That’s rather hard to say; I believe I first heard Funkadelic… early 70’s? Seems as though I remember hearing “Maggot Brain” as my introduction to their music? And it would most probably have been at a party; maybe a cousin’s house or on a military base at a function? Don’t really know. However I seem to remember that piece first: I certainly had no idea what or who it was? At the time I thought the label art was somehow the band’s responsibility, therefore I would buy records according to the artwork; if I was at a friend’s house and they had something I liked I would go to the record store, usually with my father, and look for the same artwork and buy the record (we’re talking 7″ singles here). Needless to say it was often not what I was looking for. However, rarely did I return anything! This is how I ended up finding out about Led Zeppelin at age 5 or 6. I was looking for Rare Earth. When I finally witnessed Funkadelic’s artwork first-hand it cemented my high regard for their overall “thang”!
Was it a part of your childhood and youth in California?
There was a very strong and rich musical culture in our house. Every morning before school we were allowed to listen to music (no TV, only on Saturday mornings) that we selected from an extensive record collection procurred over previous decades and life in Kansas, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Poplar Bluff Missouri, Osaka, and wherever else our parents had been on their journeys with the military. This included 78 rpm shellac discs and 7″ children’s records recorded at 16 rpm. Father always loved Jazz and has an extensive collection of Blue Note recordings from the label’s inception until around 1970 something. Errol Garner was a big favourite, Booker T. & the MG’s. I did not really get into Jazz though until much later, though I liked Errol Garner! The rest was boring to me then. “Shotgun” and “Green Onions” I liked a lot but until this day I can’t stand James Brown for example?! Only one song that I can’t remember the title of, from around 1958. Mother was into Gospel and female vocal performers such as Morgana King, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Dakota Stanton, Aretha of course, also some guys like Major Lance and Joe Simon both of whom I still love today. This collection still exists, excerpts of which you can hear in a set I uploaded to soundcloud.com/eric-d-clark under the moniker “The OZ Effect”. When I’d go looking for what I liked and tried to share it with them it was not met well. They tried to form me with classical which I found to be very little of a challenge, especially as I could trick the teachers by learning pieces twice or even three times as fast by listening to them on vinyl (my component stereo system was right on top of the piano next to my father’s AKAI reel-to-reel, which he bought in Osaka three years before I was born and I adopted; when I am at our house in Sacramento I still use this machine!). Funkadelic were strictly off-limits (very enticing) but I kept the records anyway, even though they were considered to be devil music by Mom and Dad. I was still under ten? Read the rest of this entry »
In discussion with Philip Sherburne about “The Flat Earth” by Thomas Dolby (1984).
Why did you choose this album, and how did you come across Thomas Dolby in the first place?
Until I was 12 or 13, I got most of my pop music from Top 40 radio. There weren’t a lot of other options for kid living in suburban Portland, Oregon in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and I loved a lot of things that I’d probably cringe at now, simply because they were all that was available. This is not one of them, though. Thomas Dolby’s “The Flat Earth” has remained a personal favorite for a quarter century now, and within it I can find many of the seeds of my eventual love for electronic music. I don’t remember any first encounter with Thomas Dolby’s 1982 single “She Blinded Me With Science,” which was all over the radio that year. I’m sure it was the synths and samples that grabbed me. I had discovered synthesizers through the music shop where I bought piano sheet music – Bach, Czerny, Phil Collins – and was nuts about anything with synths in it (In 1983, I’d get one of my own, a Korg Poly-800). Curiously, I didn’t dig any further into Dolby’s music at the time, but then, the song was ubiquitous, and in retrospect, it was such an odd single it probably didn’t gesture towards a form bigger than itself, like an album. It was what it was, and that was plenty. In 1984 or 1985, I went through a brief period of checking out LPs from the Multnomah County Library. That’s where I came across „The Flat Earth“. It was the cover that got me. Around that time, I would latch onto anything that had the faintest hint of “new wave” to it, and the cover’s pseudoscientific markings and cryptic photo-montage seemed like the most modern thing I’d ever seen. In retrospect, the sleeve is hardly so dazzling — a slightly watered down version of Peter Saville. (In fact, it looks a little like a cross between the Durutti Column’s “Circuses & Bread” and Section 25’s “From the Hip”, but it lacks the elegance of either.) Still, it was good enough for a 14-year-old jonesing for the New. I remember sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room, hunched over the sleeve, trying to make sense of the whole package. Not to repeat myself, but “cryptic” is the only word that fits. Everything about the music seemed to hint at hidden meanings, from the sleeve to the lyrics: “Keith talked in alphanumerals,” after all. Who the hell was the guy panning for gold on the cover? Who were these mysterious Mulu, people of the rainforest? What was a drug cathedral, and why an octohedron? (I had so much to learn.) Etc., etc. I’ve long since stopped caring much about lyrics, much less concept albums, but I was young and impressionable then, and every flip of the record seemed to offer another clue as to some strange, grownup world I couldn’t begin to decipher. The same went for the music, of course. For starters, there was the stylistic range: “Dissidents” and “White City” were recognizable as pop music, after a fashion, but what was “Screen Kiss”? It presented a kind of liquidity I don’t remember having recognized in music before that – first in the fretless bass, the synthesizers and the stacked harmonies, and even the chord changes, but mainly it was the way it trailed off into the scratchy patter of L.A. traffic reports, multi-tracked and run through delay. I’d never heard the “real world” breaking into pop music before, and certainly not spun into such a purely “ambient” sound. “Mulu the Rain Forest” was another weird one – again, an approximation of ambient, long before I’d discover it. And “I Scare Myself” totally threw me for a loop. What was a Latin lounge jazz song doing here, especially sandwiched between the humid “Mulu” and the jagged, chromed funk of “Hyperactive”? There was no doubting the continuity of the album, but the pieces felt at odds, as fractured as the cut-up sleeve imagery; the sequencing seemed erratic and the two sides of the LP felt out of balance with each other, and yet you couldn’t have put it together any other way. Just like venturing to the edge of the (flat) earth, flipping the record had a weirdly vertiginous quality to it. (I was, you may note, an unusually impressionable adolescent, at least where music was concerned.)
