Category: music

A Brief History Of Robert Johnson And The Great Mississippi Delta Blues Musicians

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

By far the most well known of the great Mississippi Delta bluesmen is Robert Johnson. The Paganini of the Blues. The one who was said to have sold his soul to the devil in return for being able to play like no one else. He was truly a one off and isn’t called the King of the Delta Blues for nothing. I first listened to a compilation of his meagre recordings when I was 19 and I was blown away by them; by the magic and the mystic of these rudimentary and raw records as much as by his guitar skills. When Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones first heard one of his songs in the very early 1960s while living in a cold flat with fellow bandmate Brian Jones (before the Stones hit the big time), he famously asked who the other guitar player was? That’s how off the wall his guitar playing was.

Only two photographs survive and certainly no video footage of the man himself, although there are some who claim that there exists a very rare 30 second film footage of him. If anybody wants to know more about the man, especially from those who knew him, I highly recommend trying to track down a copy of the fascinating 1991 documentary produced by the musician John Hammond called The Search For Robert Johnson, which contains interview footage from his former lovers and some of his contemporary Mississippi bluesmen like Johnny Shins and David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards. The latter is particularly instrumental in the Robert Johnson story especially since he happened to be there on that fateful night when Robert was poisoned by the partner of one of the women he was sleeping around with. His whiskey was laced with strychnine and he died a slow and painful death. Eyewitnesses at the scene including Honeyboy recalled that he was in so much pain he was howling like a dog all night. Raw Wild West stuff. It is difficult to imagine one of Mumfords & Sons getting into such a pickle.

Unlike Robert, Honeyboy went on to live a very long life. He died in 2010 at the age of 95. I was fortunate enough to have watched and met the man on two occasions. Firstly at an Irish Centre in Leeds in 2007 and secondly at the 100 Club in central London in 2008. Within the paradigm of the great original Delta bluesmen he is no Van Gogh or Gaugain like Robert or Son House, but he is a solid, special and integral component of that red hot time. When I watched Honeyboy in 2007, he was 92, but no slouch. When he was not sliding away on the expensive Martin guitar he was playing, he was knocking back bottles of Becks.

Yours truly with David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards in 2007

But let’s go back to the roots of that great time of those original Delta blues axemen. Where did it all start? Many blues aficionados point to Charley Patton as the grandfather of that whole original Mississippi Delta blues scene. Patton was born in Hinds County, Mississippi in 1891 (although some claim he could’ve been born as early as 1881). When Charley was a young boy his family moved to the Dockery Plantation cotton farm in the wilder northern part of the Mississippi Delta looking for better work opportunities. While his parents almost broke their backs working on the farm, ol’ Charley boy didn’t care too much for all that gruelling cotton picking. Instead, he dedicated his time to developing the Delta blues and becoming one kick ass guitar player. If he’d have tried to please his parents instead, a great void would have remained. Shit, if everybody tried to please their folks there would be little to no inspiration to draw from and a tremendous cultural poverty would prevail.

Charley Patton

Charley already lived like a rock n roll animal decades before the likes of Jim Morrison. He lived the quintessential hard drinking, hard livin’ rough and tumble life. A serial womaniser too, he married and had affairs about as many times as most people walk into their living rooms to crash on the sofa after a hard day at the office. If you look at the only photo of him that seems to exist, it is not the face of a man you could comfortably introduce to your mum and dad. You don’t need to be a psychic or know anything about the man’s personal history by looking at that photo to deduce that he was one ‘don’t fuck with me’ son of a gun. It also appears that he was an interesting mix of African American and Cherokee (or possibly even Mexican) heritage, which was unusual as most of the Mississippi bluesmen of that time were African American.

Within the whirlwind of his brief 40 years on this planet, he was popular and he played at many parties and events for both a black and white audience. He performed frequently at Dockery Plantation farm where he developed his own style. Even though Patton today is widely seen as the father of the Delta Blues he was highly influenced and tutored by a local musician called Henry Sloan who was one of the very early proto Delta bluesman. He was born in Mississippi in 1870 and died in 1948 leaving behind no recordings. Perhaps one could deduce that what the 13th century Italian artist Cimabue was to the development of the Italian Renaissance, Sloan was to the development of the Mississippi Delta blues. And in the context of the Italian Renaissance, Patton could be compared to Cimabue’s most gifted student Giotto.

As Patton performed at Dockery and other local plantations he got to know the legendary bluesman Willie Brown (more on him later). Patton also knew several younger bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf and just as Henry Sloan taught him, he mentored those younger Turks of the Mississippi Delta Blues. Patton was quite a versatile player and could play old hillbilly and country songs as well as traditional ballads and other styles. He was like a living jukebox who had a natural knack for whacking out almost anything from his battered six string machine. That may also explain why he was such a big draw at various events. He could play his own raw and authentic style of deep blues yet at the same time he could also give the people what they wanted.

My own introduction to Patton came when I was 20. Having spent most of the previous year obsessed with Robert Johnson, I naturally investigated further, checking out other great blues artists. Via a secondhand four CD compilation of miscellaneous blues performers which I purchased from Notting Hill Tape and Exchange for three quid, I discovered the Patton song High Sheriff Blues. I later checked out his other songs, but it was this particular song, which made a big impression on me. His deep gravelly whisky soaked voice hypnotised me. It was so unpolished, almost, dare I say, verging on rank. This was not the voice of an angel. This was the voice of a fucking criminal. If he came back from the dead to perform that song on the X Factor show, he would never have made the stage. He would’ve already been arrested and given a good hiding by one of the burley security guards at the entrance.

Willie Brown was a friend of Charley’s. Yet beyond this friendship he is one of the most mysterious of the early Delta bluesmen as well as one of the most influential. He is mentioned by Robert Johnson in his famous song Cross Road Blues in the line, ‘my friend Willie Brown’. I myself know very little about the man, but I am fascinated by his myth and legend in the history of the Mississippi Delta Blues. I see him more as a Henry Sloan figure, yet unlike Sloan who left behind no recordings, Brown did cut six songs for Paramount Records in 1930, which were released as three separate records on shellac 78rpm discs. Of those three records, only the Paramount 13090 two sided recording “M & O Blues” / “Future Blues” is known to have survived of which only three copies of that record are declared to be in existence (making it one of the rarest records in the entire history of recorded music). The other recordings are rumoured to have been destroyed in a fire. Alan Lomax, the son of the groundbreaking father and son field recording John and Alan Lomax duo, claims to have recorded that same Willie Brown in Arkansas back in 1942. Yet some dispute as to whether the recording he cut for Lomax, “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor”, was actually by that same Willie Brown who cut those early records for Paramount 12 years previously.

What is important though is Brown’s association with Patton, Johnson and the other legendary bluesman Son House. Willie Brown and Son House were very close. They were both born at the turn of the 20th century, both were musical partners who each cut recordings for Paramount (along with Patton) in 1930, and, more importantly, both musicians influenced Robert Johnson. Yet it was Son House, more than Brown, who was probably the biggest influence on Robert.

Eddie James “Son” House Jr was born in 1902 in a small Mississippi hamlet called Lyon situated to the north of Clarksdale, a town deeply rooted in the history of the Delta Blues. It was the birthplace of Willie Brown and John Lee Hooker. 1950’s Rock n Roll pioneer Ike Turner and the legendary early soul singer Sam Cooke also came from Clarksdale as well as numerous other musicians.

son house

Son House

The interesting thing about Son House was that in his early years he hated the blues and was passionate about religion instead. He found that the blues, being the music of the devil and all that, went against his religious beliefs. At the age of 15 he was living in New Orleans and had started to preach sermons. He also married when he was 19 to an older woman called Carrie Martin. They then moved to Carrie’s hometown of Centreville in Louisiana where her father owned a farm. Most of Son House’s time over there was spent with her father working on his farm. It was grilling work under a swampy Deep South sky and after a couple of years, feeling he was being taken advantage of, he split from Centreville leaving behind Carrie, her father and his farm. House remembered of that time, ”I left her hanging on the gatepost, with her father tellin’ me to come back so we could plow some more.”

House, like his blues brother Charley, hated farm work and most forms of manual labour. He found a way out of it by accepting a position as a paid pastor, initially in the Baptist Church and then later in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. However during this period he began drinking and womanising. This conflicted greatly with his role as a pastor (no shit!!) and he eventually left the church.

In 1927, when Son House was 25, he threw himself into the Devil’s music he’d long tried to suppress. He began frequenting and playing at local Mississippi juke joints. Juke joints were rough and raw wooden, shack-like barrelhouse dens where music, dancing, drinking and gambling occurred. They were places where cotton plantation workers and other menial labourers could relax and wind down after a hard day’s work. These juke joints, scattered around the Mississippi Delta, were instrumental in the development of the Mississippi Delta Blues. It was at these juke joints that the younger generation of blues musicians like Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters would watch Son House and his buddies Willie Brown and Charley Patton perform. Muddy Waters, just as much as Johnson, idolised Son House and he would try to go to almost every juke joint where House was playing.

One night when House was playing at a local juke joint around 1927/8, someone in the crowd brandished a pistol and went on a shooting spree. One of the bullets hit House in the leg. Son House swiftly reacted with his own weapon and shot the man dead on the spot. House was sentenced to 15 years at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. He served only two years of his sentence. His early release was the result of the intervention of an influential high ranking white plantation owner whom his family worked for. After his release, he left Clarksdale and caught a train to the small Mississippi town of Lula, 16 miles north of Clarksdale. Here he hooked up with fellow outcast Charley Patton who had already been kicked off Dockery Plantation, I imagine, for probably spending too much time creating one helluva racket on his six string machine, drinking and chasing women and not enough time being a good diligent cotton picker. Patton was with his partner in crime Willie Brown who by then had both developed quite a reputation on the local Mississippi blues juke joint circuit. All three of them would eventually play together and go on to cut records for Paramount.

This brings us now to Robert Johnson. The most legendary and famous of all the Delta bluesmen. For a long time the little I’d actually read and discovered about his life was either via the scant liner notes in the copies of his recordings I purchased and via well trodden anecdotes. There is so much mythology around the man. This is only fuelled by the fact that aside from the few recordings he left behind and just two confirmed photographs, almost all other information extracted about him has come from people who were associated and close to him. It doesn’t help that he died in 1938, before the second world war and at a time when mass media communications were far less developed than what they are today. 

