friends turned the bathroom into a neon installation with hanging octopi and dreamy seaweed. They hung a huge roll of paper on the outside wall and pulled and pegged the resulting pictures out around the house, and someone sung a funny song about why his dad was a c-word.

We sat in Kev’s shed, that he had built himself. He had raided skips and de-burdened builders of salvage they’d otherwise have to tip. He uprooted Sold signs outside houses and used the poles for joists. “Estate agents are immoral,” he said, “so it’s fine.” Sitting in Kev’s shed was like sitting in a building imagined by Hammer & Tongs or Roald Dahl, a made-up shed made real by a simple equation: idea + action + a healthy disregard for other people’s rules.

I wanted to make my own shed, and fortuitiously, I had created a window of my own, in the shape of a three-month sabbatical from my job as editorial mentor at Live Magazine. It would be a time to fill myself up with ideas and inspiration. I would read, write, research, meet up with interesting people… and built my own shed. It would be my shedbatical. However, there were some problems: I was ill and exhausted and spent the first month of my sabbatical in bed and looking out of my window like an invalid from 1892 and I spent the next two months making a radio documentary about influential nightclubs. Instead of making a place of my own, I made radio about places that had built the foundations for inventive and shape-shifting music culture. It was an enjoyable mission and a labour of love, but it left no time at all for skips and saws and hammers. The shed remained unbuilt.

I have to be honest. My garden is more of a yard (or a ‘yarden’, as I like to call it) and it’s quite possible that my shed actually belongs in a garden of the future. I’ve got a perfectly nice bench already, reclaimed from a 1950s ferry, which I bought from Brixton Village Market, which is another epicentre of the ideas + action equation. I love it down there because you can buy items from people who’ve actually made them: an idealised version of localised capitalism where there’s a delightfully small gap between your purchase and its impact.

So the shed sits in my mind, waiting for a future when it is built. I think it’s good to have a plan that’s just out of reach, I’m all for steep learning curves and I like having something to work towards. But in this case, I’d probably best actually buy a jig-saw and some proper nails, which ironically means that my first step towards my self-built utopia is actually B&Q.

Oh, Whitney

Just last week I was talking to a colleague at Live Magazine, about how you feel when musicians die. I wasn’t expecting to be reflecting on this quite so soon.

It’s always sad when someone dies too young, but there’s something particularly poignant about the early death of a musician who mattered when you were a kid, when music doesn’t just soundtrack your life – it’s part of it. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like certain songs are corporeal. If you did the musical equivalent of a drug test on my blood you’d get blasted with the results; Leonard Cohen, Dillinjah, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Dennis Bovell and the new release from Portico Quartet and Terror Danjah would probably come flying out of the test tube. Or something.

Anyway, enough oddly-angled magical realism. I certainly wasn’t expecting to wake up to find that Whitney Houston had died. I feel really sad that such an incredible singer couldn’t find her way back out, and I’m sorry for her 18 year old daughter, too.

I didn’t know Whitney Houston, so my feelings about her death are musical. Even though records like How Will I Know and I Wanna Dance With Someone are brilliant ’80s pop records, and set the groundwork for the street-up R&B that followed in the ’90s, she never really made the records she could have done. She had an incredible voice, but where were the sideways soul songs she could have done? Where were the strange and beautiful musical explorations that her godmother Aretha Franklin managed alongside mainstream success? I always felt Whitney was sold something of a major label lie, and that musically she suffered for it, although I’m saying this as someone who knows all the words to Saving All My Love and still believes that the lyrics of The Greatest Love Of All are a work of true philosophical wisdom, because basically the greatest love of all really is learning to love yourself, oxygen masks on yourself first type thing.

But anyway, the one Whitney song that you felt was really her was It’s Not Right, But It’s OK in 1999 with Rodney Jerkins (when we featured him in THE FACE it was with the headline ‘This Time Next Year Rodders, We’ll Be Millionaires’). Here was Whitney, strong in her exit from a troubled relationship with a song that was redolent of been-around-the-block sass and strut. I just wanted more like that.

One last thing I’d like to thank Whitney for, apart from blessing us with that voice. My first act of journalism was to make a school newspaper which had a pop quiz in it, which included the question ‘What is Whitney Houston’s middle name?’. The answer: Elizabeth. And no, I didn’t just need to check that.

RIP Whitney Houston, gone too soon.

#RCFF

Without realising it, my week has ended up revolving around one three hour slot. Now you wouldn’t think that a three hour old school jungle show that starts at 11am on a Friday morning would be so essential, but honestly, if I’ve got to be out of my house for Uncle Dugs Old School Jungle and Hardcore show, I really miss it.

Like all Rinse shows, it’s always there on the podcast, but for me, I’ve got to listen live. I obviously need to get out more. The show has become part of my week to the point where I have to make sure I’ve got my work finished before the show starts because it’s so hard to concentrate when you’re being assaulted by hyper-energised lemon-facing amen breaks and drops that make you feel like you’re about to fall through the floor. I’m not alone: one twitter fan admitted that he’d “sent students out to lunch early so this tutor can tune in”.

Listening to Dugs rolling out old Slipmatt tunes (this one actually made my body go into some kind of involuntary freestyle shock out) or 1994 Krust records at a time of day when you’re usually in a very different zone makes it even more enjoyable and the fact that a Friday morning slot in the UK is Friday night in Australia hasn’t passed by some ardent Oz listeners.

The show’s been going since March 2011, and on his old station, Kool FM, before that, and has gradually become a focal point for an increasing interest in this period of history that laid the foundations for much of the UK’s music culture. You can hear jungle and hardcore sounds slipping back into new music, including the people that have figured that juke and jungle make excellent bedfellows, and there’s been a bubbling junglist sideline to UK club culture for a while: Zinc and Kode9 played jungle sets at last summer’s Deviation Carnival session, Mark Pritchard’s been playing jungle tracks in his Africa Hitech sets, and any savvy DJ knows that playing the odd jungle classic is a gold-standard guaranteed way to increase the vibes – or to paraphrase a Dugs saying: “vibes for miles”. If there aren’t at least a handful of old school jungle and hardcore sets smashing it at this summer’s festivals I’ll eat my radio.

Dugs been doing a weekly three hour old school show for time without running out of tunes, which tells you something about the huge volumes of music that was made by these artists between the late ’80s and mid-late ’90s. More importantly, the tunes sound just as powerful as they did back then – this really was music that hadn’t been made before born of technological, chemical and social alchemy that’s pretty much unrivalled nearly two decades on.

So obviously I like the tunes, and I like hearing three hours of music from one particular period of time: today was ’94-’95, last week was a birthday show covering ’88 – ’98, but he’s also bringing in key people from the time to chat over an hour or so, whether it’s the promoters behind Labrinth and Desire, or Dan Donnelly, who started Suburban Base. So it’s not just shining a light on important times and important tunes, it’s documenting a scene that was run by renegade producers, promoters and DJs who just did what they wanted, and set off a chain reaction of massive creativity.

Listening to Run Come Follow Friday reminds me how different life was back then. If you knew about this stuff you probably knew about all of it. If you were part of a more mainstream England, then you probably never heard any of it. There was no internet, no YouTube, just record shops and tape packs and people borrowing stuff off their friends. It might have been underground, but back then, underground meant thousands and thousands of people.

See you on the #rcff tour?