2010年Jay-Jay Johanson中国巡演 广州站

'Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be' by MAX BYGRAVES

Thanks to Moz for this one....popular track in the 1970's, especially with the Teddy Boys

Tranquility

I came across a cache of photos from Thailand….every photo is a postcard….this takes me back to the tranquility.

This melts my heart

Gorillaz In Damascus

How cool is this poster....
Gorillaz were joined on stage by some of pop music's biggest stars alongside The Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic Music.

Morrissey - Happy Lovers At Last United

Bona Drag: 20th Anniversary vinyl and CD editions release information

To celebrate its 20th Anniversary, on 27th September, EMI will release through the resurrected 1960s Major Minor label, with Morrissey's full cooperation, a remastered Special Edition of Bona Drag.

Originally released to much acclaim in October 1990, Bona Drag perfectly captures Morrissey's effortless transition in becoming a solo artist. It brings together his exceptional first seven singles, four of which went Top 10: his triumphant Top 5 debut, "Suedehead"; the anthemic, apocalyptic lament to wet seaside towns, "Everyday Is Like Sunday"; "The Last Of The Famous International Playboys"; and "Interesting Drug". The Top 20s "Ouija Board, Ouija Board", "November Spawned A Monster", and "Piccadilly Palare" and a selection of high quality b-sides from the singles complete the album.

The compilation has now been remastered and overseen by Morrissey, and is updated with the addition of six previously unreleased and much coveted songs from the era:

- "Happy Lovers At Last United"(Outtake from "Sunday" sessions)
- "Lifeguard On Duty"(Outtake from Viva Hate sessions)
- "Please Help The Cause Against Loneliness" (demo)(Outtake from Viva Hate, previously covered by Sandie Shaw)
- "Oh Phoney"(Outtake from Bona Drag sessions)
- "The Bed Took Fire" (early version of "At Amber")
- "Let The Right One Slip In" (alternate long mix)

Directing the artwork for the reissue, Morrissey has chosen to return the cover art - taken from the "November" video - back to its natural colour, so his shirt is black. In addition, he has also decided to update the back and inner artwork with a selection of favourite, hand-picked and rarely-seen photos.

The LP version will be a double heavyweight 180g vinyl, housed in a wide-spine sleeve with a pull-out poster. The CD will be housed in a gatefold, card sleeve with an eight-page booklet, which will contain the aforementioned photos.

Look who I want to come for dinner

Stephen Fry is a someone I would like as a guest at my house for dinner. Check out his site...it will give you a glimpse into his diverse inter st.... Perfect guest....Debates Catholicism, and can tell a great story about hecklers.....

"At a U2 concert in Glasgow, Bono asks the audience for some quiet. Then in the silence, he starts to slowly clap his hands. Holding the audience in total silence, he says into the microphone, "Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies."A voice from near the front pierces the silence: "Well, stop clapping your fucking hands then"

This then got me goggling the famous stories of heckling...here are some that I came across.....

Bill Bailey was at a Whitney Houston gig in New York in winter and witnessed this. Whitney sauntered on stage a full hour late in a massive fur coat. She walked up to the mic and said, "I'd just like to say, that I love each and every one of you."
And then a huge black guy behind him shouted "SING, bitch!"

Heckler: "Show us your cock"
Comedian: "I will if you show me your brain cell"
Heckler: "Least it´ll be bigger than your cock"

New Duran Duran Song - Produced by Mark Ronson

The first taste of Duran Duran’s long-in-the-works 13th studio album hit the Internet this evening after Mark Ronson — who’s producing the disc — played 30 seconds of “Blame the Machine” on his East Village Radio show. You can hear the sample in the clip embedded below; as hinted at by the band’s members and Ronson, it’s got a decidedly old-school Duran Duran vibe.
Duran Duran began work on its follow-up to 2007’s Red Carpet Massacre in February 2009, with guitarist Dom Brown filling in for the (once again) departed Andy Taylor. In a video message to fans last month, Nick Rhodes said the sessions nearly are over, and “we will have a record done this year and out in the first quarter of next year.”
The members of Duran Duran did take a break from those sessions last weekend to join Ronson onstage during his set at London’s Lovebox festival to perform the band’s 1981 debut single “Planet Earth” together.

