Treasure Isle Dub (197?)

I spent two weeks travelling across the north coast of Jamaica in the summer of 1992, from Montego Bay to Negril and then back east to Buff Bay before heading down to Kingston on the south coast.

Dancehall was the sound of the nation back then, with Shabba Ranks the king of the hill and Buju Banton the young prince, with the reggae, rocksteady and dub that I loved seen as old hat that belonged to another generation. I did get to see Bunny Wailer and Black Uhuru play under the stars on a hill outside Montego Bay as part of Reggae Sunsplash one night, though the moths the size of bats were a little distracting.

Once I got to Kingston, I bought a stack of reggae and dub albums (I think it was from Randy's on North Parade) and lugged them all the way back to England via Freeport and Miami.

I wasn't sure which one to pick out to write about but I've gone for Treasure Isle Dub due to the cryptic sleeve that took a bit of investigation. Apart from the title of the album, the only name mentioned anywhere is in the address for 'Coxon's Music City', which is actually a mispelling of Coxsone's Music City, which would hardly have pleased Clement Seymour 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd, the legendary label owner/producer behind Studio One.

Not that Treasure Isle Dub is actually a Coxsone production - he just re-released the album and the budget clearly didn't stretch any further than a two-colour sleeve featuring the title, track listing, Coxsone's studio address and a pencil drawing of a treasure chest.

He even seems to have subsidised the whole enterprise by putting an advert for Air Jamaica in one corner on the back.

Talking of which, has Guy Hands heard about this idea? Dulux's pastel range sponsors Coldplay - he's missed a trick on that one.

Anyway, it turns out Treasure Isle Dub is a collection of rerubs of rocksteady tunes released on Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label mainly in 1966-69.

Just before his death in early 1975, Reid sold the back catalogue to Sonia Pottinger, herself a respected producer who worked with the likes of the Ethiopians, Culture, U Roy, Big Youth and Toots & The Maytals.

Pottinger handed over the tapes over to Reid's nephew Errol Brown (not the lockless Hot Chocolate frontman), who conjured up three dub albums - Treasure Dub volumes one and two, and Pleasure Dub, which has been re-released recently by Pressure Sounds.

Exactly when these albums first came out is hard to discover - my guess is 1975/76, though it could have been as late as 1979, when Brown left Treasure Isle to work for Bob Marley's Tuff Gong.

Assuming it was 1975, dub was still in its infancy back then and Brown's style is pretty straightforward, stripping the songs back and letting a few heavily reverbed vocal snippets float to the surface, while occasionally filtering guitars or drums through the echo chamber.

You race through 12 tracks in half an hour, only two of them breaking the 3-minute mark, and the mood is joyful throughout - Brown keeps you skanking all the way, rather than getting lost in a fug of studio trickery.

Considering it's a compilation (see track listing with original tunes below), it sits together very well, racing past in a blur (not something you can usually say about dub), making it tough to pick stand-out tracks. However, De Pauper A Dub is a particularly fine opener, taking Dobby Dobson's Loving Pauper to higher ground by accentuating the loping groove underpining the original while the vocal bubbles in and out of the mix.

Arabian Dub (here with a picture of the original 1970s LP cover), a rerub of John Holt's Ali Baba, is full of wet, splashing drums, cryptic vocal shards bouncing around the speakers and a great organ/guitar groove.

Dub I Love sees Alton Ellis's original vocal on Baby I Love You granted a little more respect, before being suddenly sent ricocheting around the mix, resulting in a tune that makes you want to dance around with your hands in the air.

I must confess that part of the charm of Treasure Isle Dub is the snap, crackle and pop that accompanies every track. Look close at the vinyl and it's peppered with tiny dimples and there's a curious crease in the run-out groove on side B.

It never jumps but there's quite a bit of surface noise coming off it. Had I bought it in the UK I'd probably have taken it back and asked for a new one, but having carried it halfway around the world it just adds to the charm - a fine reminder of a memorable trip.

Looking at the subsequent reissues of Treasure Isle Dub, it's interesting to see there's still confusion about who the album should be credited to, as well as the year it came out, with some (such as mine), carrying no artist name at all, some giving the honours to Errol Brown and others to The Supersonics.

