2. Various ArtistsStreet Sounds Vol.6
As I was going into the fifth year at school, I was listening to The Smiths and Joy Division, wanting to be arty and sophisticated. Then I went out to the Roma wine bar, which was an upstairs/downstairs chicken-in-a-basket club. The dancefloor was small, the DJ played Latin American music and bits of jazz. It felt like going on holiday. This was our Ibiza. It was four miles away, and I could get there on my bike. You’d hear tracks like ‘The Girl From Ipanema’. There was a big thing in Coventry around Latin American jazz. If you think about More Specials, a lot of the people that worked and played on their albums were still around at that time. And there was a culture of it. At The Hope And Anchor on Friday nights, you could hear that kind of thing. You wouldn’t hear it anywhere else; it didn’t exist in a record shop. I didn’t even know what this music was called. When I was in Roma one night, Candido’s ‘Jingo’ came on. As the drum and this funky guitar kicked in I could feel myself standing up. I had goosebumps, almost like I’d shat myself in public. I thought, something has happened, and I’ve got to do something about it, otherwise people are going to notice I’m not dancing. I was fidgeting on the edge of the dancefloor thinking, no one is looking and it doesn’t matter. Is this what being in time is? I never knew what the track was called, and I couldn’t ask the DJ. I was always on the fringes. I didn’t really talk to anyone else, but everyone seemed to know what it was, except me.
It was the opposite of listening to ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ in the bedroom and then going out somewhere, and hearing the music that you heard inside outside, which didn’t work at all. Then I played ‘Jingo’ in my room, and it didn’t work either. This was music that had to happen with other people and with a much better music system. It was a hugely important record that enabled me to have a life outside of the bedroom and introduced me to another life out there. At some point after moving to Sheffield, I saw the Street Sounds compilation of albums around 1986 in a second-hand shop and that’s when I realised it was ‘Jingo’. I’ve subsequently found out the original is a Nigerian record that came out in the 50s, by Babatunde Olatunji and when I heard that, it sounded even better.