24 Hour Party People - Best moment clips

Brilliantly written and acted film....one of the best 'music' films.

Der fünfte Beatle

Klaus Beyer, the Fab Four's fifth member?

Soul Jazz Records - rare and classics!

I was in Nicholas Hoare bookstore and came across a stunning collection of Jazz albums covers. The book was released by Soul Jazz Records out of the U.K. The book is called: Freedom, Rhythm and Sound I went to their website to learn more - what a great collection of books and music such as "New York Noise" featuring the cream of New York’s punk-funk bands from the early 80s, Liquid Liquid’s Optimo is a great track.

Jean-Michel Basquiat : The Radiant Child

Cited as one of the art world’s brightest—and fastest burning—stars, Jean-Michel Basquiat began his meteoric rise to fame in the art world in the late 70s.

Promoted by such 'friends' as Debbie Harry, Keith Haring, Glenn O’Brien and Andy Warhol, Basquiat produced thousands of artworks in his short life (Died in 1988 at 27).

Director Tamra Davis, who met and befriended Basquiat when he visited LA to exhibit at the Gagosian gallery in 1983, was one of few to document the artist during his lifetime. Footage of the artist is extremely rare to find. Here is a link to an interview from the early 80s.

The documentary alos features a soundtrack from Beastie Boys Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond and Manhattan-based composer J. Ralph.

No Toronto theatre release date yet. Plays August 4 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, see trailer below. Also if you want to paint like Basquiat with an amazing online tool click here.

It has been sometime since I visited the National Film Board of Canada website…the NFB has always been a national treasure and an internationally renowned institution. With their new website (not certain how new) they have exceeded their vision / mandate to make these documentaries accessible to all Canadians. You could spend days just reviewing and then weeks watching these documentaries. Go check it out and see what a treasure it is.

My favourite that I purchase years ago on VHS is the NFB documentary Ladies and Gentlemen Mr. Leonard Cohen by the famous Donald Brittain.

Nightmare - Gil Scott-Heron - "Me And The Devil"

This gave me nightmares.....just like old New York - gritty and when quality of life in New York reached a nadir.

Broken Social Scene - Meet Me In The Basement

This video from Broken Social Scene was made as a response to the G20 Summit in Toronto, June 2010.

A brief escape

Haven't done this in ages. Today I had my lunch in St. James Park while enjoying the sun and the 19th century garden with all the pigeons, and birds. After lunch I walked into the Cathedral Church of St James (the oldest congregation in the city) to enjoy the sounds of the organ recital...a nice and brief escape from work... I read that the organ console was installed in 1889 and was 'modernized' at the beginning of the 20th century by renowned Quebec organ builders Casavant Freres.

From pop star to the U.K.'s top aficionado of cheese

One of favourite columns / celebrity contributor is Alex James former bassist with Blur now lives on a farm, writes column writer for the Independent and one of the U.K.'s top aficionado of cheese (literally cheese)

Here is his latest column entitled; "Sometimes, I long to be beside the sea"

I landed, blinking through lack of sleep, for a three-day job, a fashion shoot in Hastings. Hastings is the other end of the world from the Cotswolds, not just the wrong side of London, another country altogether. As I arrived I was struck by the sight of large groups of men playing football in the middle of the day. Men as idle as the empty shops along the esplanade, as hopeless as the pier, the focal point of the place, derelict and slightly sinister, waiting for someone or something to come and breathe life and meaning back into it all.In need of someone to breathe life into it? Hastings, with its 'hopeless' pier.

A vast suite in the best hotel in town was £50 a night. I took one look at the view and realised I wanted to live in Hastings. I fell into vast daydreams about selling up the farm, buying one of these knackered seafront palaces and spending all day on the beach honing my keepy-uppy skills. I love the farm but I continue to make the mistake of thinking that one day it will get easier. It is always becoming more and more complicated. I love the place, but now it has a million moving parts and only about three-quarters of them work.

