Black Roots

All Day AII Night (Deluxe Edition)

Bristol Archives CD/DL

Recorded for the Nubian label in 1985,

Black Roots recruited Neal Fraser, The Mad

Professor, for mix duties and the trombonist

Vin Gordon for authentic brass weight. The

result of this more professional approach

was a cleaner, punchier sound, less rootsy

than previous work – an inexplicable move,

as those earlier tunes had generated BBC

sessions and a commission for the theme

music for the TV sitcon The Front Line. lt’s

mostly conscious tunes all the way, and

so magisterial is the 12″ cut to “Pin ln The

0cean” that it’s difficult for anything to

match it, although the “Face Dub” (the flute

and trombone version to “Seeing Your Face”)

is as good as anything to be found on Mad

Prof’s Dub Me Crazy series. Black Roots are

currently working on a new album.

The Columns I Soundcheck I trrewire | 0r

Gil Gillespie traces the city’s modern music back to its roots 30 years ago…

If there was any kind of music scene in Bristol before 1977, his name was Russ Conway and he liked to play piano. In fact, it wasn’t until the jagged edges of new wave began to cut the shock tactics out of the punk movement that the first serious local bands began to emerge from their Clifton and Redland hideaways. So we’ll make 1977 our starting point for a tour of the Bristol music scene.

First out of the blocks were The Cortinas, four sneering teenagers in torn blazers not long out of grammar school sixth form. Fittingly, their feisty and dangerously energetic double A-sided single ‘Fascist Dictator/Television Families’ set the standard that others would have to follow. And sure enough, by the middle of 1979, hundreds of nervy young punk bands were popping up all over town. A fanzine called Loaded sprang up in support like a regional Sniffin’ Glue. Suddenly, there were six or seven live venues with the Guildhall Tavern in Broad Street at the epicentre of the punk scene. Then Heartbeat Records released the Social Security EP which featured four irreverent dum-dum bullets, including the immortal I’m Addicted to Cider.

Bristol was up and running as a music town. The fledgling label followed its debut release with another excellent single, The Europeans, by The Europeans. The Europeans became the first but certainly not the last Bristol band to be linked with a major record deal that never quite came off. The likes of the Pigs, the X-Certs, Joe Public and the Numbers all followed. Aggressive, confrontational upstarts all.

But from here on in, the sound of young Bristol splintered in several different directions. There was the wheel-spinning R&B in the shape of 14-year-old rebel-rousers the Untouchables. There were experimental types such as Art Objects, Glaxo Babies and Essential Pop. Black Roots introduced the dub influence while Shoes For Industry volunteered to be ringmaster for weird circus rock and confirmed their status by getting the lead singer to wear an inside-out brain on his head. And most controversially of all, Melanie, the daughter of Bristol City manager ‘Alan-Alan-Alan’ Dicks did a puty Wendy James type of thing for a band called Double Vision. Ashton Court Festival became a canvass for the city’s eclectic range of characters. The Wurzels were not welcome.

But lording it over this newly built sonic kingdom were the mightiest of all the pre-Nineties Bristolian hollerers, the Pop Group. How good were the Pop Group? Well, when Nick Cave and his growling Birthday Party entourage first landed on these shores in 1980, they spent every night going to gigs all over the capital but were shocked and disappointed by the limp, bloodless bands they found. Then one night he saw the Pop Group. The experience changed his life. As part of Channel 4′s Music of the Millennium series, Cave chose We Are All Prostitutes as his favourite piece of music of all time. “The beginning of the record is the greatest start of any record, ever,” claims the awesome Aussie. And you wouldn’t want to disagree with him.

This is why it’s the Pop Group who are cited as being the biggest influence on what became known as the Bristol Sound. Even if it’s not all that easy to see why or how, they laid the foundations for Massive Attack. The Pop Group, y’see, made a fearsome chaotic noise that was always experimental and sometimes unlistenable. Their first single, She is Beyond Good and Evil, might have been as infectious as it was deeply disturbing, but much of the Y album sounded like a load of out-of-time clanging and primeval hollering, interrupted by the occasional blast of raucous feedback. These elements burned on a fire already white hot with punk, funk and thunderous dub to make a protest music completely out on its own.