Recently though, I discovered a book called Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson And The Invention Of The Blues by Elijah Wald. This is probably one of the best books out there on Robert Johnson that does a commendable job on hacking through the dense thickets of myths around his life and getting to some of the more mundane facts. Chapter 6 of Wald’s book, A Life Remembered, contains a lot of this information. Robert Johnson was an illegitimate child born in a small Mississippi town called Hazlehurst (about 30 miles from the capital, Jackson) on May 8th 1911 (although this date may be incorrect). His biological mother was married to a man called Charles Dodds who was a relatively wealthy landowner and furniture maker. Following a clash with some white landowners, Dodds was forced by a lynch mob to leave Hazlehurst. He had now started calling himself Charles Spencer. After leaving Hazlehurst, Robert spent 8-9 years in Memphis. It was in this city that he developed his love for blues music and the popular music of the time. He later returned to Mississippi to a small town on the Mississippi Delta. At school he had a friend named Willie Coffee who remembered Robert from that time for having a knack for playing the harmonica and the jews harp…

“Me and him and lots more of us boys, we played hooky and get up under the church. They had a little stand up there and we’d get up under there…and he’d blow his harp and pick his old jew’s harp for us and sing under there. We’d play hooky until the teacher would find our variety, and she’d make us come in and give us five lashes.”

On February 1929, before Robert had turned 18, he married fourteen year old Virginia Travis, who shortly died in childbirth. Some argue that this tragic incident had a deeply traumatic effect on Robert and was the catalyst for his life of rambling. During this time Robert crossed paths with Son House and Willie Brown who would both have a huge effect on him. I’d already been aware of the influence Son House had on Robert when I purchased some cheap double CD comp of all his recordings. I was also familiar with the name Wille Brown as I heard his name mentioned in his song Cross Road Blues (‘You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown’). In the scant liner notes of those recordings, there were quotes from Son House directed at Robert. Most of these quotes were from Son House telling Robert to quit making such a racket on that guitar. Even though in those early days he was a talented harmonica player, Robert was a very rudimentary guitar player and would drive people nuts in the juke joints. As Son House recalled…

He (Robert) used to play harmonica when he was ‘round about fifteen, sixteen years old. He could blow harmonica pretty good. Everybody liked it. But he just got the idea that he wanted to play guitar….He used to sit down between me and Willie. See, Willie was my commenter, you know, he’d second all the time, he’d never lead. I’d do the lead. And we’d be sitting about this distance apart, and Robert would come and sit right on the floor, with his legs up like that, between us. 

So when we’d get to a rest period or something, we’d set the guitars up and go out – it would be hot in the summertime, so we’d go out and get in the cool, cool off some. While we’re out, Robert, he’d get the guitar and go bamming with it, you know? Just keeping noise, and the people didn’t like that. They’d come out and they’d tell us, “Why don’t you or Willie or one go in there and stop that boy? He’s driving everybody nuts.”

I’d go in there and get to him. I’d say, “Robert,” I’d say, “Don’t do that, you’ll drive the people home.” I’d say, “You can blow the harmonica, they’d like to hear that. Get on that.” He wouldn’t pay me too much attention, but he’d let the guitar alone. I’d say, “You stop that. Supposing if you’d break a string or something? This time of night, we don’t know no place where we can get a string.” I’d say, “Just leave the guitars alone.”

But quick as we’re out there again, and get to laughing and talking and drinking, here we’d hear the guitar again, making all kinds of tunes: “BLOO-WAH, BOOM-WAH” – a dog wouldn’t wanting to hear it!

Then one day Robert disappeared for many months. During that time, he got married to a woman named Callie Craft and performed frequently in various juke joints and lumber camps. When he returned, he persuaded Son House and Willie to let him play at a small joint they were both playing at. Initially, they were both very sceptical but they eventually caved in. When Robert got on the stage he blew everybody away with his playing. As impressed as Son House was, he was concerned that Robert was by that stage accelerating head on into the musician’s life and embracing the liquor, women and drugs that came with it. Whenever Son House tried to warn Robert of the dangers of this lifestyle, Robert would simply shrug and laugh it off. 

From 1931 until his death in 1938, he led an almost nomadic existence travelling across the country and leaving all the people he encountered dazzled and spellbound by his off the wall guitar playing. One thing I immediately notice when I study those two photos of Robert are his abnormally long fingers. Johnny Shines, who sometimes travelled with Robert during those final seven years of his life, remembered, ‘His sharp, slender fingers fluttered like a trapped bird.’

The bluesman Robert Lockwood Jr, born just a few years after Robert in 1915, learned to play guitar directly from Robert Johnson. Robert lived with Lockwood’s mother off and on for ten years. Lockwood was born in the same year as Honeyboy Edwards and also lived for a long time into his 90s. On a two week trip to New York City back in September 2006, I discovered that Lockwood was playing one evening at a small venue in the city of Cleveland in Ohio during my stay. He was 91 at the time and along with Honeyboy one of the very few remaining original Mississippi Delta Bluesmen still alive at the time. Unfortunately, I passed on the opportunity to see him on the grounds that I didn’t have enough time on this trip and that the greyhound bus from NYC to Cleveland was both too long and too expensive. I did however make up for this lost opportunity by seeing Honeyboy in concert twice over the following two years. 

One of Lockwood’s memories of Robert Johnson was how isolated and restless he was. He never seemed to want to get too close to anyone and would always be on the move;

“Robert was a strange dude. I guess you could say he was a loner and a drifter.”

Johnny Shines, during his time spent with Robert, remembered that in addition to his incredible musical skills, he also had a strong aura and magnetic appeal;

“…Robert was a fellow very well liked by women and men, even though a lot of men resented his power or his influence over women-people. They resented that very much, but, as a human being, they still liked him because they couldn’t help but like him, for Robert just had that power to draw.” 

Personally, I can fully believe this. Whenever I look at the photo of Robert looking incredibly dapper and handsome with his guitar and pinstripe suite, there is something striking and hypnotic about him that one just doesn’t easily forget. He was not some rough and tumble Charley Patton or Son House character. There was an elegance and fineness about him. Shines also remembered Robert as being quite a versatile musician who was up to date with all the latest musical styles and sounds. In this sense that is what separated him from the older Delta blues players such as Patton and House. Aside from the blues, Robert was also able to play anything from hillbilly songs to Bing Crosby hits:

“He did anything that he heard over the radio…When I say anything, I mean anything – popular songs, ballads, blues, anything. It didn’t make him no difference what it was. If he liked it, he did it. He’d be sitting there listening to the radio – and you wouldn’t even know he was paying attention to it – and later that evening maybe, he’d walk out on the streets and play the same songs that were played on the radio.”

This was all quite a revelation to me. For a long time, I thought Robert was a pure bluesman and that he didn’t play anything else beyond the small collection of recordings he left behind. That’s how much I fell for this kind of a myth. I could not envisage this other side to him. 

However, it is those recordings that he left behind that I prefer to remember him for. As they are an astonishing set of recordings. I think that I would be deeply disappointed to hear Robert hollering some hillbilly tune. The story of these recordings begins in 1936, just two years before he died. At some point during that year, Robert walked into a furniture shop, H. C. Spier, in the city of Jackson. As well as selling furniture, Spier also sold phonographs and records in addition to being a talent scout of note in the area. Most of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians had got their recording deals via him. When Spier first heard Robert he was impressed with his skills and connected him with a guy called Ernie Oertle, who was an agent for the ARC company and who booked Robert in for a session at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas in November of that year. The sessions were conducted over three days on November 23, 26 and 27 where he recorded a total of sixteen songs – recording two takes of each song. Of Johnson’s total recorded output left behind, there are several songs that were recorded twice. 

The sessions Robert did in November 1936 yielded one modest hit, “Terraplane Blues”, which sold reasonably well. When Son House, who had initially in those earlier days so doubted Robert and his guitar skills, first heard that song he was knocked out by how good it was;

“Believe the first one I heard was ‘Terraplane Blues.’ Jesus, it was good. We all admired it. Said, ‘That boy is really going places.’”

The sales of those recordings from the November sessions were respectable enough, that ARC invited Robert back in June 1937 for another session this time in Dallas. For those sessions Robert recorded a further thirteen songs. Unfortunately, Robert’s life would soon be cut abruptly short. His reputation as a ladies’ man would eventually have grave consequences. As Shines recalled…

“Women, to Robert, were like motel or hotel rooms. Even if he used them repeatedly he left them where he found them. Heaven help him, he was not discriminating. Probably a bit like Christ, he loved them all. He preferred older women in their thirties over the younger ones, because the older ones would pay his way.”

Even though many women were attracted to Robert, it was natural that some men were going to be jealous. As Shines further adds…

“If women pull at a musician, naturally men’s gonna be jealous of it. Because every man wants to be king…and if he’s not king and somebody else seems to be on the throne, then he wants to get him down. It don’t take very much to set people off when you’re being worshipped by women. And so naturally we got into a hell of a lot of trouble.”

This last paragraph from Shines pretty much gets to the heart regarding the reason why Robert was poisoned on that fateful night at a small country joint concert near Three Folks in Greenwood, Mississippi in August 1938, which he was playing with Honeyboy Edwards. According to Edwards, the man who ran the joint was under the impression that Robert was sleeping around with his wife. So, at the show he gave Robert some whiskey to drink laced with strychnine, which he duly accepted. In a sense, Robert was still at this point rather naive. As I mentioned earlier, Son House would invariably warn Robert to be careful regarding the lifestyle he was living. He often told him not to accept any drink that was given to him as he may not know what may be in it. Sometimes House would be very cross with Robert when he behaved like this and would duly push the offered bottle of whiskey away from him. Robert would get angry and say, “Man, don’t ever knock a bottle of whiskey out of my hand.” 

But Robert paid a huge price in the end. There was nothing romantic or glamorous about the way he died. He died a very painful and undignified death and was still just a young adult of only 27 – arguably one of the first members to join that club long before Jim, Jimmy, Brian and Kurt. Son House, born almost a decade before Robert, lived well into his 80s passing away in October 1988. 

By Nicholas Peart

Published 16th May 2024

(Written 2016/2024)

(c)All Rights Reserved

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FURTHER READING:

Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald

Searching For Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick

VIDEOS:

The Search For Robert Johnson – directed and produced by Chris Hunt and narrated by John Hammond

RECORDINGS:

The Complete Recordings – Robert Johnson

Back To The Crossorads: The Roots Of Robert Johnson

CRATE DIGGING IN MOROCCO: On The Hunt For Vintage Moroccan Vinyl Records

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

My time spent in Morocco during the months of November and December last year proved to be quite fruitful overall in my search for old vinyl records in this country. This was my sixth trip to Morocco. I have travelled extensively across the country in the past yet I knew very little about the country’s music and musical history. 

