Ask Doc McCoy
skel
You can't cheat karma 5,033 Posts
We don't make enough of the unique and time- limited resource we have right here. For the ages, for now, for all.
Word to Aaron breakself, Matt Africa. We are all getting older.
Imma carry on from a Pickwick muse and expand it to the equally abundant depths of the wider SS massive.
What was the true lasting legacy of UK punk?
Did you ever write a review without hearing the product?
What was the band that shoulda been but never was?
What was the most surprisingly brilliant gig you ever went to?
What piece of briddish musical heritage most fills you with some sort of pride?
Who is the GOAT? In rock, in soul, in jazz, in funk and so on.
And yes, he would be my first pick in a pub quiz team.
And if this flies, Doc to nominate the next Ask participant.
If it dies, it was Duder's idea.
:
:
That be it.
Word to Aaron breakself, Matt Africa. We are all getting older.
Imma carry on from a Pickwick muse and expand it to the equally abundant depths of the wider SS massive.
What was the true lasting legacy of UK punk?
Did you ever write a review without hearing the product?
What was the band that shoulda been but never was?
What was the most surprisingly brilliant gig you ever went to?
What piece of briddish musical heritage most fills you with some sort of pride?
Who is the GOAT? In rock, in soul, in jazz, in funk and so on.
And yes, he would be my first pick in a pub quiz team.
And if this flies, Doc to nominate the next Ask participant.
If it dies, it was Duder's idea.
:
:That be it.
Comments
[edit: maybe there's a little bit of trolling happening here..... just the truly curious kind]
Next!
What was the last great style of music to originate in the UK?
If Clapton Is God who is Satan?
Who appeals to Euroman more..Marvin Gaye or Curtis Mayfield?
okthxbai
- Soul II Soul: Any thoughts? Reminiscences? Regrettable impact on your wardrobe?
- Related: Wildest shit you ever wore?
- What are your favorite books of music writing?
- Beatles or Stones?
- What's the most personally important record you own?
- Do people in the UK rollerskate?
- Top five artists, all time, all genres, all everything. No bullshit, no qualifiers, no "...but ask me tomorrow and my answers might be different." Top five, straight up.
- DJ Steve Walsh: Please help me understand.
- What's the disco section of your collection like?
And, of course, the only question that matters:
- What are you listening to lately?
Who is the greatest English footballer of alltime?
Is there any UK rap worth listening to?
Name that one song that gets you all
The West London/Broken Beat scene in the UK: completely dead, or are folks keeping it alive?
The Sex Pistols; or The Ramones?
Indian cuisine; or Jamaican cuisine?
Chappell; or KPM?
Edit: Feel free to answer as many/few as you like. I've asked WAY too many questions on account of a caffeine-induced mania. My apologies.
Kindly,
parallax
b/w
What was your #1 proudest moment as a Liverpool fan?
-What's your take on the "Evolution" LP by The Hollies?
-Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath?
-What ever happened to 5 Star and why aren't they mentioned in discussion of 80s U.K R&B to cross over to the U.S.?
-Why wasn't "(Evening) Time to Get Away" not listed as a separate track on the "Days of Future Passed" LP by The Moody Blues?
-How strongly is Jethro Tull revered in the U.K.? Do you consider Ian Anderson a musical genius? Please explain why you think so (or not).
-Why did Soft Machine move from prog rock to pretty much playing jazz in the mid 70s? Was it because Robert Wyatt left, or some other reason?
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak
What is the best British movie of all time?
Will the England national side ever win any cups in your lifetime?
Full English. Where can I get a great breakfast in London?
Fondest memory of pirate radio?
http://goldpopcorn.blogspot.co.uk/
Except P***s Blur Oasis question, for which the righteous answer should be "neither".
But anyway, maybe all these questions might generate some sellable article ideas. You never know. Agitation and provocation can lead to creation blah blah blah.
I'd pay to hear the answers.
May as well start with the easy ones, eh? Disclaimer: I don't really ???do??? brevity.
I think that whatever importance punk had probably lies in the cumulative impact it had on all the individuals who were affected by it, and what they chose to do next. It's a bit like that thing about how hardly anyone bought the first Velvets album, but everyone who did formed a band. With punk, for some it was just something they were into as kids, and with others it shaped the direction of their lives from then on. What you have to remember about punk as far as the UK is concerned is that, in terms of enduring cultural impact, it ran second to disco by some distance. This was as true at the time as it is now, although it's taken a while for some folks to realise/admit it.