A man can never look out over fields and feel completely content. There will always be something in a pastoral scene that needs tending to, that could be developed, improved. A field can be anything. A beach is something else altogether. A beach will always be a beach; it could never be any more beautiful than it is already. It's a finished thing. A view of a beach transmits a very clear message to a man to let his hair down. I grew up in a culture of idle bliss in Bournemouth. Why, I began to wonder, do I put myself through endless 5am starts, lists of teasing decisions and expenses?

Of course, I'd had enough after three days, couldn't wait to get home. I suppose the great thing about work is that it drags you through all the colours of the rainbow. From British racing green to deep-sea blue and back again.

Baby's here, so the birds have got to move

The arrival of our fifth child in six years precipitated an enormously complicated series of events, the immediate upshot of which was that the chickens had to move. I thought this house was big when we moved in. Now I've got to move the chickens so we can squeeze another nanny in. My office is a former pig shed next to the current chicken shed. Ever since we've lived here, for seven years, I've been trying to renovate the big barn for my office, but there is always something else more pressing. Now it's the chickens getting their new office.

I don't begrudge those birds their good fortune. They never fail to lift my heart. In fact, a handful of chickens is about the simplest, happiest proposition in the whole of the countryside. You feed them scraps. They lay eggs. You have to stop the fox from eating the chickens and you have to stop the chickens from eating the garden. That's all there is to it, the easiest food equation you'll ever encounter. I was so convinced I could solve it, I've just invested in a 20-egg incubator.

It took a while to work out exactly where the chickens should move to, but I found the perfect spot in some trees at the end of the garden. It was all looking lovely until the chicken man quoted me a small fortune to build a pen. I'd asked him to quote on knocking down three ugly, disused cattle sheds, too. I'd imagined that was going to be quite a pricey job. Demolition does tend to be expensive, but it transpired that the tin roofs on the sheds were worth enough money to cover the cost of removing the sheds and building the chicken run as well. It might only be a tiny little thing, but it's kept me cock-a-hoop for a week.

The pain and pleasure of a Hix chicken addiction

I went to a party thrown by Range Rover at Kensington Palace. I'd said I'd go but I must admit I wasn't really relishing the thought when the time came, as the birth of our daughter had fallen right on top of it. What I was relishing more than life itself was the thought of going to Hix Brewer St for one of his Woolley Park chickens afterwards.

I'm completely addicted to that chicken. Every time I have one it doesn't satisfy my cravings. It makes them worse. Sometimes it's the first thing I think of in the morning. All the way through the birth I'd been telling myself it would all be fine and soon I'd be in Hix having the chicken again. It was a sort of finishing post, the Woolley Park chicken. I was so set on it that on my way to the party I pre-ordered one – it takes ages to cook but when it was time to go and meet my dinner I was having such a good time, it was hard to tear myself away.

I was looking forward to the summer party at the Serpentine Gallery but it was strange this year. I'm not sure how a party at an art gallery can be less cool than a party for a car, but it was. It was exactly the same crowd as at the Range Rover bash, with the unwelcome addition of the Botox brigade. Dizzee Rascal appeared and pounded his aggressive teenage rants at their middle-aged rubber heads. It was like a billionaire's wedding. In terms of cash at the bank and bright ideas, the art world is apparently in a worse state than Hastings.

I somehow stumbled upon this site going through music / mp3s blogs ......House of self-indulgence...amazing what people create / blog about.

The Festival of San Fermin, 2010

The Festival of San Fermin, 2010
The Spanish festival of San Fermin, a nine-day festival held since 1591. Tens of thousands of foreign visitors descend on Pamplona, Spain each year for revelry, morning bull-runs and afternoon bullfights. Although the tradition of bullfighting remains strong in Pamplona, opposition from animal rights groups remains high, and the parliament of the nearby Spanish province of Catalonia will soon be voting on a motion to outlaw bullfighting altogether.

Paris is Burning - An exploration of race, class, & gender

Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary, filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s. It chronicles the ball culture of New York City as well it is a thoughtful exploration of race, class, and gender in America.....fascinating stuff!