In the months before I embarked on this trip I tried to look for old Moroccan music on the internet and even created a YouTube playlist of old Moroccan songs I discovered and found interesting. Via the online vinyl records database site Discogs, I also stumbled upon an interesting and esoteric compilation entitled Kassidat: Raw 45s From Morocco released in 2013 on a small label called Parlortone. I loved the songs on that compilation and began to find out more information on the old major Moroccan record labels such as Boussiphone, Casaphone, Koutoubiaphone, etc, and all the many releases on those kinds of labels. I also discovered some very helpful blog posts written a number of years before my trip by travellers who documented their digging adventures and stories across the country. These blog posts were very helpful and gave me in advance a taste of some of the music and artists to look out for, including some unique Moroccan singers and musicians. 

My Moroccan crate digging (mis)adventures begin in the old walled medina of the imperial city of Fez. The medina is a veritable never ending labyrinth of narrow and winding passages. It is an awesome and fascinating place yet it’s equally at times an overwhelming, high pressure and high octane experience. Some of the souk sellers are hardcore in their persistence of persuading you to buy stuff from their shops even if you only project a mild glance. 

Deep in the medina I find a small bric-a-brac type shop selling miscellaneous junk shop bits. In the corner of the shop, I spot a small pile of 7 inch records (or 7s as I like to refer to them). The records look exactly like the kind of discs I am looking for and superficially tick all the boxes. Alas, on closer inspection some of the records are in very poor condition. I discover cracks and heavy scratches on the surface of some of the records. Also, I notice that many of the records are not in their correct sleeves. I have no intention of buying any of these records even though the shop owner is insistent on giving me a ‘good price’. I reply with a calm but firm ‘La shukran’ and continue down the endless maze of the medina. 

The medina of Fez

In a quiet and more sedate part of the medina, I find a nondescript hole-in-the-wall cafe where I pause for a strong pot of pick-me-up the a la menthe with enough sugar to give me some serious dental decay. If I were a careers advisor in Morocco, I would recommend a career in dentistry as you will always find work! But I digress. This is just what I need right now at this moment in time. This brew sustains me in this can’t-stand-the-heat kitchen of Fez’s medina. 

On the way back to my riad accommodation, I stumbled upon a small and cosy antiques shop exuding a laid back old bohemian vibe. An old John Lee Hooker song hums from the back of the shop. Situated amongst the pillars and stacks of trinkets smoking on a pipe is the shop’s owner, Omar, who could be a throwback from 1950s Tangier when the city’s residents included the Beat writers William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Omar is a dude and refreshingly bereft of the characteristics of many of the grade A hustlers in the medina. In his humble little emporium he has a sizable pile of vintage Moroccan 7 inch records unstably resting upon each other like jagged mini Babel towers. Next to the 7s is a stack of dusty LPs, but it is the 7s that interest me. A lot of the records are in tired condition, but there are a number of records that are not too bad and with some thorough cleaning I could probably restore them to a much better condition. My fundamental rule here is to avoid the records that are severely trashed – regardless of how rare they may be. Any records that are cracked or heavily scratched are a no-no for me. Omar has the records I am looking for. On my initial visit to his shop I purchase two old Moroccan 7s that look interesting and are in good condition. The first record is on the Koutoubiaphone label by Rais Hmad Amentag, a traditional Berber singer and musician. And the other 7 is on the Atlassiphone label by Chaab Mohamad Hilali. I have no idea who either of them are but they look intriguing. Omar wants 40 Dirhams for each record, but we agree on 50 for the two. 

For the remainder of my stay in Fez, I make a few more visits to Omar’s shop where I purchase more records. I would say that in total I purchased 10 records from him. I found some crackers in his shop including a couple of 7s on the Boussiphone label by Mohamed El Aroussi, who is a jbala style composer and singer from the Taounata Province, as well as a rare 7 by Albert Suissa, a Moroccan Jewish musician from Casablanca. The Suissa 7 was released on the label, Editions N. Sabbah, which was an old label from Casablanca dating back to the 1950s that released many records by Moroccan Jewish musicians. I know very little about the music of Jewish Morocco, but it was thanks to a blogger called Chris Silver and his excellent and revelatory post, Record Digging, Cassette Collecting and Musical Memory In Jewish Morocco, published in 2012, that I was able to learn a bit about it and it was through this post that I first became aware of Albert Suissa and other notable Moroccan Jewish musicians and singers. 


Most people who come to Fez will visit the famous medina, but very few venture to the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter of Fez. Morocco used to have a large Jewish community. Before the state of Israel was established in 1948, around 265,000 Jews lived in Morocco making it the country with the biggest Jewish population in the Muslim world. By 2017, that number had been significantly reduced to only a couple of thousand. When Morocco had a sizable Jewish population, the mellahs in the large cities were thriving. Sadly, as the Jewish population diminished over the years, the mellahs fell into a state of neglect. But the mellah of Fez is not a sleepy part of the city. There are some amazing old buildings, albeit in a crumbling and worn state.

The mellah of Fez

There is an energy here, but thankfully it isn’t of the intense and high stress variety that one finds in the medina. Here nobody bothers you or tries to sell you anything. My random mellah wonderings lead me to a small block of antique shops. The first of these shops that I visit has a small pile of vinyl LPs on the floor near the entrance. I have a hurried flick through them. Sadly none of the LPs are of much interest to me and are mostly European landfill records from the 1970s and 1980s. However, in the next shop I visit I spot a stack of vintage Moroccan 7s on a table at the back. They look promising and I dig out two 7s including a rare 7 by Fatima Zehafa, an old aita singer from the town of Settat, on the Ifriquiaphone label. The shop owner wanted 100 Dirhams for both 7s, but we eventually agreed on 60. 

Fez crate digging fruits

From Fez, I take the train to the nearby city of Meknes, only an hour away. I stay at the faded French colonial style Hotel Majestic in the pleasant and rather modern nouvelle ville. In the morning of my second day in Meknes, I have breakfast and then take a petit-taxi to the old walled medina part of the city. The medina of Meknes is big with lots of souks, but it is free of the almost constant hassle of the medina of Fez. Walking deeper into the heart of the medina I soon enter a marche brocante area with lots of stalls selling antiques and other miscellaneous items. One stall displaying a dazzling kaleidoscope-like array of old trinkets and bits catches my eye. The elderly owner has a modest stash of old dusty 7s that I dig through. Unfortunately, many of the records are in a sorry state and when I do find a record in reasonable condition it is not in its correct sleeve. 

The medina of Meknes

Meknes doesn’t yield much in my digging searches. Fortunately, I have more luck in Rabat, the capital of Morocco and the next city I visit. In the eastern part of the medina of Rabat towards the end of Rue Souika is the old market of Rabat. Here I discover a number of antique and bric-a-brac shops. The first one I visit is run by a bona fide curmudgeon. He brings over a pile of old 7s. It is not a bad stack at all. It’s a mix of vintage Moroccan records with a smattering of records from Egypt and Lebanon. I pick out a nice looking 7 by the Lebanese singer Fairuz. It is however not a Lebanese pressing but a French pressing. The owner wants 100 Dirhams for the record. When I offer 30 for it, the owner snatches the Fairuz record from my hand and slams it down on a nearby table. I never witnessed Omar behaving like this, but to be honest Omar was likely so stoned most of the time that losing his temper must have been too much effort. Omar is a cool dude. This guy, on the other hand, has some serious unchecked aggression.  I think about duly getting the fuck out of his shop. But in no time the shop owner cools down, relaxes his composure and points me to a small tray of records on the ground. On first impressions the records don’t excite me, but the owner tells me that they are 25 Dirhams each. Most of the records in the tray are charity shop 70s Euro Pop fodder destined for the bonfire. I do however get lucky and unearth a vintage Moroccan 7 on the Casaphone label in great condition and an immaculate old Egyptian 7 on the Sono Cairo label in its original company sleeve. 25 Dirhams for each of those records is an excellent price and I don’t even haggle with the owner. 

The medina of Rabat

I visit a couple more shops in the old market. Both shops have records, but I don’t find any that interest me. The next day, I return to the old market of Rabat and randomly check out a small bookshop. I ask the owner whether he has any records? ‘Arabic?’ he replies. I nod my head and he brings over a modest stack of 7s in varying degrees of condition. I select six of the better records from the pile. The ones I pick are all in playable condition with their original picture sleeves. Initially, the owner asks for 300 Dirhams for the records. I put my hustle muscle to work and we eventually agree on 130 Dirhams. These finds include a record by the Egyptian musician Abdel Halim Hafez on the Lebanese Voix Du Liban label as well as a record by the Moroccan singer Fathallah Lamghari on the Ifriquiaphone label and another record by an old Moroccan singer and songwriter called Brahim El Alami on the Koutoubiaphone label. 

From Rabat I continue on the train along the Atlantic coast to nearby Casablanca. Casablanca is huge and a grittier city than Rabat. In contrast to Casablanca, I found Rabat a more relaxed and accessible city. Fortunately, Casablanca has a modern tram system and I am able to reach my hotel without too much bother from Casa Voyageurs train station. From reading the aforementioned Record Digging, Cassette Collecting and Musical Memory In Jewish Morocco blog post by Chris Silver, I learn about two record shops located in Casablanca, which I am excited to visit. The first record shop, Le Comptoir Marocain de Distribution de Disques, looks encouraging. It is located only a few streets away from the Hotel Astrid where I am staying. When I finally reach the shop it looks permanently defunct. I later learn the sad news from the owner of a nearby shop that the shop closed down during the COVID pandemic. And much to my dismay again, the second record shop, Disques Gam, also appears to have ceased trading. 

Downtown Casablanca

Casablanca is a spicy city. It is the commerce capital of Morocco and for that reason it is not so reliant on tourism like Marrakech is, for example. I love exploring the streets of Casablanca. There are some amazing old faded French colonial era buildings in the centre of the city. When I walk along the streets close to my hotel I feel as if I could be in Marsaille or the Riquier district of Nice. Yet on the fringes of the city’s enormous old medina I know very well that I am in Africa. The old medina surprisingly disappoints in my search for old records. Casablanca hasn’t delivered the goods. However, one day when I am walking along one of the Parisian style arcade streets close to the Place Mohammed V, I spot a stall selling old records. There is a large pile of LPs on the round along with a few 7s. Most of the LPs are no great shakes, but I do find an original UK edition of the second album by Terry Reid – an English musician from the 1960s-70s, also known for turning down an offer by Jimmy Page to be the singer for his new band Led Zeppelin. The vinyl is in respectable condition, but the sleeve is completely destroyed. The 7s are a different story. I find three 7s that interest me. One of the 7s is a rare Algerian pressing. Sadly, on closer inspection of the vinyl I detect a crack on the surface of the vinyl and end up passing on it. The second record is by an old Moroccan Jewish musician called Haim Botbol released on the Boussiphone label. I later discover that the Botbol record is also quite rare. The third record is by an old Berber musician on the La Voix Du Maghreb label. The record seller is very pleasant and is happy to accept 60 Dirhams for both the Botbol record and the record released on the La Voix Du Maghreb label. 

