Monthly Archives: Oct 2023

Level 42: Rockpalast 40 Years On

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It’s not surprising that a lot of Level 42 fans cite 1983 as the peak of the band’s career.

Messrs. King, Lindup, Gould and Gould had just released their first UK top 10 album Standing In The Light (and arguably their greatest single ‘The Sun Goes Down’) but were still very much holding on to their jazz/funk/rock roots, despite Polydor Records wanting more hits and less instrumentals.

The band were also still very much an in-your-face live act in 1983, a year off adding sequencers, drum machines and a much more commercial sheen to their sound. They toured Standing extensively during the autumn, including a dynamite show filmed 40 years ago today in Bochum, Germany, recently released on DVD.

It’s Exhibit A for those who love the early days of the band. And, for Level fans like movingtheriver who only came onboard around 1985, discovering the broadcast was gold dust. Also it’s not every day you see a bass player laying down deliciously funky lines while dancing like Max Wall (at around 4:30 below) and telling the fans to ‘Clap, you sods!’.

It’s interesting though that Mark King himself to this day strongly questions the live potency of the band during this era. In the March 1992 issue of Bass Player magazine, he came out with all guns blazing, discussing their November 1983 ‘Whistle Test On The Road’ appearance at the Brixton Ace (now the Academy):

‘I dug up an old one of us doing a live BBC programme… I thought, “Oh yeah, they were the good old days”. So I put on the video – and it was crap. The audience were fine, the lights were fine, the sound was fine. The band was crap. It was just so unsure, so uncertain…’

So which Level do you prefer? The choice is yours… In any case, it’s exciting to report that they’re currently in the middle of a UK tour celebrating 40 years of ‘The Sun Goes Down’.

Further reading: ‘Level 42: Every Album, Every Song’.

Book Review: The Extraordinary Journey Of Jason Miles (A Musical Biography)

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Surprisingly few musical memoirs take the reader right into the recording studios of the 1980s and 1990s, documenting what actually went down during the making of some classic albums.

In his enjoyable new book, Jason Miles – synth player/programmer for Miles Davis, Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Roberta Flack, David Sanborn, Diana Ross, George Benson, Will Downing, Marcus Miller, Chaka Khan, Scritti Politti and The Brecker Brothers – does just that, in the process outlining the joys and sorrows of the American music business in its money-drenched pomp.

‘The Extraordinary Journey Of Jason Miles’ traces the author’s young life as a teenage Brooklyn jazz fanatic to becoming a first-call studio sessionman for some of the biggest artists on the planet. The book is also notable for outlining the considerable pressures – and potential threats to one’s mental health – of coming up with the goods and harnessing the ever-evolving music technology when time is money.

There’s a memorably tense episode when things go very wrong on a Vandross session and an unsparingly honest view of putting together his Miles Davis-celebrating Kind Of New project with trumpeter Ingrid Jensen. Jason also outlines his struggles bringing award-winning tributes to the music of Grover Washington Jr., Ivan Lins, Weather Report and Marvin Gaye to life.

Printing problems bring about a few curious errors/typos but the book is an absolutely key text for Miles Davis fans, a fast-paced, brave, uncompromising read also featuring some superb photographs. There are also intriguing, fond portraits of musicians such as Bernie Worrell, Lenny White, Marcus Miller and Joe Sample.

Also it strikes movingtheriver that we don’t have much first-person documentation of great 1980s and 1990s Black music – ‘The Extraordinary Journey Of Jason Miles’ corrects that, and sheds more light on who actually played what on Tutu and Amandla, though sadly my favourite ‘80s Davis (and Miller) album Siesta barely gets a mention (Jason tells movingtheriver he will write about it in his second book, coming soon).

(Postscript – One of Jason’s gripes is the lack of credit he has received through his career – sure enough, my remastered CD copy of Davis’s Amandla only gives him a sole credit, on the classic track ‘Mr Pastorius’… But Jason assures movingtheriver that Warners has made corrections to more recent versions of the album).

 

Keith Floyd: The Man On The Telly

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What a treat to see that Freeview channel London Live seems to be re-running Keith Floyd’s classic BBC films of the 1980s.

There had been others before him but Floyd is generally regarded as the original modern TV chef. He’s certainly the only one I can watch, though probably wouldn’t be let within a mile of a television studio these days.

But who was this charismatic, erudite, passionate, well-spoken, Withnailesque bloke gently joshing the cameraman (the long-suffering Clive – ‘Stay where you are, old bean!’) and director (David Pritchard), all the while quoting poetry and chucking down the red wine?

He had a colourful past. Floyd was born at his family farm near Reading in 1943 into distinctly less-than-well-off circumstances. He developed a passion for picking fruit and vegetables and attended Wellington School (at the same time as Jeffrey Archer) but left at 16 to develop his writing skills alongside Tom Stoppard at the Bristol Evening News.

Then, on a whim, after seeing the Michael Caine movie ‘Zulu’, he joined the Army. He moved into catering work at the BBC before opening his own successful restaurant in Bristol, where he’d mill around amongst the clientele, reciting First World War poetry and Bob Dylan lyrics.