The film also documents the origins of "voguing"......later brought (ripped off) by Madonna to a mainstream audience.

Nostalgic trip - "Oh my God, you're a Nick Rhodes girl "

This article was featured in the Village Voice music blog. Read an excerpt here.

"Oh my God, you're a Nick Rhodes girl," says Rob Sheffield, referring to Duran Duran's keyboardist.
Earlier in the evening, we'd wrapped an interview about Sheffield's new book, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut, - Read an excerpt here - the follow-up to his 2007 bestseller Love Is A Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time; hours later, we'd moved to the Woods in Williamsburg, where Sheffield began talking to two female friends he'd run into. About Duran Duran. "Loving Duran Duran has been one of the constants in my life," Sheffield writes in his new book's introduction, "but I have no idea what they would sound like if the women in my life stopped loving them. I guess I'll never know."

Each of Talking to Girls's 25 chapters tackles a song from the '80s, from Haysi Fantayzee's "Shiny Shiny" and Paul McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights" to Madonna's "Crazy for You" and the Replacements' "Left of the Dial." Sheffield riffs on each, summoning up humorous tales of teenage crushes and growing up with three sisters, along with intimate accounts of caring for his 90-year-old grandfather and feeling out his first serious relationship. Like the bombastic, sugary tunes that inspired it, Sheffield's book rarely hits a dull note.

The Drums - Forever & Ever Amen

My clear winner (so far) for best album of the year....heard 4 tracks before album release and so melodic and catchy that they stay with you as you sleep. The Drums were formed in Brooklyn, New York.

Can't stop listening to: Conversation 16 by The National

Black Lips In India - The Full Frontal Rock and Roll Stor...

Saw the Black Lips at the Horseshoe in the winter....best live show I have seen in ages.

From the makers of Vice magazine VBS posted a documentary chronicling the Black Lips tour of India over a year ago - a 'controversial trip'. VBS introduced the footage with the following:

"Join us as the band attempts to bring flower punk to the subcontinent and pays dearly for doing so."

You can check out the documentary below

Jobriath - Documentary we could have funded

I wish this documentary was completed and released....an interesting yet tragic story about the 1970's singer / performer Jobriath. I love the music and 'image' portrayed as well as the some of the barriers that were broken down. It did not get the funding......It is always a challenge to fund projects such as these, but with the web you and I can provide funding to support the 'cause'.

The production was a non-profit through the International Documentary Association and was tax deductible. From minimal to sustainable financial contributions you could have helped this documentary featuring the tale of Jobriath be told. Donating a $5,000 and you would have been listed as an Executive Producer. Every contribution would receive a 'reward', depending on the amount. There were 53 backers that pledged $3,781 of $18,000 goal....Kickstarter was the site that facilitated the pledge drive. Still not 100% certain if this project has been shelved or if funding will come from other means...like the mulit-million dollar artists that cite Jobriath as an influence.....

Now to try and explain Jobriath and his impact below is a brief feature from the BBC....

This type of funding is happening not just in documentaries but music. I read about the request to fund the Fryars' debut album...reward.....get your name in the liner notes and in some cases depending on success of the album - profit sharing! Click here for more details on this investment scheme called Bandstocks

Crap From The Past

I stumbled upon this site called Crap From The Past, it is a radio show that goes back to 1992. Shows are available for downloading or streaming, all for free, courtesy of the good people at archive.org, a terrific non-profit entity that does this sort of thing regularly......you really should see this site....80,085 concerts are available on this site.

The shows are divided up into segments, which can be individually downloaded as .mp3 files, and can also be sequentially streamed as a .m3u playlist file for playing in Winamp or other suitable media player.

Enjoy

Films bought and sold like works of art

Can films be works of art that can be bought and sold.....like a Matisse, a Picasso or a de Kooning.

Spun around politics, sexual identity and cinema, "Kiss of the Spider Woman," nominated for four Oscars and the winner of one in 1986, is the consummate art film. But is it a collectible work of art? Those who own it are trying to find out...... it was also a great musical that stared Brent Carvey and Chita Rivera, ...the best musical I have ever seen....

