Dr Robert NUTs Head Honcho and toppermost in demand DJ Prescribes a second in the series of Modernist sonic set of fruity delights, rarities and underground shakers to accompany your Summer days. Have a real good listen and feel free to share it with those you love!
We brought you a showcase of the best acts that will be playing at LBB8. If you’re still unsure if you’re coming, give it a try… If you’re definitely coming, then get a quick fix. See you all there anyway!
A transcript in case you can’t understand Eron’s Jive English…
Hello everyone and welcome to NUTsCast. We’ve got a special NUTsCast for you on this third official release. Le Beat Bespoké 8 is coming up in April and all the kids are a-shakin’ with anticipation. The crowd dictated our direction and we chose just the songs to give you a taste of what’s coming in April. Sit back, enjoy your cooking, cleaning, your pipe or cigar and beautiful penthouse view of central Tokyo or dodgy dusty basement feel of suburban London. I’m gonna take you on a journey through the acts we chose for Le Beat Bespoké 8.
The Winners of our Battle of the Bands competition and possible rockabilly champions of London will open the festival on Thursday night. Jack Rabbit Slim – Listen to: Long Time Dead,
Friday night we’ll be bringing you back to the 8 hour technicolor dream in Alexandra Palace 1967… Don’t miss our revealing interview with Arthur Brown and his Surprisingly Crazy World.
A band hailed post-mortem and resurrected to shine even brighter, here’s July with Dandelion Seeds
So we’ve shown you July and we’ve shown you the crazy world of arthur brown, but there’s one more band that will be performing their classic late 60′s album live for the first time since the Hipster Golden Age, a personal favourite of mine, the Pretty Things
ANOUNCEMENT April Come She Will, so hurry and get your tickets before we sell out at www.newuntouchables.com
After the record fair and Dirt Water Records, showcases, Saturday afternoon you’ll hear the wonderful sounds of our new breed garage sensation Thee Vicars,
Before we step into the gloriously sinful night of Saturday, I bring you another personal favourite to grace our stages, Don Fardon & the Sorrows.
There’s a cherry on top of every night, that is the DJs of NUTsWorld who will be taking you into the wee hours of the morn, remember kids, it’s no use whining when the tickets have gone, times are fast and it’s all one click away at www.newuntouchables.com
I interviewed the Trashmen myself, and they didn’t have a lot to say… they were to busy screaming! Saturday night at Le Beat Bespoke 8
It’s Sad, but it’s Sunday finally. Now we’ll be testing your moves with two rooms on Sunday night, on Room A, Cataluñas Armada devastation the Pepperpots. Singing with the Pepperpots is the unforgettable Maxine Brown
On the other room A will be the garage palatable, a great European band I once had the privilege of having a bus ride with, Wild Evel & the Trashbones
Scotland’s finest will leave you with a pre-nostalgia to an undoubtably memorable event, The Poets live at LBB 8, yes, you heard me right, the Poets…
How does it feel to have heard it all and still not have a glimpse? I’m with you brothers and sisters, tickets at www.newuntouchables.com
Eron the Red Baron, DJ MrE out…
Eron Flbo took time to interview Brit Psych legends JULY as a preview to the 8 HOUR TECHNICOLOUR DREAM HAPPENING on Friday Night at this years Le Beat Bespoké 8 Event.
July are a psych rock band from Ealing, West London, that were mainly active between 1968 and 1969. The band’s music was a blend of psychedelic rock and pop-sike, with subtle yet lush harmonies, folky guitars, flutey keyboards, and intricate lead guitar patterns. Although none of the band’s records managed to chart in the UK or the U.S., July are today best remembered for their classic songs ‘My Clown’, ‘Dandelion Seeds’, and ‘The Way’, which can be found on various compilation albums available over the years.
July, a conversation about Psychedelia, the 60′s and the mind. The guys from the band say what they think about Mods & Rockers, the current scene and their new sound. We begin with a new concept I’m exploring, which I explained to them before we began. It’s a poetic live review, that is, a review of a performance written during the performance, in verse.