So what does all this have to do with the birth of the Wild Bunch and everything that followed them? Crucially, Mark Stewart’s unholy Pop Group crew were the first to assimilate the city’s black, or more accurately, Rasta counter-culture into their social life, their worldview, and ultimately their sound. Back then music allowed you to define your enemies more clearly. “With the roots worldview…the feeling of spiritual uplift was undeniable,” says singer Stewart of his dub days. As if this wasn’t significant enough, the band also spent their youth going to clubs and listening to dance beats. “We were like the Bristol funk army,” recalls Stewart. “We’d go to clubs and dance to records by T-Connection, BT Express, Fatback Band, all this heavy bassline funk.”

This is how the Pop Group invented the politics of dancing. It was a warped, out-of-shape boogie, but a boogie none the less. “They even used to dance in the most peculiar way,” remembers one fan. Sadly, by the time they’d made their third album For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? all the incendiary radicalism had got out of control. Maybe it’s best to let the band explain. “We were creating a wall of noise for the lyrics to fight against,” sighs drummer Dan Katsis. “We were challenging the production process, disrespecting the machines.”

Something, inevitably, had to give, and the six members went their separate ways. Gareth Singer formed the distinctly patchy Rip Rig and Panic, bassist Simon Underwood sought relief in the happy honking of jazz-funkers Pigbag and had a top 20 hit, and Mark Stewart sank still deeper into the well of nihilistic creativity in which he had always prospered.

They were only around for two years or so but the Pop Group cast one hell of a long shadow. There were a lot of bands who found themselves permanently stuck in the shade. Performance art, free festival politics, second-hand clothes, a vibrant live scene and copious amounts of free drugs all played their part in a shift towards an artier and more offbeat order. If you can track down any copies of the compilation albums Avon Calling, Fried Egg-Bristol 1979-1981, Wavelength/Bristol Recorder 1979-1980, or Western Stars Vol 1-The Bands That Built Bristol (now on Sugar Shack-www.sugarshackrecords.co.uk) you can hear for yourself. It’s from this increasingly bohemian atmosphere that Gerard Landley’s first band the Art Objects sprang.

What we didn’t know then is that Bristol was about to rewind to a second year zero. This time it began down amoung the funk jams and scratched beats of the St. Paul’s cafe sound system scene. With the fragments of post-punk scattered all over the place and pulsing electronic dub everywhere, something truly remarkable began to bubble to the surface.The Slits made an unlikely union with Dennis Bovell, the Clash raised swords with Mikey Dread, and the Specials united black and white to fight against anyone who wanted to make something of it. Bristol had reggae collectives Talisman, Black Roots and Restriction. At the Dug out on Park Row, DJs were lining up Chaka Khan against Superfly Soul as the first blasts of urban hip-hop began to filter from across the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, somewhere around town, Robert Del Naja was getting arrested for decorating walls with a spraycan. Soon he joined Nellee Hooper, Daddy G and Milo Johnson in a hip-hop collective called the Wild Bunch. That same year, St. Paul’s Carnival played host to a number of heavily-amped crews such as 3 Stripe Posse, 2Bad, City Rockers, UD4 and FBI Crew. But bigger and bolder than the rest were the Wild Bunch, who blocked off Campbell Street with their colossal, towering bass bins. The band’s reputation spread by word of mouth and they were invited to play at London’s Titanic Club. Then they set up residency on Wednesday nights at the Dugout, spinning 12 inches, rapping over the top, heads nodding eerily in time.

Hindsight has given the Wild Bunch a legendary status in modern music folklore. But Milo’s retrospective album, Story of a Soundsystem, suggested this is as much myth as reality. It’s party music, full of sax burps, cheesy disco jangles and it is very much of its time. Robert Del Naja puts his own perspective on the Wild Bunch. “People always ask us about the Wild Bunch,” he says.”But the truth is it’s just history to us now. I don’t know why people go on about it so much.”