BBC producer David Pritchard observed Floyd there in 1983 and offered him a TV gig. The rest is history. First there was ‘Floyd On Fish’, then ‘Floyd On France’ and a selection of well-regarded films and series, all shot on film and still looking sumptuous today. Don’t watch if you are hungry…

Floyd was married and divorced four times and fleeced by the vicious British tabloid press of the late 1980s. It’s not surprising he fell out of love with the TV game, outlined in hilarious detail in Tom Hibbert’s ‘Who The Hell’ interview for Q magazine:

‘Celebrity? It’s a heap of sh*t! You get frightened to go out. People you’d like to speak to don’t speak to you because they’re too polite. People you don’t want to speak to hound you to death. Everyone thinks you’re incredibly rich when you’re not. No-one believes you if you say you’re lonely or depressed because…you’re The Man On The Telly.’

Floyd even made a single with The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell called ‘Give Geese A Chance’ (apparently no-no’d by Yoko Ono…), with Fuzzbox guesting on the B-side. Between 1989 and 1996, he also ran his own gastropub/B&B – The Maltsters Arms in Devon – still going strong today.

Floyd was probably not an easy man to get along with, and Keith Allen’s excellent TV doc – made just before his death in 2009 – shows the effect his drinking had on lovely daughter Poppy. But in terms of the idiot box, he was a breath of fresh air. And in these nannying, oversensitive days, his brutal honesty, erudition and unabashed debauchery are a delight.

Jean-Michel Jarre: Destination Docklands @ 35

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35 years ago this weekend, French synth pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre played two concerts at London’s Royal Victoria Docks, in an area of East London known as Docklands.

Destination Docklands took place on a huge, somewhat dilapidated site next to the Thames, the largest of the three Royal docks in the borough of Newham. The area was completely refurbished a few years later.

Both the Saturday and Sunday concerts were reportedly attended by 100,000 people. There were fireworks, lasers, choirs, dancers and a Hank Marvin guest spot. My dad spontaneously drove us out to Woolwich on the Saturday evening (quite a journey from South-West London) and unsuccessfully tried to get us in, though I distinctly remember the thrill of seeing the lasers and fireworks in the sky.

Brilliantly, the second night (beset by torrential rain and high winds) was filmed by Mike Mansfield, the director best known for his hilarious ‘Cue The Music’ clips on late-night ITV. His documentary makes for fascinating, funny viewing today, most of the (rather ‘eccentric’…) musicians having to be shadowed by umbrella-holding extras. Jarre seems to enjoy it, though, quipping: ‘Frogs like rain!’ However it’s questionable how much of this music was played live, if any…

Did you go to either of the concerts? Let us know your memories below.

Little Feat: Let It Roll 35 Years On

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If memory serves I was given the cassette of Little Feat’s Let It Roll for my 16th birthday.

I loved their cocktail of blues, acid-rock, funk, fusion, country, Cajun and Tex-Mex. And they – along with Steely Dan – seemed to represent everything exciting and glamorous about America to me, also introducing exotic-sounding place names like Georgia, Atlanta (!), Tupelo and Juarez.

A burgeoning drummer, I also particularly dug their skinsman Richie Hayward who belongs in the same bracket of 1970s groovemasters as James Gadson, Jeff Porcaro, Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon, Earl Young, Bernard Purdie et al.

I was excited to listen to Let It Roll – which recently turned 35 – again after many years, so I looked for my old cassette. Gone. I must have got rid of it years ago. Why? A re-listen brought it all back.

Recorded at The Complex, the LA studio owned by EW&F’s Maurice White, it was their comeback album, their first since the death of chief singer/songwriter/slide guitarist Lowell George in 1979. Of course the absence of George is palpable. Despite new vocalist Craig Fuller’s vague similarity to George in both vocal and slide guitar departments, the days of lyrics like: ‘Onomatopoetry symmetry in motion/They heard about that girl across the ocean’ (‘Down Below The Borderline’) or ‘Heard you got an infection/Just before your lewd rejection’ (‘The Fan’) were long gone.

(According to Hayward, George’s musical influence was also palpable, regularly suggesting fill ideas and rhythms, and frequently telling the drummer that he played too many notes!) Fuller also brings more of a country influence to the band, and there’s less of the ‘white boy got the whoo-whoos!’ (Van Dyke Parks’ analysis of George’s vocal style).

But most of all Let It Roll is inconsistent both song and sound-wise. The good stuff first: opener ‘Hate To Lose Your Lovin’ is a passable pastiche of the classic Feat sound, Second-Line meets funky country, while ‘Cajun Girl’ and the title track are very catchy. ‘Business As Usual’ has a few intriguing harmonic moves and riffs.

Elsewhere there’s too much rather bland AOR, Bruce Hornsby and Steve Winwood apparently the touchstones. Most of the band’s kinks have been ironed out, though Hayward still sounds fantastic, inspired by his new drum hero Manu Katche. Let It Roll could have used some decent mastering too – the volume levels are all over the place.

Surprisingly, the album didn’t chart in the UK but was a very good seller in the US, making #36 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earning a gold disc (they followed it up with 1990’s Representing The Mambo, which I confess I’ve still never heard).

They played a triumphant gig at London’s Town & Country Club in December 1988 though, with special guest Bonnie Raitt on guitar and vocals, and I’m not sure why I wasn’t there. I had to wait until 11 September 2000 to see this brilliant band at the same venue. And, despite the loss of George, Hayward and guitarist Paul Barrere, they’re still an occasional live entity.

(If you’re not acquainted with the band, try Little Feat in their pomp on Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, The Last Record Album or Time Loves A Hero).