Place Mohammed V in Casablanca

On my penultimate day in Casablanca I visit the Derb Ghallef market en route to the Museum Of Moroccan Judaism. Derb Ghallef is raw. Located south of the centre of the city, it isn’t for the faint of heart but I recommend a visit for those who want to experience a taste of rough and tumble Casablanca. The markets sells lots of electronic goods as well as furniture and building parts. When I visit I find a couple of antique shops, but alas no luck in finding any old Moroccan records. 

From Casablanca, I take the train further south down to Marrakech. Marrakech, one would think, with its abundance of souks in the old medina would be a mecca for crate diggers. Unfortunately, during my stay here this has not proven to be the case at all. That is not to say that there is an absence of places to find records. There are, but I encounter hurdles. The first shop I visit, close to the large Jemaa El Fna square in the medina of Marrakech, sells an assortment of traditional musical instruments. When I discover a small stash of 7s, I have a brisk plough through them and select a few that interest me. The young owner of the shop is a stubborn and temperamental sod and refuses to accept less than 100 Dirhams a record. This is madness as the records are not uber rare and I personally wouldn’t pay more than 30 Dirhams for each one. 

The Jemaa El Fna in Marrakech

At another shop I visit in the medina, I ask the owner whether he has any magic Moroccan 7s? He tells me that there is a record shop only a few shops away and that he will take me there. We end up walking for close to ten minutes and, being rather asleep at the wheel here, it dawns on me that I will have to give this guy some form of baksheesh. When we arrive at the record shop he becomes grumpy and predictably demands payment. I hand him a few coins and thankfully he leaves. I have to admit I am underwhelmed by this record shop. Many of the records are in an irrevocably fucked state. He has an original LP by the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. Both sides of the vinyl look like the surface of the moon. The owner wants 300 Dirhams for the record, which is a preposterous price. When I put the vinyl on the shop’s record player, it skips all over the place and fails to play properly. The owner remarks that the reason for this is nothing to do with the fact that the record is totally mutilated, but rather because ‘the record player is no good’. After this incident, I come to the conclusion that the main Marrakech medina around the Jemaa El Fna square is not the place for crate digging. And this suits me fine as I find the whole experience of being in this place for too long like being in a medieval free-for-all open prison. I can’t breathe. 

But I don’t give up entirely on Marrakech. At a small shop by a rank of grand taxis outside of the medina, the kind owner recommended that I visit a market on the northern outskirts of the medina called Souk El Khemis. A small local bus departing from close to the Jemaa El Fna takes me to this part of the old town in around 20 minutes. The market here is different to the souks around the Jemaa El Fna. Here, there are no other tourists and nobody bothers me. The souks here sell mostly household goods. There is a souk selling large ornate old wooden doors. Another souk sells bed frames and mattresses and others sell mechanical parts and a variety of secondhand home products. The bit of the market that interests me is the souk full of bric-a-brac shops. The first of these shops I enter sells lots of old books and miscellaneous antiques. In the back corner of the shop I find a cardboard box containing a stack of LPs. Most of the LPs are not what I am looking for and I sadly don’t find any old Moroccan LPs. However, I do unearth an original LP from the 70s on the EMI Egypt label by the Egyptian singer and composer Mohamed Abdel Wahab. The sleeve is slightly worn around the edges, but the vinyl is in stunningly pristine condition. I can’t detect a single blemish on either side of the record. What’s more, the owner lets me have the record for only 50 Dirhams. In an adjacent shop I found a 7 in respectable condition with its original picture sleeve by the Syrian-Egyptian singer Farid Al-Atrash released on the Moroccan Casaphone label. The pleasant and easy going owner is happy to accept 30 Dirhams for it. 

From El Khemis, I walk a few kilometres on the road leading to Bab Doukkala at the edge of the medina. There are lots of informal sellers selling all kinds of random items and bits of junk. At one point I see a landslide of miscellaneous crap strewn across the side of the road – like a kind of odd homage to Kurt Schwitters. 

Outskirts of the medina of Marrakech

After Marrakech, my Moroccan travels take me to Essaouira, Agadir, Tiznit, Sidi Ifni and Taroudant. I find a few more vinyl bits in these places, but all in all I would say that the cities of Fez and Rabat have been the most rewarding for digging. In the attractive coastal town of Essaouira, I visited a shop close to the main square that appeared to be owned by an elderly French chap. The shop sold many old books and a few racks of old records. He had a fantastic collection of old Moroccan records – one of the best I’ve seen on this trip. Unfortunately, as wonderful as the records were, I found the prices a bit too high for my liking. 

I find a smattering of old Moroccan records in the souks of the medinas of Taroudant and Tiznit. In the coastal city of Agadir, I visited the Souk El Had – one of the largest souks in Morocco. Sadly, records are quite thin on the ground here, but I do find a small shop with a modest collection of 7s. From this pile I dug out two interesting old Moroccan records on the Casaphone label. I managed to get them both for 50 Dirhams. The record digging highlight of Agadir for me though is a cool little record shop located not too far away from the market called Records Zaman run by a pleasant young man called Amine. It was founded back in 1967. The shop may be small, but there are quite a number of records to dig through. There are a few rare original Moroccan LPs on the display racks on the walls, but alas they are out of my price range. I dig through a crate of LPs that are mainly western Rock and Pop albums. The crate that does interest me contains a couple of rows of old Moroccan 7s. Whilst digging through them I pull out an old record on the Editions N. Sabbah label by the Jewish Moroccan singer Feliz El Maghrebi. Save for a slight edge warp, the record and picture sleeve are in near perfect condition and Amine lets me have it for a good price. I must have spent a good hour chatting with Amine. He is great company. His English is very good and he shows me his own personal collection of LPs containing some very rare and obscure records across the Arabic world. Amine has a deep love of music and I feel that with him at the helm, Records Zaman will become an increasingly popular record shop to visit. I wish him all the best. 

Text and photos by Nicholas Peart 

8th February 2024

© All Rights Reserved   

LINKS/FURTHER READING:

https://jewishmorocco.blogspot.com/2012/11/record-digging-cassette-collecting-and.html

https://terminal313.net/2016/04/feature-dusty-vinyl-from-rabat.html

CRATE DIGGING IN LONDON: The Best Places In The City To Look For Vinyl Records

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

In this article I am listing some of the best places I have visited in London to crate dig for vinyl records. Here I will be focusing on old original records. In this case, that would be records mostly from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s spanning all music genres across the globe. I am not so much interested in new releases or Record Store Day releases, etc. The places I am listing below tick the following boxes. Firstly, they offer ample opportunities for digging. Secondly, they sell many old original records. And thirdly, their prices are reasonable and the records are graded conservatively. 

Flashback Records 

Right now, I would argue that the Flashback Records chain of record shops is the best place to dig for records in London. Flashback originally began its life as a single record shop on Essex Road in Islington back in 1997 before expanding and opening two more record shops under the Flashback name in Shoreditch and Crouch End. It has all the ingredients of what a good record shop should be. The shops have a huge selection of old original secondhand records (as well as many new records) across the main music genres. Their prices are very competitive and with the great number of records in their shops and the very reasonable prices, bargains can be found. The shops are all well run and orderly. It is an accessible place and the staff are friendly and helpful. There are no snobby or rude staff at the till a la Barry Judd in The High Fidelity. Although to be honest much of this kind of behaviour is largely now a thing of the past. Flashback is a welcoming place for everyone. 

A lot of the records for sale at Flashback are listed on their website. Yet, there are also many records in their shops, which are not. Both the Islington and Shoreditch shops are each set over two floors and are excellent shops for crate digging. The two shops have lots of LPs and 7s across a wide mix of music genres such as punk, rare prog/experimental music from the late 60s-early 70s, collectable 60s-70s rock and pop, indie records from the 80s to present, jazz, reggae, world, soul, folk, dance, etc. In my own experience, I have found Flashback to be a really good place to find original collectable first edition LPs for a decent price as well as some very nice rare 60s psychedelia, beat, reggae and world 7s.  

The Crouch End shop is smaller than the other two shops and it is a bit harder to reach, but it is worth the effort to visit this shop as their stock is also very good. If you do visit the Crouch End shop I recommend first taking the train to Hornsey station and then walking there. Close by the station is KONK recording studios. You will see the neon KONK sign above the entrance. KONK was founded by The Kinks (the brothers Ray and Dave Davies are both from nearby Muswell Hill) in the 1970s. They made many albums here and lots of other bands and artists have also recorded at KONK.  Nearby is a small record shop called The Little Record Shop. It is an under the radar gem with limited opening times and no online presence, but is very popular with those in the know. Although it may be a small space, it has a large selection of rare and collectable vintage LPs in decent condition. The prices are not cheap, but the stock is very good. However, it is not all high priced rarities here. There are a few bargain areas, which contain some collectable and great records for an affordable price. Even in the bargain sections there are good records to be found. There is no charity shop fodder here. From The Little Record Shop it is only a ten minute walk along Tottenham Lane to the Crouch End branch of Flashback. One last thing I should mention is that all three Flashback shops are equipped with turntables for customers to listen to and test out any records they want to buy. 

https://flashback.co.uk/

Music & Video Exchange 

Music & Video Exchange is one of the oldest and longest running independent record stores in the city first established in 1967. It is also one of the first independent record shops I used to visit on my trips to central London during my early record collecting days more than 20 years ago. I remember my first visit to the flagship Notting Hill store at the turn of the millennium. Back then, I think I remember there being at least 3 Music & Video Exchange record shops in Notting Hill; the main rock and pop shop, a shop that sold soul and dance records and even a shop just for classical music records. There also used to be a separate video/DVD shop as well as a second hand clothes shop on two floors and a couple of books and comics shops.  This place used to be huge; a veritable emporium selling all kinds of second hand old records, books, comics, clothes, you name it. 

There also used to be Music & Video Exchange shops in Soho and Camden, but they are sadly no longer around. However, the Music & Video Exchange shop in Greenwich is still in operation. Today the Whole Music & Video Exchange business is a smaller affair. The original rock and pop store in Notting Hill set over three floors is still going and is today the sole Music & Video Exchange music shop in Notting Hill. The shop now sells second hand vinyl records of all genres and prices as well as lots of CDs and DVDs. Also, the Music & Video Exchange book shop in Notting Hill is still there and is worth a visit. 