At the time I got this it took some time to grow on me. Was it the same with you or was it love at first sight?
A little of both. There was definitely something off-putting about the record at first, but I devoured it anyway. I’d go so far as to say that the parts that alienated me were precisely what sent me back into it. I wanted to figure it out. All this might sound a little silly now. Today, I can recognize that a lot of it is pretty overblown, beginning with the lyrics: “My writing/ is an iron fist/ in a glove full of Vaseline”? That’s… pretty awful. (Also, it may go some way towards explaining the purplish quality of my own youthful stabs at poesy.) But for all its excesses, it kept drawing me in. I still listen to the fade out from “Dissidents” into “The Flat Earth” and feel a thrill all over again, all those gangly licks and hard-edged FM tones giving way to hushed percussion and a yielding soundfield… It’s funny, too, to listen today to the title track and even hear the tiniest hint of disco and proto-house in the rolling conga rhythms, things I had absolutely no idea about then. Whatever its failures, this was the album that, more than any other up until that time, convinced me that records offered more than just a hook and a chorus, that they deserved to be puzzled through, analyzed, unpacked. That they offered up their own little worlds, worlds I would aspire to inhabit. Read the rest of this entry »
Terry Hall – Sense Stereolab – Miss Modular The La’s – There She Goes Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Opportunity Superpanzer – Geheimer Star The The – Heartland Spandau Ballet – I’ll Fly For You The Waterboys – The Whole Of The Moon Lewis Taylor – Say I Love You XTC – The Loving Tears For Fears – Sowing The Seeds Of Love Tex & Erobique – People Of A Destimate Prefab Sprout – Electric Guitars Jack Peñate – Every Glance Tuxedomoon – In A Manner Of Speaking John Cale – I Keep A Close Watch Glenn Gregory – Perfect Day The Monochrome Set – Goodbye Joe David Sylvian – The Ink In The Well It’s Immaterial – The Better Idea Thomas Dolby – I Scare Myself The Special AKA – Racist Friend The Beat – Drowning UB40 – The Earth Dies Screaming Carmel – I’m Not Afraid Of You Matt Bianco – More Than I Can Bear Human League – Louise Pet Shop Boys – Hey Headmaster Osymyso – Fiver To Bigwig Saint Etienne – Hobart Paving The Style Council – Changing Of The Guard Robert Wyatt – At Last I Am Free
Ryuichi Sakamoto – Before Long (CBS) Hajime Tachibana – Arrangement (Ralph) Masami Tsuchiya – Secret Party (Epic) The Beatniks – No Way Out (Statik) Ryuichi Sakamoto & Robin Scott – Just About Enough (Plexus) Susan – Ah! Soka (Epic) La Sellrose Can Can – Happy Morning (Soft) Logic System – Clash (EMI) Ryuichi Sakamoto feat. Thomas Dolby – Field Work (Ten) Haruomi Hosono – Body Snatchers (Another Record Company) Yellow Magic Orchestra – Taiso (Alfa) Ryuichi Sakamoto – Rain (I Want A Divorce) (Virgin) Yellow Magic Orchestra – Shadows On The Ground (Alfa) Miharu Koshi – Parallelisme (Alfa) Ippu-Do – Magic Vox (Epic)
It’s been too long, but now the Druffalo Hit Squad decided to skip the distractions (and there are so many!) and get back to duty. The result is a most exquisite invasion of your audio senses, laden with strings, drama and a thorough analysis of today’s society and the detours of love. We dedicate this Druffmix edition to Katherine Hamnett and Super Hector.
Liza Minnelli – Tonight Is Forever Marc Almond – My Hand Over My Heart (Grit And Glitter Mix) Heaven 17 – And That’s No Lie It’s Immaterial – Happy Talk Bronski Beat – It Ain’t Necessarily So Pet Shop Boys – My October Symphony Thomas Dolby – Cloudburst At Shingle Street (Edited Version) ABC – Ocean Blue (Atlantic Mix) Propaganda – Dream Within A Dream Spandau Ballet – Through The Barricades (Extended Version) Madness – One Better Day The Walker Brothers – My Ship Is Coming In Frankie Goes To Hollywood – The Power Of Love (Leave The Rest To The Gods) The Art Of Noise – Moments In Love (Intro) Ryuichi Sakamoto – Before Long
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