No, the first truly staggering thing the Wild Bunch ever did was to become Massive Attack. And the first thing Massive Attack ever did was to take a giant leap ahead of anything else that had ever come before. Daydreaming is one of the most startlingly original and self-assured debut singles ever made. Even now it sounds as fresh and as relevant as it did back in the early Nineties. And there was so much more to come.

From its majestic opening line-’Midnight rockers, city slickers, gun men and maniacs’- it was obvious the Blue Lines album was going to be a classic. Three hit singles-Daydreaming, Safe From Harm and Unfinished Sympathy- propelled the band right across the globe. At the same time, they redefined what dance music could be. As 3D put it at the time : “We’re not just interested in making something for people to throw their arms and legs about to on a dancefloor.”

Everything had changed. Suddenly, Bristol was being talked about as the ‘coolest city on the planet’. Then someone, somewhere in the media, labelled the sound ‘trip-hop’ – a supposedly softer, near-ambient version of hip-hop unique to the South West. Apparently. And within minutes, the city was overrun by gangs of A&R clowns frantically searching for the next Bristol Sound sure things. Not only was the local music mafia not talking, they were also trying to get as far away from the term as possible.

This is an extract from the music chapter in The Naked Guide to Bristol by Gil Gillespie, published by Naked Guides Ltd, ISBN 9780954417765

 By Alex Cater

One of the last surviving founders of the festival that evolved into the St Paul’s Carnival has spoken out about the state of the event in the wake of this year’s cancellation.

Community activist Roy Hackett, who is now 84, was among a small group that launched the festival in 1968 and while his active involvement ended 11 years later, he has kept closely in touch with this key event in the Bristol calendar.

It was due to take place on 7 July but after a cash shortfall, organisers announced in February that it would be scaled back, and at the end of April said it would be cancelled, citing funding and crowd safety concerns.

Hackett criticised a lack of transparency in the organisers’ dealings with the public. “They seem to have a closed door policy. It’s only when the money ran out that we heard how much they had got and how much they had spent.”

He is concerned that the event was successfully run without subsidy for many years but now seems unable to function without costly financial support.

Hackett said: “We ran it for 11 years without this council or any council, ever putting any money in. So when they are talking about how this carnival hasn’t got any money, I want to know why.”

He added that after decades when the event ran fairly smoothly, a rising tide of problems seem to have occurred only in recent times: “It has been cancelled three times in its whole history, but in the last 10 years it has been stopped twice.”

Hackett fears that between the money worries blamed for the latest cancellation and other problems of the past few years, the St Paul’s Carnival may have lost it way.

He is scathing about the use of external advisors – “A consultant to tell you how to run a community event?”– and people being paid when carnival should be community-owned and community driven to stay closer to its roots.

“The festival was never a business. It was a community event. The event involved everybody that was living in the community. Everybody did their little bit. We went with caps in hand, begging pennies, and half a crown. If you give five shillings, that is a whole lot of money.

“People always asked me: ‘Do you get big pay?’ I say: ‘For what?’ I’ve never charged anyone for what I do because I don’t need to; I have a job, I have my wife, I have my family.”

Hackett was interviewed as part of Bristol Archive Record’s ongoing oral history of the city. An individual who is almost an institution in Bristol and St Paul’s, he arrived in the UK from Jamaica in 1952 at the age of 24.

A career in construction took him all over the country, with spells building the Hinkley Point nuclear power station on Somerset’s coast and even working alongside Welsh star and The Voice coach Sir Tom Jones: “He was always singing.”

After settling in Bristol, Hackett became engaged in community activities, including anti-racist protests.

He was strongly involved in Bristol’s bus boycott in 1963, called in protest at the failure to hire black staff for the city’s transport company, which led within weeks to the lifting of the so-called “colour bar”.