Thing is, people might more readily recall the iconoclastic moments - virtually the Sex Pistols entire career, for instance - but they paid less attention to the ripples, and the ripples were the real difference, where you saw a slow, but significant change. A lot of kids began to feel and think differently about things like politics, sexuality or race. Matter of fact, many of them began to think about those things for the first time and from there they started to question the received wisdom that'd been handed down up to that point about all sorts of things. The most immediate by-product of that was the whole 2-Tone thing, the Specials having started life as a punk band. Attitudes and approaches to music changed as well, although not necessarily in a positive way. There was quite a bit of cultural Stalinism on one hand ??? good though punk's democratising effect was initially, the subsequent veneration of ???attitude??? over competence as an end in itself has, I feel, become a bit of a hindrance over time. But, y'know, if it works for you.
The other side of that was the emergence of an all-bets-are-off attitude, where bands like ATV went from doing fairly regular, straight-ahead punk rock to free music within little more than a year, and things like Don Cherry opening for The Slits became commonplace. I went out and bought Relativity Suite after seeing a few of those shows, and from there I began to explore things like AEC, Ornette, David Murray and so on. (I know that the Waxi line on AEC is that they're toy, entry-level free jazz, but, hey, I was listening to that shit when I was 19 and without a cosign from Thurston Moore either, so fuck you. I can be a musical snob as well.)
For my part, punk helped make me a lifelong pluralist; there was all kinds of music and art and literature that I may never have found my way to without the direct or indirect influence of punk and I know that's also true for a lot of other people. And you have to wonder as well how many women might never have picked up an instrument or got involved in music on anything other than a passive level if the existing orthodoxy hadn't been challenged, however briefly, by punk. So there's that.
No, but I have reviewed things on only one listen. Not often, though. Luckily, in hindsight I've never felt I got it wrong when I've done that. Time permitting, I'll usually listen to something at least three times before writing it up, but there are certain kinds of records where you know immediately that you won't feel any differently about them after a dozen listens. I know people who've reviewed movies they haven't seen. I remember once reviewing Spike's Inside Man by proxy for a mate who had a deadline that didn't leave him enough time to watch the DVD.
I always thought the Sneaker Pimps could have been pretty big. They were just a little bit ahead of the curve. I liked that first album, and they had hits. Not long after it came out, I saw them in some tiny little basement in London and thought they were fantastic. The lass out front was great. She could sing her arse off, and she was pretty sexy/charismatic in that Suicide Girls kind of way. As I later heard it, her fella at the time got into her ear and convinced her she should go solo (and that he should be her manager), and it all ended up being a lot less than the sum of its parts. Around the same time there was a band from Nottingham called the Hy-Birds who I felt were nailed on to be massive, but ended up falling short. Their album took ages to come out and it was a huge disappointment, just tanked completely. The frontman/writer Richard Warren got asked to join Oasis at one point, but he turned them down. I wonder if he regrets it. Last I heard he was recording for Mute as Echoboy, doing a sort of neo-Krautrock kind of thing worlds away from his old stuff. Then there's Lewis Taylor, but he just didn't want it, probably never did in the first place, and definitely doesn't anymore.
Bon Jovi. Trust me, I get raised eyebrows whenever I tell people this. Basically I got offered a freebie and I thought, ???Y'know what? Fuck it - it might be fun???, and it was. The default punk stance as regards the whole arena-rock thing holds no value for me now, and I couldn't give a fuck about all that ???false metal??? bullshit anyway, so I went along with the intention of taking them as I found them. Their whole set-up was about giving the audience a good night out ??? hit after hit, bang-bang-bang. I genuinely enjoyed watching a bunch of seasoned pros doing something they're really fucking good at, even if it's not the kind of thing I'd normally care for. There's a real skill in that and I can respect it, no matter what I think of the music. But there was one very enlightening moment when they did Someday I'll Be Saturday Night, and about 13,000 women began to sing along with the chorus. Right then it dawned on me why a certain kind of rock snob hates Bon Jovi; it's because women like them.
Anything that's emerged from transplanted sound system culture ??? jungle/drum and bass, dubstep, bassline/UK garage, lovers rock, 2-Tone, Massive Attack/Soul II Soul, Sade, Loose Ends, the techno stuff Warp put out when they were still based in Yorkshire, any and all derivatives thereof ??? things that simply would not have happened anywhere else. Britain is a very small place, smaller than New York state, and we're all shoved pretty close together. Eventually it's going to become more difficult not to be influenced by things that are outside your frame of reference, culturally speaking (which in a way brings us back to punk, I suppose). And when you begin to actively embrace those things, that's when the fun starts.
I get one pass, right? Well, I'm gonna pass on that one.
I refer to skel's earlier answer.
I'm gonna go for the populist option here and say Spector. Meek was more of an auteur and an individualist, and he made some amazing records, but Phil had the songs.