In an unusual twist even for a picture outside the norms - its Oscar-winning lead, William Hurt, paused his red-hot career to play a film-struck homosexual for almost no fee when that still seemed more suicidal than savvy - David Weisman, the movie's producer, and David S. Phillips, who joined him later in acquiring its rights, are planning in coming weeks to offer "Kiss of the Spider Woman" for sale as an artwork.By that, they mean an object of beauty. The film is now available in its entirety - its copyright, negatives, prints, digital video masters and more - along with a carefully preserved archive that includes 313 boxes of 35-millimeter outtakes, five drafts of the screenplay by Leonard Schrader and a stack of rejection letters from studio executives who were sure that the movie would never work."I'm not aware of its having been done before," said Grey Smith, who specializes in film collectibles at the Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, and is not involved in the "Spider Woman" sale."I wish them the best," Mr. Smith added. "This could open up avenues for people who own rights to other feature films."After their commercial release, feature films are typically held in clumps, like the 4,000-title library owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or the smaller collection of about 700 movies and television shows at Miramax Films, which is now being sold by the Walt Disney Company.But independent films sometimes fall out of the system, as agreements under which they were licensed for distribution expire, and the copyright remains with, or is acquired by, individual owners who are not aligned with any of the major film companies.Such outlying works normally have little value for large distributors, which may buy them for a relatively small fee, based on future returns in the home video and television markets, but which remain far more interested in fresh films or mass transactions."It's really difficult to sell just one film to that universe," said Stephen Prough, a founder of Salem Partners, a Los Angeles investment banking firm that handles entertainment transactions. Mr. Prough said it was unusual even to find a single film with its rights held by one or two individuals.About 10 years ago, however, Mr. Weisman, an independent producer whose latest passion is a proposed Bollywood gangster project called "Xtrme City," joined Mr. Phillips, a lawyer who had come to view "Kiss of the Spider Woman" as an important event in the history of public art, in consolidating their ownership of all rights to the film, as licensing agreements with Island Alive and other distributors expired.They released the picture, which was shot in Brazil by the Argentine-born director Hector Babenco, along with a documentary, "Tangled Web," about its making, on a DVD from the Independent Cinema Restoration Archive, an operation managed by Mr. Weisman.But as Mr. Weisman and Mr. Phillips explained during a tangled luncheon conversation in Los Angeles last week, they also conceived the idea of selling the movie - along with its extraordinary archive of negatives, prints and associated materials that Mr. Weisman had kept in a Los Angeles warehouse - to an institution or private collector who would value it not as a library title, but as art."Actually, I said we should give it away," said Mr. Phillips, who spoke intently of things like "heteroglossia," the diversity of voices and viewpoints, in a literary work.Not as eager to part with an asset on those terms, Mr. Weisman, who at lunch mostly out-talked Mr. Phillips, argued for a sale modeled on his earlier experience with a collection of more than 8,000 movie lobby cards. Those were amassed by the screenwriter Mr. Schrader, a close friend, then sold intact after his death in 2006 to a film buff in India.So Mr. Phillips, with help from Mr. Weisman, designed a prospectus for their film and its archive. With the sale, it promises, " 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' transcends mere commodity and reclaims its aura as a unique work of art." .And John Wronoski, the proprietor of Lame Duck Books, a Cambridge, Mass., dealer, now says he expects to begin offering the film privately to a small group of potential buyers in the next month or so.While he generally deals in books, Mr. Wronoski explained in a phone interview this week, the large collection of film and papers associated with "Kiss of the Spider Woman," including early drafts of a script written by Burt Lancaster, who once meant to star in the movie, and Manuel Puig, who wrote the underlying novel, make it an attractive proposition."There aren't many archives that would be even remotely similar to this," he said.(Props and costumes from "Kiss of the Spider Woman," which took in $17 million at the domestic box office after its release in 1985, have long since been destroyed or dispersed.)At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Katie Trainor, the film collections manager, said her institution held the copyright to only a tiny handful of the roughly 26,000 shorts and feature-length movies, none well known, of which it owns prints.Most often, Ms. Trainor said, the museum is simply authorized to screen its movies on site, and may get permission to lend them to others.For their own film - with which remake rights and everything else are included - Mr. Weisman and Mr. Phillips declined to say what they would accept as a minimum bid. Mr. Wronoski said he had a number in mind but also declined to discuss it.And what a buyer might ultimately do with the movie is an open question. Over lunch, Mr. Weisman and Mr. Phillips suggested, for instance, that a new owner might digitize all of the filmed material and offer admirers the chance to rebuild it according to a vision of their own.Reached by e-mail, Mr. Babenco said he hoped that the scripts and other material associated with "Kiss of the Spider Woman" would become accessible to the public after their sale. "I would love to keep historical elements of all my movies alive," he said.In any case, Mr. Weisman said he and Mr. Phillips expected to find a buyer who would remove the film from an industry that, in his view, no longer respects its own wares."The diminishment is appalling to me," Mr. Weisman said of the movie business.Asked whether he would accept a good offer from a Warner or a Paramount that wanted to add a jewel to its existing collection, Mr. Weisman dismissed the notion as fantasy."If the Hudson River were made out of grape juice, you could drink it," he said.

