1981
This song sounds as strange today as it did when I first heard it on the John Peel Show in 1981. It always does. An a capella song eight and a half minutes long, based on an operatic aria from a century earlier, it was the unlikeliest of hit singles. And yet… Such was its unique appeal that it reached No.2 in the UK charts.
Chant! Chant! Chant! were working-class lads from the northside of Dublin and were Ireland’s answer to Joy Division: at least that’s what their publicist would have said if they had one.
This was the first funk I ever really “got” – I remember first hearing it in a pub on the Mile End End where there was a DJ who span tunes far removed from my usual New Wave and postpunk fare.
This is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. I never tire of hearing it, with its shimmering echo from speaker to speaker, Green Gartside’s romantic vocal and Robert Wyatt’s syncopated piano.
Here are The Slits, half of them anyway, with ex-members of The Pop Group and Rip Rig + Panic, in session for John Peel from 1981.
Being somewhat jazz-hesitant, if not an outright jazzophobe, especially when it comes to the F-word – “fusion” – I obviously haven’t heard of Alphonse Mouzon before.
“Like getting stabbed in your ears,” said one critic about the abrasive funk, atonal horns and unhinged screams of James Chance & The Contortions’ opening track on No New York. “In a good way.”
It’s always sad to hear that someone you once used to see on Top of the Pops has fallen on hard times. That’s what prompted me to post Pigbag’s finest moment – the funky instrumental with which they (literally) made their name.
Here’s one of those songs I haven’t heard in years (decades?) but it comes right back to me the moment the needle touches the groove. I was never a fan of jazz-funk but you’d have to have a heart of stone, and feet of concrete, not to be moved physically and emotionally by the infectious groove, skittering bassline and blissful vocal of Southern Freeez.