Paul Nice/ Eric & The Vikings

Paul Nice : Poised, yet remaining louche.

Slack slack slack. Despite my best efforts to post up here every 10 days, this simply isn't good enough. Rest assured that will change, after my suprisingly beautiful wife gave me my birthday present yesterday of 32 hand wrapped killer funk 45's.

So, thankyou for your patience. As a small token of my guilt, please accept a double helping, basically linked by some crashing funk, hard-as-nails drums, and skittering piano.

An under-rated master, Paul Nice has been serving up remixes and break albums for several years from NYC, underpinning tracks by Rasco, Mobb Depp, and many many others.

It's very difficult to pick one - his recent mixtapes (Soul On The Grill, Breaks For Days and Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie) index a man who sucks up good music and turns out diamonds. His Fingers of Death battle breaks series are an essential, his remixes of Greyboy, Nightmares on Wax and the Beasties' "Hey Ladies" need snapping up...I could go on.

So let's get down to brass tacks. His excellent reworking of Jay Z on the unofficial Black Album, including the ludicrously good adoption of Billy Joel's Stiletto break for 99 days. Just when you thought you never want to hear that track again (as I did last summer), and suddenly you hear this essential take.

Eric & The Vikings recorded for Motown in the 70's, and were led by the sublimely named Eryke McClinton. Their million-selling "Vibrations Made Us Fall in Love" may well have taken the charts by storm, but for our purposes, the flipside, a mean, loaded instrumental is the stuff of champions, and is also one of the finest names for a song, ever.. They're still gigging and recording today, track 'em down if you can. Cheers to Greg Belson and Daddy Vegas for the original heads-up.

Link Removed

Link Removed



Paul Nice's Website
Buy Paul Nice at Fat City Records

Matumbi - Law of the Land

London produced many fine reggae bands in the late 60's/early 70's. In the surge of popularity at this time, it was only natural that 2nd generation of the Windrush diaspora would swing into action, proving that labels such as the mighty Trojan didn't just have to chase the Jamaican sounds, but could go a little closer to home. And amongst them was the perennially excellent Dennis Bovell's outfit, Matumbi.

Ironically, they long masked the fact that they were from London, pretending for at least the first few promos that they were from the Island. Spotted at a Stockwell talent contest, they signed a deal with Trojan when they were only in their teens, and although it all ended in tears with the major domo Brit label, they still managed to create some fine, fine music, hoisting up the Lover's Rock movement by its bootstraps.

Bovell will forever remain a legend, not just because he was the co-creator of Janet Kay's "Silly Games", producer of the Slits and longtime Linton Kwesi Johnson collaborator. Still hugely prolific, the man remain one of the true London-based reggae pioneers.

You can also hear the roots of another British Export, Cymande, in this, their excellent cover of the Temptation's hit "Law of the Land", covered under pressure enforced by Trojan to skank up any other known hits.

Pressure or no, this completely eclipses the original. Killer brass, heavy orchestral stabs over a drop dead beat. Utter class.


(Incidentally, this has just been re-issued on an interesting looking comp, Ultimate British Breaks & Beats, available here)


link removed

Spiked bandwidth...quelle surprise.

Thanks for listening in - a neat lesson for me on bandwidth limit...from now on, tracks will stay up for 10 days, and 10 days only.

For those of a Statto sensibility, Anne Sexton has been the clear favourite so far, with Lena Horne a close runner-up. Seems you're all of a sisterfunk mentality.

Next Mp3 will be up before the weekend...

Lena Horne/Gabor Szabo - Rocky Raccoon

Ex-Cotton Club chorus dancer, and the first black performer to get signed to a long term/vehicle contract with one of the big studios, Horne fought hard to fight against the antipathetic tokenism of a studio as happy to play the race card, as withdraw it for the Southern audiences. Cast in a succesion of "window dressing" roles, she baulked at neat stereotypes of overtly pigeonholed, demographic-enhancing race roles, and during the war refused to play to segregated army troops - where German POW's sat in front of black US servicemen.Unable to announce her second marriage to Lennie Hayton for fear of miscegenist retaliation, Horne struggled, and eventually won.

This fine version of The Beatles' Rocky Raccoon is outstanding for it's smoky grandeur, elegantly underpinned by Gabor Szabo. And I'm convinced that's Bernard Purdie laying down the drop-on-a-dime backbeat

MP3 Removed

Bobby Powell - Peace Begins Within

Running the risk of biting, here's a call and response to the ever-excellent Home Of The Groove's most recent blog on Mr. Bobby Powell. It's the flip of this fine, cheap 45, containg two pearls of laced Baton Rouge funk, on Lionel Whitfield's Whit label.