This was my first attempt at it, written whilst watching July live from the back where the sound engineer was. They asked me to read it to them:
“Marble statues made of styrofoam are getting in the way
Hand written neon signs lay between us
Icarus incarnates the bones and stays
Inside even the marrow of the steamed lust
Slow and powerful the sound of future visions
Hand made axes of the Northern deities
Intrepid prophecies in collision
With those who stand between me and a maybe”
Tom: Yeah, we started withThe Shadows
Tom: Yeah, the problem was we didn’t know we were a psychedelic band till way after this.
Alan: We were looking on the internet and we saw ‘this is the best psychedelic band from the 60′s’ I didn’t know we were psychedelic. ‘Cause at that time we just thought Pscychedlia was colours. John Lennon had a psychedelic car because it had all these swirly patterns all over it. It wasn’t really used a term for bands in those days, even Floyd.
Tom: Well it wasn’t used as deeply. I think what happened as well, when the term was coined in the 60′s it kind of applied to that Hendrixy wishy washy kind of… and then of course Sgt. Pepper, and you know, so… It was very much the oil wheel light shows and that kind of stuff but it hadn’t developed. And it was obviously… you know… potheads… you know, were involved. They were the people who went to these gigs. But it hadn’t developed into a very deep sort of culture at that time. It was just like a pop genre. It was a very pop genre because it was the Beatles that started it and Hendrix.
Tom: So, Mods are suits psychedelics are colours, Heavy metal is bikers
Alan: We’re very popular with Mods as well, so you could so ‘oh we’re a Mod band’, but we would never sort of pigeonhole ourselves.
Alan: One thing that we didn’t do is we never got influences from other bands
Tom: What? Apart from the Beatles. We did, we got it. Well, I did…
Alan: We got the R & B sound from Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf all those sort of people. And that’s what we were interested in. Tom then started writing words. And then we suddenly evolved into a different way of doing it. Cause we’re just one of several hundred thousand bands that copies Chuck Berry, so we can’t carry on like this. Then we changed and this young man here started writing.
Tom: Yeah, me and Pete. Yeah, but at the time. my recollection… It’s a bit kind of hazy, it was years ago, was that we were just trying to make money in the pop industry. We’d gone through the kind of doing… Look, listen, the whole reason for getting into a band in the very first instance was that I had three chords in the guitar and I liked skiffle, I liked Rock Island Line and you know, the kind of Jump bands and stuff, you know… but as soon as it became… when I met Allan and Pete and Chris, when we formed the Tom Cats. He Suddenly, and we started to do Shadows numbers and then we got into Eddie Cochran, and you know, we were doing pop covers… you know… we hadn’t written anything by this time. And then we went into R & B, and R & B in those days were kind of Benny King and Chuck Berry and you know that was…
Alan: Then the Blues!
Tom: And then we got into Blues and then we got influenced by the Beatles. Once we got influenced by the Beatles we did some Beatles covers in our set and the girls started screaming and we suddenly started to think that… because we were good at the Beatles covers… And that’s when we started writing really… But it was at no time… None of us did drugs anyway, we were all…
Tom: It’s terrible! It was just made up… I had to say this but it was… we were trying to… do what the Beatles did on Sgt. Pepper really… So you make lines literally out of nowhere and you don’t have to be stoned to do that. If you’ve got a reasonable kind of literary background. Make up some lines!
You can make up stuff fairly easily if you, you don’t…. without … I don’t ever remember… well, some of my songs were to do with lost love you know… because I was a terrible romantic… I got dumped
No, No No, it was very much personal adolescent situations. I fall in love very easily, and… I was a smelly Rocker as well and I got dumped very quickly because the girls I fell in love with were nice clean girls and I was this foul stinking rocker covered in spots and I would get two dates and then they’d dump me and I’d write a song about that.
Alan: He was a Harley Man
Tom:! I was a rocker, yeah! I built Harley Davidsons out of basket cases and fumbled about at the Ace caff and things like that.
