Monthly Archives: Jul 2025

The Stanley Clarke Band: Find Out @ 40

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Like several other jazz/rock heroes of the 1970s, Stanley had a distinctly dodgy 1980s.

But the decade had a decent beginning (Rocks, Pebbles And Sand), middle (Find Out, released 40 years ago this month) and end (If This Bass Could Only Talk).

Circa 1989, this writer found a vinyl copy of Find Out in a weird (long-gone) record shop on Hammersmith Broadway called Trax, having no idea that it had ever been released.

As it turned out, the album was a fresh (but false) start for Stanley, arguably his best funk/pop record and a last shot at stardom, complete with ingenious ‘Born In The USA’ cover.

His bass playing could still knock your socks off but here it took a back seat to well-crafted, commercial songs plus a few decent instrumentals, all utilising top LA-based players/engineers/songwriters.

The liner notes reveal all. Many of the keyboards were played by Patrick Leonard, who had just finished a stint as musical director for the Jacksons’ Victory tour and was rehearsing for Madonna’s first US tour during the recording. He also had a hand in several compositions.

Stanley had also recruited his best drummer since Simon Phillips: Rayford Griffin. Their duels match anything he did with Steve Gadd and Gerry Brown during the ‘70s, and Griffin brought great grooves and arrangement-smarts too.

Then there was the presence of teenage soul prodigy Robert Brookins, a fine vocalist and keyboard player who had toured extensively with George Duke in 1983. Finally the album sounds great, helped by superstar engineers Chris Brunt, George Massenburg, Mick Guzauski and Tommy Vicari.

It’s full of catchy, easy-on-the-ear pop/soul tracks like ‘Don’t Turn The Lights Out Yet’, ‘Psychedelic’, ‘What If I Should Fall In Love’, the title track and ‘The Sky’s The Limit’. His Springsteen cover pushes the envelope, opening with a nod to John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ and turning into a neat mash-up of rock, electro and old-school hip-hop, with mad bass solo thrown in for good measure.

The two synth-heavy instrumentals are a blast and the album closes with a kind of ‘School Days’ for the ‘80s called ‘My Life’, complete with superbly over-the-top Raymond Gomez guitar playing and Griffin drumming, much-imitated by yours truly back in the day.

Sadly Stanley followed up Find Out with the dismal Hideaway and his solo career arguably lost momentum. He mainly moved over to movie soundtracks in the ‘90s though made a partial return to top solo form in the mid-2000s. But if you want to mainline mid-1980s synth-funk heaven, you could do a lot worse than this.

Shifty: the new Adam Curtis BBC doc

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Those wanting to understand the mess in which Britain finds itself may get some answers from ‘Shifty’, Adam Curtis’s new BBC documentary series. It’s also a classic bit of 1980s reportage.

A rather po-faced press release announced the launch of the show on iPlayer (it’s also on YouTube) – Curtis has now been ‘moved on’ from terrestrial TV, and has alluded to the ‘freedom’ that streaming platforms give him.

But the new series certainly delivers, not a surprise given his track record of superb, unsettling docs such as ‘The Century Of The Self’, ‘The Mayfair Set’ and ‘HyperNormalisation’. Using long- forgotten/lost BBC footage mainly shot during the 1980s, ‘Shifty’ traces the death of Britain’s role as a technological superpower, showing how the decimation/privatisation of national industries ushered in an uncertain era when dark, long-dormant secrets bubbled up to the surface, and the tabloid press ran riot.

We see how Thatcherism (read monetarism) was based on a false belief – that money always acted predictably. Meanwhile the privatisation of state industries (a policy invented by the Nazis) handed fortunes to private capitalists, a system which the Tory government knew would lead to industrial ’empires’ and the creation of huge private fortunes. They were essentially buying the support of the financial elites, and this has been convulsive.

Re-editing the work of those brilliant, groundbreaking (uncredited) TV directors and technicians who plied their trade at the dawn of the 1980s, Curtis uncovers the ‘real’ decade. There are many striking juxtapositions; the death of a commercial airline pilot after a crash on the Isle of Sheppey uncovers tales of wartime mental distress.

We see what the Falklands Islands looked like just before the 1982 invasion, a National Front rally in Brixton, the birth of video dating in London, dub sound systems in Birmingham, a pop lookalike competition of 1981 with hilarious Midge Ure. Freemasonry is debated openly on national terrestrial TV.

We see Thatcher during down time, pottering in the kitchen, schmoozing with Jimmy Savile, discussing her wardrobe, teenagers dancing to Bee Gees in Belfast and Hawkwind’s ‘Silver Machine’ in Kent, sex pests calling mental-health helplines, abject poverty in Bradford, the first known personal surveillance camera in North Kent, Sus operations in West London, Princess Di opening the Broadwater Farm Estate just six months before the deadly riots, Dodi Fayed interviewed about his father and producing movies such as ‘Chariots Of Fire’, Stephen Hawking as an undergraduate at Cambridge University.

All in all, ‘Shifty’ is a fascinating look at a mostly forgotten Britain and a great companion piece to Simon Reynolds’ ‘Rip It Up’ book and Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ films. So The Beeb is still doing a few things right but it’s a shame the series wasn’t given a cursory showing on terrestrial TV.