Pauper A Dub (Dobby Dobson - Loving Pauper, 1967)
Construction Dub Style (John Holt & Slim Smith - Let’s Build Our Dreams, 1971)
Dub So True (Ken Parker - True True True, 1967)
Arabian Dub (John Holt - Ali Baba, 1969)
Dub I Love (Alton Ellis - Baby I Love You, 1967)
Willow Tree Dub (Alton Ellis - Willow Tree, 1968)
Touch-A-Dub (Phyllis Dillon - Don’t Touch Me Tomato, 1968)
This Yah Dub (The Sensations - Those Guys, 1968)
Everybody Dubbing (The Melodians - Everybody Brawlin, 1969)
Moody Dub (The Techniques - I’m In The Mood For Love, 1968)
Dub On Little Girl (The Melodians - Come On Little Girl, 1966)
You I’ll Dub (The Techniques - It’s You I Love, 1968)

Fever Ray - Fever Ray (2009)

News that Let Me In, a US remake of the 2008 film Let The Right One In, is actually pretty good and not as dismal as expected led me to dig out Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer Andersson's 2009 solo album.

I saw the original film not long after getting the album and they've become intertwined in my mind - they're both Swedish, spooky and located inside wintry domestic settings. 

There's also a mutual interest in swimming pools, featuring in the videos for Andersson's When I Grow Up and If I Had A Heart and providing the setting for Eli's limb-tossing rescue of Oskar from his tormentors in the film. 

Andersson even vaguely looks like an amalgamation of the two, with Oskar's straggly blond hair and Eli's mysterious, dark, rather gothic air. Seeing Fever Ray play live last year, she sang the first two songs with what seemed to be a giant insect mask on her head and subsequently spent the rest of the gig standing in the gloom near the back of the stage while lampshades flickered around her.

Andersson also likes to use pitch-shifting effects on her voice, a trick she carries over from The Knife, the band she fronts with her brother, Olof Dreijer. 

She uses it to particularly good effect on album opener If I Had A Heart, with her voice sounding husky and alien as she sings the opening lines 'This will never end because I want more/Give me more, give me more, give me more' over a slowly throbbing electro backing in a manner that brings to mind Eli's ageless thirst.

The film is set on a run-down concrete Swedish housing estate covered in frozen snow and it's a scene easily conjured up by Concrete Walls, with its slow, slurred chorus of 'I live between concrete walls/ In my arms she was so warm'.

The final two songs, Keep The Streets Empty For Me and Coconut, both sound big, echoey and deserted, ideal for soundtracking a walk through slow, windless snowfall under street lights. The effect is a little reminiscent of Gier Jenssen's 1994 Biosphere LP, Patashnik, which he recorded in northern Norway on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

Not that Fever Ray is all so spooky or distant, with Andersson's ability to alchemise her surroundings into something magical sounding also stretching to the most mundane of everyday occurances.

On When I Grow Up she somehow goes from singing about the escapism of 'I want to be a forester/ Run through the moss on high heels' to the remarkable verse of 'I'm very good with plants/ When my friends are away/ They let me keep the soil moist', and somehow takes you with her - you smile rather than smirk.

Seven finds her singing about riding around on her bike and talking to an old friend about love and dishwasher tablets. But my particular favourite is 'A new colour on the globe/ It goes from white to red/ A little voice in my head goes oh oh oh', which will ring a bell with any new parent whose brief moments of respite on the sofa have been shattered by a wail from the baby monitor.

Fever Ray was largely recorded at home very early in the morning while Andersson was bringing up her two children, and lack of sleep is a theme that crops up several times.

On Triangle Walks, she mischievously sings 'Eats us out of house and home/ Keeping us awake, keeping us awake', but it's not the kids she's complaining about, it's the birds who feed on the berries outside her window.

Despite the demands of being a mother and the drain of not sleeping, Andersson seems determined to keep her creativity alive, which is why Fever Ray ultimately feels like an uplifting listen. I'm Not Done is a will to power, a refusal to give up what she loves. 

Perhaps she felt a little like Eli at the end of Right One..., hidden away inside a trunk but tapping out 'kiss' in morse code confident that Oskar is still listening. We're fortunate that she stuck with it because Fever Ray is a fine album that feels all the more appropriate now winter's drawing closer.