The Mods got in first if you weren’t careful, they’d stick a bottle in your face. So it wasn’t, yeah. The point I was trying to make is we didn’t consciously write deep lyrics. We wrote what we thought were fantastical lyrics on the most simplistic level that you can think of. At the time, no one was well read; I’ve since read lots. You know… I’m fairly well read now. I’m not very well read. I’ve dabbled in Gurdjieff and Crowley and all that, the mystics.
When we wrote music, we wanted to be July still, we had that in mind…
Tom: The whole point… we’ve got two albums kind of ready to go. One’s called ‘temporal anomaly’, which we’re trying to kind of fit in an interesting poetic concept about coming back from the past into now if you like but still having the mental attitudes that we had in 1969, you know what I mean? But having developed older and hopefully wiser bodies but we’ve still got the masculine stupidity of a 17-20 year old, you know?
Pete writes the really Psychedelic songs! And I was just trying to say that the whole concept of playing again now and the songs that you’re writing now. I’ve only written two or three songs that have gone in this bunch of stuff. Because I can’t get me head into the place that his head’s never got out of. He’s still a twenty year old on a scooter.
He writes incredibly honest songs about his own… what’s going on in his head. And I tend to write airy fairy songs about what I think might be going on somewhere, you know, so…
I’m very aware of the multiple personalities. I’ve got millions of them.
Tom: I tried it once when I was in Canada, in Vancouver. All it did was make everything… all the straight lines went bendy. I felt separated. There’s a detachment.
Pete: But you don’t need drugs if you’ve got a dysfunctional mind.
Tom: Probably drugs just introduce dysfunctionality.
Pete: I’ve never taken drugs. I don’t need drugs. I’ve got a dysfunctional brain. It don’t work normally. I talk shit. I write shit.
Pete: I love Simon Cowell, I think what he’s doing is fabulous. I think this manufactured plastic music is just what the kids want. I think it’s beautiful!
Alan: He did admit to being dysfunctional!
Tom: He might write this now!
Pete: You should fear nothing, what’s the worse that can happen? Well… lots of shit. Bad things can happen.
Tom: The Horrors are very exciting! We went to see them the other week, last week. And they’re very exciting. It was the Horrors, or one of the Horrors, that got us back into playing, Rhys. He claims that it was July that got him into music in the first place. It would be lovely if that were true.
Pete: Any band that gets people wanting to see them is doing ok. That’s what it’s about.
Alan: I read a quote by Evan Dando (from the Lemonheads) that said exactly the same. That he’s trying to get people listening to July. Somebody said on Facebook ‘What have you done to ‘Dandylion Seeds’ ‘He said ’ We did screw it up, but if it leads one person to listen to July then…‘he’s ’… done no wrong.’
Tom: We’ve been told that the audience that are into the ’68 album want to hear it as close as they can to the actual record.
Pete: We play as we would’ve done now.
A song that fuses the UK garage organ tradition with a folkloric Brazilian rhythm called ‘Baião’. The song is about a rich farmer from the Brazilian colonial aristocracy who breaks tradition by going to the big city (Rio de Janeiro) and inviting ‘Benê Nunes,’ the equivalent of say, Bill Haley in Brazil, to play at his daughter’s wedding rather than a more regional ‘sanfoneiro’ (Hurdy Gurdy player). He says that on this day ‘Bodocó (a district from the conservative state of Pernambuco)’ almost ‘turned.’ The song stands as a statement of youthful breaking of tradition – much in the vein of the youth movement throughout the entire world. Tim Maia here foreshadows his own revolution by speaking of a trend that happened in the 50s but himself adding foreign elements to Brazilian textures throughout the tune.
