The Old Musical Express

 

New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.  

Reviewer Paul Du Noyer notes that "interest in old music has never been higher", with NME's own series of cassette compilations of vintage soul, jazz, reggae, etc, given as proof. He says the timely reissue of Gillett's classic tome can nourish the evident appetite for history out there.  

1983 figures here as a lull, a flagging of energy, with a wide range of listeners and musicians looking to replenish the era's empty reservoir of inspiration by drawing from the aquifer of the archives.

But as the review reveals, the early '70s - when the book first came out -  similarly were also a moment of "re-cycling, self-consciousness and nostalgia" taking over "from spontaneous forward momentum" . 

Indeed Gillett cites Don McLean's "American Pie" as the terminus of his narrative for precisely that reason.

As so often, the Rift of Retro recedes ever deeper into the past...

Gillett's column in Record Mirror - back catalogue grave-robbing is in full swing as early as March 1970, ten years before the big reissue label boom of Edsel, Ace, Charly, et al. 

A record I bought! It features hand-scrawled liner notes by Joe Strummer. 

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Those cassettes whose popularity with the readers Du Noyer proudly mentioned .... as cheap introductions to regions of the past (nearly always black regions), they were a very decent offer and reader-service indeed from the New Musical Express or (should that be Old Musical Express in this case?)

Just a fraction of the NME cassetteography...

I sent off for several of these but then my interest flagged... 

I was still too interested in the present.... didn't fancy turning into one of those tight-pegged pants, short-hair epigoners from a Biff or Serge Clerc drawing, forever (Courtney) pining for some long lost era of quality music....

Still I have to thank this tape in particular - and its compilers - for one evergreen delight

Straight No Chaser didn't turn me into a Blue Note disciple but it did introduce me to one of my favorite tunes of all time

I recreated the Straight No Chaser playlist on Tidal

Also made a playlist of versions of "April In Paris" (concluding that my favorite remains Thad Jones's)

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Straight No Chaser was also the title of a magazine started a little later in the Eighties. Its founders include Paul Bradshaw, who had written about reggae for NME, and Neil Spencer who had edited NME during its postpunk era through to the era of the archival cassettes.

The look of that first issue is close to the NME cassette aesthetic, but more august and austere. 

I don't think I ever once picked up a copy of Straight No Chaser - I took it to be acid jazz aligned, Gilles Peterson-vibed, a neo-conservative alternative to The Wire (founded a few years earlier in the '80s). 

It seems to have been more adventurous than that, albeit always looking for the jazz connection in modern music.  Its slogan is "ancient to the future" and they seemed to have liked it when your futuroid musician paid homage to the ancient ancestors, aspired to the tradition of live musicianship, and generally talked that kind of Talkin' Loud type of talk... 

So they had Roni Size on the cover, in 1997, around "Brown Paper Bag" and New Forms. 

4 Hero as early as 1995

(but not as early as 1993)

And again in 1997

Bukem waxing poetic on CTI....

Gerald, in '96, so when he'd gone off the boil

I'm guessing MJ Cole, or Wookie might have featured later on. 

Am I right or am I right!

I do have an instinct, a nose, for this kind of thing, you see

Probably rather a lot of broken beats.

Mo' Wack, natch

SNC is rather like a Brit version of Wax Poetics.  

There's that obsession with image - a love of classic-era jazz rooted in the photographs of it as much as the music, you secretly suspect. (And the record design). 

Whereas The Wire, despite a similar emphasis on high quality portrait photography, would have much more in the way of musicians who are image-less. Badly dressed improvisors. Haggard legends with wrinkles and disappearing hair.   Frowning scowlers with jowls and baggy sweaters. 

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Another thing I think is interesting about this area is how much the original fetishized era of music (fusion, John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, etc) is bound up with spiritual questing in a seriously dedicated, committed way ... but I strongly suspect that the Brit demographic drawn to this kind of music don't have anything like the same degree of interest in their revered artists's belief-systems.... it's probably a rather sceptical and down to earth milieu on the whole.

Nothing wrong with that... I personally don't buy into the creeds of musicians I love, whether it's roots reggae or Pharaoh Sanders... you like the musical outcomes that this devotional mentality generates...  a vibe or drive or aura that non-believing musicians can't reach

Especially with the Brit fandom for this kind of music... the U.K. being such a faithless culture... For us the music becomes its own fanaticism... religion enough in itself

But then the writing about the music in this sort of zone doesn't really go in much for testifying or mystical language... it's a rather dusty discographic sort of writing (think also of the fact-heavy liner notes you get with dub and roots reissues - where what the music is actually about, its motor yearnings, is largely evaded).

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Although Wax Poetics and in a different way Grand Royal show that there are Americans like that, I do tend to think it's a British sensibility. "We are the select few white guys who understand the black music." It always rubs me up the wrong way.  For various reasons, but in part because they don't actually seem to understand it that well.  They are always catching up with the cutting edge a little on the late side.  They are all about rhythm but often have difficulty initially with the new rhythm.

Which is one reason - among several - that I continue to believe that Melody Maker had the best, most acute coverage of hip hop in the late 80s and early ‘90s, out of all the Brit mags covering it. Yes, Melody Maker, the paper that had The Cure on the cover all the time. But we also had Schoolly D, Mantronix, Public Enemy, LL Cool J on the cover.

Our coverage of dance music wasn’t shabby either - indeed an entire monthly magazine, Muzik, was spun off the club tracks section of Melody Maker. You can’t say that about Sounds or NME.

All that span plus the sharpest coverage of the new underground rock - why would anyone have read any other music paper during this era? Seriously.