Great site by Manchester District Music Archive.....

I particularly like this featured artifact form The Smiths' gig in 1984.

This is from their first major tour in support of the classic debut album. The Smiths' fans were a little more rowdy than the venue's (very few and old) security staff were expecting. Consequently the first 4 rows of the stalls collapsed as the audience jumped on the backs of the seats. This caused some panic as everyone had to get quickly out of the way of the collapsing rows (some less successfully than others). There may have been some minor injuries but nothing serious. The gig carried on and was fabulous.

Setlist:

01. Hand In Glove02. Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now03. Girl Afraid04. This Charming Man05. Pretty Girls Make Graves06. Still Ill07. This Night Has Opened My Eyes08. Barbarism Begins At Home09. Back To The Old House10. What Difference Does It Make?11. I Don't Owe You Anything (with Sandie Shaw)12. Reel Around The Fountain13. You've Got Everything Now14. Handsome Devil15. These Things Take Time

Getting toddlers on bikes

Look at this innovative toddler training bike by Kokua from Germany.

When the designer's son Niklas was two years old, he wanted to encourage his love of movement but knew he wasn’t old enough to ride a bicycle. So Mr. Mertens, a trained product designer, set about creating a special wooden vehicle back in 1997. A bicycle without pedals, little Niklas could sit and push with his feet to ride around. Also check out LIKEaBIKE

The Divine Comedy - Down In The Street Below

One of the best storytellers.....and songwriter as well....

Part One in a series of short films where Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy discusses "Bang Goes The Knighthood" and plays a selected track from the album. Features "Down In The Street Below".

Sound Portraits

I'm a documentary junkie, always in search of sites that feature interesting portraits of people, places or topics. I highly recommend this site for radio documentaries, the diversity of topics continually keep it intriguing…

Please consider supporting the work of Sound Portraits and StoryCorps by making a donation.

Rap's first label - The Real Sugar Hill Records Story

The Village Voice recently featured an interview with Keith Le Blanc, the one-time in-house drummer for Sugar Hill Records.

The pioneering New York label, which brought hip-hop to the world's ears in 1979 with the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," later became legendary for mistreating rap's first wave of recording talent--their accounting habits made rumors about Suge Knight's shady activities at Death Row Records seem like behavior befitting a hippie artist's commune. With the release of a fresh retrospective on the label, A Complete Introduction To Sugar Hill Records, we asked Le Blanc to address a bunch of the popular accusations aimed at the notorious enterprise, which was run for years by the infamous husband-and-wife duo of Sylvia and Joe Robinson.

The Sugar Hill Gang scored hip-hop's first big pop hit with "Rapper's Delight"--but were they really a rap group at all?