Some people say that Music & Video Exchange is not what it used to be, however I don’t agree and I am very happy that this place is still going and that both the Notting Hill and Greenwich shops are still doing business. The Notting Hill shop still holds a special place in my heart and is a unique and surviving example of the old Notting Hill – a part of London that has changed so much over the years. 

I recommend visiting both the Notting Hill and Greenwich record shops. Both shops are excellent for digging. There are lots of old collectable LPs to dig through across all genres and prices. One could easily spend an hour or two in either shop. My advice is to go through all the main racks if you can as you don’t know what you might find. Some records can be quite expensive, but then you may also find that record you’ve been searching for ages for a really good price. Thus it pays to dig here. 

https://mfeshops.com/pages/music-video-exchange

Reckless Records

I have been going to Reckless Records in Soho for almost as long as I’ve been going to the Notting Hill Music & Video Exchange shop. Today I would say that Reckless is one of the best record shops in central London to dig for old and collectable records. The shop has lots of LPs and 7s across most genres and a lot of stock is of high quality and conservatively graded. There is little fodder here except for in the bargain crates, which are worth going through as you may find a classic record for next to nothing. Every time I search through records in the New Arrivals section, I usually find a record I have had on my wantlist for a reasonable price. I have found a good number of collectable and rare LPs in this shop for a good price. Those who extensively dig here are often rewarded. Some of the best LPs I’ve found here have been rare original prog and experimental rock albums from the late 60s – early 70s on labels such as the early green Harvest and pink Island and Charisma labels. I have also found some really rare and hard to find original LPs from countries in West Africa like Nigeria. Reckless is also a great shop to dig for old 7 inch singles (or 7s as I refer to them here). They usually have lots of rare reggae, old jazz and 60s beat and psychedelia singles and sometimes some quite rare and hard to find world music singles as well as original rock and pop 7s pressed in countries like India and Hong Kong. 

If you visit Reckless it is also worth visiting nearby Sister Ray records shop. Sister Ray used to have a larger shop on the same street, which I used to frequent regularly many years ago now. The new Sister Ray shop is good and it does have a sizeable number of records to go through, but a lot of the LPs are new editions. If you like high quality new reissues of old classic albums then this is a good shop to visit. Sister Ray also has a large collection of CDs and boxsets with a selection at bargain prices. 

https://reckless.co.uk/

Jelly Records 

Jelly Records, with the exception of the Flashback Records Shoreditch branch, is probably my favourite record shop in East London right now. It is a small place located on the basement floor below a furniture shop not too far from Homerton Overground station. But please don’t be dissuaded by the size as this place is a crate diggers paradise. I would recommend visiting in the middle of the week when it is less busy as it can be too hectic when the shop is full of people. What makes this record shop unique is that it has a very good selection of original world music LPs and 7s – probably one of the best in the city. Furthermore, the prices of these records are very reasonable considering their scarcity and the grading of the records and sleeves is conservative. 

Whenever I visit this shop, I often find a number of rare LPs from countries in West Africa like Ghana and Nigeria. I discovered some lovely collectable highlife LPs from Ghana as well as some rare afrobeat and juju records from Nigeria. And sometimes in surprisingly good condition. One has to understand that the covers of many original old African LPs can be quite fragile. I am also impressed by the crates of 7s at the front of the shop. Last time I visited I spotted a handful of rare original 7s from pre-Revolution Iran as well as many 7s from Pakistan and India. There were also some nice 7s from West Africa in addition to a good selection of original rare reggae 7s. 

This is an excellent little record shop and the owner is very friendly. There are also some other record shops in this area of East London not too far away and have a good selection of old LPs and 7s. Not far from Jelly Records, there is a small record shop called Kristina Records. And in central Hackney I recommend visiting Tome Records and Atlantis Records. The latter place has lots of records to dig through.

https://jellyrecords.co.uk/

Upside Down Records 

Upside Down Records is a new record shop that opened its doors last year in November that is located in Deptford, South East London. The reason I am listing it here is because the people behind this record shop are the same people who used to run Rat Records in Camberwell, which sadly closed in 2022. Rat Records was a legendary place and one of the best record shops in the city to crate dig for old original records. The best time to visit was on a Saturday when the shop would fill the crates with large stacks of newly arrived records at really good prices. For this reason it was a hugely popular place and those Saturdays could get madly busy, but it was always worth it as I picked up some fabulous records. So I was delighted by the news that the same folk behind Rat have opened this wonderful new record shop. When I recently visited Upside Down I was impressed by the records they had in the racks. The prices are just like there were at Rat and I think this record shop over time will do well and become increasingly popular. I can also see the stock of records in the shop increasing over time and I look forward to making many more visits here. 

upsidedownrecords.co.uk

Out On The Floor Records 

No photo description available.

For many years I used to visit Camden Market to buy records. However, in more recent times, I feel that overall the market doesn’t offer the same experience and value that it did in the past. Music & Video Exchange used to have a great record shop in Camden that was perfect for digging, but alas it is no longer there. There is, however, one record shop in Camden that is a great place for finding old and rare records for a reasonable price and that is Out On The Floor Records. It’s a small shop located close to Camden Town tube station.  The racks are full of records of different genres. I find this shop particularly good for original and collectable 60s and 70s rock, prog and punk LPs in addition to old reggae 7s. There is also a large area of bargain records. Most of the time digging through such crates can be a waste of time, but in this shop I have found quite a few original, albeit slightly tired, and collectable LPs for only a few coins. 

outonthefloorrecords.com

Crazy Beat Records

Crazy Beat Records is located in the Essex town of Upminster at the eastern end of the District Line on the edge of Greater London. Despite its far location, it is well worth the effort to visit this record shop. In fact, I would even recommend a day’s visit here. This shop has many crates of records to dig through. The speciality here is reggae. I would argue that this shop has one of the biggest and best stock of old original reggae 7s in London. It is actually quite mindblowing the amount of reggae records they have. On my last visit here, there were at least 20 boxes of new arrivals to dig through. Lots of rare old 60s soul gems were in the boxes as well as some collectable old 60s and 70s rock and pop 7s. However, most of the records in the boxes were original old reggae 7s from the 60s and 70s in varying states of condition. One could spend at least 2-3 hours just going through those boxes. It can be gruelling at times, but the rewards can be bountiful. I found a handful of lovely original old reggae and ska records on the Trojan and Blue Beat labels as well as a few rare soul 7s from the 60s for a very reasonable price. In addition to these boxes of new arrivals, many more crates await. 

After getting all reggae’d out, I walked over to the bargain section of LPs by the entrance. I highly recommend digging through the bargain crates. A lot of the records in this section are no great shakes, but with persistence some seriously good and collectable LPs can be discovered for an amazing price. I will stress though that it is important to always check the condition of the records in this section. I once found an original first pressing of the first album by Emerson Lake and Palmer on the pink Island label for just £4. Alas, on closer inspection, the record had some rather nasty scratches so I passed. However, on my last visit I found an original Bo Diddley LP from the 60s on the Chess label also for only £4 and the vinyl was in much better shape than the ELP record. 

There are also crates of original soul, funk, reggae and jazz LPs to dig through plus a huge collection of dance 12 inch records. 

crazybeat.co.uk

Shaks’ Stax Of Wax Record Shop

May be an image of eyewear, hat shop og tekstur

Before this record shop, located in Kingston upon Thames, began trading as Shaks’ Stax Of Wax in October 2018, this place used to be known as the Collectors Record Centre. I used to frequent the Collectors Record Centre quite regularly during my early record collecting days. In fact, some of the first LPs in my collection were purchased from this shop. I remember one time almost 25 years ago purchasing an original LP copy of Hatful Of Hollow by The Smiths in decent condition for only a quid. Back then vinyl records were cheap and lots of people were dumping their LPs for CDs.  Hard to believe now. 

Stax is a great record shop for digging with lots of crates to get stuck into containing a wide range of original records across many different genres. It’s a worthy successor to the Collectors Record Centre record shop and the owner is very friendly. The shop has a good selection of original 60s and 70s rock and pop LPs as well as crates of quite decent original jazz and world music LPs. One of my favourite places to dig are through the crates of 7s at the back of the shop. There are lots of crates in this area of the shop containing some unusual and rare records to discover if you search hard enough. 

If you have time, its also worth checking out nearby Banquet Records. Today Banquet sells mostly new releases focusing on new music. I would argue that its probably one of the best independent record shops in the country to buy LPs and CDs by new bands and artists and its been very successful. Before this shop was known as Banquet Records, it was originally known as Beggers Banquet Records. I used to frequent Beggers quite often back in the day. 

Banquet Records also puts on a number of live events by established and up and coming bands and artists inside their store and at local venues such as The Hippodrome and The Fighting Cocks. 

https://collectors-record-centre.business.site/

VIP Record Fair London Victoria 

VIP Record Fairs have been holding record fairs across the country since the 1980s. The VIP Record Fair in London Victoria is one of the biggest record fairs in the city. This is a phenomenal place for crate diggers with more crates to dig through than one can shake a stick at. One can easily spend the whole day here and that’s what I would recommend doing. Give yourself ample time to check out all the stalls. Some stalls sell some very rare and collectable records that are priced accordingly. Sometimes though, one can find highly sought after original records through persistent digging for a good price. It is also possible to bargain on certain records with some sellers so it doesn’t hurt to make an offer, especially on a large or expensive purchase. This record fair is highly worth the £5 entry fee (£10 early entry). Even in the unlikely case that you don’t end up buying anything it is a great experience. This fair has an amazing buzz and there are some interesting characters here. All in all, this is a real mecca for dedicated diggers and not to be missed. 

http://www.vip-24.com/

Your recommendations 

I think I have picked some pretty stellar places in London that are fantastic for crate diggers of old original vintage records. However, I don’t think my list is definitive and I am sure that I have missed some really great places that I haven’t discovered yet. If any of you know of any other places in London that I haven’t already mentioned and that tick most of the boxes of the kind of places that I am looking for then please mention these places in the comments section below. These places could be independent record shops overflowing with stacks of old records or even flea/antique markets and car boot sales in the city where one can dig through crates of records and find some gems for a reasonable price. 

By Nicholas Peart

24th January 2024

(c)All Rights Reserved

The Future Could Be Very Bright For Song Rights

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

Some big names in the music world in the last few years have sold the rights to their songs for mega bucks. In 2020, Bob Dylan sold his back catalogue to Universal Music Publishing Group for a reported $400m. Then more recently last month, Bruce Springsteen sold the rights to his songs to Sony for half a billion dollars. Other names like Neil Young and the estate of David Bowie have also sold their song rights or at least a percentage of their rights for big money.