Hackett said his role in creating the annual celebration that became carnival came from his habit of attending meetings and joining committees.

As he puts it, some people preach, others enjoy gambling, but he “fell into sitting in on associations and committees”. Even today, in his eighties, “I go to the meetings because I am a nosey person, because I want to know what’s going on.”

Carnival is seen as something strongly derived from Caribbean culture, in particular Jamaica, and Hackett’s childhood memories are of Christmas celebrations: “We don’t have anything back home on as big a scale as the St Paul’s Carnival. In Jamaica, the carnivals move from parish to parish.

“I lived in the countryside in Jamaica until I was 16. There, carnivals are part of the Christmas amusement; everybody dresses up as a god or a devil and has their own role in the carnival. Each year we looked forward to it and it would go right on through to New Year’s Day.”

Hackett is saddened that the St Paul’s Carnival he helped launch has hit so many problems when the original ideals of 1968 were very simple.

“At the very beginning we just wanted to do something to say thank you to our community. I thought it was a good idea because everybody could have a part in it. The old people could watch from their doorways and the children would have smiles on their faces and shout, ‘Mum, look here, Look here.’  That brings joy.”

Bristol Archive Records: www.bristolarchiverecords.com

© Alex Cater 2012

Joshua (Jashwha) Moses and Talisman both confirmed in the line up for 17/18/19 August 2012

Record Store Day came into being in 2007 when over 700 independent stores in the USA came together to celebrate their unique culture. The UK followed suit and 2012 will see the fourth celebration of the UK’s unique independent sector. This is the one day that all of the independently owned record stores come together with artists to celebrate the art of music. Special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products are made exclusively for the day and hundreds of artists across the globe make special appearances and performances. Festivities include performances, meet & greets with artists, DJ’s, in store quizzes and many other events.

Bristol Archive/Sugar Shack Records participates with two Limited Edition Vinyl releases:

The Bristol Reggae Explosion 1978-1983 (GREEN VINYL) – 500 pressing

AMJ Dub Collective – Sound History Vol 1 – 500 pressing

More info:

www.sugarshackrecords.co.uk

www.bristolarchiverecords.com

Hot news: Ujima Radio (98 FM) has forged a partnership deal with Bristol Archive and Sugar Shack Records to promote its releases, the artists and their tunes to the world.

We start with our April releases which includes Joshua Moses, Black Roots, AMJ Dub Collective and Cool Runnings

More information and detail soon

Bristol Archive Records came from seemingly nowhere when the label in early 2011 dropped the acclaimed compilation Bristol Reggae Explosion. This release has been followed by several hard to find roots reggae gems by Bristol-based artists. United Reggae got a chat with label owner Mike Darby to find out more about him and his many projects.

Meet Mike Darby, an independent financial advisor, golfer and married with two children. He’s also the owner, head of people relations, chief detective, finding new material, head of A&R and boss man at Bristol Archive Records and Sugar Shack Records. If that wasn’t enough, Mike Darby is also a Director at Archive Publishing.

He started his music career as a singer in 1979 with the reggae/two tone/ska band The Rimshots. The band put out a couple of singles and played with The Beat, The Bodysnatchers, Black Roots, Talisman and acclaimed dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Six years later he ventured into band management and launched Sugar Shack Records focusing on British rock artists. The label recently switched direction though, and from 2012 and onwards Sugar Shack will be putting out contemporary British reggae acts.

In music terms, Bristol is primarily known for the genre trip-hop and artists such as Tricky, Portishead and Massive Attack.The reggae scene has however also been thriving ever since the 70’s in different shapes and forms, and the main aim for Bristol Archive Records is to put many more or less unheard of reggae artists on the map and put the record straight.

“For me it’s the untapped and unreleased gems that have fallen through the cracks of time,” explains Mike Darby, and continues:

“The expectation is minimal from the artists so its amazing seeing these people get a break some 25 or 30 years later, smiling, being proud and getting excited about roots music again.”

And the response on the releases so far seems to please Mike. And one word sums it up well.