Do I detect a suggestion from this that the UK is done creatively and artistically? I don't think that's true. Look at one of the hottest things in the US right now - a derivative of something that originated in the UK and which, little more than six years ago, was as underground and marginal as it got. I don't expect too many people to concur that [what I'll call dubstep for argument's sake] is necessarily "great" according to the standards by which musical greatness is normally measured. I don't think that the ins and outs of America's take on it are all that important either. But from what I've observed, there's still an amazing amount of creativity out there, and like I said in response to one of skel's Q's, it's the kind of thing that could only happen in the UK.
Yngwie Malmsteen.
I don't think there's a lot in it. Bear in mind I'm talking as a Brit here, though - the rest of Euroman thinks we're a bit strange and vice versa.
Marvin probably shades it inasmuch as What's Going On has become one of those set texts for measuring musical taste, a la Kind Of Blue. If I was to go through someone's record collection and the only Marvin album they had was What's Going On, I wouldn't expect to find much Curtis in there, if any. Anyone who has a bunch of Marvin will usually have a bunch of Curtis too. Probably some Impressions, Leroy Huston, Jerry Butler. But all that and no Marvin? Can't really see it.
She wasn't great in the way you'd say that Lyte or Latifah were, but she could stand next to them without being laughed at, and that was a pretty big deal at the time. She deserves more credit than she gets. There's a tendency to cut our own a bit of extra slack, but I never felt like she ever relied on that. She did her thing, and never made a fuss. She had some good records, she had energy and personality, she was through the door early and made some room for herself, and she's done OK. All in spite of the standard industry bullshit of being signed as a rapper and subsequently forced down the pop route, where you risk falling between two stools - something which happens time and time again to black British artists.
I think I can, as it happens. I will have a word with a few people, and holla via the PM.
I may have owned a t-shirt, let's leave it at that. Anyway, that whole acid-house/warehouse rave era is one long succession of regrettable wardrobe choices (back me up here, guys). Nobody rocks Naf-Naf sweats, batik prints or Travel Fox trainers anymore, but you couldn't move for that shit back then. It's probably landfill now, or on the back of some kid in a remote Moldovan village.
The music? Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. There was one particular Friday night at the Hacienda where it was just live as fuck, as it often was, and one of the DJs ??? I couldn't tell you who ??? threw on the album version of Back To Life. At peak time. So you've got Caron Wheeler's voice and all those wild harmonies sailing out, unhindered, over this crowd of a couple thousand or so lunatics, who are all completely off their nut. Airhorns, whistles, whooping and hollering, the whole lot. And then, here come the drums. And the place goes screaming fucking mad. Absolute pandemonium.
Back To Life was such a big record, but the one that's most special to me is Keep On Moving. It was maybe about 1985 and I was talking to my girl about music after yet another band I'd tried to put together had floundered. I said to her that what I'd really love to do if I had the time and money would be to try and figure out how to take some Loose Ends soul/r&b thing, then combine it with Chic-style orchestration and those hard-ass drums you were hearing on the shit Def Jam were putting out. She was like, that'd never work, it wouldn't sound right. A few years later, I heard Keep On Moving, and I thought to myself, ???someone else obviously had that idea too, then.???
It's a pity Jazzie didn't want to pay anyone.
1978. Dyed-black Danny Zucco quiff. Black leather motorcycle jacket. White shirt given to me by a girlfriend after she'd lovingly dyed it to match the cover art from this 45...
..black bondage strides (which I bought off Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive, as it happens), side-lacing white winklepickers like those on the cover of Look Sharp by Joe Jackson, which I'd dyed canary yellow. It may not sound all that wild now, but out in the sticks back then and walking around on your own dressed like that, you could end up in hospital. I'm serious.
Hit Men by Fredric Dannen, The Rap Attack by David Toop, Where Did Our Love Go by Nelson George, Head On by Julian Cope, Faking it by Hugh Barker & Yuval Taylor, Nowhere To Run by Gerri Hirshey, Revolution In The Head by Ian MacDonald. I've only just got around to reading Keith Richards' autobiography, and it's fascinating. There are some very big gaps in my knowledge as regards music writing, and I aim to put that right in the not too distant future because I'm getting fed up with people saying, ???I can't believe you haven't read that...???
Dude. I'm from Liverpool. C'mon, son.
I couldn't whittle it down to one. There are a few things I inherited from my parents. A handful of 78s from my ma ??? Gene Vincent, Elvis, the Everly Brothers ??? and a bunch of Frank Sinatra albums, which I would never part with. Likewise my dad's old Django Reinhardt albums. They're not the kind of things I play very often (although I do from time to time), and they don't have any real value on the open market, But I don't just hang onto them for sentimental reasons ??? there's a bit of shared experience there, the odd story, the odd moment that changed me a little.