I’ve thought a lot about all this. On one hand, these may be shrewd moves especially with that kind of money offered. Yet alternatively, one could argue that song rights/publishing may over time end up being an increasingly desirable asset class. The last decade has been very rough on artists and the music industry in general. The growth of the internet and streaming platforms has had a huge dent on physical record sales. Even though there has been a revival in vinyl sales it is a small market and gone are the days one could make a comfortable living on CD sales or any physical record sales alone. To exacerbate this, the disruption created by COVID-19 over the last couple of years, has dealt a huge blow to arguably the most crucial source of income for music artists, which is playing live. All in all, the last few years have been pretty rough for music artists.

Yet I believe that the future is bright for music artists and the music world in general. I think the last decade was the nadir point, but I am optimistic that things will get better. And this all comes back to my point about the value of song rights. When the music industry was really growing in the 70s, 80s and 90s, record sales made up a huge part of the total revenue of this industry. So much so, that it would not be uncommon for the record label of a major artist (or sometimes even a new artist) to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a new album.

When upstart streaming sites like Napster started to appear and be increasingly adopted in the late 90s with the then recent rise of the internet, it was already a sign that in the future consumers would turn increasingly more to digitally downloading and streaming their music over buying physical records. By the early 2010s, it was clear that this trend had already had a huge effect on physical record sales.

Yet what the internet may have taken away, it may also give back generously. I believe that the full potential of song rights as a serious source of money generation has only barely been scraped. There will be so many new ways for songs via the internet to generate money. It is well known that streaming platforms such as Spotify pay artists very little every time a song of theirs’ is played on their site. And there may eventually be growing pressures or new laws passed to ensure that these platforms pay artists more fairly. However, music streaming sites will just be one way out of many other new ways for artists to make money from their songs.

Whenever a song is played on the radio or in a film/TV programme or advert, the songwriter receives royalties. With the growth of film and TV series streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, there are new opportunities for songs to be licensed to shows and films on those platforms.

I think for new and up and coming music artists, sites with oceans of video content by all kinds of people and entities (known and unknown) like Alphabet owned YouTube offer lots of opportunities for songwriters to earn additional royalties on their songs when content creators on those platforms use their songs in their videos. In the case of YouTube, some of the statistics are off the charts; 720,000 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube daily of which 500 hours of content is uploaded every minute. This simply phenomenal and abundant growth and with that immense opportunities for songwriters to earn income from their songs if their are used in any of these videos.

It is also important to see where the internet may be going and how it will develop in the future. Currently, there is a lot of hype over something called the ‘Metaverse’. And I can see why. To put it simply, this is a kind of ‘Virtual Reality’ stage of the internet. We already spend a large portion of our lives on the internet, yet it is a 2D experience – via our smartphones and laptops. In the so called ‘Metaverse’ it is a more immersive 3D experience. Although there is a lot of noise about the Metaverse and it is generally impossible to make predictions, it is possible to spot trends and I think the next stage of the internet will be a much more immersive one were people will be living in more virtual worlds via Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. I think this could grow exponentially, especially once it experiences mass adoption.

This will again create lots of new opportunities for songwriters as well as music artists/performers in general. In the case of the latter, I can see a huge growth in revenues for so called ‘hologram’ concerts where the artists don’t have to be present but the viewers receive a fully realistic and immersive live music experience where they can even interact with the artists and others in the virtual audience. But I digress. To get back to the point of song rights, I see lots of new income streams from songs to be made in these new worlds every time a song is used. Plus there will be lots of new opportunities and demand for songs to be licensed.

This is why companies like Universal, Sony and Warner Brothers have been paying huge sums of money for the catalogues of these blue chip artists as well as lesser known artists too. They are playing a long term game. Even though the sums they paid may seem like a lot of money, when these new digital platforms and worlds develop and grow exponentially, these catalogues could be worth even more money. So much so that it may end up being much more expensive for those artists to buy back the rights to all those songs they sold in the future.

By Nicholas Peart

27th January 2022

(c)All Rights Reserved

Image: NikolayFrolochkin 

THE KINKS: The Lost Masterpieces

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

Whenever someone asks me to choose between The Beatles or The Stones I will sometimes reply with ‘neither’. Instead I will say The Kinks. There is something special and close to my heart about that band. Throughout the 60s they had hit after hit and were certainly one of the leading British groups of that era. Yet many listeners of The Kinks I feel only penetrate the surface of this great band. They know the hits, but few venture beyond those songs as popular as they may be. I came to the band a little late. I first got into the group via a greatest hits compilation I purchased when I was 19. As much as I cherish all those well loved songs, what struck me as odd was that the compilation ended at the 1970 hit single Apeman; as if the group ceased to exist after that song. It seems to be the same with many other Kinks compilations.

Most of their well known hits are from the time when they were signed in the UK to the Pye record label from 1964 until 1970. The vast majority of their most well known songs such as You Really Got Me, Sunny Afternoon, Tired Of Waiting, Waterloo Sunset, Days and Lola fall within those years. Personally, my favourite years are from 1968 to 1975. I love those early songs and they will never get stale and always retain a timeless quality to them. For me though, the most exciting years are when the group’s chief songwriter Ray Davies began to compose these brilliant and ambitious concept albums starting with the 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (TKATVGPS) and ending with the 1975 album Schoolboys In Disgrace. Those albums receive mixed reviews from fans. For example, the former is today frequently heralded as a classic landmark album and can be seen in many ‘greatest albums of all time’ polls. The latter album, on the other hand, gets invariably torn apart. Perhaps those journalists and listeners never even bothered to actually listen to Schoolboys? They probably saw the hideous front cover and decided that they didn’t need to investigate further; their prejudices already set in stone.

During the few remaining Pye years, The Kinks released some very strong albums. In 1968 they released the aforementioned TKATVGPS album. Then the following year they released the album Arthur, which is just as good as VGPS and is equally held in high esteem. The final two albums they released on Pye were the 1970 studio album Lola Vs Powerman And The Moneygoround and the 1971 soundtrack album Percy for the film of the same name. Lola Vs Powerman… produced the hit singles “Lola” and “Apeman”. The former is one of the band’s best known songs.

After the band left Pye, they signed a new deal with RCA records in 1971. Their tenure at RCA would last for four years and during this time the band continued on it’s trajectory of releasing concept albums. Just as they signed to RCA, they released the album Muswell Hillbillies. It’s a strong album with some fine songs on it. The next year they released the album Everybody’s In Showbiz. Personally, I have mixed views about this album. On one hand, I like Ray’s ideas and inspiration behind it as well as songs such as Celluloid Heroes and Sitting In My Hotel Room. Both these songs are excellent. Celluloid Heroes has gone on to be covered by multiple artists – most notably Bon Jovi. It contains some of Ray’s finest lyrics.

Then in 1973 and 1974, the band released two albums; Preservation: Act One followed by Preservation: Act Two. All in all, neither of these albums were particularly well received by music critics at the time; especially the Preservation: Act Two album. However, after listening to both those albums I have come to the conclusion that they are the two lost masterpieces of The Kinks’ cannon of albums. And it is those two albums that I want to make the centre of this article. Whilst it may be too controversial to say that they are the best albums by The Kinks, I think I can firmly say that they are Ray Davies’ most ambitious works. It doesn’t matter whether one thinks those albums are a success or a failure. I don’t personally think they are a failure. What I will say is that those albums took Ray down avenues he never, or at the minimum only casually, ventured down before. He had already explored subjects like greed, poverty, inequality and injustice in society earlier on via songs like ‘Dead End Street’, ‘Brainwashed’ and ‘Powerman’. But on the Preservation Act albums he goes right into the heart of darkness. The Village Green Preservation Society(VGPS) album is almost soft liquor by comparison. Whilst the songs on VGPS are very strong and vivid, they are also accessible. They don’t rock the boat nor do they, at least superficially, take the listener to an ostentatiously dark and uncomfortable place. The Preservation Act albums, on the other hand, are much more polemic.

We’ll start with the Preservation: Act 1 album from 1973 before delving more deeply into Preservation: Act 2. One of the gems of this album is the song Sweet Lady Genevieve – a song that could fit quite comfortably with the cannon of better known Kinks hits. Of the two Preservation Act albums this one is lighter in tone and there are even echoes of the earlier VGPS album via songs like Sitting In The Midday Sun and Daylight. Another pearl on this album is the song ‘Where Are They Now?’…

I’ll sing a song about some people you might know
They made front pages in the news not long ago
But now they’re just part of a crowd
And I wonder where they all are now.

For me this song is an affectionate tribute to all the mavericks. The individual and special people who were a blast of colour in a world that is becoming increasingly colourless and homogenous. In the context of the earlier VGPS album that would be characters like Johnny Thunder. Some strands of humanity are evident on Preservation: Act 1. But this is deceptive. The presence of the song Money And Corruption/I am Your Man poisons any idyllic and romantic notions…

Money and Corruption
Are ruining the land
Crooked politicians
Betray the working man,
Pocketing the profits
And treating us like sheep,
And we’re tired of hearing promises
That we know they’ll never keep.

With this song Ray dives straight into the underbelly of the system – taking it on like a firebrand revolucionario a la Hugo Chavez. This continues and is reinforced in the end refrain part of the song with it’s Communist Manifesto overtones…

I visualize a day when people will be free
And we’ll be living in a new society.
No class distinction, no slums or poverty,
So workers of the nation unite,
Workers of the nation unite,
People of the nation unite.

This song sets the tone for the follow up Preservation: Act 2 album. On the later released bonus edition of the Preservation: Act 1 album is the song ‘Preservation’, which wasn’t featured on the album when it was originally released. It’s lyrically not only a very strong song but totally encapsulates the spirit of both Preservation albums as a whole. It also, along with the song Here Comes Flash, introduces the character Flash, a central figure in the follow up album who represents everything that’s wrong in the world – a psychopathic, greedy, amoral, corrupt and duplicitous individual who lacks empathy and is only out for himself. He is the type of person that would make Gordan Gecko blush…

Once upon a time
In a faraway land
Lived a villain called Flash
He was such a wicked man
He terrorized the people
He broke arms and crushed hands
He ruled with a fist and he purchased all the land

Then he plowed up the fields and cut down the trees
For property speculation
And he did it all for a pot of gold
And for his own preservation

Preservation: Act 2 is a dark unsexy beast of an album. Whatever light there was on Preservation: Act One has now been blocked out. If VGPS is all rural fields, church fetes, strong bonds of trust, tea and scones and strawberry jam, then Preservation Act Two is polluted rivers, eyesore landscapes, revolutions, and societal collapse where everyone just looks after number one. The VGPS album has a kind of innocence to it. Even the mildly dark characters in the album like in the song Wicked Anabella completely pale in comparison to Flash. The world of VGPS is a paradise compared with the world of Preservation: Act Two, which represents a paradise that is well and truly lost. It is about as east of Eden as one can get.