“Amazing,” he states, and explains:

“I can’t believe the response from all around the world. The records sell, the artists have a second chance and we are one big happy Bristol family – taking on the world and spreading our sounds.”

Thanks to the success of Bristol Archive Records Mike has also changed direction of his other label – Sugar Shack Records. Its first reggae release is the 12” Sound History Volume 1 by AMJ Dub Collective, released on 23^rd April 2012.

“The success of the Bristol Archive Records means that Black Roots, Talisman and now Joshua Moses are back out in force spreading their message via live performances. It just made sense to support them and their new material by having a record label that can work with them,” says Mike, and further explains the company’s direction:

“All things reggae from Bristol and the rest of the UK if we can discover the talent on our other label www.reggaearchiverecords.com .”

Now back to the reissue business, and Mike’s recipe for finding new material to put out.

“Word of mouth, referrals, putting out great looking records and being nice people.”

It sounds easy, but it probably also means a great deal of work to compile compilations with hard to find golden nuggets or unreleased gems, Mike pays special praise to his Reggae colleague Martin Langford aka Dubmart who compiles the track running orders and writes the amazing sleeve notes, plus Steve street who does most of the mastering.  

Jah Praises from Revelation Rockers is one of those gems. It was recorded in the late 70’s, but didn’t see the light of day until March 2012.

“Shocked, stunned, excited and motivated,” says Mike about his reaction when he heard about Jah Praises.

But this album is far from an exception in the increasing Bristol Archive catalogue, and the flagship compilations Bristol Reggae Explosion 1, 2 & 3 includes a great deal of unissued material. To me, it’s remarkable that a tune like Rise Up from Joshua Moses has been lying around in a drawer somewhere.

And happily enough Mike reveals that there are more to come.

“Joshua Moses’ Joshua to Jashwha 30 Years in the Wilderness is a must buy for any roots fan. It’s stunning.”

www.bristolarchiverecords.com

www.sugarshackrecords.co.uk

www.reggaearchiverecords.com

www.archivepublishing,net

Taken from: http://unitedreggae.com/articles/n936/032312/interview-mike-darby-from-bristol-archive-records

Joshua (Jashwha) Moses with The R.A.S Band booked as support to The Skatalites – Exeter Phoenix – May 19th

For further information go here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/183990848377925/

Thu 29 Mar – Exeter Phoenix (Supporting Selecter)

Sat 31 Mar - High Wycombe WAMA

Sun 27 May – Bristol Veg Fest

Sat 30 Jun – Diss WowFest (Norfolk)

Fri 20 Jul – Llangollen Fringe Wales

Sat 18 Aug – WOWfest, Isle of Wight

Sun 19 Aug – Strummerville (To Be Confirmed)

Sat 25 Aug – Plymouth Crocadon Sawmills

Mark Stewart, frontman with the Pop Group, the maverick’s maverick has a brilliant new album new album and tour exploring the possibilities of sound, The Politics Of Envy is out this week and is backed up with a mini tour. We chat to him.

26 March 2012: Glasgow – King Tut’s tickets £12.50

27 March 2012: Manchester – Ruby Lounge tickets £12.50

28 March 2012: London – The Scala tickets £13.50

Mark Stewart defines the word maverick.

In the decades since punk and his legendary band, The Pop Group, he has made a series of records that have combined a whole rush of cutting edge musics to create his own style. His new album, The Politics Of Envy, is his best for years- a mash of dark disco, post punk, skewed electronics and punk spirit- it’s dark, heavy and political but somehow also really pop.

Still fascinated by the cutting edge he has gone to the musical frontiers and collided all the flux of new styles into a composite new whole. The Politics Of Envy is a frenzy of anarchic, confrontational sound with some key collaborations with a series of names that help to define the adventurous spirit of the album from cult film-maker Kenneth Anger, Keith Levene (Clash/PiL), Richard Hell (Television, Voidoids), Lee “Scratch” Perry, Gina Birch (The Raincoats), Tessa Pollitt (The Slits), Douglas Hart (Jesus And Mary Chain), Factory Floor, Daddy G (Massive Attack), all of Primal Scream, Youth (Killing Joke) and Bristol new blood Kahn.

