13.
Various Artists – Watch The Closing Doors: A History of New York’s Musical Melting Pot Vol.1
There was something on BBC4 recently about the Jazz Age. It showed these film clips of clubs which had these Puerto Ricans coming from the islands into the New York barrios and influencing jazz. That really, really blew my head. It was a real melting pot, to use a stupid phrase. I also saw this documentary in Berlin called Before Stonewall which was history of gay culture before the Stonewall Riots and they had black lesbian women running these jazz shebeens in New York. People think that all these kinds of mix-ups and mash-ups and clashes are something new to our age but they’ve been going on since barbarian times.
I remember being on a panel where someone was saying that Ari Up and Nina Hagen and Gina Birch were the first feral women in music but this stuff has been going on since the beginning of time.
I was over in New York a lot with The Pop Group and the Gang Of Four and going to the Danceteria and the Mudd Club and we were messing about with the local radio stations and we heard [makes scratching sounds]. We found Kiss FM and we were chasing these Red Alert shows and listening to rap and bringing it back to Bristol and that kind of kicked off the Wild Bunch and the Massive Attack scene. You’ve got to go off the map.
These are just fantastic compilations.