The Chambers Brothers - The Time Has Come (1967)

I first bought this on tape in 1992 for a solitary dollar in a record shop sale in Freeport in the Bahamas and listening to it now still brings back memories of driving an American car with the steering wheel on the left but the traffic on the right side of the road.

It's since become one of a select band of albums I own on tape, vinyl and CD (Blondie's Parallel Lines , J Geils Band's Bloodshot, REM's Fables Of The Reconstruction and Miles Davis's Sketches Of Spain are the others that come to mind).

Having only ever heard a five-minute edit of Time Has Come Today previously, I was expecting psychedelic soul but Time... proved more of a curate's egg, filled with traces of the band's long journey from the Mississippi gospel circuit to fashionable Haight-Ashbury.

The Chambers Brothers had already been going 13 years by 1967, having started out as a gospel group when George Chambers quit the army to join forces with his brothers, Willie, Lester and Joe.

By the early 1960s they'd adapted their style to suit folk-blues crowds, with Lester being taught to play harmonica by Sonny Terry along the way. In 1965, they played at the Newport Folk Festival, scene of Bob Dylan's ill-received electric conversion that had Pete Seeger searching for his axe.

Never the types to turn down a paying gig, the Chambers Brothers were also happy playing to R&B crowds pumping out the likes of Long Tall Sally and Bony Moronie.

This approach won them a deal with LA label Vault in 1965 and, a year later, drummer Brian Keenan joined on his return from three years of schooling in London where the psychedelic scene was getting underway. As a result, the band soon threw themselves into the burgeoning US scene, sharing stages with the likes of Iron Butterfly and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

A new deal with Columbia followed and they immediately got busy in the studio in late '66, including an early single version of Time Has Come Today with what sounds like a sitar in the intro.

1967 saw the band's full emergence as black hippies, with the added multi-racial dimension of having a white drummer, which went down a storm on California's countercultural scene.

By the end of the year, Columbia were finally ready to release The Time Has Come. It climaxes with the 11-minute psychedelic blow-out of Time Has Come Today - but before that come a nine-track dash through much of the band's past.

The harmonising between the four brothers remained the bedrock of the band and is brilliantly showcased in covers of two very different songs - Curtis Mayfield's Impressions hit People Get Ready and Bacharach & David's What The World Needs Now Is Love.

They blow up a storm on Lester's I Can't Stand It, a cover of Wilson Pickett's In The Midnight Hour and the particularly fine Uptown, written by Betty Mabry, who later became Betty Davis when she briefly married Miles in 1968 and subsequently released a trio of stunning albums that I want to write about on here in the near future.

George's Please Don't Leave Me is pure barbershop quartet soul and they drop the pace right down for So Tired and Lester's Romeo And Juliet. The recurrent use of a cowbell throughout the album even seems to obliquely tip a hat to their country origins in the Deep South.

Finally the album winds itself up to the full version of Joe and Willie's Time To Come Today, with its spectacular echo-drenched 'time tunnel' section that showcases what a great drummer Keenan was. Joe certainly appears to have noticed when he detours his guitar solo into a sly take on Little Drummer Boy.

When it comes to naming the epic acid rock songs of the 60s, Iron Butterfly's In Gadda Da Vida seems to have stolen Time Has Come Today's thunder, which is harsh. It may be six minutes longer but it came out six months later (18 months if you count the original single version).

Mind you, both bands ultimately suffered the same fate of opening a lot of doors but not being able to capitalise for long while others took their ideas to the bank. The Chambers Brothers suffered from the lack of main songwriter, despite all four brothers earning writing credits on the album and Keenan supplying the excellent B-side Love Me Like The Rain.

Sly & The Family Stone and The Temptations under Norman Whitfield's guidance quickly seized the moment, while the hits dried up for the Chambers Brothers and the band split in 1972.

Various reunions followed but Keenan ended up working as a carpenter before dying of a heart attack in 1985. There's no better way to mark 25 years since his death than by giving The Time Has Come a spin.

Flying Saucer Attack - Further (1995)

Buying an album purely on the strength of its cover seems like a notion from another age now everything is so easily accessible.