The lead off track, Autonomia featuring a shared vocal with Bobby Gillespie is a modern anthem- the kind of music you expect in these end times and it comes with a really cool video with the two singers wandering through the modern meltdown looking like the hippest wise guys in town.

Mark Stewart has made some serious records in his career and he is also a serious operator but he also has a completely unexpected mad sense of manic humour, a six foot plus rush of energy and ideas, too intelligent for the run of the mill mainstream, too maverick to fit in anywhere, it’s this feral energy and high IQ that makes him fascinating and with the album and a series of upcoming gigs he makes a welcome return to the front-line where we need this kind of loose talk.

Conversation with Mark is an adventure in itself, he can switch from the deadly serious to the almost childlike funny with a series of machine gun gags, he still has the bristol burr of his youth and has that full on lust for life that defines all the punk originals with that added air of unpredictability and danger.

LTW: How are you, Mark?

MS: Tired, but fine. It’s full on at the moment. Rehearsing full on and everything is kicking off. It’s like having to do everything round the world in three days. It’s all good.

LTW: You are about to tour. What kind of format are the gigs gonna take, are you going to be using a lot of the guests you use on the album?

MS: At the moment, I’ve got a killer new rhythm section, these guys called Arkell & Hargreaves. They were the first people I’ve ever seen that can reproduce Future Bass and Dubstep noises with real instruments. I’ve nicked them from this grime outfit called True Tiger. The bass player can get the deepest sub bass low end wobble you’ll find. In the rehearsals the sound is like astronauts in one of those wind tunnels. His bass playing is like sucking your face off! And this drummer is amazing. I’m really excited about it, these kids are mental. The sound they make is mental. The drum and bass sounds mental. Sometimes I forget to sing because I’m just nodding my head.

Then we’ve got Dan Catsis who’s the bass player in the Pop Group, but in fact he’s a really good guitarist as well. Before the Pop Group he was in a Bristol punk band called the Glaxo Babies. They did this great song called Christine Keeler and I saw him play it with a dildo on his guitar. Apart from Levene, he was one of my favourite guitarists from that period. We got him to play bass in The Pop Group, but he’s playing guitar on this stuff, it sounds mental.

And then we’ll have guests coming in and out. In London, Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Innes from Primal Scream are getting up, and hopefully Doug from the Mary Chain and probably Levene. I think when we play L.A. Kenneth Anger will get up, or Richard Hell in New York, it just depends on who’s around at what ever, just different things.

LTW: It’s quite a complex line up of guests but the album retains your personality and works within the spirit of adventure that was the true punk ideal.

MS: The songs on the record started as punk songs anyway. I just used Daddy G’s voice or Lee Perry’s voice or other people’s voices as textures instead of samples but underneath they are my punk songs- so it’s quite easy to do it live. Playing live is always different to the studio anyway. We always experiment in the studio and try new things. Live, though, it’s gonna be very punky.

LTW: The album has got a lot of collaborations on it, do you just go through your address book and put an album together? You’ve obviously known a lot of these people for a long time.

MS: Yes, My Little Black Book! For me it’s like coming home to my family. I remember way back in the punk days when we used to come down to the Roxy with the Cortinas and I remember hanging out with different people there like Don Letts. I met Keith Levene there the day Elvis died. We were supporting the Cortinas at the Roxy with the Pop Group and I went outside to have a cigarette. There was this kid just leaning against the wall and I ended up chatting to him about UFOs. I really got on with him and thought he was just a random stranger. A couple of years later I saw him playing with Public Image! I’ve always had a lot of time for him, I think Keith Levene is one of the lost legends from the whole English punk thing. So many of the people I work with come from chance meetings like that.

