Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great Sounds from the Rock and Soul Archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. Each week I select tracks with a specific theme, and this week the theme is once again IN MEMORIAM. I'm celebrating the work of a few of the musicians who left us over the past three months to join that Great Gig In The Sky. I'll be playing tracks from Television, Sly Dunbar, Siouxsie & The Banshees, the Grateful Dead, Midnight Oil and many more. But first the superstar British hiphop DJ Simon Harris, who passed away in February. This is...
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Bass How Low Can You Go, which was the biggest hit in the career of DJ and producer Simon Harris, one of the pioneers of the British hiphop and house scene in the second half of the 1980s, and cofounder of the dance label Music Of Life. He once recalled in an interview that he got his start when his parents bought him a stereo system for his 13th birthday. "There was a cassette deck, and of course I started playing around with the pause button, started doing pause button mixes – and I got into audio from there."
In the later 70s he ran his own mobile disco, and began creating remixes of classic British soul standards. One of these, a remix of The Real Thing's You To Me Are Everything in 1986, became a top 5 chart hit in the UK, and he issued a series of collections of Beats, Breaks and Scratches that other DJs could incorporate into their own sets. This led to a record contract in his own right on the FFRR dance label launched by another star DJ Pete Tong.
Between 1989 and 1992, Harris produced three albums of original tracks, with guest performances by different rappers and musicians, and lots and lots of samples. The first and most successful was LP was Bass!, which spawned four chart singles including the title track, followed by Disturbing The Peace and finally Back To The Bass in 1992. After that, he was in steady demand as a top remixer, reworking tracks from Prince, James Brown, Joyce Sims, Steve 'Silk' Hurley and Roy Ayers among others. There's a fabulous extended remix of Elvis Presley's Bossa Nova Baby, for example, which was the first time the Elvis estate had allowed another producer to rework one of the King's songs.
It always sends a chill down the spine when one of your contemporaries passes away, and Simon Harris was just 63 but had been battling leukaemia.
Moving on, the bassplayer Andrew Bodnar, who left us in January, was a fair few years older than me but his work was part of the soundtrack to my adolescence, and probably yours too. He was best-known as one of the founder members of Graham Parker's backing band from the mid 1970s to 1980, and The Rumour also released three albums of their own. But in London's close-knit pub rock and indie record label environment, talented players like Bodnar were in constant demand as uncredited session musicians backing other artists. I'm going to play two tracks you will almost certainly recognise in which Andrew Bodnar's bass plays a key role. More about each in a few minutes.
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So that was of course Watching The Detectives from Elvis Costello, followed by I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass from Nick Lowe. Andrew Bodnar's sublime bass is the cherry on top of both songs. Nick Lowe is one of the key figures in British indie music in the 1970s. He was one of the founder members of the massively influential pub rock band Brinsley Schwarz, half of whom went on to become The Rumour. Lowe, however, signed to newly formed Stiff Records -- his single So It Goes was the label's very first release. Because he also knew his way around a mixing desk he also became Stiff's inhouse producer, behind the controls for virtually all their early releases including the first singles and album by The Damned, and also by a fiery young singer-songwriter by the name of Declan MacManus who called himself Elvis Costello.
For Elvis Costello's debut album, My Aim Is True, Nick Lowe roped in the American country rock group Clover as the singer's backing band, but they couldn't be credited because they were signed to a different label. My Aim Is True did well, so Costello went back into the studio in the summer of 1977 to record a follow-up single.
He told Rolling Stone magazine that he got the idea for the white reggae style of the song from another band. "I was in my flat in the suburbs of London, and I'd been up for thirty-six hours. I was actually listening to the Clash's first album. When I first put it on, I thought it was just terrible. Then I played it again and I liked it better. By the end, I stayed up all night listening to it on headphones, and I thought it was great. Then I wrote Watching the Detectives."
Clover were no longer available to provide backing so Nick Lowe roped in bassplayer Andrew Bodnar and drummer Steve Goulding from Graham Parker's Rumour - another band whose albums he was producing. Costello was on guitar of course, and the keyboard parts were overdubbed later by the 19 year-old music student Steve Nieve, who was the first recruit for of what became Elvis Costello's backing band The Attractions.
Watching The Detectives gave Costello his first hit record, and it was also the first commercial success for label Stiff Records. But behind the scenes, Stiff's co-founders Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson had fallen out with one another. Riviera quit Stiff and signed both Costello and also Nick Lowe to a new indie start-up Radar Records. Just as had been the case with Stiff, the first release on Radar was another single by Nick Lowe, I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass. And who was Lowe going to call to provide backing? Yes, it was members of the Rumour once again, and Bodnar and Goulding also got a co-writing credit on the song.
We're staying in the late 70s for two of our next three songs. First up Siouxsie & The Banshees, featuring the Banshees' original drummer Kenny Morris; then Television, whose bass player was Fred Smith. After them, The Pogues, with Four O'Clock In The Morning, released in 1996 and composed and sung by their drummer Andrew Ranken. All three men left us earlier this year.
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The Staircase Mystery by Siouxsie & The Banshees, Friction from Television and Four O'Clock In The Morning from The Pogues' final album Pogue Mahone. I mentioned that that last track was written by Pogues drummer Andrew Ranken, whose longtime nickname was The Clobberer because of the way he tackled his drumkit. He didn't compose many songs in his career, but those that he did were very personal. Like its predecessor My Baby's Gone, from 1993, Four O'Clock In The Morning was written about his longterm partner Deborah Korner who had passed away suddenly in 1991.