Back in the pre-internet twilight, taking a punt on something you'd vaguely heard of - did a friend recommend this? Did I read this name in the NME? Perhaps John Peel mentioned them in passing the other week? - wasn't such a strange idea, particularly if the artwork stood out.

Flying Saucer Attack's Further caught my eye in Piccadilly Records when it came out in 1995. Had someone tapped me on the shoulder and informed me that FSA were a pair of Bristolian shoegazers then I probably would have slipped it back in the racks and gone on my way.

Thankfully, there was no helpful voice to hand and I stood intrigued by the picture of what looks to be a long exposure of a milky moon shot through winter trees. The sun features on the back, sinking into the sea on a rocky beach as clouds roll overhead.

Flip open the gatefold sleeve and there's a becalmed light blue sea almost indistinguishable from the cloud covered sky above. It's reminiscent of the handful of strange, blank seascapes that LS Lowry painted, seemingly intent on proving himself the anti-JWM Turner.

The only writing on the whole thing, bar the spine, is the name of the band and album on the back cover in a deliberately unexciting helvetica font.

In the highly unlikely event that The Wire magazine ever asked me to contribute to their regular feature when people talk about their favourite album cover art then this is what I'd go for.

Not only because the artwork is intriguing, atmospheric and mysterious but also because it brilliantly captures the mood of what lies in the grooves within.

Whispered vocals and sheets of feedback courtesy of David Pearce and Rachel Brook saw them lumped in with the tailend of the shoegaze scene but in truth this was only part of the story. There's a blissful ambient swell to most of the songs that seems touched by Eno's best work and traces of a bucolic folkiness.

Pearce credited Popul Vuh as a major influence, particularly 1971's epic In den Garten Pharaos.

Krautrock and folk may be all the rage nowadays but back in 1995 the former was the preserve of prog fans and latter that of elderly real ale drinkers and earnest lefties.

Just to underline how out of step with the times they were, CD versions of FSA's stuff would carry the legend 'CDs destroy music'.

Which leaves you wondering why FSA haven't been rediscovered. Even shoegaze, so enthusiastically buried by the music press in the mid-1990s as grunge slouched into view, has enjoyed a revival as nu-gaze in the States and heavily influenced the likes of Ulrich Schnauss and Fennesz.

Mind you, FSA were really a post-rock outfit rather than shoegazers. The likes of Chapterhouse, Ride, Lush and Moose were all in love with classic 60/70s songwriting but just smothered it with a vast overdriven guitar sound inspired by the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.

Pearce's influences were rather more exotic, as their 1996 cover of Pentangle's Sally Free And Easy underlined.

A more conventionally fuzzed up cover of Suede's The Drowners on their 1993 self-titled debut album seemed to earn FSA the shoegaze tag that Further should have shaken off but somehow didn't.

There's little in the way of classic songwriting left here, just a huge oceanic swell of sound that builds to an almighty racket at times, particularly on the abrasive Here I Am or the steady build of For Silence.

Other songs are beautifully soothing, gentle lo-fi acoustic guitar lapping against slow guitar drones and echo-drenched dreamy vocals. In The Time Of Light, Come And Close My Eyes and She Is The Daylight all manage to combine pastoral and blissful sounds with the ambience of having been recorded in the cellar of a haunted house in the early hours. With the lights off.

Side one ends with Still Point, Brook's only vocal turn sounding even more distant and diffident than Pearce.

Side two is dominated by the 12-minute To The Shore, a curious krautrock-indebted confection that starts with the ominous bongs of a gong and features several songs sliced together, including excerts of the band playing live. The cover images and song titles may be firmly earth-bound but the sound here is purely cosmic/kosmiche.

After a burst of four albums in two years, FSA steadily ran out of steam, attempting to trade their psychedelic folkie wall of noise for a more rhythm based approach with only partial success.

Brook left to focus on her other band Movietone at the end of 1995 and Pearce steadily slipped out of view - but Further remains a fine legacy worth seeking out.

Shortly after Further came out, Pearce told an interviewer: "Records are your friends. You can look at the song you're hearing, it's physically there in the spirally groove." I salute you, sir, wherever you may be.

Spacemen 3/Wooden Shjips - split 7-inch single (2010)

Having written about the first single I ever bought last time out, this is the most recent - and it's definitely the stuff of vinyl geek dreams.