A classic that will be instantly recognised by any fan of Brazilian music. Below you can see the Mutantes live in about the time they wrote this song. The song is reminiscent of ‘Time of the Season’ by the Zombies, but takes a different turn altogether. That is, the Zombies had much influence from Bossa Nova and Brazilian music in general, so you never know who ripped who off – see ‘Tell Her No.’ There’s a decent version in English entitled ‘I Feel a Little Spaced-Out.’ It seems to be about somebody getting ‘high’ just thinking about somebody else, so it’s psychedelic without being drug-apologetic, which is a good twist for a country run by a military dictatorship (at the time). The catch phrase is “não leve a mal (don’t take it the wrong way), which keeps it nice and casual. These guys studied at the British School of São Paulo (St. Paul’s – where the author of this went to school as well, incidentally), so the English version has decent lyrics too.
Imagine an English song about George Best with Irish medieval imagery, sung at times in Gaelic. This is the black Brazilian equivalent. It’s a song about scoring a goal playing football in Africa. He keeps repeating “Homem Gol [Goal Man]”; “Joga bola, jogador [Play ball, player]!” ; “Joga bola [Play Ball], Corocondô [I couldn’t find the meaning of this, but I know that Jorge Ben always puts names and chants in the tongue of African earth religions, so that is my guess - in fact finding out what this means may be the key to understanding what the song is really about].” The lyrics are not as important as the imagery in this song where he invokes the excitement of a village football match. I did research to find out who ‘Umbabarauma’ was, but found nothing – this seems to be the name of the player in question, though not necessarily so. In other words this song is mysterious in terms of wording, but pretty straightforward sonically.
One of my favourite songs of all time, ‘Alegria, Alegria’ is something only myself and a handful of other Brazilian misfits can relate to in a land that nowadays has been recognised as a natural and economic paradise (when in the past it was naturally beautiful though disastrous both politically and economically). Here Caetano Veloso expounds why he is leaving Brazil to move to London (where I also happen to have moved to). In the song he often repeats “Eu vou! Porque não? [I’m going! And why not?].” Sonically, it’s a complex arrangement composed by a sophisticated musician with tempo changes and irregular chord structures. However, this is one of the first tunes that Caetano clearly showed his interest in British music and shows it with organs and psychedelic imagery as well as subtle political commentary alla Bob Dylan. This is a classic 60s pop tune albeit musically sophisticated lest he lose his fame with his pre-tropicalia samba crew. My favourite bit is when he says “I drink a can of coke and she thinks about Marriage” which perfectly illustrates youth and casual liberalism versus conservatism and a worried mind.
Fuzz, Hammond, Mojo – Portuguese! This is a song that could’ve been in ‘Nuggets’ or a similar compilation showing the best of world garage music (maybe it even is somewhere). The constant organ phrases follow the song perfectly adding suspense and tension. Lyrically, it could’ve been sung by Alfie (the one with Michael Caine). The title translates to “You’re Not Good Enough for Me.” It’s one of Roberto Carlos less politically correct tunes.
This song is one of the most well known songs in Brazil. It was covered by many artists and I doubt the youth know this original version by Erasmo Carlos. His voice almost cracks, or does crack, in some parts. This is because this guy was used to singing much less belting songs. I bet someone walked into the studio with a Sonics album and said “We’re gonna have to compete with this soon, let’s get cracking!” and he did… erm… get crackin’.
Another incredible track by an incredibly underrated Brazilian 60’s group called ‘Os Incríveis’ (The Incredibles). The song is about a banana salesman in a crowded sunny market day. The different types of banana illustrate the different pleasures of life – with the obvious phallic implications. The rhythm is Samba with a jazzy twist and R & B brass and structure.
Here we can hear organ, rhythm guitar and brass section alla Stax. Reginaldo Rossi is known for being a ‘brega’ singer, which is the brazilian word that means something in between Robbie Williams and Bryan Adams. But in this song he caught my attention explicitly saying in the chorus ‘Tô doidão, tô doidão, bicho, tô doidão….’ which basically means ‘I’m out of it, dude’ – In other words, something that can mean ‘I’m high’ and ‘I’ve gone mad’ simultaneously. Similar, in that sense to ‘Ando Meio Desligado’, track two above. In times of military dictatorship, it was fairly risky to say ‘Girl, we couldn’t get much higher’ on the equivalent of the Ed Sullivan show. Let’s hand it to this ‘brega’ singer.