But as for ???personally important???? Well, during the 80s I decided to go back to school and needed to raise some cash to live on while I studied. I did this by selling off a whole load of my punk 45s, basically all the choice pieces. A lot of personally important stuff went that day, and I've spent plenty of time since then cursing myself for letting my short-sightedness rule me. At the time I thought it was a trade-off worth making, and in truth the guy who bought them gave me top dollar ??? high-end book-price amounts - but the money didn't last as long as the regret over selling them did.
I've only ever seen people rollerskate in Trafalgar Square. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in roller derby lately, though. There's regular roller derby here in Berlin, and I keep meaning to go. The whole roller-disco thing never really happened in the UK, though ??? at least, not to as significant an extent as in the US.
I passed when skel asked, so I'm going to pass again. But...since I've now been asked twice, I will give this some serious thought over the next day or so and come back to you both. It's a tough one.
Skel is probably your man here. Being a northerner, I have limited familiarity with the kind of scene Steve Walsh emerged from. That's more of a southern thing ??? part of the whole Caister Soul Weekender experience, of which a certain kind of personality DJ is a key element. It was never really part of what went on up north, at least not after the turn of the 80s. DJs would introduce a record BITD, but they'd never talk over it or do the kind of routines that the Weekender DJs did. I suppose it came back in a different way when emceeing became popular at house and jungle raves, but even then, for all the people who dug it, there were about as many who just thought it was something that got in the way of the music.
Like that of a Chic fan. It doesn't really go that deep ??? I have friends whose disco game is nothing to fuck with ??? but it's strong on the fundamentals.
I'm enjoying the discipline of listening to music with a view to articulating why it's worthy of someone's attention ??? usually in far too few words for my liking. I had to review that 10-CD Philly box set in about 250 words the other month. That was like trying to fit five pints into a four-pint pot. But that's the game these days. Nothing stopping me from writing as much as I'd like outside the confines of a magazine's review section. But I'm always wary of just adding to all the noise out there, without necessarily adding anything that's worth adding.
But to answer your question, all those Black Hippy kids seem to have a very clear idea about what it is they're doing, and I like that. The Schoolboy Q and Ab-Soul albums have been amongst the best things I've heard this year. I'm listening to more rap than I have done in a long time and, the obvious shortcomings aside (such as too many dudes doing the same kind of shit and trying to occupy the same space), I think rap is in really good shape right now, especially if you're a ???try the buffet??? kind of listener. Even if you're not, or if you don't much care for more mainstream styles, then the likes of El-P and Aesop Rock have released good albums this year. The new Flying Lotus album is really good. A$AP Rocky's done some good stuff. Both the records Big K.R.I.T. has put out have been tremendous. The Killer Mike album still sounds great. Some of the stuff coming out of Chicago is raw as all hell - real IDGAF, menace-to-society shit, hacked all the way back to the bare bones. Heavy music in every sense of the word.
I've been listening to more Bowie than I have done in years. I'll spend days at a time just soaking up that amazing run of albums he did throughout the 70s and into the beginning of the 80s, and I'm still hearing things I missed every other time around. I like that Cocaine 80s thing that No ID's involved in as well. Other than that, (or so iTunes is telling me) Steely Dan, Dungen, Badu, John Fahey, Aaliyah, Danny Brown, John Surman, Satie, King Crimson, Oliver, Talk Talk, QOTSA, Four Tet and a whole bunch of other shit.
Doc: best West End clubbing experience you ever had?
and to skel for starting this thread...i remember always being in awe and the depth of don's posts
this needs to turn into a :five_pager: for the ages
I have one question and one discussion/perspective topic
Logo records..has China Burton ever participated in something else as good as ''You Don't Care about our Love'' ?
i mean according to his bio he could have been a british don mccoy but the logo comp with the track is god awful..
Secondly, i'd like to further the discussion about black british artists it seems quite on point
I mean MsDynamite is a perfect example but there are 2 things i when watching brit music indutry award shows
Xcept for Dizee, the black artist winners seem huge in England and off the radar in america
None of them seem to perdure however and they fizzle out rather quickly even in the local scene
Is it justa Pop reshuffling of the guard or something else...MsDynamite is not All saints level and could have crossed over a lot more
She had the strong album, laurynhill girlpride sensibility, image, acclaim...but she did not touch one tenth (1/10) of Adele/Winehouse levels
is this an industry thing?
bonus beat
Tell us an industry horror story of epic/consipracies proportions!
Artist behaviour, manager schemes, promo payola or court/copyright armageddon..your pick!
what's your opinion on Suarez as a player/individual
Right decision with Caroll, cut your losses or go further into the hole and he could have torresed his way into a late bloom
Charlie Adam leaving good or bad?
me
I gotta say at least the youth are showing promise and you have some good big pieces in place (manager,keeper,back,veteran,academy)
but what's missing
finally over/under newcastle this year?