The life portrayed in Village Green is overall idyllic and peaceful. Yet it is a bubble shielded from the truly evil and disruptive forces of life. It is naïve to think such a life like that one can just go on forever. Flash hadn’t yet pitched up to turn things upside down.

The first song on Preservation: Act 2 to really get things going is the song When A Solution Comes…

When a solution comes,
It’s gonna breathe right down on everyone.
When a solution comes
It’s gonna cover up the clouds
And eclipse the sun
And black out a pale blue sky,
And everybody’s gonna be terrified,
Because they’re all going to feel the bite
And there’s going to be a revolution

‘Days’ this song is not; in that iconic song from 1968 there is sadness, loss and grief. But there is no bitterness. There is no hate nor is there fear. This is evident in the following lyrics;

You took my life,
But then I knew that very soon you’d leave me,
But it’s all right,
Now I’m not frightened of this world, believe me.

Yet in When A Solution Comes there is a change in the weather. This is the beginning of a new period of fresh hell that will reign down on all of society. In the book The Fourth Turning, the authors William Strauss and Neil Howe look at the world over the last 500 years and locate a series of cycles each lasting a generation. Within each generational cycle are four turnings. The first turning represents a ‘high’: this is a period of stability. Trust in institutions is strong and individualism is weak. A new civic order is established the old values regime collapses The second turning represents an ‘awakening’ where the civic order established in the first turning begins to come under attack from a new values regime. The third turning represents an ‘unravelling’. During this era trust in institutions begins to weaken and individualism strengthens. The first turning civic order collapses at this point and eventually taken out by the new values regime. The forth and final turning represents a ‘crisis’. By this time the world is in chaos as the the new values regime replaces the original civic order created in the first turning with a new one.

In the context of the trilogy of all three Preservation albums, the song When A Solution Comes represents the ‘unravelling’ phase of society. It is not in the full ‘crisis’ phase yet, but it is already well on it’s way. On the other side of the coin, the opening title track of the VGPS album in some ways represents many attributes of the first turning….

We are the Village Green Preservation Society
God save Donald Duck, Vaudeville and Variety
We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society
God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do

The lyrics of the title track of that album for me evokes a strong sense of unity. A sense of everyone looking after each other. Not allowing society to disintegrate. Keeping the peace. And that requires making an effort and caring. Once people stop caring, apathy begins to prevail and with that goes the ties that bind paving the way for disruptive forces to take over. The consequences of this are probed deeply in Preservation: Act 2.

The song Shepherds Of The Nations is one of the strongest songs on the album and in my view represents the new horror show of this dark turning….

Down with sex and sin,
Down with pot, heroin.
Down with pornography,
Down with lust.
Down with vice lechery and debauchery.

We are the new centurians.
Shepherds of the Nations.
We’ll keep on our guard
For sin and degradation.
We are the national guard
Against filth and depravity,
Perversion and vulgarity,
Homosexuality.
Keep it clean.

When all of a sudden all basic freedoms that were once taken for granted have now been eroded and a new cabal of neo-puritan Gestapo-like folk have taken over the asylum. Rather than the world taking a step forward and continuing to evolve and flourish, it has been abruptly thrown off its course and has taken a thousand steps backward towards some unfolding new sterile, lifeless and fearful Middle Ages era wasteland; where all the flowers start to wilt and die, and turn a new shade of grey. All the colours of the Village Green world now dulled to cigarette ash.

The song Nobody Gives is another dark slice of what it’s like to be in the living in the middle of a turbulent fourth turning style world…

I can’t understand why everybody’s quarreling,
Nobody gives in case they lose face,
And everybody’s guilty and everybody’s innocent,
And the fact of it is nobody gives any more.

Once upon a time there was a period of peace, stability and trust amongst one another. The aforementioned VGPS title track nails that sense of societal harmony perfectly with the lyrical couplet, ‘Preserving the old ways from being abused / Protecting the new ways for me and for you‘. But in the song ‘Nobody Gives’ everyone has turned against one another. They have become fearful and full of mistrust. Any attempt at simply performing any altruistic acts of kindness is simply not worth the bother and in a climate of unanimous fear this could even backfire. Thus it is easier and safer to just not care anymore.

As the song gathers pace, it takes the listener on a vivid and sombre journey through the roots of this social breakdown leading to, in the example of this song, the rise of Hitler…

Back in nineteen hundred and twenty-five
There were thousands of people struggling to survive.
There was hunger, unemployment and poverty,
Then in 1926 they decided to be free
So they all went on strike and
The workers told the unions, who blamed it on the government,
The politicians blamed it on the strikers and the militants,
Everybody’s guilty and everybody’s innocent,
But the fact of it is nobody gives any more.

Back in nineteen hundred and thirty-nine
There were scores of German military waiting in a line,
And the Fatherland wanted what the world wouldn’t give,
And then Hitler decided he could take what was his,
So they all went to war and said
Kill all the left-wing intellectuals,
Annihilate the Jews and wipe out their race,
Eliminate the weak because they’re ineffectual,
And the fact of it is nobody gives any more.

In 1923, when Germany was then the Weimer Republic, the country experienced a period of devastating hyperinflation. This had the effect of throwing millions of citizens into acute poverty – especially those who didn’t own any hard assets that could protect them from this inflation. Any savings in the local currency that had been accumulated via hard work and over a long period of time had very quickly become worthless. The grinding poverty and desperation aside, one can also only imagine the extreme anger and injustice felt by those who had lost all their life savings. They wanted blood and someone to blame. Hitler emerged at a time when this anger and desperation was reaching boiling point. It is only when a society is in meltdown and in the eye of a fourth turning that a figure as evil Hitler can rise to the top. In a Village Green world of togetherness and mutual respect for one another, Adolf wouldn’t stand a chance.

Overall, I think both these Preservation Act albums should be essential listening and certainly deserve to be much more wildly known. They not only complement the earlier and more well known VGPS album, they also give the listener a glimpse into the more intricate and visionary workings of the mind of Ray Davies. I think this was perhaps lost on some of the music critics who were reviewing both albums at the time. The lyrics aside, I think some credit also needs to go to Ray’s brother Dave. Generally, I don’t think he gets another credit as a guitarist. His guitar work is a really important part of both albums and I feel it sets the tone very effectively on some of the songs.

Two further albums followed in 1975, Soap Opera and Schoolboys In Disgrace, before the group left the RCA record label. Like the earlier Preservation Act albums, neither album got overly favourable reviews. Yet I think they are both interesting in their own ways. Soap Opera is a flawed hit and miss album yet the concept behind it is strong and very relevant. I particularly like the songs Everybody’s A Star (Starmaker) and You Can’t Stop The Music. The former song quite simply describes how anyone can be a star; even the blandest and most personality and talent bereft of individuals. Ray created a character called Norman to personify such people.

Schoolboys In Disgrace also has it’s moments. Unfortunately, it suffers from a front cover that is quite frankly a veritable abomination. I feel it unfairly undermines the whole album. That is certainly one reason why many listeners do not give this album a proper chance. However, those who look beyond this monstrosity of an album cover will be rewarded for their curiosity. It is not a perfect album, but there are some gems on there like Schooldays, I am In Disgrace and The Hard Way . It is also conceptually a very interesting album as it is based around a disruptive and unruly schoolboy who would eventually develop into the vile and evil character Flash of the earlier Preservation Act albums. So, in a way, this album plays an notable role next to those albums. It is an important part of that complex puzzle.

By Nicholas Peart

3rd July 2021

(c)All Rights Reserved

A Self-Guided Walking Tour Through Manchester’s Musical History

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

Manchester skyline

A lot of the music I regularly used to listen to in my younger years came from the city of Manchester. Joy Division, New Order, The Fall, The Buzzcocks, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays and Oasis all hail from this city. I would need a good few weeks to navigate the entire musical map of Manchester, but since I only had a day for this, I had to be selective.

From my modest Air BnB lodging, located in the district of Higher Broughton in the north of the city, I take a city bus towards Strangeways prison. You may think what on earth does a prison have to do with Manchester’s music scene? It was however referenced in the final album by The Smiths, Strangeways Here We Come. Located in an industrial and non-descript part of the city, the entrance to Strangeways is an architectural gem. There are not many people passing by on this early morning and I don’t feel the urge for some unfortunate to take my picture next to the gates. I am glad I didn’t.

 

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The entrance to Strangeways prison

 

From Strangeways I walk towards the Arndale Shopping Centre in the centre of the city. I was hoping that today would be an overcast day to set the scene for the places I’d be visiting, but there’s sadly not a cloud in sight. I am truly disappointed. After purchasing a sandwich at Sainsbury’s Local, I board the city tram for Deansgate located on the southern edge of the city centre.

Close to Deansgate station I only have to walk a short distance until I am face to face with the site of the legendary Hacienda nightclub. During those heady ‘Madchester’ days during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Hacienda was well and truly bopping with a big enough supply of ecstasy doing the rounds to fill a good few Olympic swimming pools. Today the site of the club is now home to a block of luxury apartments.

 

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By the site of the Hacienda nightclub 

 

A brief history of the Hacienda and its origins. The club was originally established by the founder of Factory Records, Tony Wilson, in the early 1980s. Factory Records played a central role in Manchester’s music scene since the late 1970s signing Joy Division (and subsequently New Order), the Happy Mondays and many other local bands. As instrumental as the label was to the local music scene, it was also victim to a streak of tremendous bad luck in failing to sign some of the city’s most successful talent. It came very close to signing The Smiths (yet Wilson doubted Morrissey’s potential and ability to be a pop star and encouraged him to be a novelist instead), missed the boat with The Stone Roses, and, allegedly, turned down Oasis. Much of the funds for the establishment and running of the Hacienda came directly from New Order’s royalties. The Happy Mondays, despite their commercial success, contributed towards the financial downfall and bankruptcy of Factory Records in the early 1990s. Yet it was very much the irresponsibility of Tony Wilson to give the band upfront an advance of almost £1m in cash to record their final album in Barbados in 1992. Most of the money went up, literally, in crack smoke and very little towards the actual recording of the album. The Hacienda plodded on for a few more years before shutting its doors permanently. Yet in it’s heyday during the late 1980s it was the place to be and the coolest club not just in the city of Manchester but across the whole country if not the world.