Kenny Morris was the first proper drummer for Siouxsie & The Banshees -- let's not count Sid Vicious' turn behind the kit for Siouxsie's shambolic first ever performance at the 100 Club in September 1976. Ironically, Kenny Morris was in the audience for that show, and he auditioned for the band early the following year. Morris and guitarist John McKay spent the next two and a half years in the band, playing on debut album The Scream and its follow-up Join Hands. However, there was a growing divide within the band between Morris and McKay and Siouxsie, her close friend Steve Severin and manager Nils Stevenson. Morris said later "We disagreed over so many things and each time we were outnumbered by three to two".
Famously it all came to a head in the middle of a signing session in a record shop in Aberdeen at the beginning of a UK tour. There was an argument between Siouxsie and John McKay which ended when Siouxsie apparently punched McKay. "I quit," shouted the guitarist and he stormed out of the shop, followed by Morris. According to Morris, as they fled in a taxi, manager Stevenson "reached in through the window, and started trying to strangle me so I wound the window up on his arm." "I'll see you never work again!" yelled Stevenson as they drove off. In fact, Morris quit music altogether to return to art school, and later pursued a career as an artist and teacher.
And Fred Smith of Television had originally been the bassplayer in the mid 1970s for another seminal New York band by the name of Blondie. All the bands in the New York underground knew each other and Blondie and Television were both regular bookings at the club CBGBs. However the partnership between Television's two frontmen Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell was getting ever more fractious, and one night in 1975 it all got too much and Hell quit... or was sacked.
Verlaine immediately asked Smith to take over, but at first the Blondie bassist hesitated. "I told Tom no the first time," Smith said later. But things weren't going so well for Blondie, and when the offer to join Television was repeated, Smith said yes. "Blondie was like a boat that was sinking and Television was my favourite band," he said. Of course Blondie righted their boat and went on to enjoy considerable commercial success, while Television earned huge critical kudos but no hit records before they split in 1978. Though he continued to play with a re-formed Television off and on over the following years, as well as with other bands, Smith eventually reinvented himself as a winemaker, eventually establishing his own artisanal winery in upstate New York.
Two slightly less edgy bands now. In a few minutes, the American rock band Three Dog Night, whose lead singer Chuck Negron left us in February. First up though is the British folk rock band Renaissance, whose drummer Terry Sullivan passed away in January. This is Carpet Of The Sun.
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Sadly, following the death of Terry Sullivan, Annie Haslam is now the only surviving member of the classic line up of Renaissance. I played Carpet Of The Sun from their 1973 album Ashes Are Burning.
For much of their heyday, the group had an odd process for composing almost all of their songs, including Carpet Of The Sun. It started when Renaissance's founders, former Yardbirds Keith Relf and Jim McCarty were introduced to the reclusive Cornish poet Betty Thatcher and decided her words were perfect for their vision of the sort of songs their new band should be playing.
Thatcher didn't sing or play a musical instrument, but she loved to write. To begin with she would post them poems which McCarty would set to music. But eventually Relf and McCarty both left the group and new guitarist Michael Dunford took over the partnership, and was given Betty's telephone number in 1972. "After speaking we decided that I would put down a couple of songs I'd recently completed on cassette tape and send them down to her. To my amazement, in the mail three days later were lyrics that were fantastic. She just knew what lyric would work with the music. That was the beginning of a wonderful partnership that lasted over fifteen years."
It covered all seven albums of Renaissance's so-called classic period from 1971 to 1980, including A Song For All Seasons which contained their biggest commercial success Northern Lights. Carpet Of The Sun is from 1973's Ashes Are For Burning, which features Terry Sullivan on the cover alongside singer Annie Haslam.
After that we had Joy To The World -- often mistitled Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog -- from Three Dog Night's 4th album Naturally, released in 1970, and sung by main vocalist Chuck Negron. So what has a bullfrog called Jeremiah got to do with it? The words are nonsense of course but don't have the deeper religious meaning ascribed to them.
The song was written by country singer Hoyt Axton, who explained the origins of the song in an interview with an Oregon newspaper. He'd come up with a melody and a chorus, but not the other verses, and the song publishers were pushing him to sing the finished song for them. "Jeremiah was an expedient of the time. I had the chorus for three months. I took a drink of wine, leaned on the speaker, and said 'Jeremiah was a bullfrog.' It was meaningless. It was a temporary lyric. Before I could rewrite it, they cut it and it was a hit."
We're coming up to the break now. I'll be back with you again after the news, but before then here are three songs with a common Jamaican theme. First up, the title track from Third World's breakthrough album 96 Degrees In The Shade. The song is about the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 in which preacher Paul Bogle led a protest march against injustice and poverty but were mown down by government militia. Third World's co-founder and guitarist Stephen 'Cat' Coore passed away in January.
After that two tracks from the legendary reggae drummer and producer Sly Dunbar. For more than 40 years he and his longtime musical partner bassplayer Robbie Shakespeare were among the most admired session musicians in the industry, working all over the world, not just in the reggae field but with artists including Grace Jones, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Carly Simon and many others.
Brian Eno once said of Dunbar when you buy a reggae record, "There's a 90 percent chance the drummer is Sly Dunbar. You get the impression that Sly Dunbar is chained to a studio seat somewhere in Jamaica, but in fact what happens is that his drum tracks are so interesting, they get used again and again."
I'm playing Mr Music from Dunbar's first sole album Sly Wicked & Slick, and then a track from the first of three albums he produced and played on in the 80s for the soul singer Gwen Guthrie. That's It Should Have Been You.
But first 96 Degrees In The Shade.
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