A limited edition red vinyl single featuring previously unreleased Spacemen 3 material with artwork drawn by an original member of the band plus a cover of one of their finest tunes by San Francisco freaks Wooden Shjips thrown in for good measure. Not exactly a steal at nine quid but who needs new socks when there's this to buy?

Split singles are about as indie as it gets - a show of comradeship and a treat for the fans - not to mention a good way to get a bit more cash over the merch desk on a tour. Oasis would never have bothered with a split single. Too small time.

Mind you, Metallica and Black Sabbath put one out together in April to celebrate Record Store Day, so it would seem all things are possible.

This is actually the second Spacemen 3 split single I've got, the previous one coming free with a fanzine in 1990, with the Spacemen and Mudhoney covering each other's songs to great effect.

The 'new' Spacemen track here is labelled Big City (demo) and though it certainly went on to become the track of that name, this version must have been called something different when it was recorded as the chorus is nowhere to be heard.

The burbling synths are in place but sound more inspired by The Silver Apples, Suicide or Kraftwerk than anything being played in dance clubs of the time, while the heavily phased guitar lines are present and correct as Pete Kember once again manages to make an asset of his limited skills.

But the melody and lyrics are totally different and the song starts with a spoken intro similar to Let Me Down Gently from 1989's Playing With Fire album. Like several of Kember's songs from this period, it's not clear if it's about a girl or about his fellow Spaceman Jason Pierce.

The band was crumbling at this stage, with 1991's final album, Recurring, basically two solo albums glued together, with Kember and Pierce only playing together on one song (Mudhoney's When Tomorrow Hits, from the previous mentioned fanzine vinyl, which had already come out a year earlier and predated the album sessions).

'I felt so tied up/And I wanted to be free/And I wanted to be you/And I wanted you to be me/Yes, I was blind and I thought I could see/And I'm sorry I'm not what you needed me to be'. Make of that what you will.

It's not hard to see why Kember decided to have a rethink, taking the song in an entirely new direction apparently inspired by attending a particularly druggy Happy Mondays gig and his own experiments with ecstacy.

Giving the synth line a techno sheen and ditching the original bummer lyrics for lines such as 'All of my friends can be found here', 'Let the good times roll' and the final bliss-struck pay off of 'Waves of joy/ Yeah, I love you too' took Big City out of the bedroom and down to the disco. Of course, this being Spacemen 3, it still sounded to slow and stoned to actually work on the dance floor but it was fascinating to hear Kember absorbing the sounds of the era into his usual esoteric stew of influences.

The final version may be superior but this is still a charming work in progress, with its clear links to the Playing With Fire era.

On the flip side is Wooden Shjips version of I Believe It, originally a gospel-inspired devotional drone from Playing With Fire that's dominated by keyboards and features Kember at his most wide eyed and awe struck.

The Shjips take it to the garage and swathe it in fuzz guitar while Ripley Johnson rolls out a bluesy psych solo that owes more to Pierce than Kember.

I must confess to being in two minds about the Shjips. At times, particular the Volume One compilation of early singles, they seem utterly inspired with their endlessly refracting motorik boogie. But at other times, they strike me as absurdly stunted, locked in by a limited palate and chugging endless round in addled circles.

But I Believe It finds them at their best, with Johnson's echo-drenched whisper suiting the lyric just as well as Kember's rather more committed original version did and the Shjips managing to draw on the Spacemen's Perfect Prescription era sound to breathe fresh life into the song.

With Kember and Pierce seemingly no nearer to settling their differences than when the Spacemen finally split in 1991, this two-song morsel is a fine reminder of what a great band they were.

Fans of Big City may also find this Erol Alkan remix of interest.

My first single: Booker T & The MGs - Green Onions (1980)

I bought my first single from Woolies in Stockport in January 1980, when I was ten years old. I think I paid 59p for Green Onions out of my Christmas money, though it may well have been cheaper.

I can't recall what spurred me to actually buy it, though I dimly remember it standing out on the radio at the time - a taut, short burst of instrumental R&B played at walking pace, kind of slow and tense and groovy at the same time.