Also close to Deansgate station is the original site of the Broadwalk, which was a small live music venue in the city. For me it will be forever associated with the place where Oasis played their first live gig in 1991. Back then Noel Gallagher was a roadie for the Oldham band The Inspiral Carpets. It was only when he joined the band a year later in 1992, establishing himself as the main songwriter and driving force, that Oasis began to develop. In 1993, Oasis played a brief set at the King Tuts Wah Wah club in Glasgow, where Creation records founder Alan McGee spotted the band and signed them to his record label. The rest is over documented music history.

 

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Site of the Broadwalk music venue where Oasis played their first ever gig in 1991

 

From Deansgate I catch a bus out of the city centre to Salford. I must add that Google maps has been of great assistance in helping me navigate this city, finding the right buses and trams and, more importantly, saving me a good deal of time. After a few stops on the bus, I disembark off a busy dual carriageway close to a large Sainsbury’s supermarket. I desperately need to pee. I resist the temptation to do it near a bush close to a housing estate and duly cross the dual carriageway making a dash for the toilets inside Sainsbury’s. Returning to the bus stop, I walk a few blocks through a series of quiet residential streets until I encounter the iconic redbrick building of The Salford Lads Club. It was of course here where The Smiths posed for that infamous photo featured inside their seminal The Queen Is Dead album. I find a passer-by to take a photograph of me by this legendary site.

 

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By the iconic Salford Lads Club; a place forever associated with The Smiths 

 

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The Smiths at that same location 

 

A couple of blocks away is a bus stop with a direct bus to the district of Stretford. The Old Trafford, the location of Manchester United football club, is located over there, yet it isn’t football I’ve come for. Stretford is where a young Stephen Patrick Morrissey once lived before finding fame as the lead singer and lyricist of The Smiths. From the bus stop where I disembark, it is a 15 minute walk to reach his house located on Kings Road. When I approach the junction with Kings Road, there is a cheap takeaway joint serving kebabs, pizza and fried chicken. The childhood home of the one of the most celebrated vegans on the planet is about a two-minute walk away. I am mighty hungry, but I resist the urge to purchase a ‘donar wrap’ en-route to Chez Moz.

Kings Road is one wide empty street full of predominantly semi-detached suburban houses. I soon arrive at number 384. In one of the small top floor rooms of this house, an adolescent Morrissey would be furiously typing verse on his typewriter, reading Oscar Wilde and listening to The New York Dolls, Sparks, Sandie Shaw and other acts beloved by him. Oh, and the curtains would be forever closed. Morrissey often dreamt of stardom regardless of how remote the chances seemed to be for a cripplingly shy young man from greater Manchester. In fact, although Morrissey mixed with the local music scene of the city during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the consensus around that time was that he was the least likely person to make it as a pop star from that scene. And any such notion was immediately ridiculed. He was best known as the village idiot. Steve The Nutter. Bad judgement. The rise of Morrissey into one of the most iconic and influential pop stars of all time is one of the greatest black swan events ever to occur in the history of popular music. Nobody saw it coming.

 

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At 348 Kings Road in the Manchester district of Stretford; The home of an adolescent Morrissey

 

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A photograph of an adolescent pre-quiffed Morrissey taken during the late 1970s

 

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In the 1980s as lead singer of The Smiths

 

It was at this very address that, one day in 1982, a young guitarist by the name of John Maher (later better known as Johnny Marr), rang the doorbell to enquire as to whether Stephen would be interested in being the singer for a new band he was trying to put together. Morrissey could’ve easily just told the boy to go away, but thankfully he didn’t as this encounter would eventually change his life, propelling him from the bedroom to global stardom.

Leaving 384 Kings Road, I walk for some time towards the nearest tram metro stop, from where I board a tram all the way to the southern Manchester district of Didsbury Village. Didsbury Village is a well-heeled part of the city reminiscent perhaps of Hampstead or Muswell Hill in North London. I take a break here and order some lunch. There are some great charity shops in this neck of the woods too. Didsbury Village is the springboard for the less well-heeled district of Burnage, where the home of a young Liam and Noel Gallagher is located.

Walking away from Didsbury Village and past Burnage train station, I soon locate Sifters record shop. This is the place where Liam, Noel and their older brother Paul used to buy (or maybe, dare I say, pilfer?) their records. It is also namechecked in the early 1994 Oasis single Shakermaker in the line, ‘Mr Sifter sold me songs when I was just fifteen’. Unfortunately, the shutter is down. I read that today it was supposed to close at 5pm yet its currently only after 3pm. Perhaps Mr Sifter wanted a day off? Nevertheless, I get a young tattooed lad on his bike to take a picture of me by the shop.

 

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By Sifters Records in Burnage; a popular haunt of the Gallagher brothers

 

Now I commence the final part of the tour towards the home of the Gallagher boys. Burnage is a rather sedate part of the city. Nothing much goes down here. Yet its in no way the craphouse that perhaps Noel makes it out to be. The only other landmark I remember is some large Chinese restaurant whose name I can’t recall. Past the busy Kingsway dual carriageway I carry on towards Burnage Lane before arriving at Cranwell Drive where their old home is located. It’s a modest nondescript semi and that is all.

 

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The home of a young Liam and Noel Gallagher

 

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Early photo of the Gallagher brothers (Noel, Paul and Liam) with their mother Peggy

 

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Photo of Liam and Noel taken sometime in the 1990s 

 

Many years ago, I read their brother Paul’s book on their upbringing and it was a pretty shocking read. Their father Tommy was a violent man who used to beat Paul and Noel regularly as well as their mother Peggy. Thankfully, sometime around the early 1980s, the local council were able to move their mother and the boys to another house and this is the house. I believe their mother still lives there, but I could be wrong. As with Morrissey’s childhood home, I refrain from knocking the door out of respect for the privacy of the current residents as tempting as it may have been.

I have no desire to linger longer in Burnage so I catch a bus on the Kingsway road back to central Manchester for a well-deserved pint.

 

By Nicholas Peart

©All Rights Reserved

The Death Of David Bowie, The Future and 3D Printing

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

This is a piece I wrote on January 12th 2016, a couple of days after David Bowie died

I’ve been thinking about nothing but David Bowie these last couple of days. So many of his songs are playing in my head; Sound and Vision and Heroes being the most popular. Heroes always makes me pause and be deeply pensive. There’s something majestic and timeless about that song. Like millions of others around the world I am saddened and shocked by his early death. I had no idea he was so unwell even though I was a little suspicious that something was not right regarding his sporadic movements over the last decade. Another clue that perhaps all was not well was from watching the video to the 2013 song Where Are We Now? from his penultimate album The Next Day. It’s a beautiful, haunting and deeply reflective song. More importantly, it seems to me like he’s seriously questioning his own mortality. When I initially saw the video to that song I could see real pain in his face and I began to feel very sad for him.

In my selfish state of mind I was hoping that he would tour again but I can now kiss that option goodbye. I remember one day back in 2003 pondering on whether to see him live at Wembley Arena. The Dandy Warhols were confirmed as his support band. That day I was at the Stargreen ticket office on Argyll Street in Oxford Circus and the lady at the desk told me they still had tickets left for the show but I foolishly declined on the grounds that I thought the £65 ticket price was too high. As the years went by and I got more deeply into Bowie’s music the desire to see him live increased exponentially but that was never to be as, after a heart attack in 2004, he retreated into splendid isolation with his beautiful wife Iman and the rest of his family. I have seen his compadre Iggy Pop live many times (and I even saw his other soul brother Lou Reed live once but he was dreadful and in a foul mood that day, which was a huge disappointment for me) and as special as Iggy will always be to me, I still regret not taking that unique opportunity to see David live. But life goes on man.

Taking a slight tangent, I often wonder what kind of people the people born today and in the last few years will grow up to be? I don’t know what the world is going to be like in 2020 let alone in 2030 or 2050. I humbly predict that by 2100 there will be no purely organic/biological human life still standing. I think by then all humans will be at least trans-human (half human/half machine). If the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s 2045 prediction for ‘The Singularity’ comes true then by 2050 artificial intelligence will be on par if not far more advanced than human intelligence. The question now is will this advanced level of AI further benefit our lives? Perhaps we can augment our bodies with AI technology in order to be compatible with AI itself as far as logical/mechanical intelligence is concerned? Or will it have dystopian consequences and wipe us all out? Some prominent figures such as the scientist Stephan Hawking and Tesla founder Elon Musk have already publicly expressed much concern that a situation like the latter may very well happen and Musk has even gone as far as to spend a large chunk of his vast fortune on AI research.

By the beginning of the 2020s I predict that 3D printing will slowly start to become mainstream. Currently 3D printing machines are the preserve of scientists and a smattering of ‘geeks’, innovators and early adapters. It is also still rather expensive to acquire a 3D printer but with time costs will decrease and the technology will only get more advanced. I think 3D printing will be the biggest thing to shape our lives since the Internet. 3D printing now is what the Internet was back in 1994/5. Give it time.

Now back to the subject of David Bowie, there is an interview he did with Jeremy Paxman in 2000. At one point in the interview they were talking about the Internet and what it meant back then. Paxman seemed to have little belief in the power of the Internet and stated that he thought it was just a ‘tool’ whereas David disagreed and saw it as potentially a much bigger and larger force (both good and bad) to what it currently was. In fact, Bowie was one of the first major artists to utilise the Internet as a platform for his music when it had just become mainstream back in 1997. Now let’s fast forward to 2016. The Internet plays an enormous role in our lives. It has also disrupted many industries in the process. The one that really springs to mind is the music industry. Many will remember the Napster saga involving members of Metallica back in 1999 but how many back then could have foreseen the colossal impact that illegal downloading would have on an entire industry worth billions of dollars? For many creative people; especially writers, musicians and digital photographers, this is now the age of Free Content. Yet what the Internet has enabled is an instant connectivity and strong social networking facility with an enormous and growing number of people around the globe, which was not possible before.

 

David Bowie talks about the Internet with Jeremy Paxman (2000)

 

Back to 3D printing. The main casualty of this emerging technology is going to be the mass manufacturing industry. “Made In China” will become a thing of the past as every household becomes a factory. Big mass manufacturing businesses like IKEA will either have to adapt in the face of this growing technology or potentially face serious challenges to their current business modal. I believe that the next 5-15 years are going to be very interesting.

For more information on this I highly recommend that you purchase a copy of The Curve by Nicholas Lovell. It is a riveting and incredibly insightful and enlightening book which is very ahead of its time. Furthermore, it is an indispensable book to have with many helpful and practical solutions if you are a creative person struggling to make a living in a world of free content.

 

by Nicholas Peart

12th January 2016
London

 

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