"All the other rappers didn't consider the Sugar Hill Gang to be real rappers. They just got lucky. They hadn't lived the life, they hadn't invented anything. They took what people were already doing in New York and Sylvia got her son [Joey Robinson Jr.] to find some kids to imitate what was going on in New York. There wasn't so much resentment towards the Sugar Hill Gang as jealousy that they got to be the first group out. I think Sugar Hill Gang is the only group that was manufactured--the others all had their own material."

​According to legend, Big Bank Hank stole the lyrics he recited on "Rapper's Delight" from the Cold Crush's M.C. Grandmaster Caz. Was this rap's first documented case of stealing?

"For Big Bank Hank, they definitely had to write raps for him. I know the Furious Five helped him write at times, and [fellow Sugar Hill Gang member] Wonder Mike would help him. Sometimes Sylvia Robinson would even help write lyrics for them. It was a joke in the company--they'd make jokes in the studio under their breath. It was also kinda a joke that it was really hard to make them sound funky. Compared to the Furious Five, Spoonie Gee or Kool Moe Dee, it was night and day. To be honest with you, the only one in the Sugar Hill Gang to me that was creative was Wonder Mike. He wrote all his own stuff and was a funny guy. He could have been a comedian. He used to do this routine where he'd do an imitation of a black weather man, like how a black rapper would do the weather, cause in those days there weren't any black people on TV."

Naughty By Nature rapper Treach once boasted that he was "more feared than a Sugar Hill
contract," alluding to the way paperwork was skewed against artists. Did anyone who recorded for Sugar Hill ever get paid?

"Really, the best way to get money out of the Robinsons was to be related! Beyond that, the one that got the most consistent money was [in-house arranger] Jiggs Chase, cause he was arranging songs all the time. For artists, it was the Sugar Hill Gang, because when it first started they were trying to do the right thing. They made pretty good live money, at least, though I don't think they got what their record did. Looking back, it seemed like Sugar Hill used money as a tool to manipulate people to do what they wanted. I wish I didn't have to say that in an interview, but I can't lie, that's how it seemed to me. It seemed like whenever a group asked for what they were supposed to get, they got thrashed by the company, didn't get anything released for a while, and were left to go broke. It was the old pimp game. It's a shame, cause if Sugar Hill had done even 25% of the right thing for their artists, they'd have been the biggest rap label ever."

Hip-hop's folk story decrees that the nascent hip-hop scene regularly mixed with New York's downtown punk crowd. Was there really a brilliant clash of cultures going on?

"No, not at all. The cultural cross-over might have been someone who'd listened to The Ramones a few times--and I don't know how much you'd call that punk. We'd hear it in the rehearsal studios, but punk never got anywhere near the Sugarhill Records scene, really. When we'd do shows, the crowd was always mixed, but a lot of the time we were on big r&b tours, opening for groups like Parliament, Funkadelic, Cameo, The Gap Band, Roger Troutman--anybody that had a hit at the time."

​Keith Le Blanc's "Malcolm X No Sell-Out" is credited as one of the first ever examples of a totally sample-based hip-hop song, being based around vocals from Malcolm X speeches. But did Sugar Hill rip-off Malcolm X's widow in the process?

"For that song, sometimes Grandmaster Flash would play beats and take the soundtrack to Dirty Harry and chime in over the top. I thought that was a good idea and Sugar Hill had put out some speeches of Malcolm X's before I got there, so I grabbed a few of them. Marshall Chess was there at the time--the label were working the Chess records catalogue that Joe Robinson had just bought but didn't know what to do with--so I approached Marshall and he agreed to finance the record. In the end, we went over the river to Tommy Boy records to put it out as I found out that Sugar Hill never paid Malcolm X's wife any money and she didn't want anything to do with them." (Bonus Egregiousness: The song was also released on Sugar Hill Records, credited to The Sugar Hill All-Stars. Asked about the group, Le Blanc says bluntly, "No, there was no such thing as the Sugar Hill All-Stars...")

On the surface, Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel's "White Lines (Don't Do It)" was an anti-drugs ode. But was the whole thing an ironic in-joke designed to mask rampant substance use on the Sugar Hill scene?