Master Jones is a guru who lives inside a whale because he chose to. Listen to the groovy woodwind-like organ that fuses with that high pitched guitar to cause a rather unique blend of psychedelia.
There’s a lot to be said about Raul Seixas, known as the Brazilian Bob Dylan. The first thing I’d say is that he’s very different to Dylan – he’s tougher, more Brazilian and more of an alcoholic. He was also a follower of all-star guru Aleister Crowley and wrote songs with another follower of Crowley’s Paulo Coelho, whom you might have heard of from best-seller shelves around the world in several translations. This is a song of his ranting about his likeness to the devil alla Rolling Stones and Sabbath, but here with a very soulful samba beat that only Brazilians can pull off.
To listen to the podcast, click the play button in the left hand corner of the Podcast Player below! Et Voila!
[nggallery id=1]
Stax – Behind the Scenes Interview
A conversation between Rob Bailey, renowned international DJ and promoter; myself (Eron Falbo), editor of the NUTsMag; Eddie Floyd, legendary singer and songwriter; and Steve Cropper, one of the world’s best guitarists.
The Highlights from the Legends:
Steve Cropper:
“… they ask you… ‘what was it like workin’ with Otis Redding?’”
“Before Wilson Pickett we had Lance Finnie, Joe Stubbs, Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops Brothers…”
“His [Wilson Pickett's] manager had a demo and they sent it to Atlantic Records.”
“We already had two hits and a half and we were ready for the next one!”
“Al Bell who ended up being Vice-President… was a DJ when I met him.”
“… what I would kind of key as a style was a guy named Lowman Pauling of the Five Royales… that was one of my influences, and the other one I’d have to say was Bo Diddley… my other main influence was Billy Butler with Bill Doggett… Last night [at the Mojo Honours Awards] they opened with Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’… just two chords, but a great record… one of the first songs that I learned to play.”
“[regarding unreleased material for Stax]… We didn’t really make demos at Stax… When we turned the red button on it was for real!”
“The reason Isaac Hayes was at Stax was that Booker [Booker T.] took off and went to college!”
“[regarding the rumour that MG's originally stood for the name of a car] That’s right, but Duck changed it to ‘Musical Geniuses’… the car company drew us a letter saying ‘we will not endorse Rhythm & Blues’… ‘we will not endorse Rock & Roll Music’… so we told them we changed it to Memphis Group… Memphis Group’s”
“the first single… went to number three… the Royal Spades who changed their name to the Marquees… I did one half a tour with them and then I fired myself… about a year later we did Green Onions”
“We missed Al Green by 10 minutes”
“[what do you think about the current soul music?] Is there a current soul music?… Eli Reed… he’s legit”
“If that’s what you call R&B fine… I don’t know… but it ain’t Stax!”
“The industry’s coming back to real bands and real music…”
Eddie Floyd:
“Philadelphia, if you need me call me… Pittsburg, call me… Ohio, call me… Detroit, call me…”
“As we go pick him up [Wilson Pickett], there was another car sitting there… that was the end of the Falcons… We quit… nobody could sing ‘I Found the Love’ except for Pickett”
“Atlantic were basically the mother company of Stax…”
“When I came to Stax, I came with all the intentions of being a singer… but… I wrote songs too and Pickett didn’t…”
“Anybody who would be in the house could come and be on the record.”
“Marv Johnson… Berry [Berry Gordy] and him were supposed to start a company together… but Berry started his, my uncles started his because of me…”
“I remember Smokey [Robinson] ask ‘How do you guys get a hit record?’”
Newuntouchables.com ‘head honcho’ and compiler of the Le Beat Bespoké LP Series selects some underground gems that can often be found filling the dancefloors at various events around the UK and Euro Scene based Clubs and Events! Well worth a listen! To listen to the podcast, click the play button in the left hand corner of the Podcast Player below! Et Voila!