I'd been taping the Top 40 on Sunday evenings for a while and already bought my first album (Blondie's Parallel Lines, sadly on tape) so experiencing the rite of passage of buying your first single was surely overdue. Other kids at school must have been talking about what they'd bought, so I headed off to nail my colours to the mast.

I may have cheated myself of the full experience by heading to Woolies, where I was probably served by a kindly middle-aged lady, rather than some intimidating High Fidelity-style bloke disgusted by the idea of children buying music. I suspect I was also accompanied by my mother, come to think of it.

Still, despite the unpromising circumstances, Green Onions turned out to be a fine choice for first single. Quite why it wasn't something terrible like The Monks' Nice Legs Shame About Her Face or The Buggles' Video Killed The Radio Star I'm not quite sure. M's Pop Muzik and The Knack's My Sharona must have been in serious consideration about that time, because I loved both, but thankfully Green Onions was the winner when it came to parting with my money.

It came in a brown sleeve marked with the Atlantic logo - no picture sleeve sadly - and had been re-released 17 years after it was originally a US hit because it featured in Quadrophenia, to the sight of a preening Sting dancing at a Mod disco. Not that I was aware of any of this at the time.

Booker T & the MGs had disbanded back then, so there was no Top Of The Pops appearance.

I recall the huge sense of investment I felt while listening to the weekend chart after I'd bought it. Surely it would go straight to No.1 now I'd slung my resources behind it. In truth, it crept to No.7 and started to slide the week after. I felt slightly cheated.

Not that it put me off listening to the record. I've played it on and off for the last 30 years and never grown tired of it. Some of the music of your youth you lose interest it or turn against only to return to because it has such a nostalgic pull. But Green Onions has always sounded great.

It's been claimed that Green Onions in some kind of drug reference but Booker T Jones, who was just 17 when he wrote the song's great Hammond organ riff, insists it refers to a cat whose walk inspired the loping pace of the song.

That rather more innocent explanation suits the memories it evokes. Playing it now still brings back my parents' old stereo, with its wooden trim around the edges, large radio dial and top-loader tape deck.

Most of the music of my youth reminds me of friends and places but Green Onions is all about still being at home, heading into the final straight of primary school, fooling myself that I a big kid now because I was about to head off to secondary school.

Ah, Pannini stickers, the smell of cut grass on the school field, jumpers for goalposts...

Factory work: how records get made

Tucked away in the Guardian's Money section the other week was a curious little article about what was supposed to be Britain's only surviving large-scale vinyl record factory, based in Middlesex.


Back in the 1970s it was owned by EMI and used to press 1million records a week, nowadays it's down to 100,000 a month and the equipment is all 40 years old. Check out this slideshow about the place.

It looks like something you'd find at Manchester Science and Industry Museum, just up from the old machines from the cotton mills.

Making records is a messy, sticky job requiring elderly gentlemen in overalls to tinker with large, complicated machines. Lovely. Some things is life are worth sweating over.

It's the equivalent of watching your photographs swim into view in a little basin of chemicals in a dark room you've set up in your cellar, rather than churning digital pictures out of your printer. We all need a little soul in our lives, after all.

However, a few days later, it transpired that the wonderful if rather unimaginatively titled Vinyl Factory had not been the country's only old-school LP producer after all.

Police raided an industrial unit in West London to find two 'German men' presiding over a large pirate vinyl operation involving 200 record 'stampers'. It sounds faintly like something out of 'Allo 'Allo. Presumably an Italian escaped through the toilet window.

Apparently these dastardly German chaps were printing up various hard to find records, including Rolling Stones live bootlegs, and they even the equipment to make coloured vinyl. Perhaps I should put in a cheeky bid to the police for the machinery - after all, it's probably leaking oil over a corner of the station at this very moment.

Most of their output must have made it's way on to Ebay and various record shops, with a fair few collectors nervously checking recent costly purchases for a scent of bratwurst.

Which goes to show that this recent trend for rubbish-sounding but incredibly limited edition records to sell for massive money simply due to their obscurity and lack of availability might not be the best way to invest your money after all.

I'm firmly of the belief that you should buy vinyl to play it, otherwise you're missing out on the best part of the fun.

I might even get hold of a few cheap Stones bootlegs on lovely coloured vinyl now...