"No one really partied in the studio. When it came to being in the studio, there was lots of money being spent and it was pretty serious to get the job done. There was that New York ethic that if you were derelict in any way it would show and you would be replaced by someone waiting in the wings for their shot. After the job's done, the rappers might go outside to party a little bit, but they definitely didn't do that in front of Sylvia! She was definitely the queen bee in the studio. On tour, I saw people do all kinds of stuff, but the only time the work ethic slipped in the studio was around tax time, when lots of older, non-hip-hop artists would come in to record records that would never come out. We didn't find out that was their way of writing off taxes until a lot of years down the line, but they'd have artists like Squeeze, Candy Staton, Bunny Siegler, Jack McDuff come in to work..."

History has characterized Sylvia Robinson as a ruthless, money-grabbing business lady. But did she add anything to the label's creative output?

"I would say that Sylvia's forte was being able to recognize talent and get all that talent in the same room at the same time. She would have some creative input as far as what she did and didn't like about this or that, or she might have an idea based on something that she heard in a club and would get Jiggs Chase to write, but mostly the creative side of the music came from the musicians and the rappers."

Zanta - A sad tale

Most Torontoians have had some encounter with Zanta or witnessed his antics during the CityTV morning show. A number of years ago I found a documentary on Zanta....a very sad story.

If you don't know Zanta he travels the streets of downtown Toronto doing pushups and shouting "yes yes yes" and "Merry Christmas". His attire consists of nothing but shorts, boots, and a red-and-white Santa hat, even during Toronto's harsh winters. He estimates he does 2,000 to 3,000 pushups per day. He has been banned from several public areas around Toronto, including the Toronto Transit Commission and from the CityTV building.

Late one night I stumbled upon this series from the Guardian entitled 'great interviews of the 20th century'. I began with number four on the list, Truman Capote's interview of Marlon Brando in Kyoto, Japan, 1957.

Here are just some of the other noteworthy great interviews:

• David Frost's conversations about Watergate with Richard Nixon
• Marilyn Monroe's last interview
• Bill Grundy's disastrous grilling of the Sex Pistols on live television.
• Fidel Castro interview in 1957
• Mae West interviewed in 1979
• Malcolm X interviewed in 1964

From 1st birthday to 1st Pride

Cole attended his first Pride today to show his support to all the boys and girls.....and one Queen.... Below is a classic to celebrate today, Jimmy Somerville and his band Bronski Beat performing Smalltown Boy...

Hope everyone enjoys today!

This should be the soundtrack to the start of your day......Baccara's “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie”. In 1977 it sold more than 16 million copies and is featured in the 1977 edition of the Guinness Book of Records as the highest-selling female musical duo to date.

"How Soon Is Independence?"

The jury is out on this one.....a mash-up between How Soon Is Now by The Smiths and Destiny's Child. It is the work of Mark Vidler - http://www.gohomeproductions.co.uk/, who I understand has produced some astounding mashups....still deciding if this is one.

Baseball documentary on PBS

PBS played this documentary entitled “Inning 5: Shadow Ball”, even if you are not a baseball fan you will be moved by this portrait of America's favourite pastime during the ‘30s and ‘40s. The clip below is another segment in the story of baseball created by historian Ken Burns.

The fifth inning of Baseball covers the sport's desperate attempts to survive the Great Depression and Babe Ruth's fading career. This episode also presents the parallel world of Negro League players, as they take to the road mixing showmanship with talent to draw crowds in big cities and small towns alike... Click here for more info

Documentary Portrait of '60's Record Producer Phil Spector

He may be a mad man but he was a genius when it came to music and creating the quasi-symphonic "wall of sound" heard on 1960s hits by the Ronettes and the Crystals.

A creepy new documentary portrait, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector," has just been released. The interviews were conducted at Spector's mansion in a Los Angeles suburb, between his first and second murder trials. Watch The Ronettes perform, click here

Celebrating Canada

I always thought Douglas Coupland had one of the most unique ideas to celebrate Canada...in 2002 he wrote a book entitled "Souvenir of Canada" it was then made into a feature film in 2006.

To read an excerpt and view the pictures in the book click here