Dan Phillips chose the sweet soul of the Questions flip, here we've gone for the buttoned down funk. Bobby Powell was a gospel-based blind pianist, who would go on to record with Excello, Hep City and others. Lush backing vocals are almost certainly supplied by Jackie Johnson (later to adopt the Lady Mem'fis title), and I'm not sure whether this came before or after Powell's breakout hit, a cover of CC Rider.

There's a fantastic cover of this on the Trojan label by Nora Dean to be blogged at a later date...

{Mp3 removed}

Jimmy Smith - RIP

Didn't have time to mount a brief Obit for the legend before we went to Germany.

What's left to say ? That he was THE single-handed revivor of an instrument that seemed doomed to the kind of queasy end-of-the-pier doldrums.

Inspired by the great Wild Bill Davis (note to self - dig out that great Caves De La Huchette live album, and blog accordingly), Smith pioneered a hard, strident sound, made tougher and funkier through the use of heavy bass pedalling. Have you ever tried to play a Hammond ? Flying a chopper would be simpler. And his long, pyrotechnic marshalling of Bernstein's theme from Walk On The Wild Side, with Oliver Nelson signalled a desire to go beyond the mere 30 organ stops in front of him.

Gone were the supine, lax, chordal-based output of many of his peers ; this was all about the note. And the silence in between. The definition of funk.

His impact was enormous, sparking Jimmy McGriff and Charlie Earland to change instruments mid-career, and his legacy after his tenure at Blue Note left a mark on the sound of labelmates Grant Green, Lou Donaldson and many others. He scorned the efforts of James Brown's hammond playing, and held a healthy contempt for those that mimicked or bit his style.

Recent concerts in London saw a tough gritty fighter - a man justly arrogant of his own impact. This was not a man of whom you could think ever took an easier path in life. Cussing like a sailor, he played the crowd like a last great showman, and took the roof off with his gnarling style.

Much missed.

{Mp3 removed}

Soul Brothers Six - "(She's) Some Kind Of Wonderful"

Now, Northern Soul really isn't really my thing. This is about as close as it gets, but I've had at least with one pious soulbore who tells me that this isn't the real thing, anyway. Why ? Because it's not expensive enough ? Because you can pick it up for the price of a mild piss-up in a pub ? Because it was...commercial ?

Aah, who cares a fig for rarity. This is the stuff of champions. And pointlessly covered in a really nasty, Dinner Funk way by Joss Stone. And Grand Funk Railroad.

An Atlantic stormer from 1967, this probably featured the lineup of members Willie John Ellison, Joe Johnson, Charles Armstrong, Harry Armstrong, Vonn Elle Benjamin and Lester Peleman. John Ellison went on to release a bunch of singles on that fine, under-rate label Phil-La of Soul, but this was the breakthrough..and the exception, commercially.

By 1969, the Soul Brothers Six were split up, leaving this fine fragment plus some solid follow-ups in their wake. If you're into this, check out You Gotta Come A Little Closer, recently comped, along with another John Ellison track, on the Soul Jazz Philadelphia Roots comp over here.

This is from the 1969 UK reissue. A mere £3 in your local boot sale, fact fans. £3 for this piece of sweet, uplifting, gospel-soaked feel-good, goddamn-i-even-put-britches-on-the-right-way-round anthem ?

You was stitched up there mate.

{Mp3 removed}

Ann Sexton - You're Gonna Miss me

We start things off with some sublime, heavily soulful sisterfunk.

Ms. Sexton is probably best known for the absolute classic "You're Losing Me", which makes up the tough flip for this fine 45 on John Richbourg’s 77 label - one of those songs that now matter how much you've heard it still makes like you've got a glass jaw, and smacks you down hard. It's an evergreen, beloved by hiphop fraternity, funkheads and soul collectors.

So, why the flip ? Because we're perverse. And because there's little point in educating the educated. And because sometimes we've all made the mistake when we've depended upon one side of a 45, that we quite forgot to turn it over. And also because I for purely completist reasons, picked this up in the US as a promo same-sider, one mono, one stereo. Which is only slightly interesting.

Recently this way more mellow flipside has never been far from my turntable. We're in near-gospel territory, belying her South Carolina roots in the church, probably recorded in Nashville.

Other classics include the Northern Soul classic "You've Been Gone Too Long", "Colour My World Blue".Seems like those bright chaps at Soul Brother have a fine compilation for you, over here.

{Mp3 removed}