I was going to call this album ‘Fountains’, it’s a bit of an experimental title, it means people that have been fountains of knowledge and information and nutrients to me since I was a kid. I remember when I was about 12 or 13 and I went to this all day Kenneth Anger screening and some of his films just completely and utterly blew my mind. Then I remember reading about Richard Hell and the Neon Boys, and dreaming about working with Richard. And it’s these people that educated me. Like Lee Perry- the guy’s a shaman. Underneath it all I am just a little fanboy, standing next to these people, I’m still the little kid listening to their records in my mum’s bedroom. When we started doing the artwork to the back cover and they got everyone’s names on there, I was thinking what is my name doing in with all these people. Mental!

LTW: When the guests came down to do the recording, did you have an idea of what you wanted them to do, or did you just say to them ‘Here’s the track, do it’?

MS: It’s weird, there’s been some random procedures to it, and the thing has developed on my travels. The vocals on that Bowie cover I did, I organized a big conference in all these galleries in the old area of Lisbon, as a hommage to Kenneth Anger. I recorded that vocal while he was doing a performance piece. These friends of mine from this Dada collective called Mechanosphere did all the treating of it. Some other stuff was recorded in these mental run down bits of Vienna, other bits were done in Berlin. With hard drives it’s like a little diary, a travel log, you pick things up and capture the moment of the people when you’re hanging out with them. With the technology now it’s not like you go to some residential studio and ponce about, you just capture things of the moment and try to capture the magic.

I had ideas that I wanted to use Lee Perry in a kind of War of the Worlds thing as a Richard Burton voice-over thing on the track Gang War. With Kenneth I wanted to bottle his magic so I got him to play the theremin. I was using people as samples of their spirit. We got Keith Levene to play guitar, he hadn’t played guitar for about 10 years. He was doing all this cyber stuff- he’s got this thing called ‘Destroy all Concepts’. He’s back on form now, sounded amazing. Douglas Hart, who has been making films for ages, was playing this weird Indian Ragga stuff which is great. I wanted Gina Birch’s energy and her shouting. I was using the skills of the people to tell my story.

LTW: It’s such a complex sounding process and weirdly, somehow, it almost sounds like a pop record.

MS: Yes, fantastic, that’s what it’s meant to be. And touch wood, with Daddy G’s help and the Primals’ help, suddenly we’re on the BBC, we’re being playlisted, suddenly all these doors are opening which I wasn’t really aware of. I think it’s good to engage with the mainstream at this moment, as an antidote, maybe to have someone saying something else is out there. I know when I was a kid if the New York Dolls hadn’t been on the Old Grey Whistle Test I’d be working in a factory, music can make that difference. They are playing my songs on big chat shows on American TV now, it’s mad.

LTW: The mainstream and the underground are so mixed together there’s no point boxing yourself in one or the other.

MS: Exactly. There’s a real vacancy at the moment for something like this, a scarcity of mad ideas. There are cool people deep in the middle of the machine, there’s punks all over the world running things, taking over. It’s crazy the kind of people you hook up with, maybe all this will make a difference.

LTW: The line has gone really bad now. Are you holding the phone funny?

MS: Yea Yea. I do everything funny John! That’s what she said to me last night!(laughs)

MS: Live we are going to mix it up as well. In Glasgow we’ve got this kid called Twitch from this dance collective called Optima. They’ve got this really cool label, people in Germany love their stuff. Twitch did a remix of Autonomia. He’s doing a mad set when we play in Glasgow. And Adrian Sherwood is doing all the mixing. Jez Kerr from A Certain Ratio has got a brilliant new solo project, I saw some of it by chance and I love it. So he’s going to open up in Manchester.

In London we’ve got this noise artist friend called Russell Haswell. he does this post-conceptual noise art stuff, he’s absolutely brilliant. I’m DJing, Bobby Gillespie is DJing. Bobby and Innes from the Primals are getting up on stage, Adrian is mixing it all, there’s lots of different things going on.

LTW: So like on the album, there is a lot of diversity at the gigs?

MS: Completely. Every single song to me is like a mini movie, a jigsaw. Sometimes I change genre halfway through a song. For example back in the day when I made an album called ‘As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade’, from one song my mates in Bristol went off and had ideas for trip hop, but on the same song Trent Reznor and Al Jourgensen said it inspired them to make industrial music. I don’t see where that’s coming from! I’m interested to see what new genres people will start calling some of these things. I love it when they start thinking of weird titles, especially in a foreign language.

LTW:When you work with other people is it like working with different genres, trying to balance opposite ideas to create something new.

MA: I need to be excited about something. If I’m in some club in Berlin and I hear these new bass wobbles, some post-dubstep or whatever, I just think ‘I want that bass!’ I spent ages looking for this plugin called Massive, it makes the most wobbly flatulence inducing, bowel pounding bass noise I’ve ever heard, and it’s better than sex. But I don’t want to play it in the dubstep style, I played it in a Black Sabbath style with the heaviest sub bass instead. We’re having to bring in special reinforced sub bass sound systems for the tour that they use on big raves and stuff. The bass has got to make you wobble. If I’m excited about something like that, I get in the mood to start hollering on the top of it. Underneath I’m like an MC really. As much as my punk roots, I grew up in blues dances and stuff, where people would just get on the mike and start shouting out nursery rhymes and sea shanties.

LTW: Bristol has always had an eclectic music scene, does that feed into where you’re coming from?

MS: Yeah, my uncles were bouncers in the Fifties, and when the Teds used to wear their drapes they used to have razor blades behind the lapels. So when my uncles had to throw them out, they cut their hands to pieces and I grew up with that. One of the legendary lost bands of the Bristol music scene is this band called Johnny Carr & The Cadillacs, who one of my aunties went out with. My mum and dad had a Skiffle thing called the Eager Beavers, so they were a really big influence and there was also all these other musics about.

LTW: The black scene really overlapped into the white scene in Bristol didn’t it. The white kids had punk and the black kids had the blues, in other cities they were separate.

MS: There’s no difference, I don’t see colour myself. All the black kids came to the punk gigs, we had Asian punks, black punks, dwarf punks. Punk was a completely mixed scene, like the football. Bristol is such a small place so there was only one late night club. We all went there. It’s big enough to be a city but small enough that everybody has to get on. I can’t really explain it but it’s still going on. I’m down there quite a lot. I’m loving all this bass stuff that’s coming out of there like Joker and Appleblim, there’s some great stuff coming out of Bristol at the moment.

LTW: Despite the fascinating guests on the album and genius sounds employed you have an interesting take on the role of the musician…

MS: With punk, we thought everybody was equal, anybody could come on the stage. I don’t see how a musician is different from a sparkie or somebody who works or makes baskets. Troubadours used to be like the local village newspaper, they just spread information around. I don’t hold the role of musician any higher than somebody who works in a cafe. In Bali they have a saying ‘We have no art, we do everything well’. People put musicians on a pedestal and think they’ve got answers. I think if you have got a role as a musician, it’s good just to be honest and not try to make out that you’re perfect. It’s a bonding thing really.

LTW: When we were younger, the pre-internet musician had a certain role or space but that’s kind of blurred now isn’t it.

MS: I’m not really a critic, I can’t analyze it. I’m quite happy to provide a service, a good night out. I remember going to the early Pistols and Subway Sect gigs in London. I remember taking Patti Smith to see the Clash the first time she came over. She didn’t even really know there was a London punk scene. I thought they were just great places to meet people. I’d be chatting to all these people; film makers and poets and it’s a good space. It’s not just about the band, it’s about the people you meet and get on with, it’s a social experiment. You create an area for people to meet for a few hours. Like a free pirate spaceship.

The Free Pirate Spaceship comes to land this week with these gigs and the album- see you there earthlings…

Taken from John Robbs site – Louder Than war:

http://louderthanwar.com/mark-stewart-an-interview-new-album-and-tour-exploring-the-possibilities-of-sound/